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The following is not robust historical-grammatical exegesis. I understand the context of 1 Cor 13 and spiritual gifts, but this is thinking more broadly about love and truth. Enjoy.
If love rejoices with the truth and this statement is in the middle of a litany of statements about love, doesn't that mean that every other principle about love should be seasoned with joy?
For example, if "love is patient" is a true reality and we already know that "love rejoices with the truth," shouldn't the patient-love combination include a demeanor of rejoicing? I'm thinking so.
One problem with all this is that the air we breathe redefines these two ideas. Love is painted primarily as sex and tolerance. And truth is whatever is true for you. This kind of "love" cannot rejoice with truth. Further, this kind of "truth" cannot be rejoiced in by love. The ideas of love and truth that are a happily married couple together in 1 Cor 13 are ideas of love and truth that stream from the personhood of God.
Therefore, biblically speaking, truth is absolute, but is not static. It is relatable. Furthermore, love is a source and a stream. "God is love. Love is from God" [1 Jn 4.7-8]. The deal is that both of these are defined on the basis of who God is and what He is doing. So, love doesn't rejoice with the truth if the definitions of "love" and "truth" are only our culture's.
Biblical love and biblical truth are the joyfully married couple. I would also say that the immediate consequence of divorcing love and truth is the absence of both.
I feel like this should resonate to how I think and live.
"He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright."
Harry Frankfurt taught philosophy at Princeton University. In 2005, he wrote what I would consider a classic – On Bullshit. Then in 2006, he wrote a sequel entitled On Truth. I remember reading these a year or so ago and my mind and spirit being caught up to see the beauty and goodness of Jesus. If all the world is bull and there is something in the nature of truth that makes it sweet, sure, and able to be experienced [as he asserts], then Harry Frankfurt has unconsciously made Jesus look good. You might think I’m just being stupid or that I just wanted to have the word “bullshit” on here, but see for yourself....It is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial – notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.
The NIV of all this is that humans are dependent, unstable, and needy [St Paul might say we are blind needing sight or dead needing life]. We get to respond to a sovereign! Too bad ol Harry calls this “other things.” Just go read both of them and you too shall find yourself blessed.
Here and here are other takes on Frankfurt's bull. And here is a must-view, political slant with Harry’s same thesis.
