Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
What is Truth!
What is Truth!
Jul 8, 2025 2:51 AM

Hugh Hewitt interviewed Andrew Sullivan on the radio last week about Sullivan’s book, The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back.

Discussing the value of various figures throughout history as moral heroes, Sullivan speaks of “the great question that Pilate asked, what is truth? The truth is not quite as easy and as simple as we sometimes think it is. And the truth about everything, the meaning of the whole universe, is something that is, by definition, very hard for humans to grasp. I mean, God, if God exists, must, by definition, be unknowable to us.”

Mark Judge, who passes along the transcript (HT: Instapundit), says that Sullivan’s favorable quotation of Pilate made him “once and for all feel sorry for Sullivan.”

Chuck Colson, who delivered an address at the Acton Institute’s Annual Dinner last week (mp3) has a somewhat different take on the scene between Jesus and Pilate:

Truth is the great issue, always has been. When Jesus was hauled before Pilate, turned over to him by the Jews, and Pilate couldn’t figure out who he was. And Jesus said, “I am the truth, and those who are of the truth hear my words.” At that moment, to me it was the great clash that has continued all through the ages. When Pilate said to him, “What is the truth?”

Except that’s not what Pilate said. Every one of the translations of the Bible I think get it wrong. They all have question marks after Pilate saying, “What is the truth.” Mel Gibson, great theologian, got it right in The Passion of the Christ, when he has takes the Aramaic, the voice Aramaic, and translates into the subtitles and has, “What is truth,” exclamation point. Pilate was saying exactly as our culture is saying to us today, “What is truth!” Scoffing disregard for the very concept of truth.

What is truth? What is truth is ultimate reality, what Jesus meant by that answer. And of course there’s truth, unless you believe everything you are seeing in this room is an illusion. And so we are the people of the truth, we believe there is ultimate reality and we believe it is knowable. And that puts us right up against our culture.

Now of course the translators of the Bible aren’t wrong (Pilate’s phrase in the Greek begins with an interrogative pronoun and ends with the punctuation equivalent of a question mark), but Colson’s point is well taken. Sullivan’s emphasis on the ineffability or unknowableness of God undermines the truth that God has definitively revealed in the person of Jesus Christ.

But instead of anchoring himself to this firm foundation, as you might expect a Roman Catholic to do, Sullivan flounders for a pass in a sea of relativism:

And what I find very troubling about today’s…some of today’s, not everybody, but some of today’s fundamentalists is their absolute certainty not only about what God is, but their right to tell other people how to live their lives, according to their view of what God is.

For more one the term “fundamentalist” as a term of opprobrium, check out Al Plantinga’s examination of the term’s usage in discussing his epistemological model in Warranted Christian Belief,

I fully realize that the dreaded f-word will be trotted out to stigmatize any model of this kind. Before responding, however, we must first look into the use of this term ‘fundamentalist’. On the mon contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like ‘son of a bitch’, more exactly ‘sonovabitch’, or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) ‘sumbitch’. When the term is used in this way, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you feel obliged to first define the term?) Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of ‘fundamentalist’ (in this widely current use): it isn’t simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relative conservative theological views. That makes it more like ‘stupid sumbitch’ (or maybe ‘fascist sumbitch’?) than ‘sumbitch’ simpliciter. It isn’t exactly like that term either, however, because its cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to depend on who is using it. In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for example, it tends to denote any who accept traditional Christianity, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, it tends to denote anyone who believes there is such a person as God. The explanation is that the term has a certain indexical element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase ‘considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.’ The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like ‘stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine’ (pp. 244-45).

It seems to me that Sullivan exemplifies this usage of the term pretty darn well.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Questions on Work and Intellectual Development
Carl Trueman has a lengthy reflection and asks some pertinent and pressing questions on the nature of work and human intellectual development. Recalling his job at a factory as a young man in the 1980s, Trueman writes concerning those who were still at their positions on the line when he had moved on: Their work possessed no intrinsic dignity: it was unskilled, repetitive, poorly paid, and provided no sense of achievement. Yes, it gave them a wage; but not a...
Samuel Gregg: Europe’s Broken Economies
Acton’s Research Director in the American Spectator: Europe’s Broken Economies By Samuel Gregg During September this year, much of Europe descended into mild chaos. Millions of Spaniards and French went on strike (following, of course, their return from six weeks vacation) against austerity measures introduced by their governments. Across the continent, there are deepening concerns about possible sovereign-debt defaults, stubbornly-high unemployment, Ireland’s renewed banking woes, and the resurgence of right-wing populist parties (often peddling left-wing economic ideas). Indeed, the palpable...
Mere Comments: The Neo-Anabaptist Temptation
Today at Mere Comments I highlight what I’m calling the “Neo-Anabaptist temptation.” Check it out. ...
Public Accountability for Public Officials
Via TechDirt: …a judge has tossed out the wiretapping claims pointing out that there was no expectation of privacy out in public. “Those of us who are public officials and are entrusted with the power of the state are ultimately accountable to the public,” the judge wrote. “When we exercise that power in public fora, we should not expect our actions to be shielded from public observation.” There’s more here and here on the question of law enforcement and ‘citizen...
A Federal Tax Receipt
There’s an old saying to the effect: “Show me a man’s checkbook and I’ll show you what’s important to him.” It may not be quite the same as a checkbook, but NPR’s Planet Money passes along what a receipt from the federal government might look like for an average taxpayer (HT): As Third Way, who put together the taxpayer receipt, argues: An electorate unschooled in basic budget facts is a major obstacle to controlling the nation’s deficit, not to mention...
Trailer: Doing the Right Thing
The Colson Center for Christian Worldview is preparing to release a new study DVD this fall titled, Doing the Right Thing: A Six-Part Exploration of Ethics. The DVD is designed as a resource for small-group studies and features leading thinkers who explore the need for ethical behavior in the marketplace, public square, political life and other areas. Hosts Brit Hume, Chuck Colson, Dr. Robert George and a distinguished panel — including Acton’s Rev. Robert Sirico and Michael Miller — undertake...
Ecumenical Witness or Ecumenical Tyranny?
Robert Joustra, writing on the website of the Canadian think tank Cardus, has published a thoughtful review of Jordan Ballor’s Ecumenical Babel: Confusing Economic Ideology and the Church’s Social Witness. The reviewer understands that when, … controversial social science infiltrates ecclesial confessions, twin dangers promising the integrity of the Gospel, and splitting the church on political and economic issues. Ecumenical superstructures claiming to speak with ecclesial authority on technical matters worry me, even when technical experts are enlisted. The point...
Global Warming Consensus Alert: KILL ‘EM ALL
I’ll admit – it’s been a long time since I’ve posted a Global Warming Consensus Alert because, frankly, any “consensus” that existed was blown apart by the release of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit e-mails, which revealed a whole bunch of underhanded activity on the part of scientists promoting the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. What’s the point anymore? The unshakeable climate “consensus” has been shown to be the fraud that it always was, and the catastrophic climate...
Review: Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers began Witness, the classic account of his time in the American Communist underground, with the declaration: “In 1937, I began, like Lazarus, the impossible return.” The line was most of all a deep recognition of the power of God to redeem what was once dead. Witness was a landmark account of the evils of Communism but most importantly a description of the bankruptcy of freedom outside of the sacred. “For Chambers, God was always the prime mover in...
German Freedom and the Danger of Socialism
In this week’s Acton Commentary, I remember German reunification and reflect on its relevance for the present. Twenty years ago this Sunday, East and West Germany reunited, capping one of the most extraordinary transformations in modern history. Communism in the Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites had collapsed; the oppressed nations of Europe rejoined the “free world.” My generation was the last to straddle the two worlds, pre- and post-Soviet Union. When I was in elementary and high school,...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved