Truth Under Siege
This is Part 1 of 4 from a sermon on Truth, the first in "The Transcendentals" series preached at Summit Church (Naples) in January 2026. It has been lightly edited for publishing. Click here to listen to the audio.
As is usually the case at the beginning of the year, each congregation has an opportunity to preach a mini-series on whatever they want, so we are going to spend three weeks considering the transcendentals.
Transcendwhat?
The transcendentals. Sometimes these are referred to as absolute values, first things, first principles, fundamentals, or natural law.
These transcendentals are the bedrock of any and every thing that exists; the bedrock of any and every society. The bedrock of any and every human life. To know them is to know truth. To live in light of them is to open ourselves up in greater measure to goodness and beauty.
The word "transcendental" is pointing to a reality that transcends our natural world and human existence. It speaks to the reality that there is a reality beyond us, above us, that existed before us, and will exist long after we're gone. A reality that actually defines reality itself and imbues it with purpose and meaning and being. Ancient philosophers spoke of the transcendentals in different ways, but they were all aligned in believing that they exist and exist necessarily. Christians also have affirmed for two millennia the existence and necessity of a reality that transcends our natural world—and we with one voice call him God, for he (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is the ultimate reality that transcends all reality and is the very source and foundation of all things. As Paul once said, "28 In him we live and move and have our being..." (Acts 17:28). In other words, the transcendentals find their ultimate grounding in the nature and being of God, for from him flows everything else that has being.
What exactly are these transcendentals? Theologians and philosophers have consistently boiled it down to three things: truth, goodness, and beauty. God in his wisdom and grace created this world. And everything that he made in this world, he made true—that is really real—a certain something and not something else. And the things and animals and people he made, he made good and to fulfill a certain purpose or end or telos. And inasmuch as what he made fulfills its God ordained purpose, it is beautiful, pleasing, and brings delight.
To give a simple example—one that Pastor Stephen Johnson utilized in a book that he cowrote[1]—imagine I point to a tree and we all agree that that thing is in fact a tree. We have made a judgment about what is really real. We're making a truth claim about the treeness of that tree. It is a tree and not a car. For someone to disagree and say that it is a car and not a tree would be false and not living in reality.
But we can say more about this tree. We can say that this tree is good inasmuch as it lives in accordance with the principles of being a tree. When its roots soak up water and nutrients and its leaves absorb the sun's rays enabling it to grow and do all the things that trees do, we can say this is a good tree doing the very thing God ordained it to do.
And finally, when we step back and appreciate the wonder of the tree and how it provides shade and food and a home for the creatures of this earth, we say that there is a certain beauty inherent to the tree. On a hot day when you sit under a tree's shade or pick a fresh juicy mango and sink your teeth into it, you experience delight—the beauty that is the special purview of trees. The beauty that God intended his image bearers to appreciate.
The important point is that the reason why the tree is true, good, and beautiful is because its Creator is true, good, and beautiful, and endowed the tree with these things.
Perhaps you think I just nerded out and you're wondering why any of this matters. Let me cut to the chase.
We live in a culture today that has written God out of the story. It takes things for granted as though they exist in their own right—without reference to God. Our culture believes we live in a closed system where nature is supreme and everything can be reduced to a mere collection of atoms that happened to bump into each other.
This is a new turn of events. Never has there been a race of men who did not make reference to a god or gods or some ultimate reality that is the source of all things... until the arrival of modern man. In his pride, modern man came to believe that man is all-sufficient, all-wise, and can recast this world in his own image.
That is exactly what has happened in the West. We now live in what theologians call a disenchanted world. A world devoid of wonder, mystery, purpose, and meaning. And the results have been disastrous. Our disenchanted world has stripped truth of its potency by making it subjective; goodness of its power by making it pragmatic; and beauty of its wonder by making it hedonistic—reducing it down to what makes me feel good.
The landscape of so many maladies that affect humanity today—whether loneliness, meaninglessness, purposelessness, confusion over gender and sexuality, the murder of the unborn (and the old!), civil unrest, an anarchy in which everyone does what is right in their own eyes—finds its source in the fact that we have abandoned the transcendentals, the first principles, and the ultimate reality that stands behind them: God.
We’d like to accomplish these two overarching things in our series on the transcendentals:
We want to help the church understand, appreciate, and delight in the true, the good, and the beautiful, which ultimately is a call to understand, appreciate, and delight in God.
We want to equip you to help others do the same. That as you live before fallen men and women who want nothing to do with God and think religion a great waste of time, you would be able to challenge their assumptions about life and ultimate reality. That your lives would show them that Christianity isn't quaint, cute, outdated, or oppressive, but that it is the only firm ground upon which we can build a meaningful life. That they would see that the Christian worldview—out of all the worldviews on earth—properly corresponds to reality, satisfies our deepest longings, and demonstrably leads to the flourishing of society and people.
So without further ado, let's jump into it. Today I will be talking about truth.
Truth Under Siege
We live in a culture where truth is under attack. There is an all-out assault on truth and upon its very foundations which we have been witnessing for over a century now. Little by little, argument by argument, generation by generation, we have slid further down into the ditch of subjectivism. The Overton window has shifted so radically that what once would have been unthinkable has become not only believable, but believed.
Just consider some of the things our society believes:
Men can be women. Women can be men.
We talk about “pregnant people” because men can have babies.
There are 98 genders now.
People can be animals.
We speak of gay marriage as though it is an actual thing.
We champion human rights by identifying with Hamas terrorists who murdered hundreds of Jews in cold blood, while we chant “death to Israel” in our largest cities.
We speak of human dignity and autonomy while dismembering precious babies in the womb. And we call it healthcare.
We speak of women's rights and dignity while we parade their bodies in endless pornographic images. Yet we're shocked when they are exploited, abused, and objectified.
We speak of caring for the elderly while increasing pressure upon them to kill themselves because they are too much of a societal burden.
Good is bad. Bad is good. Up is down. Down is up. In the words of one of my friends: "we have lost our minds." And the reason is because we have lost the truth. Two-thousand years ago, Pilate asked Jesus, "What is truth?" (John 18:38); today's question is, "Is there truth?" Truth is under siege.
Throughout human history, truth has always been questioned. Facts have been twisted or denied. Error has always been prevalent. But never have so many basic facts of human existence been rejected or reframed. Never before has mankind been so unmoored from reality.
Modern man began his assault on truth when he decided that he no longer needed God to explain anything and assumed he could have everything true, good, and beautiful without reference to the Maker or his design. Replacing humility with pride and wisdom with foolishness, mankind began his slow descent into ignorance—and called it progress. As one author from the 1940s put it: "Ideas have consequences."[2] And now the chickens have returned to roost. The lightning quick speed by which our society has changed is the inevitable result of unmooring ourselves from truth.
Postmodernist and post-structuralist relativists argued unceasingly that truth is relative—in the eye of the beholder and completely up for grabs. They propagated the idea that everyone has a truth claim that is true; that there is no such thing as absolute or fixed truth; that truth isn't real, only a product of social conditioning.
But what started in the academy didn't stay there. It trickled down to the streets through the arts and into our homes. Behind all those forces there was a much darker and sinister force at work. Though our culture laughs at the thoughts of demons and the devil today, make no mistake, they are very real and very evil and very behind all the confusion that has been sown into our culture.
Pretending to be wise, we have become fools! (Romans 1:22)
Citations:
[1] Daniel J. Trippie and Stephen C. Johnson, Compelling Ethics: Thinking for a Modern World (Fort Myers, FL: The Center for Christian Thought and Ethics Publishing, 2025), 2-3.
[2] Richard M. Weaver’s book, Ideas have Consequences, was first published in 1948.
