Christ the Meta-Metalanguage: The Divine Ground of All Truth

 

Truth is told in propositional form. It is true that if all humans are mortal, and Socrates is a human, then Socrates is mortal. It is true that water boils at 100°C at standard atmospheric pressure. It is true that the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. True propositions like the above are true because they correspond to logical, scientific and historical reality. In John 14:6, Jesus tells us that He is the Truth – THE Truth in absolute form because He’s God, and in personal form because He is the Divine Person.

Here’s how I believe we should frame it. True propositions are true because they correspond to reality; and in the deepest sense, they correspond to the ultimate reality, which is grounded in the nature and revelation of God - fulfilled and made manifest in Jesus Christ, who is the Truth.

To consider this philosophically, recall that Tarski showed that truth in formal systems must be defined in a higher-level language - a metalanguage - because a system cannot fully define its own truth. For example, in propositional logic or formal arithmetic, Tarski’s concept of truth requires a distinction between the object language (the language being used to describe the world) and the metalanguage (the language used to describe and evaluate the object language). This mirrors the idea that to fully understand the truth of things, we need something greater than the system itself to provide the proper context and evaluation.

Given the foregoing, if Christ is THE Truth because He’s God and the Divine Person (along with the Father and Holy Spirit – three aspects of the same One God), then Christ’s Truth is a Divine meta-metalanguage. You can think of like this. A metalanguage tells the truth about a language; a meta-metalanguage tells the truth about metalanguages.

In the same way Tarski's theory requires a higher-level "metalanguage" to describe the truth of a system, Christ, as the ultimate Truth, is the Divine meta-metalanguage through which all truths are made meaningful and coherent. Just as no formal system can fully define its own truth without reference to a broader framework, no aspect of reality - whether logical, scientific, or historical - can be fully understood or defined apart from Christ, who is the source of all truth. He is the Divine context and the Word (Logos) through which all things are revealed, ordered, and understood, and He is the ultimate frame of reference by which all truths are grounded. This Divine meta-metalanguage is not merely a system of rules or language; it is a living Person in whom truth is both revealed and enacted.

I get why this is hard to swallow if you’re a non-Christian, because we are talking about a hyper-reality on which this higher truth sits. But the corollary is that we cannot know truly apart from Christ, and all human knowing, especially when it taps into deeper truths, is fragmentary and only enhanced by Divine revelation, because Christ is being itself, sustaining reality (as per Colossians 1:17).

That’s also why, when it comes to salvation, Christ is the only way into truth, as His life, death, and resurrection bring us into communion with the Truth, where such fullness of Divine truth cannot be contained within human language alone.

One Day There'll Probably Be Only One World Language

 

I feel fairly confident that most of the world will be speaking the same language at some point in the future. Looking back through time, language evolution is similar to speciation. Just as in speciation, populations diverge until they can no longer interbreed, new words and phrases are adopted to the point that groups can no longer communicate properly (this was allegorised in the Old Testament's Tower of Babel story).

But while it's easy to understand how genetic populations became so diverse, it isn't so obvious with language - after all, there are thousands of languages - and yet, despite the multifarious benefits of a rich diversity of language, we all know the disadvantages of communication breakdown with language barriers. 

I assume languages evolved to suit the needs of the populations, perhaps with groups adopting new ways of communicating in order to assert their established identity. Yet you also find that there is more commonality of language in highly developed areas than lesser developed. In Europe, a great many people can speak English as their second language. In other Asian countries, many can speak Mandarin - and Spanish, Arabic and Hindi are prominent too in various regions across the world. Such diversity is less common in more remote tribal regions, where hundreds of exclusive languages are found in smaller tribes.

My tentative hunch is this. Given that English is the primary languages being pulled in the most directions, and given increased globalisation, enhanced technology and human connectivity, it seems likely that English will continue to proliferate until most of the world speaks it, either as their primary or secondary language. In a world of global trade and increased online communication, such is the advantage of mutual communicability that it's probable that as more and more people find it advantageous to speak a common language. And as smaller languages will slowly begin to die out, I think there’ll come a time when virtually the whole world only speaks one language, and other languages are only used for historical study or perhaps have survived in very remote places in successful attempts to preserve endangered languages.

It's well known that a lot of the conflict in the world is primarily caused by not understanding your neighbour (although not just linguistically, of course). In many of these conflicts and prejudices, the main barrier to concordance is a lack of empathy and appreciation of that person as an individual - and a language barrier can play a big part in that. 

While this might take hundreds or even thousands of years, I predict that one day almost everyone in the world will be speaking the same language, and that that language will be English. 

How Politicians Distort Language

 

George Orwell's Politics and the English Language is one of the best essays ever written on how the distortion and abuse of language in politics helps politicians get away with bad ideas that would be more obviously bad if the language was simplified. Cunning political language is designed to "make lies sound truthful", Orwell said - and that truth has become more and more evident, and has reached a new nadir since the Blair years and beyond.

Take many political policies or ideas, and translate the language into the most truthful and simplistic form, and you'll see all sorts of things about them that seem far less attractive. Consider the absurd initiative politicians call "Levelling Up". The Department of ‘Levelling Up’ is one of the most disingenuous things the government has ever created – so it’s probably fitting that Michael Gove is the Minister for Levelling Up, as his character almost perfectly fits the profile. Here is how the government describes it:

"Levelling Up supports communities across the UK to thrive, making them great places to live and work, and aims to reduce the imbalances, primarily economic, between areas and social groups across the United Kingdom".

And here is a less attractive but more truthful way we could describe it. Levelling Up distorts the more prudent use of capital, where instead of investors risking their own money in areas they think will get the most fruitful returns, politicians spend other people's money where they believe it will be beneficial for securing votes and popularity. Whether people like the Levelling Up policy or not, we should at least ensure that it is described correctly.

The same with small business subsidies. Taxpayers are forced to give money to business owners the politicians choose to favour instead of spending their own money on businesses they prefer. A lot of the most elusive policymaking is sold with shadowy language that evades this core truth - that the government claims an entitlement to the fruits of other people's labour in order to spend it in ways that will make politicians more popular (or less unpopular), and further their own careers by continually increasing the size of the state beyond our approval.

Political language is full of making lies and half-truths sound palatable. Things that are costs are routinely referred to by politicians as 'investments'; initiatives that are sold as benefits are really only benefits for a small subset of the population, where the costs are greater and spread thinly across the nation; rules, regulations and redistributive measures routinely throw up negative unintended consequences and costly spillover effects that are habitually ignored in the discourse; policies purported to be introduced to help the wages of the poor actually end up costing the poor more at the point of consuming goods and services; political ideas sold for our benefit or for some pretext of moral good almost never get backed up by evidence, and never come with a rigorous cost-benefit analysis of both sides of the argument - the list goes on.

Ambiguity and spin are woven into the prose of politicians, because when ideas and policies are stated in plain English, the things we might like less about them become more transparent.