Truth is personal. God has allowed us to live in a world where he is a person who is called the truth. 

Far from being just one way to think about truth, this is what truth is. The nature of God is definitive of stuff like that. 

The phrase “To live in a universe where there is a God,” is, in my opinion, a bit like saying “To read a book that has an author”—it doesn’t really add much to the conversation. By necessity, the universe is explained by the God who created it no less than The Lord of the Rings is understood in light of J.R.R. Tolkein. Here, though, it bears saying: to live in a universe where there is a God who reveals Himself as a person within that universe fundamentally changes the meaning of existence, truth and personhood. 

“Changes” is actually the wrong word for what the Incarnation does to the nature of truth. “Reveals” or “defines” would’ve been better; nothing about the purpose of reality as God had always intended it changed after God became man. 

We just learned that it wasn’t what we expected. 

In fact, we may need to be perpetually re-learning it: that God is a person, not a principle; that God is more like the face of another than He is like the sun; that no one has ever felt more pain or joy than God has. 

A Person Who is Truth

It’s a handy feature of life in a solar system, that we get regular, cyclical opportunities to revisit this doctrine—each and every Christmas. It may be that there’s no other way for time to embody eternal truth than to let it play itself out, over and over again.

Nearing the completion of another of those “trips-around-the-sun-while-working-out-theology” at present, I don’t know exactly what Christmas means for truth. It’s hard to say how our understanding of “what’s there” comes out of this startling, annual rediscovery. For myself, the implications of the Incarnation make me feel less easy about calling “truth” something that’s measured in a laboratory. Jesus Christ gives me pause before I call the results of a poll “true,” and so on.

How could data and conjecture ever be described with that same word which Jesus uses as an identity: truth?

When Jesus identifies himself as “the way, the truth, and the life,” his claim is not merely one of informational accuracy. His claim has to be larger than something like, “the things you hear me teach will lead you to grasp a more accurate theology of the God of Israel.” That is correct to say of Jesus and his teachings, but I don’t think it would be the right understanding of what he meant by being, himself, “the way, the truth, and the life.”

Anyone could have taught accurately about God. Armed with better information than previous prophets, Jesus would have only made a better one than all the rest. Still a mere prophet, just one with a supremely accurate teaching. Even being the first person to share such a revolutionized understanding wouldn’t make him personally the enduring and definitive “Way.” It would make him the way to the Way. In that scheme, the teacher would be less than his message; a servant to a truth, not the Truth himself. 

What Knowing God Is

Jesus’ message isn’t more like the truth than he is. Jesus is God Incarnate: God, the Creator of all existence, and, therefore, both the means and end of such truth itself. To the extent his message is true, it is in how it leads us to understand him as the person whose character defines reality. 

We’re used to grappling with facts as distinct data points which exist isolated from and independent of anything else; a certain measurable value is what it is despite what anything else may be, think, or feel. And this cold understanding of reality is the kind of “truth” we think of as scientific, or objective. 

But the Incarnation dramatically confronts us with the identity of Truth, reality-wide: the source of existence is a person. The Creator is not another object, but rather, the Subject from which everything else follows. 

Does the Personal nature of Truth have any claim on how our beliefs should be formed? If my beliefs about Jesus are discovered and upheld primarily by means of objective reasoning, haven’t I mistaken “a way to the Way” for the Way himself? 

Again, God is more like the face of another person than he is like a blazing, supermassive star. Knowing the “truth” about him, then, might come about by means more like relationship than reasoning. The irreducibly personal character of God forces me to at least consider how relationships in and of themselves might be more like knowing God than any amount of investigation or study could ever lead to. 

And don’t mistake me for simply asserting that relationships simply teach us more about God than other means do. Yes, human relationships can (and ought to) be viewed as an analog for the ways God relates to us, but that’s still locating the most fundamental nature of truth outside of personhood itself. If relationships only point us towards true information, then personal reality is still only a means and not the essence of truth in our reality.

Can loving another person—the action, the choice—be the truth about God? More than just a means to lead to additional objective information, could love for another person contain and embody what knowing God is?

God, the Person, is at the center—not “God, the Equation,” or “God, the Stuff.” 

God: Personal. Loving. Communal. Trinitarian. 

Knowing people, then, should be more like knowing him than knowing facts ever could be. The truth about God is as much like loving others as the meaning of a book is like what the author intended. 

In one sense, this kind of thinking doesn’t come naturally. But in the first and fundamental human sense—the sense which I believe we all knew before we sought out other ways of understanding our place in the universe—it comes more naturally than anything. As naturally as a baby clinging to his mother’s breast for his first feeding…

As naturally as one might lay down their life for a friend…

In a world where God became a human person, to know him is to love human people. There’s no other way, truth, or life in a world with Christmases.