Jesus is The Truth?

Working hard to avoid misreading Jesus

In “When Humeans Practice the Way: On how college students read John Mark Comer,” I picked on Comer’s Practicing the Way for misreading Jesus’s claim to be the Way. Today, we return to that passage in John’s Gospel:

Jesus said to [Thomas, who had asked Jesus to show the way to the Father], “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6)

I’m doing this not to further pick on Comer. Substack’s got enough of that. Instead, we home in on Jesus’s claim to be the Truth.

Photo by Alex Shute on Unsplash (cropped)

The reason? Simple: I’m prone to the same mistake in understanding Jesus’s claim to be “the truth” that I argued Comer made about Jesus’s claim to be “the way.” Here’s what I said about Comer’s mistake:

Jesus is not merely showing or modeling the way. Jesus is the Way. Knowing the Way is knowing Jesus himself, not knowing how to engage in a set of practices or even which practices are the ones that lead to life.

Jesus, so I claim, is speaking directly, literally, for lack of a better word, about being the Way. It would be inconsistent to think he switches modes when claiming to the the Truth. There, too, he speaking directly, literally.

My problem is that I’m a philosopher. And an “analytic” one at that. (I reject the label. But whatever. It’s what most people would call me in the Philosophy Biz.) Philosophers, if nothing else, have historically been radically devoted to the pursuit of truth. Philosophical conversations around truth often begin with a comment Aristotle makes:

[Thus] we define what the true and the false are. To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true. (Metaphysics 1011b25-8)

This articulates a relatively naïve view of truth, one that I happen to think withstands the strictest forms of philosophical scrutiny.

Perhaps this isn’t too surprising. As it turns out, I have fairly old-school takes on a bunch of controversial philosophical issues, views that make my philosopher colleagues look at me like I’m a dinosaur of sorts. I believe in universals and teleology and causal connections between things; in objective knowledge, even objective moral knowledge; in the idea that human persons are part of the fundamental fabric of reality, that we are more than physical, that we maintain our identity despite radical material and psychological change. I even believe—egads!—that God exists.

Anyway, Aristotle’s idea is that what we say, and likewise what we believe, is a kind of representation. And representations can be accurate or inaccurate. Pictures are accurate when the way something seems in the picture is the way it is in real life. So for our statements and beliefs: a statement or belief is accurate when the way it represents the world is the way the world really is, and it’s inaccurate otherwise. Accuracy of this form is what we call “truth.”

Often this view is called the “correspondence theory,” where the core idea is that a statement or belief is true when it “corresponds” to the way the world is. Correspondence is then understood in terms of accurate or inaccurate representation.

The correspondence theory of truth is a theory of what philosophers call “propositional truth.” Propositions, in turn, are meant to be something like meanings or contents, the things that make sentences and beliefs represent different aspects of the world in different ways. The sentence, ‘In-N-Out is superior to Shake Shack’ means something different than ‘Orcas are mammals’ because those two sentences express distinct propositions. My belief that God exists is different from my belief that chocolate desserts are splendid because those beliefs have distinct propositions as their respective contents. Propositions are the contents of our beliefs, the meanings of our statements; they are representational; they can be true or false; and our beliefs and statements are variously true or false because of their connection to true and false propositions.

In the philosophical world, conversations around truth center on propositional truth. There are, of course, other forms of truth. We talk about friends as “true,” we talk about a person being “true to her promises,” we say “he was true to his word.” We even “true” bicycle wheels and door frames. Philosophers don’t think about these so much. When confronted with these alternative uses of the word ‘true,’ alternative types of truth, the analytic philosopher in me wants to describe them on analogy with the sort of truths the correspondence theory can handle directly, the sort of truth with which Aristotle was concerned.

Jesus’s claim to be the Truth, therefore, naturally sounds to me like something I should understand as a kind of image, comparing it to propositional truth somehow.

But, again, I don’t want to misread Jesus’s words in a way analogous to Comer’s take on “the way.” Given my training, it’s a mistake I’m prone to make. I must resist my natural inclination. I must resist the idea that propositional truth is the original notion of truth. I must resist the idea that Jesus is the copy, the facsimile. To not resist would be to make the same mistake Comer made.

More importantly, to not resist would be to refuse to recognize that Jesus is the Logos of God, the being by, through, and for whom all things are made (Colossians 1). The beginning of all things, the measure of all goodness and beauty. Indeed, the measure of all truth.

So we can recast my little speech about Comer, applying it to Jesus’s claim to be the Truth:

Jesus is not merely expressing or witnessing to the truth. Jesus is the Truth. Knowing the Truth is knowing Jesus himself, not knowing how to arrive at truth or even which truths are most important for human life.

Jesus is not a pointer to the truth. He is not pointing to a path to truth, or a set of habits by which we might acquire truth. Jesus’s claim is much more radical.

Jesus is saying he is the Truth.

This claim must be at the center of a Christian theory of truth, and indeed at the center of Christian epistemology.

We cannot begin as Christians, whether or not we are philosophers, centering a notion of truth that isn’t Jesus himself. At the heart of a Christian’s view of truth must be Jesus himself.

Other forms of truth are understood as parasitic on Christ-who-is-the-Truth. Indeed, other forms of truth have Christ as their standard.¹ Propositional truth is measured against the omniscient mind of Christ. True friendship is measured against the way Jesus treats his friends. True love is measured against the love that Christ has for God and, thereby, the world God made.

More generally, “true humanity” is measured against Jesus’s incarnate life.

Failing to be like Jesus means does not mean one isn’t fully human; instead, failing to be like Jesus means failing to be what a human being is meant to be. Just as false propositions are failing to hit the targets they aim at by their very nature as propositions, failing to measure up to the standard that is Christ is failing to hit the target that we have by our very nature as humans. We are false, in that sense. False humans, to be sure, but false as humans.

To become truly human, or perhaps true humans, we must become more like Christ.

After all, Christ is the Truth.

1. There are limits: no part of Jesus is the measure against which we should true a door! But that simply shows that these notions of truth are even more derivative, even more distant analogies, of the core notion of truth.