For Real, Yo.

Four(ish) years ago, after an evening of fine company, conversation, food & wine, I stood in the living room of some friends of mine and declared, "I think that we should abandon the word, 'Truth' and start using the word, 'Real,' especially when it comes to talking about God to not-yet-Christians."

My reasons for thinking so were mostly along the lines of practicality: peeps these days were less interested in "truth" and more interested in "real" and I didn't think we'd lose much value by switching terms and would gain more hearing for the Gospel.

I was thinking I was having a particularly brilliant & momentous insight and figured that comments along the lines of, "That is a particularly & momentously brilliant thing to say!" would come rolling my way.

Not so much. (Folks were nice, of course, but not in agreement.)

Ever since then I've continued to think about it, because I still feel like my first insight was correct. (This feeling, mind you, has no bearing on whether I am, in fact, correct. I realize this.)

Nonetheless, I've continued to think about it and today I thought of another way of talking about it.

"Truth" is a subset of "Real." That is, all that is true is real, but true is not an adjective that properly describes all that is real.

For example: 2+2=4 <-- True, but we wouldn't, in common usage, say, "Two plus two is four . . . man, that is real." In fact, we mostly use "real" to describe experiences. Put another way, "real" is more commonly (and perhaps more properly) used when the object is a subject, and "true" is more commonly used when the object is an object.

So, people can be "real" or "fake," a conversation can be "real," an experience can be "real" or not. (One of the great debates that the Matrix sparked was whether what happened in the Matrix was "real." The movie's moral was that the "steaks" in the Matrix were not "real", though the lie that was the Matrix did have serious consequences.)

Postulates are "true/false," statements are "true/false." (The previous sentence was redundant and a run-on: True.)

I think another difference between the words "real" and "true" is that the criteria for determining them are very different. "True" demands a kind of certainty to be intellectually proven/disproven. "Real" requires both an intellectual and visceral determination.

I think that God is more adequately described using "real," than "true," Even though it is true that there is a God. The Triune God of Grace, the Father revealed in the Son by the Spirit, is a Subject (you might say The Only Subject), not an Object. To refer to him as "real," I think is more helpful than to move to one level of abstraction and refer to a statement about him as "true" (e.g. "there is a God, and he's the Christian one.")

at any rate, it's fun to swing people for a loop who are looking for a fight about the truth of the existence of God and instead start talking about his real-ness instead.

[Editor's Note: Your usual Piebald Life poster, Alex, is off at Chapter Camp these two weeks. In his stead, Macon is guest-blogging. Macon's normal haunts are dark corners of libraries, the comic book rack in the 7Eleven, theology/philosophy sections of used bookstores, and the Stokes Kith & Kin blog. ]