The Relational Side to Truth

I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.

Mahatma Ghandi

Photo by Miikka Luotio on Unsplash

There is an incorrect assumption some make about truth: the belief that it is a mere intellectual entity. Just a collection of cold, hard, static facts.

But the longer I have lived and the deeper I have gotten into conversations about truth, I have discovered that it—particularly our acceptance of it—takes place at a relational level. Yes, truth is intellectual, but it is a composite object made up of emotion as well. There is feeling and touch in the nature of truth and how it is received.

The value of truth is not only reflected by who has raised the questions about it, but also the sheer breadth of time through which those questions have been discussed. Historians point to Socrates as being the one who first began asking what truth is and how we can know it. Just think about that. We are reaching back to the third century BC when we speak of Socrates. Before him, questions of the cosmos or science were more prevalently discussed—but Socrates believed that more than understanding how the world worked, we needed to explore how we ought to live. For him, the moral questions were the ones worth spending a whole lifetime pondering.

Indeed, more often than not, the truth questions in our lives involve how we are to live.