In 1961, London witnessed the premiere of John Osborne’s play Luther. Osborne (1929-1994) did not aim to present an accurate historical portrayal of Martin Luther’s life. Instead, the play served as a platform to express the ideas that consumed the restless mind of Osborne.
He would come to be described as “an idealist who never managed to find an ideal.” This inner turmoil is laid bare in the final dialogue between Luther and the abbot of the monastery where he once served in his youth. Now, after shaking Europe to its core with his beliefs, Luther returns to visit. The elderly abbott asks, “Martin, are you sure you’re right?”
Luther’s response, defying history and reflecting Osborne’s own doubt, is: “Let’s hope so.” The play ends there. This “Osbornian” conclusion prompted a remark from the London press: “Isn’t it interesting that the author felt compelled to include this final line to make it a play for the 20th century?”
There is a prevailing notion in modern culture about truth and the knowledge of it—or more precisely, we now live in a society that views reality through the lens of doubt. In today’s world, everything is up for debate. No one is truly certain of anything, though this uncertainty is often embraced with startling conviction.
Truth as objective and rational reality
From a different perspective, God created man without being determined by external causes. Man was created by God as a free being, undetermined, in His image and likeness. Furthermore, the entire universe was created by God outside of Himself—distinct from His essence—giving rise to a real, objective world and a tangible history.
For these fundamental reasons, any pursuit of truth must be grounded in the objectivity and rationality of man, the world, and God. The loss of objective truth can only lead to scepticism or absurdity. Kierkegaard’s question (“Of what use would it be for me to discover a so-called objective truth? Of what use would it be to me for truth to stand before me, cold and naked, not caring whether or not I acknowledge it?”) does not reflect a genuine search for truth but is instead the consequence of a romanticised approach to it.
This modern existential relativism, or the absurdity of Anaximander’s conception—which held that the world was a hemisphere, that man lived inside a dome, and that the sun, stars, and moon were merely “holes allowing the eye to catch glimpses of the flames beyond”—are the results of approaching truth and knowledge from irrational and subjective premises.
Humans were created as rational beings in a real world by a God who calls Himself “the Word.” It is through this reality that man has the ability to know truth in its propositional form, as an expression of God’s rationality. God desires to be understood and known by man.
Truth as personal reality
All things were created by a personal and infinite God and, thus, creation is inherently personal. Since everything was created outside of Him, the universe is not a pantheistic extension of God’s essence. The human’s placement outside of God, in a world that reflects His rationality and personality, implies the existence of personal truth, which can be known through the relationship between God and His creation.
To claim that truth cannot be known or to be uncertain about it reflects a misalignment with the One who created us. God defined Himself as “I Am,” signalling that humans can only understand and define themselves in relation to this existential absolute, which is both intelligible and personal.
The human’s placement within this personal realm, outside of God, is essentially positioning him or her in an intelligible and personal relationship with the Creator. It’s not only the human being that bears the imprint of the divine, but also the relationship between the human and God. Therefore, knowing God requires placing both entities—the human and God—within this personal space. The Greek word prosopon, translated into English as “person,” etymologically means “face to face,” emphasising the concept of personhood as the relationship between the creature and the Creator.
Truth as revelation
Truth is a state of unhiddenness, because the essence of any relationship is openness—a mutual revealing of oneself to the other. Even in the polytheistic cultures of antiquity, truth could not be conceived as something hidden, and the birth of philosophy in the 6th century BC was tied to recognising the need for reality to be unhidden. This question—“What is truth?”—is not unique to modern times, nor was it only Pilate who asked it 2,000 years ago (John 18:38). From the moment the human was formed in the hands of God, the first thing he saw was a revelation—the face of God.
Truth began face to face, in stark contrast to the fictional tale spun by Oscar Wilde: “There was once a very dear man of his people because he told stories. Every morning, he left the village, and when he returned in the evenings, all workers of the town, after working all day, gathered around him and asked him: ‘Come on, tell us! What have you seen?’ He explained: ‘I have seen a Faun in the forest who had a flute and who forced a group of animals to dance.’ – ‘Continue telling us, what else have you seen?’ ‘When I reached the shore of the sea I’ve seen, on the edge of the waves, three mermaids who combed their green hair with a golden comb.’ But one day, the storyteller truly heard the faun’s music, saw the animals dancing, and met the three fairies combing their hair by the water’s edge. And that evening, when the people asked him what he had seen, he replied, ‘I saw nothing.’”
God created us under His watchful eye because He wants us to live in His presence. He created us to see, because He wishes to be seen by us. From His side, everything is revealed. Everything is truth, because He is the Truth.
This article was originally published in 2006 and later featured in a retrospective collector’s edition of Signs of the Times Romania in January 2018, marking 110 years since the magazine’s first issue in Romanian.
