EDITOR:

‘What is truth?’ asked Pilate as Jesus stood before him prior to his crucifixion. According to the Gospel of John 18:38, it seems that Pilate asked the question and then walked away not waiting to have Jesus answer. Christians and non-Christians still do that today.

I am writing this as a response to an article written by a local gentleman six plus years ago. I cut the article out, placed it on my desk, decided to leave it there until i responded, and then procrastinated for years. On a humorous note, my family moved and I lost it. Be assured, this is not an attack on that person. I am sure that he and I could have a civil discourse on this topic over a cup of coffee. The main point of his article was to question the idea of absolute truth. He gave examples, one of which struck a nerve. He used as evidence for his opinion the fact that Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity was not correct. I am not questioning that statement. However, Newton’s lack of understanding does not negate the truth that when a person drops a stone from his/her hand the stone always falls down to the ground in a natural earth setting. A person does not have to understand all the nuances involved to believe this is truth.

As a college student years ago, I had a class call ‘Symbolic Logic’. Besides the fact that it was ‘way over my head’, I remember one thing that has stuck with me all my life. The concept in the class was to take language, turning the concepts into mathematical symbols, and then proving them true or false. I learned that mathematically we could not take a false premise and prove it true.

During this week, thinking about the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ raises the question again, ‘What is truth?’ first, Christians and most non Christians usually agree on the historical evidence for the existence of Jesus. Imagine people saying that Shakespeare and Julius Caesar did not exist. When you look at Jesus Christ you basically have three choices. 1) He was a lunatic. 2) He was a liar who was an incredibly evil man. 3) He was who he said he was. Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 15 writes about the evidences of Christ’s resurrection. Paul clearly states that if this is not so, our faith is in vain. If you read the Paul’s writings, Paul staked his life on this.

Socrates said, ‘An unexamined life is not worth living.’ Robert Fulghum wrote, ‘an examined life is not a picnic.’ This is not easy stuff. The challenge here is that all of us should examine the evidence first, before making a verdict. To get the Christian perspective there is a lot of reading to be done, but I would start with the Gospel of John, read 1 Corinthians 15, and I recommend a short book by Lee Strobel entitled, ‘The Case for Easter

Darryl Lindquist

Rapid River