To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
- John 8:31-32 (NIV)
Recently an +article was published on this site concerning the humility with which we, as Christians, ought to approach Truth (capital T) and our supposed knowledge of it. The point of this article is well taken: truth, on which Christians often claim to have a monopoly, proves to be quite a slippery object to possess, especially when approached with the epistemological rigor of philosophy. In light of this, humility must, unquestionably, be among the most cherished virtues of the truth-seeker. So far I agree.
The author of the article offers a possible interpretation of John 8:32, suggesting that the truth sets us free by putting us into a “perplexed” state of “wonderment.” He concludes by prescribing that “If we are to achieve any grasp whatsoever on the truth, we must first realize that we can never grasp it absolutely.” I find the suggestions and conclusions of the article to be problematic in three ways: first, I disagree with the article’s implications for the nature of truth and our ability to know it; second, while doing much to tear down intellectual pride with regard to our knowledge of the truth, this article leaves undone the work of building up a framework for the pursuit of truth, specifically the truth of Christ’s teachings; and third, I disagree with the author’s interpretation of what Christ means when he says that “the truth will set you free.”
(1) The author of the article has this to say about the nature of truth: “Biblical truth…is mostly narrative rather than propositional in nature: biblical truth fits the form of life—i.e., flux: becoming, passing away, change.” He also writes that “truth never reaches some final state of completion, but is always rearranging itself, always expanding and evolving, because if it did not do so it would die.” I do not understand what the author can mean by saying that Biblical truth “fits the form of…flux.” Nor do I understand what the author means by saying that if the truth was not “always expanding and evolving” then “it would die.” In simply looking at Christ’s words in the gospels, we find hundreds of statements, the truth of which Christians do not consider to be in flux: “I am the way and the truth and the life,” “Any one who has seen me has seen the Father,” “For God so loved the world…” The truths expressed in these sentences are not in a state of “becoming, passing away, [and] change,” nor are they “always expanding and evolving,” or “always rearranging” themselves.
Another comment on this: I do not understand the distinction that the author makes between narrative truth and propositional truth. Narrative and proposition are not two separate kinds of truth, but rather two different ways of expressing the same truth. Whether I tell you a narrative about what my family and I did on Christmas day or I express it to you in the form of propositions, each account will only be true if it corresponds to what I actually did on Christmas day. Now clearly the first account is going to be much more interesting than the second, and the first account will be much more effective than the second in arousing emotion and pathos in my audience and maybe in convincing them to act differently next Christmas, but I am still expressing the same truths in each account.
Finally, with all this talk of truth changing and fluctuating and setting us free by bewildering us, I feel that it is appropriate to remind us of what Christ also says in John 8:32 – “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (emphasis added). Let us not forget this: we can know the truth and Christ tells us how.
(2) So how can we know the truth? Let us look back one verse: “To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, ‘If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth…” Simone Weil writes that some “certainties” are “experimental,” that they cannot be gained without acting, without giving something a try (Weil, paragraph 9). I would like to suggest that certain truths about God and certain truths about the spiritual life are like this. In John 8:31-32, Christ tells us that there is a causal relationship between holding to his teaching, coming to know the truth, and being set free. The implications of this are that in order to know the truth we must act – we must actively obey.
We, as Christians, are obsessed with right belief. In fact, many in the contemporary church have made an idol of it. We believe in the power of our beliefs to secure for us a place in heaven. But we do not believe in the truth of Christ’s teachings about how to live in the kingdom of God now. And we do not believe in the truth of these teachings because we have not bothered to try to put them into practice.
Eternal life is knowing God (John 17:3). Merely believing (or professing) the right things about God does not entail knowing him, and, consequently, merely believing the right things about God does not guarantee that a person will experience the abundant life that Christ came to bring. There are different kinds of knowledge. First, we can have knowledge of how to do something, e.g., to pray or to fast. We might call this “knowledge of how to practice x.” We can also have knowledge about something, e.g., knowledge that Jesus was a male human being. We might call this “knowledge of facts.” I do not mean for these to be clearly distinct groups – there is certainly some crossover between them. So what kind of knowledge do we mean when we talk about knowing God? Christians believe that God is a person, so it may be helpful to think about what it means for someone to know their spouse or best friend. Certainly knowledge of facts is important and even required. The facts that we know about a person form the framework within which we interact with that person. For this reason accurate knowledge of the facts about a person are quite important if one wishes to effectively and fruitfully interact with that person. Indeed, without at least a basic foundation of accurate factual knowledge, interaction with a person is quite limited. The factual knowledge we have about God comes from the Bible. But more than factual knowledge is required if someone wishes to know another person. We must also know how to interact with the person. Furthermore, if we want to love a person well, in the way that Christ has loved us (John 15:12), we must do some serious work in our inner or spiritual life. The Bible is also quite helpful in this. For example, in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ teaches us about how to pray and how to fast. Moreover, the Christian tradition, both Catholic and Protestant, is full of the writings of Christ-like men and women which provide instruction for spiritual practices and spiritual formation. But this is still not enough. Knowing how to commune with God is not the same as actually communing with God, and, consequently, if we stop here, we will not experience the fullness of the abundant life that emerges as we come to know God. This brings me to my point: if we wish to know the truth which was manifested in Jesus Christ, not just the truth about him, we must commune with God through the Holy Spirit by obeying the teachings of Christ, by becoming his disciples, not simply his admirers or his confessors. Dallas Willard writes that “knowledge,” in the sense of John 17:3, is “interactive relationship” (Willard 111). This is a third kind of knowledge: a knowledge that comes from experience, a knowledge of what something (God) is actually like. This kind of knowledge is only attained by taking action, and it will require the complete reorientation of our lives.
(3) What, then, does it mean when Jesus says that “the truth will set you free?” I feel ill-equipped to provide an answer to this question with the eloquence and glory due to it, so I will simply try to point and gesture. “The truth will set you free” means that if we truly become Christ’s disciples, if we make him the consistent first love of our life, if we believe and act on the truth that Christ came to make us new, whole people, and not only to forgive our sins or to help us feel good about ourselves when we mess up or feel like our life is out of control, then we will, in our daily lives, experience the abundant, eternal kind of life which was made manifest in Christ. We will daily see the fruit of the Spirit in our lives. And we will, in reality, take on the character of Christ and begin to act as he would act and think as he would think and love as he would love. We will be set free from ourselves and made into new, Christ-like creations. May we not settle for anything less as we live out a practiced Christianity.
Contact Brian Bushman at brianbushman@yahoo.com
Bibliography
Weil, Simone. “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” 1 Jan. 2007 < http://www.chosunjournal.com/weil.html>.
Willard, Dallas. The Great Omission. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.
