Truth as Objective and Grounded in God

This series is drawn from our "Christian Foundations Charter". This charter, which is available on our "Home Church Resources" page, seeks to combat the loss of Christian identity within the western Church by restoring a distinctly Christian ethic.

Core Foundation 2: Truth is objective, originating from God, not from human opinion, culture, or power.

A New Question

The answer proposed to Euthyphro’s dilemma from our founding first principle raises another question: what is the nature of truth?

Now that we have established the character of God as the source for our moral reasoning and ethical standard, we must ask about the nature of truth. Where does truth come from? Can truth be known? Is truth the same for everyone, or does it change from person to person?

Truth as a whole, not a pile of opinions

The psalmist gives us our starting point:

Psalm 119:160 (CSB) — The entirety of your word is truth, each of your righteous judgments endures forever.

The Psalmist isn’t just saying that the individual statements of God happen to be accurate in the way you’d fact-check something, but that truth is a unified whole. Truth doesn’t come apart into disconnected fragments, but holds together as a whole because it originates from one unified source rather than being pieced together from competing human opinions.

This matters more than it might seem.

If truth were just a stack of individually negotiated or verified claims, we’d expect it to fracture under pressure, bending differently in different norms, but the psalmist is describing something with structural integrity; he’s telling us that truth is a coherent whole because God himself is not divided against himself.

So, once again, the nature of God defines the founding principles of our worldview.

Truth tied to God’s own self-revelation

Jesus makes a related but distinct claim about truth the night before his crucifixion:

John 17:17 (CSB) — Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth.

Truth isn’t just described as “accurate information“, but is tied both to God’s own act of divine self-revelation — i.e. the Word — and to its purpose in setting people apart to God. This means that truth is both defined by it’s relationship to God, who is the origin of truth, and it’s effect. Truth isn’t some neutral, impersonal fact sitting out in the void waiting to be discovered by anyone clever enough, but is personal, coming from God, and accomplishing something in the people who receive it.

This doesn’t mean every ordinary fact, like the boiling point of water or the distance to the moon, somehow mystically discloses God’s divine nature in the same intense way as the gospel. But it does mean that all truth is bound up in the nature of God. Truth exists as a direct consequence of God’s creative work. And truth is knowable because God by his nature makes things known in the light.

All of this means that truth is measured in the balance of God’s nature, not in the consensus of human agreement or culture. This gives us the solid foundations necessary to establish, receive, and understand truth.

Truth can be suppressed, but isn’t absent

Scripture also deals with truth’s inverse:

Romans 1:18 (CSB) — For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

Paul doesn’t say people simply lack the truth, as if it were hidden from them and they can’t be blamed for missing it. He says they suppress it. That word matters. You can only suppress something that’s actually there, pressing against you, wanting to surface. Paul is describing truth as present and available, and resisted rather than absent. His fundamental argument is that humanity wasn’t the victim of an information gap, but that truth was once known and present among us, but lost via suppression.

This means that truth stands out as being separate from humanity. We cannot change truth, as if it originates from us, nor can we eliminate it, as if it were subordinate to us, but can only be suppressed as something that is there but intentionally covered. Humanity has buried the truth under layers upon layers of lies designed to obscure what may be known about the God from whom truth originates.

Calvin and the truth we can’t quite shake off

John Calvin picks up this idea in his Institutes, where he argues in Book II that even after the fall, humanity retain some natural knowledge about God. We possess a kind of unshakeable and sometimes troubling awareness that presses on our consciences.

This knowledge, though insufficient to save, does press upon humanity our sense of the divine. We are not blank slates staring into a void, waiting for someone to hand them their first idea of God or their first sense that some things are simply true and others aren’t. There’s a residue of genuine divine knowledge built into being human. Humanity’s rebellion, then, consists of the great deal of energy we expend on suppressing this knowledge of God.

Truth is objective, but not exhaustively possessed

Truth is objective because it originates from the unchanging nature of God. But, truth likewise cannot be exhaustively grasped because it originates from the infinite nature of God. Thus, God’s nature both makes us accountable to the truth, and humbles how we handle it!

An interesting study that we don’t have time for now is to trace how the different philosophies of truth emerge from one another. The Enlightenment (c. 1685 – 1815) and Modernism (c. 1890 – 1945), which believed that human reason, scientific method, and empirical observation could unlock universal truths about nature, society, and morality, gave way to Postmodernism (c. 1960 – present), which rejected such certainty in favor of the idea that grand narratives of universal truths are mere illusions that mask power structures.

The point is that our view of the world around us is often shaped more by a reaction to the prevailing errors of our time than it is by a clear and coherent understanding of reality. When truth is grasped without humility, it produces skepticism. And skepticism, in turn, creates a desperate need for something real to stand on. Only God is able to unify the objective reality of truth with a humble disposition.

Why this matters for how we think and speak

In much the same way that God’s nature being the origin for our moral reasoning establishes an ethical framework that is necessary for the flourishing of human life, so God being the unchangeable and infinite source of truth is necessary to create a worldview that can both make sense of our world and prevent the cruel tyranny of cold-empiricism.

Truth is one of the core foundations for human flourishing because we cannot survive in the chaos of darkness. We have to have something firm to build our life upon. Yet, we also cannot survive in the inhospitable environment of pure knowledge. We need an understanding of truth that is both stable and hospitable. God’s nature is the only source that provides both together.

When we reject God, we lose what is necessary to establish the truth that human flourishing requires. And both history and contemporary life illustrate the consequences of this rejection. The result is always chaos and tyranny. But, if we accept God, then we must learn how to think and live by his way of life.

In the next post, we examine the first intersection between our first two principles: that human beings themselves carry an irreducible worth because they bear the image of the God who is the source of both goodness and truth.