"What Is Truth"?

Tuesday my friend Wes treated me to breakfast at Dave’s Diner where a waiter told us they’d been robbed Sunday before last.

The gunman came in ordered a cup of coffee, pulled out a pistol, lined the waiters up, and ordered the cashier to empty the register. One of the guys who’d been working in the back saw what was happening through the kitchen door and called the cops on his cell phone. The guy ran out with the money but the cops caught him a few blocks away.

No one was injured. But the robbery shook everyone up; they closed the diner for the rest of the day.

Wes and I spent the morning discussing prostate cancer, local history, race relations and the Hegelian Dialectic.

Perhaps I should re-word that:

Wes discussed Hegel.

I listened.

As I understand it, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a German philosopher of the late 1700s, believed that there is no such thing as absolute truth.

He formulated that our ideas of truth involve becoming, not being; and he taught that our thought processes involved first a thesis, then an antithesis and then a synthesis.

But he said that there is no absolute truth.

To me this statement is self contradictory. When you say, “There is no absolute truth”, then you are stating that premise itself as an absolute truth— which makes no sense.

I’ve probably got Hegel’s idea’s garbled, but then I often garble my own ideas.

Wes, who is a member of the International Society Of Theologians, Philosophers & Other People Smarter Than John Cowart, groves on such discussions of ideas.

Wes says that Karl Marx used Hegel’s idea of there being no absolute truth as a cornerstone in developing communism and that Hegel’s thoughts form the roots for much of the materialism, idealism and negativism in the background of today’s general thought atmosphere.

What a downer.

My desk dictionary defines Truth as “the body of real things, events and facts… the property of being in accord with fact or reality… fidelity to an original”.

The word True is defined as “being in accordance with the actual state of affairs… conformable to an essential reality… the quality or state of being accurate”.

If we do not live in truth, then we generate a world of trouble!

Partial truth just don’t cut it.

Say, for instance I were to tell Ginny, “Honey, we’ve been married 38 years now and I’ve been true to you 98 per cent of that time”.

Wouldn’t she be tickled?

Not hardly — and that’s the absolute truth!

On the night in which He was betrayed, during His trial before Pontius Pilate, Jesus said, ”To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice”.

And Pilate asked, “What is truth”? and turned away.

But Jesus spoke no further.

That’s odd because all the previous evening at the Last Supper, Jesus had talked a lot about truth, especially as truth relates to the Spirit of God:

“When the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth,” Jesus said, “He shall testify of me”.

Later at the supper Jesus said, “Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but… he shall glorify me”.

Jesus equates Himself with absolute truth, with reality, with being in accord with the actual state of affairs.

Once I heard truth described as something which does not disappoint you, something which meets your expectations.

Right as that Last Supper was getting started, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me”

The Way that does not disappoint us.

The Truth of being in accord with reality.

The Life that meets our deep heart expectations.

Sounds like a winner to me.