Pondering Truth and Love in Christian Life

Part I: Truth

My colleague had just finished delivering a public lecture on the challenge that intersex persons—those born with a mix of male and female organs, chromosomes, and hormones—present to the church. A perturbed member of the audience was expressing his disapproval of her call for the Christian church to understand, affirm, and welcome them. “Truth matters,” he declared, waving his finger. “Love matters,” she countered, steeling her spirit. They were both right of course, though hardly in agreement, and they stopped short of debating any possible priority or primacy of truth and love in Christian life. Undoubtably, both matter enormously. But does one come before the other chronologically? Is one more important than the other? Is one more attainable than the other?

Some Christians argue that truth matters more, usually having in mind the propositional truth employed by the rationality of theological doctrine and philosophical apologetics. Propositional truth is any supposition or hypothesis put forward that is true rather than false. Christian theology is the use of reason to interpret the Bible and advance arguments that establish Christian beliefs and practices. Christian apologetics is the use of reason to defend Christian faith based on the principles of logic and the evidence of history, and to advance arguments that establish the plausibility of Christian faith. In this sense, both theology and apologetics are based on rationality and focused on the pursuit of truth about God, humans, and the universe.

Truth thus conceived and perceived is said to correspond to the objective facts of reality—the way things really are—and is grasped when we give mental assent to them. In this view, knowing such truth is a prerequisite for, and an enabling of comprehending what constitutes love. Hence, to speak the truth in love (Eph 4:15) requires that we first be certain about what is true before we can ascertain what is loving in any situation. We must first discern what is true before we can determine how to assert that truth lovingly. Furthermore, calling others to what we hold to be true is then itself an act of love (2 Cor 2:4), even if it must be “tough love” that the other resists or even resents. In this view, truth is clearly deemed to be foremost, the supreme Christian value beyond any Christian virtue. True love, in its subservient place, is therefore always surrendered to truth. Indeed, to speak untruth or anything less than the whole truth on any contentious matter is to be unloving. Love is only that which practices truth and “rejoices in it” (1 Cor 13:6). The combative Protestant reformer Martin Luther indirectly references Paul in Romans 12:18 when he encapsulated this view as “Peace, if possible, truth at all costs.”¹

Notably, propositional truths about material or natural facts of our physical bodies and environment are more accessible, and with greater confidence, than truths about abstract or normative facts of our social psychological selves and socio-cultural environment. The modern positivist ontology and objectivist epistemology exercised by the natural sciences are frequently more persuasive than the constructivist ontology and interpretivist epistemology of the social sciences. Furthermore, truths about the metaphysical or super-empirical realm are simply that much more difficult—indeed, impossible—to verify or falsify. As the meta-theoretical perspective of critical realism explicates, only the “mechanisms” in the smallest inner concentric circle of the “empirical” realm can be verified or falsified. While evidence can be marshalled to support claims regarding the mechanisms in the middle circle of the “actual” realm and in the largest outer circle of the “real” realm where metaphysical or super-empirical claims occur, they cannot be verified or falsified.²  Consequently, and unfortunately, there is no complete consensus on truth in any realm. Indubitably, all forms of truth-telling—historic, scientific, intuitive, principled, rational, metaphorical, mythological—are constantly contested. And theological truth is no exception.

As evidence for what he termed “pervasive interpretive pluralism,” sociologist Christian Smith listed thirty-four books outlining multiple Christian views on various doctrinal and ethical issues,³ such as the “four Christian views on this” or the “five Christian views on that.” He also listed fifty-seven separate, deep disagreements about truth on major matters among earnest and educated Protestant evangelicals alone, creating tens of millions of possible unique combinations. And that was fourteen years ago, with more having emerged since then due in large part to exacerbated political polarization within the church. Globally and historically, when free from colonization, there have long been multiple forms of theological orthodoxy present in various Christian traditions, all “located answers to located questions in located situations.”⁴ When all who self-identify as Christian are included—Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and late-coming Protestants, in the cultural East and West, in the Global North and South—perhaps the only agreement is on the four-part Christian metanarrative of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration, in which God is somehow central to each of the four scenes.

A further problem is that, contrary to the Quaker commitment to “speak truth to power,” claims of objective truth often function problematically as acts of power in themselves. If power is the ability to exert one’s will despite resistance, as classical sociologist Max Weber distinguished it from authority, then such objective truth claims seek to overpower all in their path, without empathetic regard for any in their path. Consequently, emphatic assertion of such truth claims can easily become confrontational, even adversarial—truth wielded as a weapon, and at all costs—whereas the practice of empathetic love leads more fruitfully to interpersonal reconciliation, restorative justice, and authentic peace. Acts of love abstain from reverting to raw power, much like Jesus, the Prince of Peace, modelled. Indeed, truth claims are often divisive in ways that love is not, as the multiple branches and myriad denominations of Christianity make manifest. Discrepant claims of truth have severely fragmented Christianity to the bemusement of non-Christians, as the contest of truth claims too often degenerates into both internal and external power struggles. On the other hand, though they continue to disagree on the practical character of love, the call to love is one of the few biblical imperatives that has both united Christians and benefitted non-Christians.

More profoundly, when the notion of objective truth is used as the driving force of love, it tends to turn the person who is the object of that love into just that, an object held at some personal distance, some “thing,” “out there.” The “othered” person is objectified as the fortunate recipient of our admirably principled moral duty as we perform the role of a “good Christian.” Therefore, at bottom, it’s more about us, more about our virtue than about the other, who becomes rather incidental to our oh so generous goodwill. Like too much merely financial philanthropy, such love remains primarily self-centered and self-expressive of the giver, settling for only superficial relationship with the receiver, failing to find any significant mutuality with the receiver, and ultimately leaving each other alienated strangers in every real, practical sense. Such love is as vacuous as most Facebook friends, and in the end, remains unkind, lacking the “kind”ness of simple human solidarity, because its object is effectively dehumanized in the process.

Epistemologically, objective imperialism in the extreme is the belief that Christians have complete command of absolute truth and are called and empowered to use it to build an empire, as most egregiously expressed by the Doctrine of Discovery. Clearly, such a notion should not be confused or conflated with the biblical concept and character of the Kingdom of God. However, subjective relativism in the extreme is the equal but opposite dead end, the notion that there is no universal truth, because knowledge is relative to the limited nature of the subjective human mind and its conditions of knowing. Thankfully, most Christians acknowledge that they see through a glass darkly, which is arguably a more biblical sense of truth, a third open middle road that avoids both these dead ends.

Culturally, in the Middle East where and when the Bible was written, truth primarily meant relational trust and loyalty—being “true” to the other—and only secondarily honesty or accuracy of factual content. In those cultures, truth was personal, and to know the truth was to be in living, loving relationship. Affectively, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel maintained that “it is impossible to find Truth without being in love.”⁵ In other words, love is both the experiential prerequisite and the experiential method for finding truth, not merely the way we practice truth. And volitionally, according to Quaker educator Parker Palmer, we find truth by pledging our troth, by covenanting our loving fidelity.⁶ In other words, we accept as true only what we have already come to love. So, for example, for the person who first loves reason, truth is rational. But for the person who first loves the non-rational, truth is spiritual. And for the person who first loves relationship, truth is behavioral.⁷ So, is lived Christian faith⁸ rational, spiritual, or behavioral? At the very least, Christianity calls for a more expansive concept of truth.

When Jesus says “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6), it is best understood as referring to the character of his person and relations with others, not just propositions about his identity and role in the cosmic drama. Jesus does not claim that he knows the truth, but rather that he is the truth, and a person is not a proposition. Jesus incarnates truth, and calls us to incarnate him in turn, that is, to embrace him, not just propositions about him, to emulate his way of life, not just believe creeds about his life. Therefore, when Pilate objectifies truth and famously asks Jesus “What is truth?” (Jn 18:38), he simply gets the question wrong. He would have come closer to truth had he asked “who is truth,” especially with the embodiment of it standing before him.

Overall, though some Christians argue that truth matters more than love, their conceptions of truth are often too narrow, and always too problematic. What then of love?

An earlier version of the first two blogs in this three-part series first appeared as an article in the Journal of Sociology and Christianity.

1. Emily C. Tess, Peace if Possible, Truth at All Costs: Martin Luther: A Notebook for the Always Reforming (Independently Published, 2018).
2. Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (London: Verso, 1975). For a defense of critical realism by a biblical scholar/theologian, see N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004).
3. Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2011).
4. Graham Ward, “Decolonizing Theology,” Stellenbosch Theological Journal 3(2)(2017):561–84, 573.
5. Abraham Joshua Heschel, A Passion for Truth (Toronto: Collins Publishers, 1973), 45.
6. Parker J. Palmer, To Know as We are Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993).
7. Dennis Hiebert, Rationality, Humility, and Spirituality in Christian Life (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020).
8. Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Studying Lived Religion: Contexts and Practices (New York: New York University Press, 2021).