When Jesus stands before Pilate he declares: ‘For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice’. In response Pilate pulls out some philosophical sophistry ‘What is truth?’, and then he walks off. Clearly, Pilate is stuck in a Greco-Roman mindset. Like many modern Westerners today, he just wants to appear clever. He certainly has no time for Jesus’ strange, Jewish religion. He wants an easy life and evades further discussion (John 18:37-38).
Indeed, Jesus came into the world to bear witness to the truth but all too often we are like Pilate. Even if we make noises to the contrary, in practice, we often seem to believe that “all truth is relative”. In an era marked by soundbites, short attention spans, and an anti-intellectual culture, theology frequently struggles to find its place – even in the Church. The Bible, once seen as a treasure trove of insights about God, the world, and ourselves is now regularly deconstructed and reduced to a sorry heap of dry, outdated, and rather subjective prooftexts. Therefore, I feel very strongly there is an urgent need to reclaim the richness of theology and experience the dynamic power of God’s Word by embracing the relational nature of truth.
The Nature of Truth
What is truth? I wholeheartedly believe it is found in Jesus. Jesus came to bring life, to draw us into the life of the Trinity that exists from eternity to eternity (John 14:17, 23). Put differently, Jesus Christ bore witness to the truth that God is love (1 John 4:8, 16). He revealed the self-sacrificial love that has always existed between Father, Son and Spirit and was poured out into creation at the beginning of time. Ultimate reality is therefore deeply relational, rooted in the unchanging nature of God. In that sense, you could even argue that “all truth is relational”.
Jesus says: “Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice”. According to Jesus, then, you show that you are “of the truth”, if you can accept that Jesus bears testimony to the truth (John 8:47). It’s quite simple really. When you are in a relationship with God – as a child of God – you recognise the identity of Father, Son and Spirit and pay careful attention to what Jesus says.
It was for that purpose that Jesus came into the world. He came to show that he is “the way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6). Jesus is the only way to know God. He is Truth personified and shares the life of God with us. There can be no substitute for a personal experience of this Truth. But once you have had genuine encounters with Jesus, nobody can take those away from you – no matter how much you get bamboozled by other life experiences and deceitful lies.
In John 8:32, Jesus declares, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” If you read on in that chapter, you find Jesus as “the Son” clearly equating himself with that “truth” (John 8:32, 36). The freedom Jesus speaks of is not merely a liberation from external constraints or mental assent to a body of “truths”. Instead, it amounts to a deep inner liberation from the power of sin and falsehood through the person of Jesus Christ. Through an ongoing relationship with Jesus, the embodiment of truth, we are set free from the bondage of sin and experience the freedom to live according to God’s purposes.
Relational “God Talk”
Please hear me. We desperately need to recover biblical literacy and our enthusiasm for “God-talk” (which is just another label for “theology”). God-chat is not about stuffy Bible knowledge but it is about knowing God. I don’t believe in Jesus because I believe in the Bible. I believe the Bible is true because I know Jesus. Life is one big adventure and theology relationally defined gets me excited. It draws me closer to God and helps me understand myself and the world around me. Bring on that next Bible study!
by Philip Parnham
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