What is truth?

In the Gospel of John, Pilate asks Jesus this very question about truth. However, I don’t get the sense that Pilate was really interested in an answer. He seems more interested in dismissing Jesus than dealing with the truth.1 How about us? Most people seem interested in the truth when they think they’re standing on the right side of truth. Of course, everyone always wants to believe they’re standing on the right side of truth. But should someone happen to be on the wrong side, the truth seems more like a foe than a friend.

On the wrong side, the truth seems rather inconvenient, perhaps even a threat. From the wrong side of truth, it’s tempting to smirk and ask, “What is truth?” Or someone might echo Colonel Jessup, the fictional character Jack Nicholson plays in A Few Good Men, who shouts, “You can’t handle the truth.” But is it really about not being able or more about not wanting to handle the truth? It’s a question worth pondering.

The truth matters, or at least it should. The Greek word alēthia, meaning “truth,” appears twenty-five times in the Gospel of John; one hundred nine times in the entire New Testament. Such frequency suggests that the truth, whatever it is, matters. Fortunately, the truth does seem to matter for most Christians. If you go into any bookstore and find the religious or theology section, you’ll find plenty of books on truth. Titles like Truth Matters, The Truth War, and Knowing the Truth, or a video series like The Truth Project, show how much importance Christians give to truth.

For some time now, interest in truth has pushed back against the idea of relativism that’s become increasingly popular in our postmodern society, and for good reason. The notion that all claims to truth are equally valid is absolute nonsense. If Jesus is Lord, and I believe he is, then Muhammad is not. Neither is the Buddha, Confucius, Krishna, or anyone else.2

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The challenge is that, too often, Christian pushback against postmodern notions of relativism assumes a modernism framework. By modernism, I mean a way of thinking that emerged from great thinkers like René Descartes and John Locke but reached its pinnacle with Immanuel Kant. Truth became grounded in each person's free will, governed by their own ability to reason.3 Thus, knowing what is true, determined by our own reasoning, leads to freedom. So in many courthouses, university halls, and other institutions, we find the inscription, “And the truth shall make you free.”

As brilliant as Immanuel Kant was, he was wrong. Grounding truth in an individual's free will, governed by the human ability to reason, makes each individual the arbitrator of truth, determining what is right and wrong.4 In many ways, that’s the same ill-formed choice that Adam and Eve made by eating from that one forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden. They saw that the tree could make them like God, able to know right and wrong (cf. Gen 3:3-4). Unfortunately, history has shown time and again how consequential and detrimental life becomes when people think of themselves as the arbitrators of truth—what is right and wrong, good and evil. We see this problem in our own society every day.

Kant’s grounding of truth assumes that human reasoning is sound. However, because humans aren’t infallible, their reasoning may be skewed. Ideally, a collective body of people reasoning together might help a community avoid extremism, relativism, and other consequential maladies. Unfortunately, groupthink means even collective reasoning isn't immune to error. So, if truth does not emerge from human reasoning, how do people determine truth? This brings us back to square one, with the question of what is truth.

The Gospel of John speaks to the question of truth by telling us about Jesus, the Incarnate Word of God. John says that through Jesus came grace and truth (cf. Jn 1:1, 14, 17). Then, in a conversation with a Samaritan woman, Jesus assures her that a time is coming when people will worship God “in the Spirit and in the truth” (Jn 4:23-24).5 Then a little further on in John’s Gospel, we learn that the phrase “The truth shall set you free” actually originates with Jesus. But Jesus’s understanding of truth isn’t grounded in our free will or our ability to reason. Here is what Jesus actually says: “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (Jn 8:32)

“We mature as believers by speaking the truth to each other, revealed to us in the Incarnate Word of God and communicated through Scripture as the word of God.”

Truth exists in the teachings of Jesus, and freedom does not come from our own individual free will to decide for ourselves what is right and wrong. We encounter truth by holding to Jesus' teaching, submitting to Jesus as Lord, and following the way of life he taught and exemplified. That’s why Jesus, on the very evening before he was crucified, said, “I am the way and the truth and the life” (Jn 14:6).

Pilate didn’t realize he was speaking to the Truth. Yet, Jesus has spoken: “…the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me” (Jn 18:38). The question of truth we are still challenged with remains: Are we listening to Jesus?

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Because we believe in Jesus Christ, our lives are to be formed in the truth of Jesus Christ and his teachings. We ought to speak truth with our lives, in both word and deed. Yet the truth is a challenge because it includes what Jesus said about his kingdom not being of this world. These days, far too many Christians seem more concerned with the kingdoms of this world. What follows is the spinning of half-truths, which are just lies that have enough truth embedded in them so that undiscerning minds don’t know the difference.

Of all people, Christians should be committed to the truth. Truth is not a nebulous concept we get to define. When we add adjectives to the word truth, like “my truth” or “absolute truth,” or come up with phrases like “alternative facts” to describe the truth, we are attempting to define truth for ourselves. That makes us, once again, the arbitrators of truth. But the truth is revealed to us, not reasoned by us!

Our allegiance is to Jesus Christ, whom we follow. In doing so, we encounter the truth, and in turn, it should shape our lives. Part of the reason Christians gather together in the name of Jesus Christ is to be reminded of the truth. Hearing the gospel proclaimed through song, scripture, prayer, preaching, and the Eucharist ought to form our beliefs and values, and how we live moral and ethical lives. So we should never play grace off of truth, as though we can have one without the other. Jesus comes to us as the Incarnate Word, who is full of both grace and truth. Without grace, there is no truth, and without truth, there is no grace.

The apostle Paul encourages us to speak the truth in love, saying, “speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ” (Eph 4:15). We mature as believers by speaking the truth to each other, revealed to us in the Incarnate Word of God and communicated through Scripture as the word of God. So when we see each other doing good works for the sake of Jesus, we ought to speak the truth in love as encouragement that further nurtures the embodied gospel. On the flip side, when we see each other doing things that are inconsistent with the truth, we ought to speak the truth in love as a word of correction. And the reality is that, as Christ is formed in us, we all need to hear the truth spoken in love, as a word of encouragement and correction.

Flannery O’Connor once said, “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” Ain’t that the truth, no pun intended? But here’s what we need to remember. We don’t need to fear the truth because Jesus Christ reveals it to us as the very extension of God’s grace. The truth is not revealed to harm us, but to restore the life we lost when we decided to make ourselves the arbitrators of right and wrong, good and evil. The truth is given to form us with a life that’s full of hope, meaning, and purpose for a kingdom without end.

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D.A. Carson, The Gospel According to John, The Pillar New Testament Commentary, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991, 595.

This is why I find it frustrating when people have this Coexist bumper sticker on their cars because there seems to be an implied assumption that major religions can coexist because they are all equally valid. That assumption is its own truth claim that demands all other major world religions abandon their truth claims. Yes, we should all strive to get along peacefully with our neighbors, but suggesting we abandon what we believe is true in order to coexist is just someone imposing their own alternative truth claim on others.

Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Ethics, 3rd. ed., trans. J.W. Semple, Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1886, accessed October 9, 2026, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/kant-the-metaphysics-of-ethics, who defined freedom, saying, “Freedom is the alone unoriginated [sic] birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity; and is independence on the will and co-action of every other in so far as this consists with every other person’s freedom.”

Ron Highfield, God, Freedom, & Human Dignity: Embracing A God-Centered Identity in a Me-Centered Culture, Downers Grove: IVP Books, 2013, 103-104, who explains how freedom, understood in the Western sense and as practiced in America, is individual autonomy. This ideal, emerging from the human power of reason, seeks to remove anything that hinders the good(s) of human desire and, in doing so, makes this idea of freedom itself an object of human desire.

All scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.