COMMON GROUND? What Is Truth? By Ayesha Kreutz
It is 2026. We are in the information age. And we have a truth problem. Nothing new. But still needed to be brought up. Lest we forget. Do you think we have a truth problem in Western culture?
I say “the truth of the matter” a lot, too much. Perhaps you say it too, but we do hear “your truth” and “my truth” and “the truth is, ” all the time. Question: when I say we have a truth problem, do you know what I mean? Because in order to have productive conversations, we need to be on the same playing field. This is a universal truth regardless of the subject.
We can let everyone have their own truth but let’s not baptize conflict avoidance as epistemology. We will get more into the other part in part 2.
For now we start here. With truth.
Pilate asked it standing in front of the answer.
Arrogance? Ignorance? Maybe but probably more like The condition of the heart. Proximity without recognition. Pilate looked Truth in the face and still asked the question. Most of us are guilty of that. Knowing what we know, we still look Jesus in the face and ask.
So what is truth?
There is a word for the serious study of truth. Veritology. From the Latin veritas. We do not talk about it enough and that is probably why we are living in an era of spectacular epistemological collapse. We talk about doctrine. We talk about theology. We argue about politics and policy and whose side God is on. But the foundational question, what truth actually is and where it actually comes from, tends to get skipped. We build the house and never check the foundation.
Veritology starts with one non-negotiable premise. Truth is not constructed. It is.
We do not get to make it up. Each of us may have to find it for ourselves, but the truth itself does not change. It just gets missed. Culture does not produce truth. Consensus does not produce truth. Majority opinion, institutional authority, personal experience, none of these generate truth. They can reflect it. They can distort it. They cannot create it.
Truth is the thing that holds whether you believe it or not. Jump off a building and tell gravity your truth on the way down. The sidewalk will not negotiate.
Truth has a source. And the source is not us.
Unlike the modern framework says truth is personal. It rises from within. You define it from your own experience, your own identity, your own emotional reality. That framework sounds like liberation. It is actually a cage. When truth is self-generated, it is also self-limited. When it is self-limited, it offers no anchor. When there is no anchor, everything drifts, including ourselves.
To be tethered to truth is to be anchored to something outside yourself. Something that holds when the current pulls. And here is the part that unsettles the comfortable, being anchored to truth is also to be free in ways we never should be, that kind of freedom does not come from within.
A man puts into practice tomorrow what he believes today. What you accept as true shapes who you are, your ethics, your relationships, your politics, your capacity for accountability. Truth is not abstract. It runs the whole system. And if truth is not running the system, the question worth asking is, who is. Think of it like an operating system. You do not see it running. But everything you do on the surface depends on what is underneath. Swap out the OS and the whole machine behaves differently. Most people are arguing about the apps. Nobody is checking the operating system.
The ancient Hebrew word emet, usually translated as truth, conveys faithfulness and stability. Something you can lean on without it giving way. It’s not a perspective but a foundation you can stand on. You don’t curate truth.
So what is truth?
Jesus says He is the truth. The thing itself. All truth, by that definition, is derivative. Culture does not compete with divine truth. Culture either reflects it or departs from it. Those are the only two options.
As a follower of Christ something that unsettles these days is the most aggressive attacks on truth are not coming from outside the faith. They are coming from inside it. From believers. And I say that with care, not contempt.
Chuck Missler observed that the principal weapons of spiritual adversaries are deceit and doubt, not atheism. Atheism is obvious. Doubt is surgical.
The serpent in the garden did not deny God’s existence. He questioned God’s word.
Did God really say?
That is still the oldest playbook in circulation. The enemy has not needed a new strategy since Eden. The drift did not start with postmodernism. It started in a garden, with a question that sounded reasonable.
And the church, if we are being honest, has not always held the line. In fact, we have a tendency to bend truth to protect comfort. We have softened it to avoid conflict. We are called to be Peace Makers NOT Peacekeepers. We use truth as a weapon when it suites us and abandoned it when it cost us something. That is not faithfulness. That is the same drift wearing a different outfit.
You cannot call the culture back to a foundation you are not standing on yourself.
So what is truth?
Not what you feel. Not what your side believes. Not whatever survives the news cycle or wins the argument on social media.
R.C. Sproul said Truth is that which corresponds to reality as perceived by God. It is not invented. It is not voted on. It is what is actually real, as seen by the One who made reality.
For those who follow Jesus, the claim goes further. He does not say He teaches truth, or that He points to truth, or that He is mostly aligned with truth. He says I am the truth. A claim that got Him crucified, and there is no comfortable middle ground on it. So when I say there are eternal truths it is not something negotiable but an everlasting truth I myself conform to.
For those who are not there yet, consider this. Every serious philosophical and wisdom tradition, the Tao, Ubuntu, the Stoics, the Hebrew prophets, points in the same direction. There is a way things actually are. There is a grain to the universe. You can go with it or against it. But you do not get to define it.
Everyone is searching for truth, and it is standing right in front of us. That is the starting point.
You can agree with everything above and still live like none of it is true. Most of us do, most of the time. That is not a cultural problem. That is a personal one.
Belief without practice is just philosophy.
So here is the common ground. If truth exists outside of us, if it is fixed and findable, if every tradition and every honest heart is reaching toward the same thing, then we already have a starting point. We do not have to agree on everything. We just have to agree that there is something to agree on.
Can we start there?
