Thesis.
SECTION XVI: ON THE TRUTH OF GOD
Thesis.
§ 285. God is truthful in His words, promises, and threats; in fact, He is truth itself. Some refer God’s truth to His righteousness because God reveals His righteousness when He faithfully fulfills His promises by forgiving the repentant their sins and by subjecting the impenitent to punishments. However, it is more correct to establish it as its own attribute of God, because not only does God’s truth reveal itself outwardly through fidelity and constancy in His words, but it is also inwardly an essential attribute of God.
God is true (1) in Himself and (2) outside Himself toward His creatures. In Himself He is true: (α) According as He is the highest being and hence also is the truest being, being itself, and accordingly truth itself, by which mark He is distinguished from the false and invented gods of the heathen. (β) He is true according as He is the first truth, the model of all true things that are said to be true to that extent and in that sense, insofar as they agree with their archetype in the divine mind. (γ) He is true according as all His properties, personal as well as essential, are true. Outside Himself toward creatures, God shows that He is true: (α) In His works, according as He produces true things and true beings, exercises true judgments, and provides true liberation. (β) In His words, according as He sets forth the truth without hypocrisy, pretense, or lying and fulfills His promises faithfully. He is true in promising, true in predicting, true in threatening, true in consoling.
The truth of God is proved.
§ 286. The truth of God is proved by: (I) Scripture: (1) Essentially, when it asserts that God is true in Himself. In Jer. 10:10 the God of Israel is called “the true God, the living God.” 1 Thess. 1:9: “You turned to God and abandoned idols to serve the true and living God.” 1 John 5:20: “That we may know Him who is truthful …. This is the true God and eternal life.”
(2) Effectively, when it asserts that God is truthful: (a) In His works. Deut. 32:4: “The Rock, His work is perfect, for all His ways are justice.” Ps. 25:10: “All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth.” Rev. 15:3: “Great and wonderful are Your deeds, O Lord God, the Almighty! Just and true are Your ways!” Rev. 16:[7]: “Yea, Lord God, the Almighty, true and just are Your judgments.” (b) In His words, which are proved both affirmatively (John 17:17: “Your word is truth”; 2 Sam. 7:28: “Your words will be truth,” etc.) and negatively (Num. 23:19: “God is not like a man that he should lie”; 1 Sam. 15:29: “The Conqueror in Israel will not deceive”; Heb. 6:18: “It is impossible for God to lie,” etc.). (See our commonplace [1610 Loci Theologici, locus 3 (On the Nature of God)], § 171.)
(II) Reason: (1) By the way of eminence. Both ethical and metaphysical truth are perfections; therefore we must not deny them to God. (2) By the way of causality. God is the first truth and the cause of all truth. Formal truth is properly in the intellect, for it is the conformity of the intellect with a known thing. Fundamental truth is in things themselves and is nothing other than that the things themselves are precisely as the intellect judges them to be. Truth in words is the equalling of speech with the understanding mind and with the understood thing. Truth in the created intellect is the equaling of the understanding mind with the understood thing. Truth in things is the equaling of things to the divine mind, for things are not the cause of truth in God, but truth in God is the cause, norm, and rule of truth in things. (3) By the way of negation. Not truly to be or not to be truthful is a defect. Therefore this must be removed from God.
(III) The fathers. God is “truth without deceit, goodness without malice, felicity without misery.” Fulgentius, Ad Monim., bk. 1: “There is no falsehood in God’s promises, because there is no difficulty in fulfilling them.” Prosper, Sent.: “What God Almighty promises, He Himself completes. He does not fulfill His own work with external powers.” Philo said, “Every word of God is an oath,” something that is correctly concluded from Num. 14:23 compared with Ps. 95:11. The former simply mentions that “none of them will see the earth,” but the latter adds “because God has sworn in His wrath.”
Antithesis.
§ 287. (I) About AD 640, the Syrian Jacobites denied the truth of God, according to Nicephorus (bk. 18, c. 53).
(II) The Calvinists undermine it in various ways: (1) By distinguishing badly between the hidden and revealed will and between the will of the sign and the will of good pleasure. (2) By restricting the promises of the Gospel. (3) By attributing good trickery and holy pretense to God. (4) By defending various errors that conflict with the divine truth revealed in the Word. (See our De glor. Dei, disp. 6, § 1ff.)
(III) The Photinians likewise undermine it by supporting various errors and by accusing the evangelists, the secretaries [amanuenses] of the truthful God, of some memory lapses. (See our De glor. Dei, disp. 10, § 17.) Here we should mention that Socinus argues: “God made only temporal promises to the fathers of the Old Testament, but God gave them more than He had promised” (Misc., p. 20). But in this way God is being established as both changeable and lying, like someone who has become sorry about an earlier promise and decree, so that He had to change it for the better.
(IV) The Papists: (1) By supporting the dogma of doubt. 1 John 5:10: “Whoever does not believe God makes Him a liar.” (2) By embracing and stubbornly defending various errors that conflict with Holy Writ, the tables of divine truth. (3) By removing the distinction between canonical and apocryphal books. (4) By preferring old customs to the Word of God. (See our De glor. Dei, disp. 1, §§ 39–42.)
[Questions.]
§ 288. (I) The question arises: Is God’s truth eternal? The divine uncreated truth that is in God is distinguished from created truth in created things through, among other things, the fact that divine truth is eternal and always the same without any succession of time. But created truth is not eternal a priori, yet it can be eternal a posteriori. Ps. 118:2: “His mercy and truth is confirmed upon us forever.” Ps. 146:6: “He keeps faith forever.” Thomas teaches: “In both ways the truth of God is eternal. It must be taken either transcendentally (according as God is the object of a true intellect) or as the conformity of divine knowledge with the things He understands” ([ST,] p. 1, q. 16, art. 7).
§ 289. (II) The question arises: Is God’s truth immutable? Truth in God is God Himself. Because His essence is immutable, we must certainly claim that His truth is unmoving. Rom. 3:3: “The infidelity of men does not make the faith of God without effect.” 2 Tim. 2:13: “If we are faithless, He yet remains faithful; He cannot deny Himself.” Created truth, no matter how it is taken, is changeable. For though the truth of something transcendentally does not have an opposite transcendental falsehood (because every thing [res] is true transcendentally and thus cannot change into falsehood), nevertheless as the thing itself is created, so also the truth of the thing can cease to exist and thus change into “nontruth.” The truth of the intellect can change not only into nontruth but even into falsehood, namely, when the object changes and the former concept, which conformed to the object, ceases to exist and something inconsistent with it is elicited, or when the object changes and the former concept of it is still retained. Thus before Christ’s coming, this concept was true: “The Son of God will come down from heaven and assume our flesh.” But after the Son of God was manifested in the flesh, that concept in the minds of the Jews, that the Messiah was yet to come, was false.
(III) The question arises: Is God’s truth undermined by the fact that repentance is attributed to God and that He foretold the destruction of Nineveh, which did not occur? The answer is no.
(IV) The question arises: Does the assertion that the Church can pass away [deficere] undermine God’s truth? See our De glor. Dei, disp. 4, § 7.
(V) The question arises: Does it undermine God’s truth to claim that something is true in theology that is false in philosophy? See our De glor. Dei, disp. 10, § 42.
The practical use of the doctrine of the truthfulness of God.
§ 290. (I) Consoling. God is true in His words; therefore He will fulfill His promises faithfully. Ps. 89:[33]: “I shall not remove My kindness from him nor lie against My faithfulness.” Cyprian, De mort., sermon 4: “God is truthful. His Word is eternal and firm to those who believe. If an important and praiseworthy man were to promise you something, you certainly would have faith in the one promising, and you would not believe that you would be tricked or deceived by him who you know stands on his words and actions. Now God is speaking with you, and faithless as you are, you waver with your unbelieving mind.” God is true; therefore His truth ultimately will overcome and prevail.
(II) Exhorting: (1) To have firm faith in God’s words. God is true; therefore let us cleave to His Word with an unshaken faith. Heb. 10:23: “Let us hold fast the unswerving confession of our hope, for He who promised is faithful.” The truthfulness of humans is changeable but God’s truth is eternal and immutable; it neither deceives nor is deceived. Thus it is absolutely authentic.
(2) To raise our praise of God. Ps. 57:[9–10]: “I shall give thanks to You, O Lord, among the peoples. I shall sing praises to You among the nations. For Your kindness is great unto the heavens, Your truth to the higher clouds.” Ps. 71:22: “I shall praise You for Your faithfulness with the instrument of the psaltery; O God, I shall sing praises to You with the lyre.” We truly know, worship, and glorify God when we acknowledge and declare that He is truly just, truly good, truly wise, truly omnipotent and thus that all His attributes, all His works, and all His words are true.
(3) To pursue truth. Just as Christ exhorts us to be merciful after the example of the heavenly Father (Luke 6:36), so let us pursue truth after the example of our truthful God. Zech. 8:16: “Speak the truth to one another.” The devil “is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44). Therefore those who love to lie are not the sons of the heavenly Father but of the devil, whose works they do.