The Meaning of Christ—The Truth, The Way, The Life

Truman Madsen reviews and analyzes B. H. Roberts’s three-volume masterwork The Truth, The Way, The Life. This previously-unpublished work was meant to reach out to members of other religions and to help them better understand the Latter-day Saints. Roberts focuses on the fact that Jesus Christ is the source of all truth. He discusses the magnitude of Christ as creator of the universe and as the ultimate source of intelligence. He then goes on to discuss how all things are materiate, even more subtle things like love and grace. Repeatedly, as he approaches his three main categories for the comprehension of Christ as (Vol. I) The Truth, (Vol. II) The Way, and (Vol. III) The Life, he moves from possibility to probability to assurance. All three volumes invoke analogies—the similarity of the present to the past and future; the similarity of what we know to what, by implication, we wish to know; the similarity of the discoverable in ancient religion to the core of truth in modern revelation—all in a compelling appeal to the whole man. “Let us not have the heart breathing defiance to the intellect!” he says. This is an attempt—bold, sometimes unwieldy, and at the end somewhat exhausted—to say, “I know that I can believe—I believe that I can know.”