Since moving to Vancouver I hear some version of this phrase a lot lately.

“Well, that is your truth.”

“It’s important to speak your truth.”

“What is true for you is not true for anybody else.”

Of course this is complete nonsense. Truth is not a private matter.

Truth is…well…true.

There can be things that are true OF you that are not true OF anyone else.

There can be things you understand that someone else doesn’t yet understand.

And of course you can be incorrect about what you thought was the case.

But truth is truth with a capital T or it doesn’t deserve the designation.

Now I understand why people talk like this.

Because we are all limited in our knowledge and understanding.

We all have to look at the world from within our limited perspectives.

What this means though is not that you have your truth and I have mine.

It only means you have your perspective on truth and I have my perspective.

Only God has absolute knowledge, so only God truly knows truth in its completeness.

This is why Jesus said, “I am the truth.”

He is the one who was, and is, and is to come.

Everything that is was created by him and is sustained by him.

As Paul says, “In him we live, and move, and have our being.”

God is truth and only God’s perspective gives us an absolute perspective.

Christians claim one source of revelation from God is the Bible.

But even claiming this is so, does not give us a instant short cut to absolute truth.

We still have to read and understand it, from our limited perspectives.

Which is why there are lots of different interpretations.

But this still doesn’t mean I have “my truth” of what the Bible says, and you have yours.

There is only one meaning the authors of scripture intended. What we disagree about is what that meaning is.

We have to be careful about what this whole limited nature of human knowledge means.

We get off track when we interpret it to mean that we can never arrive at truth at all.

There is a difference between not knowing AT ALL, and not knowing COMPLETELY.

We can have true knowledge without having exhaustive knowledge.

When we identify something that is true, we really know it.

There ARE things we know. When we know them we know THE truth.

Only when something is actually objectively true can we say we have truth.

But then it is not just ours.