Anyone who says, “Jesus is the way, the truth and the life,” has a particular interest in truth. And not just in what is true for me right now, but in what is true for all of us all the time.
In fact, to say, “Jesus is the way, the truth and the life,” is such an absolute and all-encompassing truth claim that it stands over and against all other truth claims.
But really, it seems everyone has “a particular interest” in truth these days. It’s a cynical time, in which we may think the most influential decide what’s true, and the rest of us are just along for the ride.
It would be a dystopian world, indeed, if truth were no more than a useful tool in the hands of the most influential, the most powerful, the most affluent. I don’t believe truth is such a small thing. And I suspect you don’t, either.
A recent executive order got me thinking about this.
Information and truth
The executive order signed Jan. 20 and titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” accuses the previous administration of “trampl[ing] free speech rights by censoring Americans’ speech on online platforms … [u]nder the guise of combatting ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation.’”
The quotation marks make clear the writer doesn’t believe certain things are rightly labeled “misinformation,” “disinformation” and “malinformation,” without disputing the basic definitions of those three terms.
Misinformation is mistaken or erroneous information communicated without awareness of its error and without malicious intent. It’s a feature of human limitation and fallibility. Here, a person unknowingly communicates wrong information.
Disinformation, according to Merriam-Webster, is “false information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth.” Here, a person knowingly and intentionally communicates wrong information.
Sign up for our weekly edition and get all our headlines in your inbox on Thursdays
Malinformation, as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency defines it, is information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
It’s interesting to me that we can agree more easily on basic definitions of these three terms than we can agree on what information should be labeled “misinformation,” “disinformation” or “malinformation.”
Labels can be manipulated and used to manipulate. But truth is not determined by labels. How, then, is truth determined?
Seeking truth
“What is truth?”—Pilate’s question to Jesus—may be my favorite question in the Bible. Like a song lyric to a catchy tune, it often resurfaces in my mind.
What is true? And how do we know? These are basic questions of life and of our efforts to ferret out truth claims.
First, how do we know what we know? We get what we know from authority figures and through reason, intuition and our five senses. These are valid ways of gathering information, but none are wholly sufficient by themselves for telling us the value—or truth—of that information.
So, we need to test the veracity of what we know. Does the information we have and our thoughts about it correspond to generally accepted reality? Is the information consistent with what we already accept to be true; does it follow logically? Does what we know work in the real world?
These are valid tests of truth, but none of them are wholly sufficient by themselves to establish something as absolutely true. Each test tells us something important, but each test also has significant shortcomings that challenge certainty in ways we shouldn’t dismiss.
This is not cause for hopelessness, however. Nor does it mean we never can be sure. Rather, this is cause for humility and honest investigation of truth claims.
Humility, because all truth claims are open to testing. Remember, Jesus granted Thomas his empirical test of Jesus’ resurrection.
Honest, because we shouldn’t shortcut our way to truth. We should bring all our faculties to bear on seeking it, because ultimately, we will answer to it.
Discerning truth
As I stated in my last editorial, “We can’t know everything, much less everything about everything.” In light of that, we must bring all our faculties to bear and work together in the pursuit and passing on of truth.
We must access all ways of knowing and hold what we know up to the various tests of truth.
We must pay attention to what is labeled “true” or “untrue” and to who is applying the label. We should ask what is being achieved by the label. Likewise, who is rejecting the label, and why? What does the pushback achieve?
If the label “false” is applied to something we communicate, we ought to ask if there is truth in the labeling. And if there is, we should correct our error—and not just our factual error, but our behavioral error as well.
We should remember the admonition not to believe everything we see and hear. We should bring wisdom, patience and discernment to bear on what others want us to believe—including when we believe those others are on our side.
We should do all this realizing truth, ultimately, is not ours to control or shape. Truth is not subject to us, our desires or our whims. We are subject to truth.
Which leads me to another way of knowing.
Truth is greater than us
There’s one more source of knowledge I didn’t mention earlier. It’s the source held high by people who believe Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. That source is revelation.
We did not arrive at “Jesus is the way, the truth and the life” on our own. Rather, we believe Scripture and Jesus himself revealed this to us. This revelation is so significant, Christians for 2,000 years have passed it down through their words, their actions, their very lives.
What’s more, we who have experienced life with and without Jesus can attest to the difference Jesus makes and to the substance of our truth claims about him.
But none of this—the revelation and all that follows from it—is so convincing as to cause everyone to believe it. However much we who believe wish it was so convincing, it simply has not been and won’t be in this life.
Nevertheless, truth is not so small a thing as to require universal belief in order to be true. Nor does it need the blessing of any administration. A time will come when, whatever we call it, whatever we think about it, whatever uncertainty we have about it will fall away, and we will stand before truth and know it and answer to it.
Eric Black is the executive director, publisher and editor of the Baptist Standard. He can be reached at eric.black@baptiststandard.com. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.
We seek to connect God’s story and God’s people around the world. To learn more about God’s story, click here.
Send comments and feedback to Eric Black, our editor. For comments to be published, please specify “letter to the editor.” Maximum length for publication is 300 words.