What is Truth? and how historical truth relates to religious truth

Speaker A: 00:00:00

If you're like me and you grew up in the church, have you ever wondered if you believe what you do just because you were raised to believe it? Have you ever wondered if other religions were true? I had those doubts and questions. And in this group of lessons, I'll share what I learned that gives me peace and confidence that I can truly trust God's Word.

Hi, I'm Yvonne Prehn with the Bible805 podcast where you learn to know, trust, apply and teach the Bible.

I've got lots of free resources for you and these are truly free resources. This isn't just, oh, you know, kind of nibble on this little bit and then we'll really sock you with what this big thing costs and all that.

No, the resources are truly free because I want you to be able to know, trust, apply and teach God's word. So go to www.bible805.com and that has links and explanations of everything.

But for now, let's begin our exploration to answer the questions about trusting the Bible and this series I've entitled the Christian Bible and Other Scripture,can youn trust them? The Unique Historical Reliability of the Christian Bible.

And our lesson today to start in this whole process is entitled What Is Truth? And How Historical Truth Relates to Religious Truth. Before we begin, this lesson is part of a five part series.

Now, each of the lessons stands alone, but you will learn more if you look at all of them. They're all available on the Bible805 website. Just briefly, we'll talk about what is truth in this one.

Then in the next lesson, how historians determine truth through geography, archaeology, artifacts and documents. Then I will compare the historical anchors that we've determined for the Christian Bible with other scriptures.

The next three lessons will be about that. The Hindu and Buddhist, the Muslim, and finally on the Mormon and Jehovah Witness. But let's get into our lesson now.

The foundational question that we really need to answer is what is truth? It's more important than ever. Fake news, conflicting viewpoints, frightening world events, personal tragedies. How do we know what to believe?

On one level, if in the confusion over truth, we're just confined to the political realm or whatever drama consumes the news, one option would be to block the media noise and hope things get better. But we can't do that in all of life.

Some areas matter more than the latest political outrage or media event. Because in spiritual realities, truth matters. The Bible says God put eternity in our hearts. We can't help but think spiritual thoughts.

So we ask questions like this--Most of us know we're going to live forever. Most people think they're going to live forever. But the question is, in which neighborhood? A neighborhood of joy or of sorrow and darkness?

What happens after we die? Is there a God who watches us and will someday judge us? Where do we go for forgiveness? And how can we live this life now with peace and purpose?

It's hard enough to find truthful answers to these questions, but we have one more problem. We start at a disadvantage because we have an enemy working against us.

Finding spiritual truth is never easy because in reality, as Ephesians 6:12 says to us, our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Our enemy doesn't play fair. Satan masquerades as an angel of light. He's a liar and the father of lies.

In addition, his lies are not always obvious and may be extremely appealing.

I always used to tell the single adults that we worked with in a single adult ministry at a church that we were working at, that if Satan appeared to you in the flesh today, he wouldn't have horns and a pitchfork. He would be the best looking, the most gorgeous man you'd ever seen.

It's like that in many areas, and that's why we need a source outside ourselves to define and determine truth. The Bible is that needed source, and this series will show you why you can trust it.

But to do that, let's start with the basic question of what is truth? Now, here's how we're going to answer. We'll first look at what truth is not, because there's many false beliefs out there about it.

We're going to look at four of them, then propose a working definition of truth, and then I'll share my journey and my search for truth in my faith. Then we're going to look at, just briefly how history makes finding out what is true practical and how religious truth can be found using history.

The second lesson will go into this in much more detail, and that's really the meat of this series and I think a really exciting thing for you to grasp.

We will discover what I call historical anchors, and we will use the historical anchors of the Bible of truth and history to evaluate the scriptures of other faith systems.

Now, I want to let you know where the content of this series of lessons is coming from.

Some of the definitions on what truth is and isn't come from the Baker Encyclopedia of Apologetics. Norm Wright was the editor of that. But I reword his definitions and I add my comments to them.

I'll give you other citations as we go along, but the majority of the content in this series does come from my personal study, my conclusions on the topics.

Be assured that this is not some hard to understand philosophical argument.

These lessons, I trust, will be practical and useful. Many of the really important questions of life, I think, are really very easy to understand if you just take a little bit of time to do them.

Read what the Bible says, think them through, and that's what we're going to be doing together.

Let's get to it

ONE Truth is not just what Works

Many believe, along with William James, that a statement is known to be true if it brings the right results, but even a brief consideration shows this isn't the case in life.

Lies, cheating, adultery all seem to bring about desired results, sometimes seemingly positive results, but long term tragedy often follows. In religion, to say all religions are true and all lead to the same place may accomplish a short term goal of peace with others and may sound kind and tolerant.

But ultimately it is unkind because not sharing consequences doesn't make them go away.

It is like not telling someone they have cancer because you don't want them to feel bad, but if you don't tell them the truth, regardless of how they feel, they can't make appropriate decisions about their future or get the treatment they need to solve their problem. It's similar if we assert that all religions are true, because if they aren't, it can have eternally disastrous results.

For people who believe in a false religion, you need to know that Heaven and hell, or however you choose to define eternity with or separated from God are real and no one accidentally ends up in either place. You make decisions as you go along as to what to believe, what not to believe, and I want to help you make what I trust are the right decisions.

SECOND, Truth is not what is internally consistent.

Now this is really key to understanding why people live in false faith systems, because once you're inside them, the world created by that system can seem to make sense. It can seem to be true. One of the best illustrations of why people believe like this is in the internally consistent world of science fiction.

For example, whether it's the Marvel Universe, Star Trek, or Star Wars, their movies are based on a belief system that is internally consistent within that universe. But being consistent within a fictional world or within a false religious system or ethical realm doesn't make that world true.

We all know, or we should know, that the force in Star Wars is an invention of George Lucas and not a true spiritual reality, but some people believe that it is. And sadly, that's how some people evaluate a religion.

A religion might make sense internally. The stories within it might be consistent with the belief system which was founded and what the authorities of that religion have taught for many years.

I'll be giving you examples of this in the third, fourth and fifth lessons when I talk about the Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Mormon and Jehovah Witness religions.

But until then, please keep in mind this internal consistency enforced by a community is a primary reason of why it's so hard to see outside of them if you're in them. And that's why we need compassionate understanding of people who are in other religions, not simply just to give them rational arguments.

We need to keep in mind that any belief system, no matter how ancient or revered, no matter how internally consistent and socially encompassing it might be if it is not based on reality and in the physical historical world, if instead it's based on fables and legends, it makes about as much sense to trust it for eternal salvation as it would be to trust the Force.

THREE Truth is not what feels good in religion.

Many people believe things because it makes them feel good or they have a good feeling aboutit. It really feels good to think you can live your life however you want and at the end of it everybody gets to step into the light to waiting loved ones. This view is much more comforting than having to think about guilt or sin or penalties from a God who will judge our lives.

But just because this belief feels good does not make it true. I can have wonderful positive feelings towards a huge bowl of popcorn dripping with butter and a bag of M&Ms candy

sprinkled in while the popcorn's still warm. But my positive feelings of that treat don't negate the consequences of the weight I'd gain if I ate popcorn and M&Ms as a snack every night.

Feelings do not validate objective reality. Feelings don't define truth, no matter how good they feel.

And bad feelings such as about the judgment of God don't make such something false just because it feels bad.

FOURTH Truth is not relative.

There are not different truths for different people. That's just kind of goofy.

It's a very popular view though today, but it violates the basic logic of the law of non contradiction in life. Either you have two red shoes on or you don't. Either you have blue eyes or you don't.

SECOND, Truth is not what is internally consistent.

In religion, either Jesus died on the cross or he didn't.

Either Jesus is God or he isn't, and he demonstrated that he was by raising himself from the dead. Truth determines the answer.

So what then is truth? Quickly, before we define truth to review. Truth is not these four things.

Truth is not what works,

Truth is not what is internally consistent

Truth is not what feels good

Truth is not relative

SO, again, what is Truth?

I give you a couple of varieties of definitions, but they sort of all say the same thing and then I'll summarize it in just a minute. Merriam Webster dictionary says truth is the body of real things, events and facts. The property of being in accord with fact or reality.

Norm Geisler expands this definition in the religious world where he talks about truth is telling it like it is. Falsehood, then is what does not. Falsehood tells it like it is not misrepresenting the way things are. The intent behind a statement is irrelevant.

If it lacks proper correspondence, it is false.

Here's my summary definition. Truth is what corresponds to reality.

Okay, that sounds good. But think about it though.

That brief definition again sounds good. And it is. When you do think about it, it only makes sense for that to be useful if it's about something that happens in our current reality.

Like if you show me a couple of shoes right now, today, you say one's red, one's yellow, you know, whatever I can say, okay, one corresponds to reality, another one doesn't, maybe whatever that kind of thing is. But it's our current reality. For religion though, this is where it gets tricky.

And this is where I started questioning the foundation of most religions in the past. There are no time machines available. I can't check out and see. Did Jesus really rise from the dead? Was he walking around? Was he talking to people?

I don't know. I can't go back there and check it out. So how do we find out what corresponds to reality as regards the Christian religion at its foundation?

The same goes for any religion--so where to we find truth?

To answer that, I want to share my story of researching the answer to the question of truth in spiritual matters.

And then I'll share conclusions that I think are useful for all of us. Here's my search for truth. It's not an apologetic or philosophical or sci fi argument for how to find truth.

There's all kinds of good resources on the web for that. This is simply my story. I'm not a professional theologian or a philosopher.

I'm one follower of Jesus, sharing how I answered my questions about the truth of the Christian faith with the hopes that it'll help others. We must all answer ultimate questions at some time in our lives, and here is why and how I did it. To start out, I grew up in the church.

I was involved in the church from little on. I taught Sunday school literally all my life. as a third grader, I taught the kindergartners. Fourth grader, I had my own little class.

I mean, as a sixth grader, I had my own little class of fourth graders.

When I got in high school, I took over the youth group and then basically taught Sunday school classes or adult Bible classes in one form or another pretty much all my life since then. And I've loved it. But in my late 20s, early 30s, I got to a place where I questioned, is the Christian faith really true?

I come from a strong faith background, but I wondered if my faith was only an emotional response to the people that I loved. Why was I a Christian? What it basically, because I loved my grandma? I had to know. I realize now I was "deconstructing my faith" before it was a thing to do.

Now I know that term deconstructing or deconstructing the faith or whatever might be confusing. Some of you might be very familiar with this topic, and some of you though, may be asking, what are you talking about? What's deconstruction mean?

Let me explain it briefly, though there are many definitions of deconstructing the faith or whatever. It's basically the idea of taking apart, of examining what you believe.

It's often used currently by people who were raised in the church and who have questions about many areas of faith, authority, the Bible and their church. I certainly did. The results, though, and responses from others to this process have not been overwhelmingly positive in the church in many ways.

Often condemnation from authority figures, sometimes encouragements to compassionate exploration. Sometimes people just don't even share, but they are sort of quietly are floundering and walking away.

But regardless of how you look at it or define it, this issue, this process of deconstructing the Christian faith is affecting many today. As someone close to me said, my friends in the faith are dropping away like flies.

This breaks my heart, and my prayer is that this series of lessons will help you regardless of whether you know and care for someone who is in the process of questioning the faith they were raised in, what we call deconstructing today, or questioning or whatever it is.

Or if in the quietness of your heart and life, you were experiencing what is sometimes called the dark night of the soul and you have haunting questions about the faith you were raised to believe. And if you simply aren't quite sure why you can trust the Bible to be the foundation of your life.

As I said, I got to the place where I questioned it all. Now here's what I decided to do to find answers. And I honestly, I don't know where this came from, but I look back now and it had to be God leading.

As I questioned my faith, the way I decided to answer it, whether it was true or not, was to get a master's degree in history, majoring on the history of the Church.

Now this was so totally crazy because all my undergraduate work had been in English and education. I had to go back, get an entirely additional major in history before I could even apply to graduate school.

But I decided this is what I was going to do because I thought if I could examine what was true in the Christian faith throughout all of history, if I could find out if the basic facts it claimed really happened, that would be good evidence that it was foundationally true.

I also decided to do my studies at a secular university because I didn't want what I studied to be influenced by Christianity, Christian bias, and honestly, to put it negatively, I just didn't want more of what I was calling the party line at that time. So there I was, several years and lots of study later. My hopes were not disappointed.

Figuring out what was true, what were the solid, trustworthy historical facts that formed the foundation of the Christian faith throughout the centuries was easy when studied objectively. I'd heard accusations that many events in the Bible didn't happen or happened at times inconsistent with what the Bible recorded and it was a great relief, particularly since I studied at a secular university and under a master professor who was antagonistic to Christianity, that the historical events, timelines and people I learned about in the Bible were true, the evidence was clear and I accomplished my goal on verifying the historical foundation of the Christian faith.

I share lots of specifics on exact details and different things that relate to different books and things like that all throughout the Bible805 ministry. Check out the YouTube channel for lessons, the website, whatever, where I share it in detail. But let me just continue with the overview of it.

In addition to as important as learning about the specific dates, people, events, one of the things that I learned during my graduate study years, something much more valuable and that was that I learned to think like a historian. Now this is what thinking like a historian means.

I learned how important it is to look at events in their historical settings, to fully understand them. I learned to look at a variety of sources and how to evaluate the validity of those sources.

I learned how to prevent bias in my study and to fight conclusions based on unconscious or underlying bias, either mine or others in my teaching, Sunday school classes, Bible studies online, all of these things. I found myself constantly going back to what I'd learned as a historian to evaluate the truth of what I was teaching.

Because I do believe that history is a valid way to determine what corresponds with reality. And I wanted to teach based on reality, not just my opinions or what I hoped was true.

In the next lesson, we'll go into detail on how historians determine truth through looking at geography, archaeology, artifacts and documents. It's really a fun lesson, so don't miss it.

But with the importance of history in mind, let's leave my story and talk about how determining historical truth ties into the search for religious truth. It seems to me, and some might disagree, that for a religion to be true theologically, it should also have a true, factual historical basis.

Of course, in any religion there are intangibles that can't be proven at some point. It requires a leap of faith to participate in a religion.

And though every religion requires a response of the will that is more than an acknowledgment of facts. At the same time, I believe that God as the Creator of reality, left us discoverable, verifiable evidence of his work and words.

For a simple example, if the Bible says Jesus was born in Bethlehem, there ought to be a real Bethlehem. And of course there is. That's why the Christian faith claims that it is historical and evidential.

This claim is extraordinarily important, and it's far more unique than you'd imagine.

As you'll learn when we look at the other religions that don't share the characteristics that Christianity does in being historical and evidential, it means that Christianity believes it is founded on true history based on true evidence. So how does Christianity prove that it is founded on true history and true evidence?

This is such a foundational aspect of the Christian faith, we often don't think about it, but it is key to determining if our faith is true. I'll go into now how history provides true evidence for the Christian faith.

I'll go into how this works, how history provides true evidence for the Christian faith in much more detail in coming lessons. But let me just share a couple of examples, sort of little teasers to help you see how we're going to be thinking about this.

The Bible is full of historical statements that can be externally verified.

When it says things like in the New Testament, in Luke, chapter two, verse one, in those days, "Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census would be taken of the entire Roman world."

Kings: 18:13

Now we'd expect these events to correspond to historical fact, if indeed the Christian faith is based on true history, if it's historical and evidential, and they do.

Every student of history from high school on knows who Caesar Augustus was and that he lived from 63 BC to 14 AD.

We have coins and statues with his image. We have written stories about him from many sources. Historians have no doubt about his life.

Yet there are some critics of the Bible who questions if he made the decree or if the Roman governor Quirinius, who served under Augustus it made it, the exact dates of it within a year or so. There are all sorts of little questions like this about ancient history.

And I'm going to be doing in a another lesson where I'm going to talk about how ancient historians recorded things and why we have some minor differences and stuff, but this isn't what's really critical.

Now if you are interested in the most minute details of this, I do have a link on the website that you can go to that breaks down every single criticism and why it's true or false or whatever.

But moving right along the Bible, the main thing that I want you to get out of the biblical interpretation now is that the main point is that the primary characters truly existed when and where the Bible said they did. There's no doubt about Caesar Augustus or Bethlehem as a real person and a real place, you can visit there today.

One of the things that I share that gives me peace about the Christian faith is our Bibles have accurate maps. Things happened throughout all of Bible history that we can go to those locations today. Now there might be debate about little details, but not about the basic facts.

Not all religions have the same verifications, as the locations and people mentioned in the Book of Mormon have no real basis outside of the imagination of Joseph Smith.

Now the Old Testament is a little more complex but it's just as true. We have Sennacarib's Prism, pillas of cunniform writing almost 3,000 years old that verify the biblical account in Second Chronicles 32. Of course this is the Assyrian telling of it but basically they tell exactly the same story.

The Assyrians just loved writing about themselves, talking about themselves. They had these little tiny cuneiform writing and they filled tablets and pillars and all of that.

This particular one, we have three full size copies and fragments of at least six more. And they all agree in content. And here's what they say.

"As for the King of Judah, Hezekiah, who had not submitted to my authority, I besieged and captured 46 of his fortified cities, along with many smaller towns taken in battle with my battering rams. As for Hezekiah, I shut him up like a caged bird in his royal city of Jerusalem."

This is extraordinary historical evidence from almost 3,000 years ago that agrees with the biblical account in 2nd Chronicles 32. Of course, this is the Assyrian telling of it, but basically they tell exactly the same story.

Archaeologists have also discovered Sennacherib's palace. And in the palace, many, many things, images on the walls and documents, all kinds of things that verify historical events in the Bible.

And next week in the next lesson, I will be sharing pictures so don't miss out on that now. There are links to truth and history.

We must acknowledge that just because you can trust the historical veracity of the Bible doesn't mean you automatically trust the God of the Bible. But it's a good foundation. If the Christian faith claims to be historical and evidential, we must start there.

Committing to a faith will require more than checking off a list of verifying documents and the geography of the fish faith, but I contend it shouldn't be less if it claims to be a faith that promises to forgive sins, give meaning and purpose to life, and grant eternal salvation.

That is why it's so important to understand the place of history in determining truth, and that is what we're going to be talking about in the rest of this series. Finally, though, the most important thing about truth, above all the data, is that truth is ultimately a person.

Jesus, who said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. To know the truth means to know Jesus. Just like those who determine what's counterfeit money and what isn't by studying the real thing.

They do that because when you know what is genuine and true, the fake is easily apparent.

The final challenge to us in this study, and always, is to know Jesus, our Savior and Lord so well that what is and isn't truth will peacefully, joyfully, and be abundantly clear as we walk closely with Jesus, our Lord, our friend, our Savior, now and forever.

That's all for now.

For printed notes, links to the video podcasts, free teaching resources, go to www.bible805.com, and again, they're really free.

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