Herman Hermeneut: O.K. So we have achieved some insight about God and about the fact that he speaks. But shouldn’t we also consider issues of language? After all, the Bible is written in human language. How does this fact limit what he says? What are the implications? What about considering what is the character of truth?
Missy Missiologist: Language is embedded in human culture. What we understand will depend heavily on the cultural context out of which we read the Bible. We need to rise beyond the limitations of our own cultural context. Otherwise, we are in danger of hearing only what fits with our culture.
Oliver Objectivist: But wherever we start, and whatever the biases of our own culture, the truth itself remains the same. Truth is the eternal sameness of a fixed, well-defined, objective meaning.
Amy Affirmationist: No, I think the Holy Spirit may bring different things to different people. Each person must find the truth that God gives to him.
Dottie Doctrinalist: Human language has its foundation in the doctrine of creation. Let’s go to Genesis.
We now look more closely at truth and language. Interpreting the Bible confronts us constantly with the language and the truth in the Bible. But what is language? And what is truth?
The Bible indicates that human beings were created in such a way that they could speak and understand language. Moreover, before human beings were created, God spoke. “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Gen 1:3). Divine language and divine speaking precede human speaking.
Here we have another instance of imaging. Human beings use language because they imitate God who uses language. God’s speaking is the archetype for human speaking; human speaking is the “image” or mirroring of divine speaking.
Truth in human language also derives from a divine archetype. Jesus says that he is the truth (John 14:6; cf. 18:37). In his divine nature he is therefore the archetype for all human manifestations of the truth. John’s language about truth is closely related to the fact that Jesus in his incarnation definitively reveals God.
For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has even seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known. (John 1:17-18)
Thus truth is Trinitarian in character. Jesus is the truth. At the same time, he is the truth about God the Father. He is the truth manifested through the power of the Holy Spirit (Isa. 61:1). Of course, we speak here primarily of central religious truth about God. But such truth cannot be isolated from all truth. God teaches human beings whatever truth they know, and he is the source of it all (Ps. 94:10; Rom. 11:33-36). Colossians speaks of “… Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:2-3).
We may summarize some aspects of truth using the triad of imaging that we introduced earlier. First, truth in the Father is original reality. Second, truth in the Son is dynamic manifestation or image of the original reality. Third, truth in the Spirit is the harmony between the Father and the Son through their mutual indwelling. We may say that this truth is the concurrence of the Father with the Son, the presence of each with and in the other. Thus we have three categories, original reality, dynamic manifestation of the original, and concurrence of the dynamic expression with the original. Clearly these three categories describe the divine relations of Persons in the Trinity. But these divine relations are “imaged” and mirrored in the experience that human beings have of truth. We experience both reality and a particular manifestation or way of grasping that reality through a particular revelation.
We can illustrate this unity in diversity with the four Gospels. The four Gospels describe one Christ and one series of events of his earthly life. There is a unity to the truth of the four Gospels,1 but also a diversity in their emphases and in the ways in which they present Christ. In Matthew Christ is preeminently the Davidic king, so Matthew appropriately begins with the genealogy running through the kings of the Davidic line. In John Christ is the Son of the Father revealing the Father. In Luke Christ is the one bringing salvation to the poor and prophetically proclaiming jubilee release (Luke 4:18-19). In Mark the Son of Man comes to destroy the kingdom of Satan. The diversity of the four Gospels is of course the product of the distinct personalities, interests, and situations of the four human authors. But God wills this diversity as well. It is divine diversity as well as human.
The Gospels in their plurality as well as in their unity represent God’s interpretation of the life of Christ. We do not need to go behind the diversity to find the “real” Christ. A person who reads only one of the Gospels can already know the real Christ, precisely in knowing him in the concrete manifestation in that one Gospel with its distinctive point of view. At the same time, that point of view is not the only possible true point of view.
As a result of coinherence, there may be both multiple expressions of truth and at the same time unified truth that these multiple expressions express. The diverse manifestations coinhere.
Now compare this approach with popular alternatives. Rationalism expresses a fragment of truth by stressing the unity, stability, and self-consistency of the truth. God is one and is faithful to himself. (This view is a kind of exaggerated form of Objectivist’s approach.) But rationalism counterfeits this reality if it then pictures truth in a way that eliminates the personality of God, the diversity of Persons, and the dynamic aspect in the Son’s relation to the Father. It then suppresses the diversity and creativity in the manifestations of the truth. The result is that we begin to think that we can find “real” truth only beyond the diversity of its concrete manifestations. Truth is an abstraction from the world. It becomes remote.
At the other extreme, relativism expresses a fragment of the truth by emphasizing the diversity of manifestations and perspectives of different Persons. (It is a kind of exaggeration of Amy Affirmationist.) But it introduces a counterfeit when it then claims that there is no real absolute truth. It falsifies the divine nature by undermining the unity of God and the unity of truth. Truth splits apart into the often contradictory views of different individuals and communities.
In the Trinity we do not sacrifice unity to diversity or diversity to unity. The Trinity provides an answer to relativism through coinherence. The diversity of manifestations or viewpoints does not imply the destruction of truth or the inaccessibility of truth. Rather, God speaks, through the Holy Spirit. Hence rather than being inaccessible truth is inescapable!
Let us illustrate again from the Gospels. In reading any one account, we may grasp Christ truly, though not exhaustively. Christ the Truth meets us and comes all the way to us in any one Gospel, through the Holy Spirit. Moreover, the truth in any one Gospel coheres with the truth in the other Gospels.
God is one, and does not contradict himself. We may not always be able to give a definitive harmonization of all the truths, for we are creatures and our knowledge is limited. Moreover, in sin we may twist and distort the truth. But in the midst of our limitations we may still know Christ, both through one Gospel and through all of them together.
We are to appreciate the distinctive emphases of any one Gospel, but not at the expense of denying the unity. Thus, grasping truth and knowing truth does not depend on our rising above all perspectives and human limitations, but rather on appropriating and enjoying what God supplies to us where we are.
Here we find also the beginnings of an answer to the vexed problems of multiple cultures and contextualization with which Missy Missiologist is concerned. Through the Spirit, who is the Creator, God is present in all the nooks and crannies of each culture. To be sure, human cultures are contaminated by sin. God may confront human beings to judge and punish sin as well as to reveal himself in blessing. But in spite of sin, people do not escape God. They suppress the truth about God even while they know it (Rom. 1:18-21). They try to run away from him, but they cannot escape him (Ps. 139). Hence, we do not need to rise above the particularities of Chinese culture, or ancient Hebraic culture, in order to know God truly. We need to be freed from sin, including its cultural as well as individual manifestations. But God and his truth can come to us right where we are, even in the midst of sin. We do not first disengage the divine truth in the Bible from its cultural setting in the Ancient Near East—that would be impossible anyway, since we ourselves are part of a particular culture. Anthropologists might try to rise above all cultures, but they can make the attempt only by using theoretical tools and methodologies that belong inextricably to the western academic subculture of theoretical anthropology! We do not, then disengage the Bible’s truth from all the particularities of cultures, but rather grasp the truth as it inheres in the particularity of its cultural setting. Each manifestational instance of the truth is a manifestation of originary truth. The instances are concurrent with the truth that they manifest.
From this standpoint we can also see how secularist theories of truth fare. There are three main kinds of approach, coherence theories, correspondence theories, and subjectivist theories.2 According to coherence theory, a system of thought is true if it is consistent with itself. Now God is consistent with himself. His consistency is guaranteed by the unity of God and the indwelling of the Persons of the Godhead through the Spirit. If our thought is consistent with or coherent with the thought of the indwelling Spirit, it is true.
According to correspondence theory, thought is true if it corresponds to what is the case. The Son as the image of God corresponds to or matches who the Father is. Truth is correspondence of the Son to the Father. Or, for human beings made in the image of God, our thought is true if it corresponds to, that is, images, the thought of the Son.
According to subjectivist theory, truth has to do with what a personal subject acknowledges. Truth is what God the Father knows. My truth is what I acknowledge, to the degree that it is not I alone but the indwelling Spirit who leads into truth (John 16:13).
Thus, all three theories in their secularist form have a grain of truth, but they also distort the truth. They become counterfeits of Trinitarian truth.
From the character of God, it follows that truth is inherently analogical. We never completely dispense with analogy and metaphor. Whether a particular piece of our language is mostly literal or mostly metaphorical, it images the divine language of God and the truth of God. The imaging relation is itself analogically related to the original imaging between the Father and the Son. Because God is unique, human beings image God in a way that is analogous to, but not identical with, the way in which the Second Person of the Trinity images the Father. As the Son is not identical with the Father, so the created images are not identical with the uncreated. As the Father and the Son coinhere, so the divine truth coheres with its images in human knowledge. We may never bring God down to the same level as creatures. But the Bible indicates that we may see analogies between what is true of God and what is true of us. For example, John 17:21 compares the oneness of believers with the oneness of the Father and the Son, even though the two kinds of oneness are not on the same level.
All attempts to dissolve all analogy and metaphor into a single level of purely literal language must fail to do justice to this mystery of coinherence.
1 Because God is consistent with himself, and because truth is one, the Gospels do not contradict one another. Sometimes we may find apparent contradictions, but closer study often reveals a probable harmonization. And even if we cannot find a harmonization through our limited human efforts, there is always a harmonization known to God.
2 See further John M. Frame, Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, 133-134, 141-142, 149-164.