"Quid est Veritas?" said Pilate, to Jesus...
"Quid est Veritas?" is the fundamental question of our time. "What is Truth?" 2000 years ago, Pontius Pilate rhetorically asked this question of Jesus in what seems to be a tone of dejected surrender. He believed that the Truth of Who Jesus was could not save him from the wrath of the Jewish people, nor from the wrath of an Emperor who threatened to punish him should those Jews mount any more revolts. The Truth was only an inconvenience, which, even if he believed it, would only add a heavy conscience on top of his already heavy heart. Too often this is how each of us feels today. The Truth is not sought because it makes no practical difference in our lives. It is at best an inconsequential curiosity. We have suffered under this misapprehension for so very long, that the cry of the culture has become, "There is no such thing as absolute Truth." Logic tells us that this very statement is itself an hypocritical claim that asserts itself as absolute Truth, but the inherent contradiction little matters since the point is not whether or not it is true, but rather whether or not anything that is true could possibly change anything about how our day to day lives will turn out.
But what if it did? What if, whether someone's claim that something was absolutely, ultimately, and undeniably True, could change your life? What if the answers to the seemingly irrelevant "fundamental" questions (what Douglas Adams referred to as "the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything") wasn't merely theoretical, but could actually change everything for you? What if that question wasn't merely a cosmic joke with no answer, but an eternal Promise with an Answer that was knowable and foundational to every individual life? What if it changed not just how you lived your life today, but where you ended up because if it?
For me, it does. For me, my life began to be filled with an unshakable foundation of joy, that carries me safely through even the most difficult times in my life, precisely because I know the Answer to the Ultimate Question. Because the answer is not abstract at all. It is a Person, and He is real, He is tangible, and He is loving!
But unless we can know with an unshakeable certainty whether these hypotheticals are true, then there is no point in asking, and the dejected resignation of Pilate is warranted. This is why God gave us not only the Bible, but the Church to interpret It. This is why St. Paul writes, "if I am delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the Household of God, which is the Church of the Living God, the pillar and bulwark of the Truth" (I Timothy 3:15). Because the Holy Spirit who inspired Paul to write this just as He inspired all the Scriptural authors, meant to assure us that we can have certainty regarding Truth. And that certainty is that the Church is the foundational guarantor of all Divine Truth.
On other pages, I explore the specific Truths taught by the Church, and attempt to suggest how they might affect your life, but in these pages it is my aim to show you how it is that we can first be certain that there is knowable Absolute Truth; how it is that the Catholic Church that alone is capable of guaranteeing God's Truth in the face of the nearly infinite interpretations and interpreters of the Bible and the world around us.
"Quid est Veritas?" is the fundamental question of our time. "What is Truth?" 2000 years ago, Pontius Pilate rhetorically asked this question of Jesus in what seems to be a tone of dejected surrender. He believed that the Truth of Who Jesus was could not save him from the wrath of the Jewish people, nor from the wrath of an Emperor who threatened to punish him should those Jews mount any more revolts. The Truth was only an inconvenience, which, even if he believed it, would only add a heavy conscience on top of his already heavy heart. Too often this is how each of us feels today. The Truth is not sought because it makes no practical difference in our lives. It is at best an inconsequential curiosity. We have suffered under this misapprehension for so very long, that the cry of the culture has become, "There is no such thing as absolute Truth." Logic tells us that this very statement is itself an hypocritical claim that asserts itself as absolute Truth, but the inherent contradiction little matters since the point is not whether or not it is true, but rather whether or not anything that is true could possibly change anything about how our day to day lives will turn out.
But what if it did? What if, whether someone's claim that something was absolutely, ultimately, and undeniably True, could change your life? What if the answers to the seemingly irrelevant "fundamental" questions (what Douglas Adams referred to as "the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything") wasn't merely theoretical, but could actually change everything for you? What if that question wasn't merely a cosmic joke with no answer, but an eternal Promise with an Answer that was knowable and foundational to every individual life? What if it changed not just how you lived your life today, but where you ended up because if it?
For me, it does. For me, my life began to be filled with an unshakable foundation of joy, that carries me safely through even the most difficult times in my life, precisely because I know the Answer to the Ultimate Question. Because the answer is not abstract at all. It is a Person, and He is real, He is tangible, and He is loving!
But unless we can know with an unshakeable certainty whether these hypotheticals are true, then there is no point in asking, and the dejected resignation of Pilate is warranted. This is why God gave us not only the Bible, but the Church to interpret It. This is why St. Paul writes, "if I am delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the Household of God, which is the Church of the Living God, the pillar and bulwark of the Truth" (I Timothy 3:15). Because the Holy Spirit who inspired Paul to write this just as He inspired all the Scriptural authors, meant to assure us that we can have certainty regarding Truth. And that certainty is that the Church is the foundational guarantor of all Divine Truth.
On other pages, I explore the specific Truths taught by the Church, and attempt to suggest how they might affect your life, but in these pages it is my aim to show you how it is that we can first be certain that there is knowable Absolute Truth; how it is that the Catholic Church that alone is capable of guaranteeing God's Truth in the face of the nearly infinite interpretations and interpreters of the Bible and the world around us.
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