50 Key Concepts in Theology

The Truth
Religions offer their adherents ‘truth’, but the concept of ‘truth’ is extremely
slippery and complex.
In ordinary language we use the word ‘truth’, apparently without much
difficulty, to refer to those things which really are the case. This is the so-
called ‘correspondence’ theory of truth, which regards a statement as truthful
when it corresponds with ‘the facts’. It is this version of ‘truth’ that gets tested
in the courts. An accusation of murder is true only if the accused person
actually committed the crime.
Advocates of the correspondence theory – from David Hume to the
logical positivists and, lately, Richard Dawkins – have tended to be atheistic
on the grounds that believers can never produce any indisputable divine
‘facts’ that could prove the claims of theology.
But this common-sense idea of truth assumes that the world consists of
unambiguous ‘facts’ which can easily be produced or described. More often
than not, ‘the truth’ must be interpreted from complex and ambiguous
evidence. ‘The causes of World War II’, for example, are a matter of
interpretation and debate, and we can imagine conflicting historical accounts
being simultaneously true but in different ways. Furthermore, interpretations
of the truth also change over time and between cultures.
It is this relationship between truth and historical/cultural change that has
been at the heart of debates in philosophy and theology since the earliest
times. Plato, for example, argued that truth occupies its own ideal world in
which nothing ever changes. Karl Marx (following Hegel) argued that truth
gets slowly realised in the changes of human history. The doctrine of the
incarnation tries to embrace both these positions: The Truth is both a pure
divine reality and living human history, both ideal knowledge and the process
of existence.
The incarnation also poses the problem of explaining how truth can be
absolute and relative at the same time: how is God’s timeless, cosmic idea of
truth reconciled with Jesus’ local expressions of truth in first-century
Palestine? One solution is to imagine, as von Balthasar does, that truth is
‘symphonic’: a single reality composed of diverse parts playing themselves
out over time.
Since the early twentieth century, and in particular the philosophy of
Wittgenstein, some theologians have understand the word ‘truth’ as a purely
cultural construct. So when I say X is ‘true’, this doesn’t tell me anything

---

about X, but only about my attitude to X. Thus it is not possible to speak
about ‘truth’ as such, only about ‘truth as we understand it’. More progressive
‘post-modern’ theologians, such as Don Cupitt, say that what we mean by
‘truth’ is always in flux and that there is no such thing as Truth in the abstract
sense. This would mean that there is no ‘symphony’ of truth: only countless
separate expressions.
We find the truth described in the Bible as a lived reality, an attitude to
life or a path along which we must walk. Jesus describes himself as ‘the way,
the truth, and the life’, which implies that truthfulness is much more than
simply uttering true statements. The New Testament uses a very particular
Greek word for truth – aletheia, or ‘unforgetting’ – which suggests that the
truth is already within us and only needs to surface through layers of denial
and forgetfulness.
THINKERS
Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) studied the concept of truth as aletheia,
which is prominent in St John’s Gospel: ‘In John aletheia denotes “divine
reality” with reference to the fact i) that this is different from the reality in
which man first finds himself, and by which he is controlled, and ii) that it
discloses itself and is thus revelation.’
Lord Byron (1788–1824) made the famous remark that ‘truth is always
strange;/ Stranger than fiction’ (Don Juan).
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) argued the constructivist case that ‘true and
false are attributes of speech, not of things’ (Leviathan).
John Keats (1795–1821) believed that ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That
is all ye know, and all ye need to know.’
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) argued that ‘subjectivity is truth, because
the objective truth for an existing person is … abstraction’ (Concluding
Unscientific Postscript).
Gotthold Lessing (1729–81) argued that the quest for truth was preferable
to having the truth itself.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) argued that truth is ‘a movable host of
metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human
relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred
and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to people to be fixed,
canonical and binding’ (from ‘On truth and lies in a non-moral sense’).
Plato (c. 427–c. 347 bc) argued that truth derives from perfect and

---

unchanging ideas (or ‘forms’) and that what is ‘true’ is also what is ‘good’.
IDEAS
Aletheia: the Greek word for ‘truth’ used of and by Jesus, especially in
John’s Gospel.
Analytical truth: the truth of logic or mathematics – e.g. the truth that 2 +
2 = 4 can be proven by logical analysis.
The coherence theory of truth argues that logically coherent statements
are true.
The consensus theory of truth argues that the truth is what is agreed by
consensus within a community or culture.
The constructivist theory of truth: the argument that truth is generated
(constructed) by culture.
The correspondence theory of truth argues that true statements are those
that correspond with the facts, or ‘sense data’, or states of affairs.
The deflationary theory of truth argues the ‘minimal’ or ‘reductionist’
case that all statements already contain implicit truth claims, so that saying
that the statement ‘God is good’ is ‘true’, adds nothing to it, but merely
restates the assertion ‘God is good’. If the word ‘true’ doesn’t do any work, it
is therefore redundant.
The falsification principle: attributed to Karl Popper (1902–94), this
states that a statement is meaningless if there is no way of falsifying it. If
there is no way of falsifying belief in God, then such belief is empty.
The objective theory of truth: the argument that truth exists ‘out there’
independently of our subjective perceptions.
Perspectivism: the argument, put forward by Nietzsche, among others,
that there is only the truth of our own particular perspective.
The pragmatic theory of truth argues that the truth is what works.
The subjective theory of truth: the argument that truth is only revealed in
individual subjective experience.
The textualist theory of truth: the argument (put forward, for example, by
the so-called structuralists) that truth always manifests itself within language.
Truth statements: according to Aristotle’s logic, assertoric statements
assert that something is the case (e.g. ‘the grass is green’); problematic
statements suggest a possible truth (e.g. ‘it could rain tomorrow’); and

---

apodictic statements present a self-evident truth (e.g. ‘a triangle has three
sides’).
The verification principle argues that a statement is true when it can be
verified from experience.
BOOKS
J. Richard Middleton and Brian J. Walsh, Truth Is Stranger Than It Used
to Be: Biblical Faith in a Postmodern Age (InterVarsity Press, 1995)
Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmons, Truth (Oxford University Press,
1999)
Marcel Detienne, The masters of truth in archaic Greece (Zone Books,
1996)

---