It is worth acknowledging that whole books have been written on this topic by philosophers and theologians. As a neuroscientist who studies the beautiful limitations of the mind and cares about the soul, I want to remind us, in the midst of our necessary deconstruction, there is something we can hang onto.

The moment in which we find ourselves is historical. It has been many centuries since there was as much disruption in the church as there is today. Though it is painful, we must acknowledge we did not arrive here by accident. We must soberly consider what steps we took, individually and corporately, that have led us to where we now stand. As Christians, this conversation must include a sober reckoning of our discipleship, as well as our understanding of truth and reality. As leaders who facilitate mission, it must include recognizing and repenting for our collusion with things other than the King and his Kingdom.

I have been interested in the nature of truth and reality since I was a young teenager. Growing up in a home with abuse and being parented, in part, through gaslighting, I sought hard for an anchor to keep both my soul and my sanity. The church I attended was only moderately helpful. Their passion for extra-biblical standards and culture wars demonstrated great theological hypocrisy and I found they had little to offer on issues more serious than rock music. Their cessationist theology significantly limited their ability to minister to my greatest needs. It was the voice of God alone, through scripture and to my heart, that literally saved my life.

Twenty years later, in the halls of Harvard, I studied how the brain makes meaning of the world. There, amongst some of the sharpest minds on the planet, I saw another limitation. The amazing ability to discover and describe still only allows one to scratch the surface of the mysteries of God’s universe. The pinnacle of human thought was vastly overshadowed by the Creator.

My journey to understand the nature of truth has been a deeply personal one. My curiosity to discover how God created us to grasp truth has led me to the conclusion that propositional truth is not useful as a primary discipleship method, either biblically or neurobiologically.

Our reliance on ‘propositions’ to define truth comes out of a long history. The Enlightenment of the 1500’s changed knowledge from something that is lived into something to be measured. It defeminized and disembodied understanding. It eliminated experience and emotion, declaring them lesser things to the ‘mind of man.’ But to live with no emotion like the Vulcan Spock or Sherlock Holmes is to be a sociopath. As the common saying in neuroscience goes: Emotion is cognition; cognition is emotion.[1] Your mind/body processes all things emotionally, and when you have words to articulate it, it is a thought.

To understand ourselves, we must first realize that the brain is not a truth-seeking organ. Rather, it is an identity-seeking organ. Its purpose is to craft and maintain one’s identity. The brain is designed to create a worldview and protect it at all costs. Your brain seeks simplicity and hates disorientation. So it protects itself with many mechanisms. It’s very disruptive to have your mind changed or your paradigm broken.

Prejudice against the heart comes from the Enlightenment, not the Bible. Scripture reminds us that the heart and the mind are equally capable of deception. But also that they are equally renewable and equally trustworthy as they are redeemed. Ultimately, it is the Spirit in us that seeks truth. The Spirit alive in us is the ‘deep that cries out to deep.’ The Spirit knows that the heart and the mind can only find identity in the truth of the I-Thou relationship we have with God. This is why scripture repeatedly identifies one thing and one thing only as the truth – Jesus.[2] Truth is a person and God created us to know Him relationally.

This is a different notion than the adherence to propositional truths with which I was raised. In the propositional-truth paradigm, a statement is made and one must determine whether it is true or not. It is a philosophical exercise of logic and is intentionally patterned after a court hearing or a debate. (Think of the Josh McDowell classic, Evidence that Demands a Verdict.)  It has been a useful exercise for those with education and the social power to discuss ideas with others of the same class.

Besides inherent limitations of expertise or cultural differences, my foundational struggle with ‘propositional truth’ is that it requires one to judge the evidence. This makes for an unstable foundation of faith. If my salvation or closeness to God is based upon the correctness of my theology, my situation is hopeless. I know so little and I don’t know what I don’t know. I cannot buy into a gospel where righteousness and holiness are based upon my ability to perceive God. Rather, I have to admit my humble state and receive God. His mercy is the only hope I have. It is not that I understand myself to be small, but rather I glimpse of the gap between my mind and God’s and I am undone.

To be sure, the soul can find a measure of agency and certainty in being the enthroned judge. The problem is that the soul doesn’t like to get off the throne. It always wants to be the judge of what is right or wrong, what is true or false. It likes to determine what evidence qualifies and what is dismissed. It doesn’t like to get off the throne and yield when it doesn’t understand, doesn’t agree, or feels insecure. Again, the brain does not seek truth; it seeks to protect identity. In this case, it seeks to protect the identity of judge.

I don’t think Jesus, Paul, or any of the authors of scripture intended for us to grab onto the identity of judge. The Enlightenment handed us that title and it has limited our maturation. Instead, Jesus came to show that our identity should be primarily child of God. Children only know a little, even if they are passionate about it.

To be clear, I do believe in absolute truth. I just believe the scope of God’s character and nature of his work in the world is beyond our ability to grasp fully, even if we are filled with the Spirit. 

So how then shall we live? The replacement paradigm for propositional truth is not some sort of ambiguous non-truth. Our perspectives are also not the whole truth. Truth cannot be reduced to either our understanding or our experience. Rather, truth is something which transcends our ways of knowing. Jesus is the truth. His ways are not our ways and his thoughts are not our thoughts. This means truth is something more and something greater. What is required then, is humility, understanding we only see in part or know in part. In our hearts and minds exists a mixture of spirit and flesh. And God seems content to let that be so.

Therefore, the strive for theological purity is at best an unrealistic expectation, and at worst a destructive quest borne out of pride. How can we require clarity and purity of one another around things which God intentionally obfuscates? It is absurd.  We were created limited and we will always ‘see as through a mirror darkly.’ On this side of the veil, we cannot really know. The reality is demons have a purer theology than you or I do. While we contemplate and theorize about the spiritual realm and how it works, demons live there. They harbor no questions about the nature of the Trinity. They were present when God created the planets. There are no debates about any of these things. And yet where does it get them? Are they saved because of this knowledge? Does it give them peace or comfort? They have all theological knowledge, but they do not have truth. Because Truth is Jesus, and Him they cannot hold (John 8:31-47).

Because Jesus makes his our home in our hearts, He reveals truth to and through us. Each person is a carrier of the truth through the mystery of the Imago Dei. Scripture says it is not our minds that lead us to the truth, rather it is the Holy Spirit (John 16:13). Holy Spirit shows us the truth of Jesus and helps that truth shine through us. Our part is a teachable disposition and to learn from one another. We are to seek the piece of Jesus that revealed through another. I believe the humility this requires is why God chooses to leave things clouded in mystery. We have to admit the limitations of our mind, our heart, and our perspective. God’s design requires us to need one another in order to grasp the truth that is beyond and bigger than us (2 Peter 1:20).

I do not think we have lost truth in this post-truth era. Rather, we have lost the façade that we have ever really grasped the truth. We are realizing that making the ‘mind of man’ the definer of reality is very shaky ground indeed. It is a grace of God that we were never the keepers of truth nor is it our job to lead people into truth. That job is taken and the Holy Spirit is brilliant at it. Instead, our response to this new age should not be cynicism, but humility and teachability.

The changes we can make are profoundly easy. We simply need to filter our religion through our relationship with Jesus. We can ask God good questions and endure the mystery when he keeps secrets. We can have Jesus read the bible to us. We can ask what God thinks instead of telling him what he thinks. We need to teach people to hear God and test what they are hearing. Finally, we need to embrace struggle, suffering, and unanswered prayers as an invitation to have a deeper heart connection with God and others.

Truth is not a proposition; it is a person. In reality (real reality) we cannot lose ‘truth’ because Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. That was and always will be our firm foundation, no matter what shakes.

We have lost our path because we have followed the idols and lesser gods. We have neglected making disciples for the sake of theological precision. We have neglected empowering all people for the sake of perfectionism. We have made the mind of man the highest judge of truth. So, we find ourselves here – at the end of truth but the beginning of humble discipleship. Paul, who was more educated than any of us wrote to the Corinthians, “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” (2:2 ESV) We must simplify our missiology to reengage the basics, as a child who lacks discernment. We must embrace Jesus with both hands, allowing him to lead us out of what we think we know, and into a deep relationship. Then we will be standing on solid ground, in the Kingdom, clinging to the Truth that sets us free.

---

[1] “Extensive research now makes clear that the brain networks supporting emotion and bodily sensation and those supporting learning and memory, are functionally intertwined, even for expertise domains like mathematics. Emotions are an essential and ubiquitous dimension of thought…” Immodino-Yang and Gotleib, Chapter 10: Understanding Emotional Thought Can Transform Educators’ Understanding of How Students Learn, Neuroscience: Development Across the Life Span, 2020

[2] In John 17:17, in Jesus’s prayer to God, he called the Word (logos) truth. This is the only place. But in John 14:6 and John 18:37 Jesus calls himself the truth. Since we must interpret scripture by scripture, we must interpret John by John and John identifies the truth (logos) as Jesus himself in John 1:1. I am not in any way denying 2 Timothy 3:16 and that scripture is God breathed and valuable. Only that it is not our interpretation of the bible that makes an idea true, but rather Jesus’s explanation, demonstration, and illumination that reveals the truth in scripture.