Is There Absolute Truth?

A few years back I sat on a panel at Metro State with Dr. Doug Groothuis, and afterward a group of students told me something I've never forgotten. One said, "I like a lot of the Christians I meet, but they all think they have a corner on truth, and they all think alike. It's too constricting. I value my freedom too much for that." If I could sum up the room, it was this: Christians claim absolute truth, and absolute truth destroys freedom.

That's not just a college-campus idea. The Supreme Court said almost the same thing in 1992, in the Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, when it declared that liberty means the right to "define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, and of the mystery of human life." Not discover truth. Define it. Create it.

So what do we say to that? Three things, and they all come straight out of John 8:31-38 and Romans 6:16-18.

Absolute truth is knowable. Jesus tells the Jews who'd believed in him, "If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:31-32). The Pharisees bristle - they're descendants of Abraham, they say, never enslaved to anyone. But Jesus isn't talking about Rome. He's talking about a slavery to sin that only truth can break.

Here's what's striking: that's the exact opposite of how our culture thinks. Jean-Paul Sartre said all truth is relative, that any claim to truth is really just a power play to control people. Nietzsche, his teacher in this, said the same - every "truth statement" is manipulation dressed up as conviction. And notice, that's precisely the charge Jesus levels back at the Pharisees. Their truth claims, he says, were never really about God. They were about control - control over people, and ultimately an attempt to control God himself, which is why they wanted him dead.

But here's where it falls apart for Sartre and Nietzsche: if you insist that every truth claim is just a grab for power, you've just made the biggest truth claim of all. You can't escape it. Everybody makes truth claims - the question was never whether we make them, but what's in them. C. S. Lewis put it this way: you can't go on "explaining away" everything forever, or you explain explanation itself away. A completely transparent world is an invisible one. At some point you have to see something.

And what's in the truth claim matters enormously. Think about the families at Emanuel AME in Charleston, who stood up in court and forgave Dylann Roof - the man who murdered their loved ones - before he ever asked for it. Nobody looked at that grace and said freedom was being crushed. Because the truth they were living out was the truth of a man dying on a cross for his enemies, praying forgiveness over the people killing him. That truth claim didn't suppress freedom. It's the only thing that could produce that kind of mercy.

Which brings us to point two: absolute freedom is always limited. "Everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin," Jesus says (John 8:34). Paul says it plainly in Romans 6:16-18 - you're always serving something, either sin, which leads to death, or obedience, which leads to righteousness. Once you're free from sin, Paul says, you become a slave of righteousness. That should sound strange. Free indeed, and yet a slave?

Think about anyone in this church who's genuinely gifted - a musician, an athlete, a craftsman. None of them got there by doing whatever they felt like whenever they felt like it. They restricted their freedom - hours of practice, discipline, repetition - and that restriction is exactly what opened up a deeper, richer freedom to actually use the gift. Freedom was never the absence of restriction. It's the presence of the right restrictions, the ones that fit who you actually are. Is a bird with a broken wing free? Is a fish free out of water?

Which leads to the last point: absolute truth and freedom reside in One. When I got married, I lost the right to make small decisions unilaterally - forever. That's not a flaw in marriage; that's what love does. The more intimate the relationship, the less independent you get to be. Jesus says at the end of our passage, "I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have heard from your father" (John 8:38). Truth and freedom aren't abstract ideas. They live in a relationship with the Father, through the Son.

C. S. Lewis wrote that if you want to keep your heart safe, you can wrap it in hobbies and lock it away from every entanglement - but in that casket it won't stay safe. It'll go unbreakable, impenetrable, and ultimately unable to love at all. A healthy love always costs both people something. And here's the wonder of the gospel: God adjusted to us first. In the incarnation, in the cross, Christ said, "I will adjust to you. I will serve you, even at the cost of my own life." Paul writes that "the love of Christ compels us" (2 Corinthians 5:14). Once you see what he gave up for you, giving up your own autonomy to follow him doesn't feel like loss. It feels like the freest thing in the world.

Friends, Jesus said it plainly: "If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." That is the absolute truth.

Scripture References

John 8:31-38

Romans 6:16-18

2 Corinthians 5:14