Christ is the truth

There's a fairly odd book by a theologian on this- I'm not sure of his name, but I *think* it's Bruce Marshall.

Let Christ come before Aristotle or Heidegger...but yes it has implications on both metaphysics and then on epistemology.

He is ultimate reality (God) and the one by which we are transformed...so that through faith, we seek understanding and know things after him.

So he may just be the crown jewel of which the theories of truth approach partially or see but one side of this jewel...He is an unveiling of reality and the reality by which we see, speak and know...

Of course I believe Augustine said some of this long ago...

In some theological quarters, great emphasis is placed on Christ's statement "I am the truth" and this is taken to mean that truth is not, or not fundamentally, a property of propositions. I confess I have never known what to make of this. I would welcome some interpretation of this utterance that did not make it sound ridiculous.

That God is Love is compatible with the claim that love is also a property of finite persons. That Christ is Truth might, likewise, be compatible with the claim that truth is a property of finite propositions. But by parallel, just as the claim that God is Love makes it implausible to think that love is fundamentally a property of finite persons, so too the claim that Christ is Truth makes it implausible to think that truth is fundamentally a property of propositions.

But I'm not much closer to a story about what it means to say that Christ is the Truth...

An option: Something Platonic... Just as good beings are beings that participate in God-qua-the-Good, so maybe true propositions are propositions that participate in God-qua-the-True?

I should add that the theological claim that we should be literalists about "I am the Truth" is often in the service of a further conclusion to the effect that theology is not really about propositional truths, and hence, that the propositional truths that one might have thought helped constitute orthodoxy are not really that essential. Not that such conclusions *must* follow; but that is a pattern in the dialectic.

Sorry Alex but I have no help for you here on the actual theoretical question.

A long time ago, when I was working on my doctoral thesis, I hoped to discuss the notion of truth in analytical philosophy and the writings of John Zizioulas. I managed the analytical philosophy, but unfortunately, John Zizioulas dropped out of the picture.

Still, I like the idea that truth is the instrument of communion. For a full explication of the idea of communion, I will have to refer to Zizioulas' book 'Being As Communion'; the idea though is that human destiny involves sharing in the life of the Trinity. My argument would be that we better understand the function of assertive practices when we understand them in the light of human destiny. Christ is truth because he is both a sign and instrument of communion.

I'm afraid that all I have are some vague ideas and suggestive phrases - and the suggestions maybe only make sense if you've read Zizioulas. If not, my one concrete suggestion is that Zizioulas' work is well worth reading.

A suggestion made to me by email was to look at "Christ is the Truth" in terms of the medieval doctrine of the convertibility of transcendentals: being, goodness and truth.

Unfortunately, while I think I have no difficulty with understanding the convertibility of what is with what is good, the convertibility of what is with what is true is harder for me.

The correspondent also suggested that it might help to think of the Thomistic way of seeing true thought not in terms of correspondence but identity. When I think of a dog, the same doghood is in me as is in the dog.

This is intriguing.

The communion idea is also intriguing. If truth were the same as intersubjective agreement, we could say some neat stuff about the idea of Christ being the Truth. (Of course, it is necessarily true that if everybody agrees that p is true, then p is true, assuming the quantification in "everybody" includes God. But I don't think this is what truth consists in.)

One could also use the idea that Christ is the Truth to elevate the importance of creedal statements: insofar as one does not have the truth, one is not with Christ.

That God is Love is compatible with the claim that love is also a property of finite persons. That Christ is Truth might, likewise, be compatible with the claim that truth is a property of finite propositions.

The statement under consideration is not "God is Truth", but "God is the Truth". The latter, if anything, is an identity statement (perhaps the former is best read that way, too). The Truth is not a property or attribute of God, it is God. If that's so, it is difficult to see how propositions can instantiate the property of being true in the same sense of the word, unless God is identical to a property. Do you want to say that some propositions have the property of being God?

Mike:

I took "God is Love" to be an identity claim as well. :-)

I was thinking of something like this. "God is Love" means that God is identical with divine love. He's not identical with our human love for each other. However, our human love for each other is a participation in divine love, i.e., in God.

Analogously, one might think that "God is (the) Truth" means something about the identity of God and divine truth. Whatever exactly divine truth is. (Maybe it is that by which God's beliefs are true?) And then maybe the truth of propositions--or, probably better, of believings--is a participation in divine truth.

I was thinking of something like this. "God is Love" means that God is identical with divine love. He's not identical with our human love for each other. However, our human love for each other is a participation in divine love, i.e., in God

But that makes God a universal of some sort. I'm sure that can't be right, since God you don't want to say that God is a property. At most you'd want to say (I htink) that God instantiates the purest love, or something along those lines.

Mike,

x's love is not a universal. What is it then? A trope? A relation-instance? I don't know exactly. But it's not a universal, any more than George's big leap is a universal (it's an event), or Frank's green hairedness is a universal (it's a trope, or an accident token, or a participating in a universal).

In any case, the doctrine of divine simplicity does identify God with God's love, with God's goodness, etc.

This might be a case of making a philosophical mountain out of a molehill. Sure, Augustine argues in De Libero Arbitrio that Truth is identical to God since both are identified as the summum bonum, but I think we're better served by plain ol' biblical exegesis here (as opposed to highfalutin, or even regularfalutin, metaphysics). John is chock full of these kinds of statements: I am the light of the world; I am the bread from heaven; I am the way; I am the life; I am the truth; I am the gate; I am the vine; etc. The context of saying it matters - and far from making it a throwaway figure of speech, it indicates that Christ is a true and accurate portrayal of the Father, as well as the one who leads us to the Father and the eternal life he offers (John 14, as you know). And as Jesus says earlier, "You will know the truth and the truth will set you free." Sometimes apparent metonymies are actual metonymies, aren't they?

Another patristic text is the discussion by St Justin Martyr of the salvation of Socrates. St Justin says that Socrates died for the truth and hence he died for Christ, and thus he is saved. Now, there is a fallacy of intersubstitution in an intensional context here ("died for _____"), but I think there is something to be said for this.

While some of the Johannine claims are clearly metaphorical, I don't see any of them as involving any other forms of metonymy besides straightforward metaphor.

That Christ is the vine is straightforwardly metaphorical.

There is a strong tradition of seeing John as very metaphysical.

That Christ is the gate is less clearly metaphorical. We use "gate" as to mean generally that by which one enters and "way" as that via which one proceeds, and it's not clear that this is metaphorical even if the entering and proceeding are non-physical ("On the way to proving the theorem, we proved three lemmas"--that doesn't seem to be metaphor). The metaphysics of Christ being the gate and the way are unclear to me at the moment.

While Christ is not literally bread, he is literally food--we eat his body and drink his blood at the Holy Mass. We do use "bread" to mean "food" in general. There is also the metaphorical usage, in that he nourishes our soul.

Life is that by virtue of which we live. Christ is the life that we live by. There is more than one deep metaphysical truth here that I think has yet to be clarified. One of these truths is that all living is a participation in the divine life. Another is expressed by Paul when he says that it is not he that lives, but Christ who lives on in him.

I think "the light of the world" is pretty clearly metaphysical. Combined with the characterization of Christ as Logos, it seems that John is talking of the intellectual light that we know by, a fine neo-Platonic concept. I am not saying that John commits himself to full blown neo-Platonic metaphysics, but he may well be committing himself to the claim that the Logos is that by which we know.

So none of the other claims you cite seem to me to exhibit any metonymy--they're at most metaphor, and they're just about all metaphysically quite heady.

On your reading of "I am the truth", though, the apparently straightforward claim "You will know the truth and the truth will set you free" turns out to be metonymous, right? That seems like a strange result to me (though probably not to someone like, say, Karl Barth). But, take it or leave it - that's just a psychological fact about me, not really an argument.

Still, maybe I wasn't being strict enough in my description; I would call Christ's claim ("I am the truth") metaphor instead of metonymy. That doesn't mean, however, that I think there's nothing metaphysically heady going on - in fact, quite often metaphors are headier than literal descriptions.

But consider this response of Jesus to Pilate: "You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world - to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice." Here, note, he says he bears witness to the truth, not that he is the truth. We already know he said that nobody's witness on their own behalf counts for anything. But if he is a witness to the truth, and he IS the truth in some literal, metaphysically beefy way (i.e. not in a metaphorical way, but in some sense of "is" that eludes us by its mystery), then he is just bearing witness to himself - a prohibited act. I know that might trigger reactions similar to other substitution-based arguments that seem to entail the denial of trinitarianism, but it still seems (to me) to give some reason for not trying to read too much metaphysics into the claim. I guess I just think Jesus (and John) are not being overly-particular in how they use the word "truth". This despite John's metaphysical robustness, which I agree is there - though I would situate it more in the light of Jewish wisdom philosophy than neoplatonism: one result of Dead Sea Scroll scholarship is to show that New Testament authors are less influenced by the Greeks than everyone thought a few decades ago. Largely for that reason, I do not agree with your reading of Christ as the light, which I think is also primarily metaphorical. Nor do I, as a memorialist Protestant, agree with your statement about Christ being the bread (which, I think, he means to use as a reference to manna in the wilderness provided by the loving Father who meets our needs, not as an anticipation of 'hoc est corpus meum'). So while I agree that these metaphors pack a punch, I generally don't see them as deep and mysterious covert metaphysics.

I don't see why "You will know the truth and the truth will set you free" should be seen as metonymous on my view.

What does it mean to say that Christ is the truth?
Is Christ a-letheia, a Heideggerian un-veiling of reality?

Christ responds to Thomas in John 14:6 with:

"I myself am the way/road, the a-letheia, the life"

Heideggerian indeed; if I may 'Goddian' indeed also.
That is, if a-letheia is (as it is) an un-veiling of ultimate reality (an un-concealing of what actually is, as well as what is actually going on); this speaks of action... a moving ... a progressing and for that, one needs (ultimately) a way along for this to be taking place, an un-veiling to be taking place, and hence... a life for that to be taking place in; in reality.
Christ is the truth in that, what has been in the archaic past, (hO LOGOS), has under the compulsory dictates of hO LOGOS (hO LOGOS having the very property of God)(QEOS HN hO LOGOS) moved God to take an action in setting the stage for the way, the truth,and the life to have opportunity to take place. For there to be ALETHEIA (an unconcealing) there has to have been something existing there that needed and required an "un-veiling."
Christ is the truth in that He is the operation of God bringing about and working out of what has been being un-veiled... what is being un-veiled... and what will be unveiled.

John 14:7 ...

"If you,(&you didn't) had EGNWKEITE (through process has come to a state of seeing and knowing for sure)..me, you would have known the Father !" ... and later saying,
"he that has seen me *has* seen the Father."
Christ is the truth in that He is what is really going on in this universe that God set in place, to be the working out of what needs to be worked out; we are on the way, we are in the unveiling of and we are in the presence of the Life that will bring all this to TELOS.

Everything that has been put in place that we see and experience around us, is merely shadow, or portrayal of hO ALETHEIA; TO DE SWMA TOU CHRISTOU. (Colissians 2:17b)

Virgil Newkirk

Alexander,
You stated:
"But I think that a deeper reading is called for, perhaps in conjunction with reflection on Christ as logos" ...and then suggested that:
"A deeper reading would, I think, have implications for metaphysics, including theories of truth."

VN:
Indeed it probably would; definitely it would, I would say, but, I would suggest that it will come by our considering, not Christ as Logos, but, as John states in John 1:1, that:
1. hO LOGOS HN (had been existing already)with respect to what is primary (ARCHi)...
and then in John 1:14 that:
2.It is hO LOGOS that became flesh; hO LOGOS bringing about expression, presentation in...Christ. *Not* Christ, as LOGOS, but, LOGOS as Christ. That is what John suggests, that is.

Alexander,
As you stated, and with that I agree:

"but he(John)may well be committing himself to the claim that the Logos is that by which we know."

Well,
That's where John takes it further and more specifically by suggesting that it is from the result of hO LOGOS becoming flesh that we know him---even as one who is an only begotten from a father; full of grace and ALETHEIA. ALETHEIA is brought about and expressed where and when hO LOGOS is acting, moving, causing. As John clearly states (John 1:1b) that it is hO LOGOS that is at...confronting God.
PROS (towards..not with)God (TON THEON..accusative)God in the accusative case indicates the action of hO LOGOS is having its extension towards or to God. **(see below)
Of course he goes on to state clearly that hO LOGOS has the very property of God....(THEOS HN hO LOGOS)

It is not until Revelation 19:13 that it is stated that His (Christ's)name (is being called)hO LOGOS TOU THEOU !! KEKLHTAI (called) is present indicative passive, referring to something happening, not in the past, but contemporaneus with this scene in Revelation 19.
That is action, process, completion (TELOS). If, (as I believe) John clearly states in John 1:3 that it is by means of what is characterized by it (DI AUTOU)(genitive case) that not even one thing that was made, was made without what was characterized by it (hO LOGOS)...that yes, Alexander, as you said:

"A deeper reading would, I think, have implications for metaphysics, including theories of truth."

Virgil Newkirk

** If hO LOGOS was, with God --- that could have easily been expressed by the Greek as:

SUN THEWi (with God)dative case..(which indicates at rest; in union with).

One quick point: I think that pros+accusative can just mean "with" in Koine.

Yes, some say this. I would argue that such an understanding of PROS+accusative violates the very principle of what is indicated by the preposition PROS, which is direction towards, or at the least: in front of. Then, add to that the basic sense or indication of the accusative case being a participation in some *action*; really, that the noun in the accusative case is the recipient or target or ultimate extension *to* of whatever (as in this case) is PROS. In our present consideration, this is hO LOGOS HN (having been being) PROS TON THEON. hO LOGOS being to-towards-at....God. As, for example, George Dunbar states in his Syntax of the Greek Language regarding the dative and accusative case:
*the dative, interchange or mutual communication
*the accusative, action, or the relation between the agent and what he acts on. How simple and efficent it would have been for the author to have written PROS TWi THEWi or SUN TWi THEWi to express rest at or mutual union with; no, he is attempting to communicate something different by his use of PROS TON THEON, I would suggest.
Some additional confirmation of what is indicated by PROS+accusative:
From the current (1996) edition of Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon under the listing for PROS: C. with accusative, ...it expresses motion or direction towards an object.
Additionally..
From Spiros Zodhiates Complete Word Study Dictionary of The New Testament:
PROS (III) With the accusative, marking the object toward or to which something moves or is directed.
Our Englishing of PROS+accusative by utilizing *with* is, istm, mistaken, and can lead to misunderstanding and misinterpretation; resulting in the formation of misleading presuppositions.

For your consideration...