1. Truth

By truth we mean that attribute of the divine nature in virtue of which God’s being and God’s knowledge eternally conform to each other.

In further explanation we remark:

A. Negatively:

(a) The immanent truth of God is not to be confounded with that veracity and faithfulness which partially manifest it to creatures. These are transitive truth, and they presuppose the absolute and immanent attribute.

Deut. 32:4—“A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, Just and right is he”; John 17:3—“the only true God” (ἀληθινόν) 1 John 5:20—“we know him that is true” (τὸν ἀληθινόν). In both these passages ἀληθινός describes God as the genuine, the real, as distinguished from ἀληθής the veracious (compare John 6:32—“the true bread”; Heb. 8:2—“the true tabernacle”), John 14:6—“I am.… the truth.” As “I am.… the life” signifies, not “I am the living one,” but rather “I am he who is life and the source of life,” so “I am.… the truth” signifies, not “I am the truthful one,” but “I am he who is truth and the source of truth”—in other words, truth of being, not merely truth of expression. So 1 John 5:7—“the Spirit is the truth.” Cf. 1 Esdras 1:38—“The truth abideth and is forever strong, and it liveth and ruleth forever” = personal truth? See Godet on John 1:18; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:181.

Truth is God perfectly revealed and known. It may be likened to the electric current which manifests and measures the power of the dynamo. There is no realm of truth apart from the world-ground, just as there is no law of nature that is independent of the Author of nature. While we know ourselves only partially, God knows himself fully. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:192—“In the life of God there are no unrealized possibilities. The presupposition of all our knowledge and activity is that absolute and eternal unity of knowing and being which is only another expression for the nature of God. In one sense, he is all reality, and the only reality, whilst all finite existence is but a becoming, which never is.” Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 57–63—“Truth is reality revealed. Jesus is the Truth, because in him the sum of the qualities hidden in God is presented and revealed to the world, God’s nature in terms of an active force and in relation to his rational creation.” This definition however ignores the fact that God is truth, apart from and before all creation. As an immanent attribute, truth implies a conformity of God’s knowledge to God’s being, which antedates the universe; see B. (b) below.

(b) Truth in God is not a merely active attribute of the divine nature. God is truth, not only in the sense that he is the being who truly knows, but also in the sense that he is the truth that is known. The passive precedes the active; truth of being precedes truth of knowing.

Plato: “Truth is his (God’s) body, and light his shadow.” Hollaz (quoted in Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137) says that “truth is the conformity of the divine essence with the divine intellect.” See Gerhard, loc. ii:152; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 2:272, 279; 3:193—“Distinguish in God the personal self-consciousness [spirituality, personality—see pages 252, 253] from the unfolding of this in the divine knowledge, which can have no other object but God himself. So far, now, as self-knowing in God is absolutely identical with his being is he the absolutely true. For truth is the knowledge which answers to the being, and the being which answers to the knowledge.”

Royce, World and Individual, 1:270—“Truth either may mean that about which we judge, or it may mean the correspondence between our ideas and their objects.” God’s truth is both object of his knowledge and knowledge of his object. Miss Clara French, The Dramatic Action and Motive of King John: “You spell Truth with a capital, and make it an independent existence to be sought for and absorbed; but, unless truth is God, what can it do for man? It is only a personality that can touch a personality.” So we assent to the poet’s declaration that “Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again,” only because Truth is personal. Christ, the Revealer of God, is the Truth. He is not simply the medium but also the object of all knowledge; Eph. 4:20—“ye did not so learn Christ” = ye knew more than the doctrine about Christ,—ye knew Christ himself; John 17:3—“this is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.”

B. Positively:

(a) All truth among men, whether mathematical, logical, moral, or religious, is to be regarded as having its foundation in this immanent truth of the divine nature and as disclosing facts in the being of God.

There is a higher Mind than our mind. No apostle can say “I am the truth,” though each of them can say “I speak the truth.” Truth is not a scientific or moral, but a substantial, thing—“nicht Schulsache, sondern Lebenssache.” Here is the dignity of education, that knowledge of truth is knowledge of God. The laws of mathematics are disclosures to us, not of the divine reason merely, for this would imply truth outside of and before God, but of the divine nature. J. W. A. Stewart: “Science is possible because God is scientific.” Plato: “God geometrizes.” Bowne: “The heavens are crystalized mathematics.” The statement that two and two make four, or that virtue is commendable and vice condemnable, expresses an everlasting principle in the being of God. Separate statements of truth are inexplicable apart from the total revelation of truth, and this total revelation is inexplicable apart from One who is truth and who is thus revealed. The separate electric lights in our streets are inexplicable apart from the electric current which throbs through the wires, and this electric current is itself inexplicable apart from the hidden dynamo whose power it exactly expresses and measures. The separate lights of truth are due to the realizing agency of the Holy Spirit; the one unifying current which they partially reveal is the outgoing work of Christ, the divine Logos; Christ is the one and only Revealer of him who dwells “in light unapproachable; whom no man hath seen, nor can see” (1 Tim. 6:16).

Prof. H. E. Webster began his lectures “by assuming the Lord Jesus Christ and the multiplication-table.” But this was tautology, because the Lord Jesus Christ, the Truth, the only revealer of God, includes the multiplication-table. So Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:257; 2:202, unduly narrows the scope of Christ’s revelation when he maintains that with Jesus truth is not the truth which corresponds to reality but rather the right conduct which corresponds to the duty prescribed by God. “Grace and truth” (John 1:17) then means the favor of God and the righteousness which God approves. To understand Jesus is impossible without being ethically like him. He is king of truth, in that he reveals this righteousness, and finds obedience for it among men. This ethical aspect of the truth, we would reply, important as it is, does not exclude but rather requires for its complement and presupposition that other aspect of the truth as the reality to which all being must conform and the conformity of all being to that reality. Since Christ is the truth of God, we are successful in our search for truth only as we recognize him. Whether all roads lead to Rome depends upon which way your face is turned. Follow a point of land out into the sea, and you find only ocean. With the back turned upon Jesus Christ all following after truth leads only into mist and darkness. Aristotle’s ideal man was “a hunter after truth.” But truth can never be found disjoined from love, nor can the loveless seeker discern it. “For the loving worm within its clod Were diviner than a loveless God” (Robert Browning). Hence Christ can say: John 18:37—“Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.”

(b) This attribute therefore constitutes the principle and guarantee of all revelation, while it shows the possibility of an eternal divine self-contemplation apart from and before all creation. It is to be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.

To all this doctrine, however, a great school of philosophers have opposed themselves. Duns Scotus held that God’s will made truth as well as right. Descartes said that God could have made it untrue that the radii of a circle are all equal. Lord Bacon said that Adam’s sin consisted in seeking a good in itself, instead of being content with the merely empirical good. Whedon, On the Will, 316—“Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result from, God’s volitions eternally.” We reply that, to make truth and good matters of mere will, instead of regarding them as characteristics of God’s being, is to deny that anything is true or good in itself. If God can make truth to be falsehood, and injustice to be justice, then God is indifferent to truth or falsehood, to good or evil, and he ceases thereby to be God. Truth is not arbitrary,—it is matter of being—the being of God. There are no regulative principles of knowledge which are not transcendental also. God knows and wills truth, because he is truth. Robert Browning, A Soul’s Tragedy, 214—“Were’t not for God, I mean, what hope of truth—Speaking truth, hearing truth—would stay with Man?” God’s will does not make truth, but truth rather makes God’s will. God’s perfect knowledge in eternity past has an object. That object must be himself. He is the truth Known, as well as the truthful Knower. But a perfect objective must be personal. The doctrine of the Trinity is the necessary complement to the doctrine of the Attributes. Shedd, Dogin. Theol., 1:183—“The pillar of cloud becomes a pillar of fire.” See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 102–112.

On the question whether it is ever right to deceive, see Paine, Ethnic Trinities, 300–339. Plato said that the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians. The rulers of the state may lie for the public good, but private people not: “officiosum mendacium.” It is better to say that deception is justifiable only where the person deceived has, like a wild beast or a criminal or an enemy in war, put himself out of human society and deprived himself of the right to truth. Even then deception is a sad necessity which witnesses to an abnormal condition of human affairs. With James Martineau, when asked what answer he would give to an intending murderer when truth would mean death, we may say: “I suppose I should tell an untruth, and then should be sorry for it forever after.” On truth as an attribute of God, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1877:735; Finney, Syst. Theol., 661; Janet, Final Causes, 416.