What is Truth?

In John,'s gospel, the monster Pontius Pilate is said to ask Jesus the hard question, "What is truth?" Jesus gives the best possible answer to that query: silence.  Some religionists claim to have captured all truth, and the spectrum of absolute certainty stretches from Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, to some churches of the Campbell Movement, the Mormons and many others. That is really problematic because what people know, or think they know, is subject to diverse and fallible interpretation.  Moreover, in our modern era new knowledge is expanding at a geometric rate, so today's "complete" truth will be incomplete next year.

I just read an article by an official of a large protestant denomination in the U.S.. He speaks of the need to clarify the term "evangelical" after our current election cycle.  What he clearly means by clarification is submission to his denomination's narrow theological views as comprehending all of religious truth.  It is clear that he believes that only evangelicals are actually Christian and that only those who follow his tenets are actually evangelical. The word itself refers to promoting the evangel, or good news, of Christ.  I try sincerely to do that and, in that sense, can be considered evangelical. Those who know everything tend to specialize in judging and correcting everyone else.

We know that the fundamental meaning of the biblical term for faith in Greek, pistis, is radical trust and reliance on God.  The key is repentance in turning from mere self-reliance to God-reliance..  Yet, the author rejects this definition as inadequate, stating that faith also requires assent to "the truth of God's revelation in the Bible" (read: belief in complete biblical literalism and infallibility) and acceptance of the penal substitutionary atonement theory as the only way to understand the Cross and Easter.  In fact, there have been more than a dozen principal theories of atonement through the two thousand years of Christian history and no denomination or spokesman has authority to declare one of those mandatory for all believers.

The author also discusses fundamentalism as though a good thing, and defines it as the literalistic interpretation of key Christian Scriptures.  First, I would respectfully deny that such perspective is required to be a faithful Christian and that, in fact, literalizing what was intended as symbolic simply drives thinking people away from Christianity.  Second, I would point out that the Christian Bible was not even defined and promulgated until 397 CE.  The Bible is the product of the Church, not the other way round; and the Church did fine without it for centuries.  The apostolic Church is guided by the Holy Spirit, not someone's interpretations of the Bible.


There are tens of thousands of protestant affiliations because they cannot agree on interpretation of holy writ.  A single affiliation should not claim to have truth figured out and locked up for everyone.