It's You I Like

When Truth is a Distinctive (Part 1 of 3)

I want to continue sharing with you our on-going faculty discussion, “Who are we? And how is it like for us to act?” If you will remember from a previous post, this phrase came up in a book I was reading this summer. It is a bit awkward grammatically, but it really started me thinking about how it could apply to us as a faculty. Instead of jumping into the more obvious distinctives of classical, Christian, or influenced by Charlotte Mason that we readily and routinely discuss, I have selected other values or philosophies central to our mission and vision. The first distinctive we discussed was goodness, and even more specifically, how goodness was manifested in beauty.

Our most current discussion was about truth. As believers, absolute truth is foundational to our understanding of scripture and the gospel. As a school, we routinely state that we are directing our students to the good, the true, and the beautiful in their education, and ultimately in their relationship with The Lord. 

Rhetoric Theology teacher, Nathan Fan, was a most valuable consult as I was preparing for this discussion. The first few days of Sophomore theology are devoted to defining truth. Mr. Fan challenges his students to define truth as a philosophical precept, not a Christian doctrine, which is harder than you might think. The working definition they ultimately landed on was that truth is the objective, accurate perception of reality. Every word was curated and replaced until they landed on a definition accepted by Mr. Fan. Each word was intentionally included and necessary for the definition to be valid. When presented to the Grammar faculty, there was robust discussion about how words like objective and perception were intended and included, with final agreement that it was a worthy definition. 

Without spending too much time here, I will tell you that our discussion further included how truth relates to freedom, how it is held accountable, and why it is not just important, but foundational. We also looked at the prevailing theories in our society opposing absolute truth, consensus truth, useful truth, and relative/subjective truth. After examining the philosophical nature of truth, it was gratifying to see the congruence between it and spiritual truth. We knew it was there, but transcendent to our faculty meeting discussion was a palpable sense of awe and gratitude that we were chosen to be illuminated by the ultimate truth of God.

From this point, we began to flesh out how a revelation of truth informs and impacts us all day, every day. Look for part 2 next week.