I was invited to the InterVarsity chapter of our campus for a discussion on Christianity in the university. One of the leaders felt I was being "wish-washy" and challenged me. She said, "After all, as Jesus says, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6), no one comes to the Father but by me.' Can you say, 'but by me'?" she asked.
"Yes," I responded, "but isn't it curious that Jesus did not say to his disciples, 'I am here to tell you about the truth?' He says, 'I am the truth.' "
Increasing numbers of Christians are decrying rampant moral and intellectual "relativism" within our culture. Our culture is undeniably in sad shape, intellectually and morally, but I'm not sure "relativism" is the problem. In "No Place for Truth," David Wells argues forcefully that evangelicals are called to push the truth, to speak up for objective, absolute truth, regardless of how people feel about it. Feeling is not the issue, according to Wells, the issue is: "Is the gospel true--objectively, absolutely true--or not?"
Wells has a point. The concept of absolute truth is a necessary corrective for a society wallowing in pop-psychotherapeutic, feel-good strategies. After all, most of us are not conditioned to ask, "Is this true?" but rather, "How do I feel about this?"
But I'm not sure that putting the matter in this way is the best strategy for the church today. It fails to do full justice to the peculiar truth that is proclaimed in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Recently I heard a Christian apologist argue that either Christianity was objectively true, accessible to anyone with rational sense, or it was a preposterous lie. "If I say it is raining today," said the apologist, "that is either true or it is not true. It can't be almost true, or figuratively true. It is objectively true. Likewise, when I say, 'Jesus Christ rose from the dead,' it is either true or it is sheer fantasy."
I could see where he was going with this. Certainly God gave us powers of reason and, in the exercise of those powers, we ought to be able to think about Jesus. Yet I thought he was not only begging the question of the myriad ways in which we use those words, That's true, he was also not being true to the nature of Jesus, who is "the way, the truth, and the life."
I have come to agree with my colleague Stanley Hauerwas that Christians who argue for the "objective" truth of Jesus are making a tactical mistake. Jesus did not arrive among us enunciating a set of propositions that we are to affirm. There is no point at which Jesus says, "You need to believe four propositions about me: number one: I was born of a virgin; number two: Scripture is inerrant . . ." Jesus doesn't talk like that. Jesus never asks us to agree; he asks us to join up, to follow. He did not call for cognitive assent; he asked for a life of discipleship involving the whole self, not just the mind.
Again, he did not say, "I have come to start a discussion about what is true." (We academics would have loved it if he had!) Rather, he came saying, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." The truth is a person, personal. This truth is not sheer subjectivity, either, for the truth of Jesus is utterly inseparable from him--his life, death, and resurrection. We Christians really would have no idea what the truth is if it were not for our being met and called by Jesus.
UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL
When people today say, "That's true," what they usually mean is that they have some preconception of what truth is, and they have heard some assertion that matches their preconception. They are saying: "That certainly is true to my experience of the world thus far" or "That idea is congruent with all my previous ideas and is not threatening to my present existence; therefore, it seems true."
Yet Christians claim that Jesus Christ brings us a world that would be otherwise unavailable to us apart from meeting Jesus. Jesus drags us into an experience (discipleship) that we could not have had if left to our own devices. We therefore do not have the resources, on our own, to think about matters like God, truth, peace, justice before knowing Jesus, who is for us the way, the truth, and the life.
Arguing that Christ and his way are "objectively true," we run the risk of deceiving people into thinking that they are already capable, just as they are, of thinking about these matters without first knowing Jesus, without conversion. That is why the gospel consistently avoids asking for mere intellectual agreement. Rather, what is demanded is conversion, detoxification, being born again. Talk of "objective truth" suggests that the truth is something that any fool can walk in off the street and get without cost or pain. It is a bad legacy of the Enlightenment, which hoped to devise systems of knowledge and morals that would be immediately available to anyone who could think rationally about such matters.
It is a mistake to talk to people as if they are capable of knowing the truth if it is skillfully argued before them, accessible through common sense. If people already know what truth looks like, then they ought to go worship that rather than learn to worship Jesus. Alas, that is often what we have done. People in the eighteenth century needed to believe that nature is orderly, so they found a god who was always the patron of order. Or, in our own age, we thought that the truth would bring us self-satisfaction and peace, so we found a god whose truth brought self-esteem. Now, in an age of moral chaos, we begin to praise a god who is "objectively true."
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I am still haunted by Michael Buckley's "At the Origins of Modern Atheism" (Yale, 1987), which argues that the early Jesuits, in their attempt to speak to the modern world, invented a god whom the modern world eventually found quite easy to dismiss. They argued that God is fair, or orderly, or compassionate--in the way in which we define these things. When people encountered life that was not orderly or fair, they concluded that God must not exist. They spent too much time arguing, "Does God exist?" devising all sorts of "objective" arguments and proofs for God's existence, rather than focusing upon the far more interesting and, indeed, biblical question, "What kind of God exists?" The Bible knows that idolatry is always a bigger problem for us than atheism.
Modern apologists for God argue that nature is essentially orderly, and therefore there must be a God who ordered nature. But the minute someone discovers how chaotic nature is, that person assumes that there must not be a God. The Bible does not stress the orderliness of God, just that the God of Israel is true.
Someone said to me the other day, "I cannot believe in God because of all the innocent suffering in the world." He was assuming that innocent suffering could never be part of God's way with the world; since there is plainly a great deal of innocent suffering, there is no God. Again, we start with some definition of what truth would look like if we encountered it, then we ask God to match our definition of truth.
Jesus is clear that his truth, that truth that is the way and the life, is himself. We really have no idea what the truth is, living as we do in a culture of lies, had not Jesus shown us a life that is true to God.
In an age of anxiety and dislocation, we think it impossible to live without "absolute truth." But what the God of Israel and the church promises us is not absolute truth reduced to propositions but the reality of the kingdom of God and eternal communion with the One who is the way, the truth, and the life.
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MORE THAN A CHANGE OF MIND
There is a sense in which we cannot know the truth without first being made truthful. Our problem with the gospel is moral before it is intellectual. We will use anything--even intellectual discussions about the truth--in a last-ditch attempt to keep Christ from us. So knowing the truth is a matter of being transformed, forgiven, born again before we can acknowledge the lies upon which our lives are based, before we can care to entrust our lives to the One who is the way, the truth, and the life.
As Jesus says, again in John (the only Gospel that bothers much with "truth" talk): "When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth" (John 16:13). He will guide us. Truth, Christian truth, is not an achievement of clear thinking. It is a gift. Grace.
So, in a way, we Christians do believe that all truth is relative. All truth, all truthful living is relative to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We really would have no idea of what is going on in the world, of how to think about things, if it were not for God's having loved us enough to send us the Son who incarnates the truth and the Spirit who guides us into all truth.
In speaking to the world, we have something much better to proclaim than objective truth. We have Jesus, the one who calls us not into agreement, but into relationship, the one who guides us into the truth which is life, and that more abundantly.
William H. Willimon is dean of the chapel and professor of Christian ministry at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. An ordained United Methodist pastor, his most recent book is "Lord Teach Us: The Lord's Prayer and Christian Discipleship," with Stanley Hauerwas (Abingdon, 1996).
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