Theopedia

Truth

— “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’” (John 14:6)

Definition

Truth is conformity to reality: a statement, thought, or person is true when it corresponds to what actually is the case. The Reformed confessions ground this in God himself, calling him the one “who is truth itself,” the very ground of Scripture’s own authority. Christ applies the term to his own person: “I am…the truth” (John 14:6). Truth is therefore not merely a property statements can have when accurate, but an attribute of God: “there cannot be a second truth which is not from the first,” so every lesser truth depends on and reflects his.

Confessional Witness

The Westminster Confession, the Savoy Declaration, and the 1689 London Baptist Confession all ground the authority of Scripture in the same conviction, that it “dependeth not upon the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God (who is truth itself), the author thereof.”1 Truth, in this confessional family’s own vocabulary, is a divine perfection before it is a property of accurate statements.

Petrus van Mastricht devotes a full chapter of his dogmatics to “The Truthfulness and Faithfulness of God,” building it on Romans 3:3-4, “let God be true and every man a liar.” He distinguishes three senses of truth: “agreement of the appearance with the thing…called metaphysical or transcendental truth”; “agreement of the mind with the thing, by which we understand a thing as it is…called logical truth”; and “the agreement of words with the mind…called ethical truth.”2 All three are correspondence accounts, and Mastricht traces each back to God: “there could not be any truth or anything true if God were not true and truthful, insofar as there cannot be a second truth which is not from the first.”2

Herman Bavinck states the same conviction more briefly: God “is truth in its absolute fullness, the source and ground of all truth, all reality. He is the light by which alone we can know truth.”3

Biblical Basis

Scripture applies “truth” to each person of the Trinity. The Father is “the LORD, God of truth” (Ps. 31:5). The Son says of himself, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), and prays to the Father that his word “is truth” (John 17:17). The Spirit is “the Spirit of truth” (John 14:17; 16:13).2

God’s truthfulness is repeatedly stated as an inability rather than merely a habit: he “never lies” (Titus 1:2), and “it is impossible for God to lie” (Heb. 6:18). “God is not man, that he should lie” (Num. 23:19). Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” (John 18:38), follows directly on Jesus telling him, “Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice” (John 18:37).

Historical Development

Aristotle originated the correspondence account of truth in the ancient world and paired it with the law of non-contradiction: a statement is true when it corresponds to reality, and a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect.4

Augustine, writing in the patristic era, located the ground of truth in God rather than in the human mind alone. The mind, he held, must be “enlightened” by God to become “a partaker of truth,” since the mind itself “is not itself the nature of truth.” Two people who each grasp the same truth see it, on his account, not in themselves but “in the immutable truth itself which is above our minds.”5

Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, took up Aristotle’s tools to describe God himself as truth’s ultimate ground: “the God of the Bible is not only the author of the correspondence theory of truth and the law of noncontradiction; he embodies both in his nature and his being.” Commenting on divine omnipotence, Aquinas held that even God cannot make a contradiction true, not from any weakness but because “a word that does not correspond with the nature of reality is not a word; it is a meaningless sound.”4

In the modern era, two significant departures from this correspondence tradition emerged: William James’s pragmatism, which tested truth by its usefulness rather than its correspondence to reality, and the relativism of postmodern thought, which relocated truth from the object of a belief to the believer’s own perspective, culture, or feeling.

Opposing Views

Pragmatism

William James proposed that religious and theological claims be tested not by correspondence to reality but by their usefulness: on this view their truth is “judged…on the basis of their social utility.”6 Bavinck argued this test undermines itself: appealing to a claim’s “value” to establish its truth only pushes the question back a step, since agreement about what counts as valuable would itself need a settled standard, and that appeal “can only be argued by its ‘value’ and so on ad infinitum.”6 James himself, Bavinck notes, eventually gave up the pragmatic test as sufficient and turned to mysticism, admitting “the heart has its reasons which reason does not know.”6

Relativism and Postmodernism

Postmodern thought commonly treats truth as relative to the individual or the group holding it. Craig Carter distinguishes two forms: “epistemological relativism defines truth as what is true for me or my group,” while ethical relativism denies any truth about right and wrong beyond what a particular group affirms; both, he argues, are “prevalent in the postmodernism of contemporary culture.”7

Objections and Responses

Truth is relative: what holds for one person, culture, or era need not hold for another. Reducing truth to what is relative to the believer runs into a self-referential problem: the claim “all truth is relative” is itself either true for everyone, in which case at least one truth is not relative, or true only for the person asserting it, in which case it gives no one else a reason to accept it. Augustus Hopkins Strong records a version of this argument turned against Herbert Spencer’s relativism: “All knowledge is, not absolute, but relative; our knowledge of this fact however is, not relative, but absolute.”8

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 4. ↩

  2. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 14, “The Truthfulness and Faithfulness of God,” 319-331. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 8, “The Living, Acting God.” ↩

  4. Louis Markos, From Aristotle to Christ: How Aristotelian Thought Clarified the Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2024), “Preface: A Platonist Learns to Love Aristotle.” ↩ ↩2

  5. Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), chap. 2, “Preparation for the School of Grace,” 74. ↩

  6. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 17, “The Order of Salvation.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. Craig A. Carter, “Do We Worship the God of the Bible?” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 9. ↩

  8. Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907). ↩