According to John Sanders, the concept of truth has multiple meanings. There are three main theories of truth in Western thought.

1. The correspondence theory: This theory holds that truth is that which corresponds to a state of affairs or fact of reality.
2. The coherence theory: a statement is true if it fits (coheres) with a set of other statements accepted as true.
3. The pragmatic theory: an idea is true if it is fruitful and workable in relation to our experience.

He says that the most widespread notion of truth for English speakers is the correspondence model, which seeks ideas that accurately represent factual states of affairs. He gives an example of the statement, “the color of the ball is red” and says it is true if the ball is the color red. This post will build on John Sanders thoughts and the general belief of cognitive linguists that correspondence theory is not the only concept of truth.

Truth of groups of statements

In mathematics and programming, we evaluate statements as either true (TRUE) or false (FALSE). This seems to fit the correspondence model. Thus, we have results where we can have many TRUE conditions, and if one of the terms is FALSE, the facts of the entire set of statements become FALSE.

> TRUE & TRUE & TRUE & TRUE & TRUE & FALSE
return: FALSE

Imagine that we have one hundred statements with an & (and) condition between each where 99 are TRUE. Having one FALSE would require us to throw out all the other statements under our & condition in our final conclusion about the truth of the statement. To me, that seems great for programming and mathematics, but a bit extreme for our applied lives. Conversely, we wouldn’t want to change all the & connectors to | (or) because we could end up with hundreds of FALSE statements and only one TRUE moves the entire statement to TRUE.

> TRUE | FALSE | FALSE | FALSE | FALSE
return: TRUE

So our challenge is to figure out how to describe or define truth without forcing ourselves into Mordo moments as is shown in this clip from Doctor Strange.

William James helps us understand the complexity of deciding the truth sets of logical statements when he said;

Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their ‘agreement’, as falsity means their disagreement, with ‘reality’. Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this definition as a matter of course. They begin to quarrel only after the question is raised as to what may precisely be meant by the term ‘agreement’, and what by the term ‘reality’, when reality is taken as something for our ideas to agree with.¹

Sanders on truth

John Sanders is an openness theologian. I have quoted him in previous posts and at the beginning of this post. He recently wrote Theology in the flesh: How Embodiment and Culture Shape the Way We Think about Truth, Morality, and God. He explains the field of cognitive linquistics and how that field can help us understand God and the truth of the Bible. I am sure I will include more quotes from his book in future posts. In this post, I have pulled heavily from his chapter titled, ‘Truth, Meaning, and Morality in Light of Embodiment and Culture’ where he details concepts on truth.

Moving from correspondence to pragmatic theory of truth

Philosophers have long recognized that many types of discourse, such as commands, questions, jokes, and ritual performances, are not assertions, and so, cannot be true or false according to the correspondence model. … Given the dominance for English readers of truth as correspondence, Jesus’s statement “I am the truth” seems odd to us.

If he had said “I tell you the truth” (as in John 8:45) or “I will show you the truth,” it would resonate with our dominant meaning of truth. Though Jesus knew lots of truths, that is not his meaning here. Rather, … the statement “I am the way, the truth, and the life” is used in the context of knowing the way (route) to God’s residence. Jesus is both the path as well as the true guide to get us to the Father’s house. Following Jesus, the exemplar of the Father, brings us to the location of the Father’s estate where we find genuine life.

Notice the two metaphors of truth and how they help us perceive what to do with truth.

Thinking of truth as a way of life involving a path to walk and the proper conduct on the path is not difficult for us to understand, but it does not play a significant role in contemporary Western Christianity. English speakers emphasize seeing the truth, based on the Knowing Is Seeing metaphor common in many languages.

• The Vision metaphor maps a passive observer perceiving an object. I may, for instance, see a bird fly over my house and this knowledge would not necessarily prompt me to take any particular action. I may simply observe its flight.
• To walk in the truth maps features of a Journey onto truth, and so, requires me to act intentionally in order to reach a goal. It involves the course I take as well as how I traverse the path.

How might we describe gospel truth under the pragmatic theory?

The conceptual challenge is to describe what it means to walk the path of truth following the true guide. In the next three quotes, John Sanders does a great job of explaining what walking the path of truth might be.

In 1 John 1:6, those who “walk in darkness” (without the light of God) are living a lie and not “doing truth.” Theologian Miroslav Volf says, “to know God it is not enough to give cognitive assent to truth about God; we must ‘do the truth’ (1:6), we must act as God acts,” that is, emulate the character of God.

The primary Western understanding of truth as correspondence seems to be what Paul has in mind when he says believers should put away falsehood and “speak the truth” to one another (Eph 4:25). In this verse, the Greek verb “to speak” (laleite) occurs. Ephesians 4:15 is also thought to have the same meaning, and so, it is typically translated into English as “speaking the truth in love.” The problem, however, is that the word “speaking” does not occur in this verse. Rather, the verb is “to truth”—which is strange for English. Biblical scholar Leon Morris observes that “English does not have a verb ’to truth,’ but Paul uses such a verb, alētheuo, when he urges the Ephesians that ’truthing in love’ they should grow up in Christ. Volf also notes the mistranslation of this verse and then comments: “Speaking is only part of what we do with truth as we struggle against its distortions; living the truth is certainly equally important. Untruth holds captive both minds and lives and therefore cannot be overcome only with right thoughts and words. It takes a truthful life to want to seek after truth. That Eph 4:15 means truth as a way of life fits with the Journey metaphors used in the surrounding verses. … The understanding of truth as something done and lived is an important concept in the New Testament that Western Christians often fail to notice due to the culturally dominant understanding of truth as an object.

In her essay “Walking in the Truth,” Ellen Charry says that in Hellenistic thought, something was considered true if it led one into goodness, transforming the person. She argues that the church fathers shared this view and considered wisdom, not mere knowledge, to be what God gives us because it leads to the transformation of how we live in community.

So truth is the transformation of how we live. We attain the attributes of God and ’truth in love’ in our community. It is so much more than verifiable statements. I may go so far to say that to ’truth in love’ may require some verifiably false statements.

LDS hymn on truth

The hymn ‘Oh Say, What is Truth?’ seems to fit the pragmatic theory of truth. An idea is true if it is fruitful and workable in relation to our experience on our journey. Truth is described as the fairest gem, the brightest prize, the last and the first, the sum of existence that is eternal and unchanged evermore. It is an aim for the noblest desire. This description is truth as beingness not solely logical statements. Verse 1, 2, and 4 have direct accounts on truth.

1. Oh say, what is truth? ‘Tis the fairest gem, That the riches of worlds can produce, And priceless the value of truth will be when The proud monarch’s costliest diadem Is counted but dross and refuse.

2. Yes, say, what is truth? ‘Tis the brightest prize To which mortals or Gods can aspire. Go search in the depths where it glittering lies, Or ascend in pursuit to the loftiest skies: ‘Tis an aim for the noblest desire.

3. …

4. Then say, what is truth? ‘Tis the last and the first, For the limits of time it steps o’er. Tho the heavens depart and the earth’s fountains burst, Truth, the sum of existence, will weather the worst, Eternal, unchanged, evermore.

What if truth is not a fact out there we are trying to understand? What if truth is not a noun but an adjective that we use to describe a particular type of experience?² Maybe truth is not an idea but a kingdom of people of the same being. Truth is the class of creatures at the top of all living things with agency.

Two extreme examples

Back to our programming chunks above, the correspondence view of truth can create extremes that push us to an understanding that doesn’t map to a lived life.

If the Book of Mormon is TRUE then ignore the other FALSE statements.

> TRUE | FALSE | FALSE | FALSE | FALSE
return: TRUE

To be honest, the statement is more along the lines of, ‘if the Book of Mormon is true, then Jesus is the Christ, Joseph Smith was his prophet, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is true, and it is being led today by a prophet receiving revelation.’³

Many LDS (including myself) happen to believe all of the statements above. However, these statements often sound like a logical argument where if one statement is true then the end conclusion must be a true statement whether any of the other statements are TRUE or FALSE.⁴ I think these types of arguments if understood correctly, have merit. However, incorrectly heard, as I have shown above, they can create false paradigms. For example, since the Book of Mormon is TRUE I don’t ever have to validate if the living prophet receives revelations from God because the entire statement is TRUE regardless of my energy asking questions about the other statements.

If a prophet made one FALSE statement, then ignore all the other TRUE statements and acts by him and all other prophets.

> TRUE & TRUE & TRUE & TRUE & TRUE & FALSE
return: FALSE

I think this extreme maps much more closely to how listeners perceive the statement and how the speaker is speaking. I have read more than one antagonistic article on the LDS faith that uses this argument⁵. I have also interacted with members that believe the evidence that the entire edifice is FALSEif any FALSE event is discovered. If we held to this view of truth for all aspects of our lives, there would be few things we would call TRUE. Maybe some mathematics equations?

Pragmatism as the balance

William James describes the intellectualists (correspondence theory) and the pragmatists (pragmatic theory) in the following two quotes.

Intellectualists

The great assumption of the intellectualists is that truth means essentially an inert static relation. When you’ve got your true idea of anything, there’s an end of the matter. You’re in possession; you know; you have fulfilled your thinking destiny. You are where you ought to be mentally; you have obeyed your categorical imperative; and nothing more need follow on that climax of your rational destiny. Epistemologically you are in stable equilibrium.

Pragmatists

Pragmatism gets her general notion of truth as something essentially bound up with the way in which one moment in our experience may lead us towards other moments which it will be worthwhile to have been led to. Primarily, and on the common-sense level, the truth of a state of mind means this function of a leading that is worthwhile. When a moment in our experience, of any kind whatever, inspires us with a thought that is true, that means that sooner or later we dip by that thought’s guidance into the particulars of experience again and make advantageous connection with them.

Thinking under the paradigm of the pragmatic theory, truth is a path or a guide. The giver of truth is one that is the best guide on the way of truth to the next worthwhile position. I don’t see anywhere in this idea of truth that the guide needs to be perfect in his/her statements. The guide only needs to be our best option to the next moment that is worthwhile.

Conclusion

Jesus is both the path as well as the true guide to get us to the Father’s house. This type of truth is more than logical statements. It is beingness. He is showing us how we can ‘do the truth,’ how we can act as God acts, that is, emulate the character of God. We can follow the guidance of Paul, like he asked the Ephesians, ’to truth’ that ’truthing in love’ we should grow up in Christ.

When Christ says, “I am the way, the truth, the light.’ He does not mean that He is all logical statements. He is truth! I am not sure that Christ’s announcement means that he is the definer of truth as the Father existed before Him. It means that he is truth. Could truth define an entity? A trout is a fish. You and I are humans. Christ is truth. Through righteousness and life in Christ, we can be changed or resurrected into this beingness of truth.

Living in a time without Jesus on the earth as our leader, we must ask who has God provided as our guide. Who can we look to as a living example of ’truthing in love’?

I believe God has given us a few people to look to as guides. None of them are God, but they are those that can help us along the path to our next worthwhile moment. I think these people can vary. For me, my mother and father are excellent guides. Some of my siblings are great guides. A few teachers have been excellent guides.

The prophets and apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints are excellent guides. It could be this pragmatic theory of truth that motivates the statement that we ‘should follow the living prophets.’ They are excellent guides in our lived lives towards Zion and the kingdom of God. We need living guides to build Zion. We need living guides that provide ideas that are fruitful and workable in our journey back to God through Christ.

• attributes
• principles
• video
• general
• truth