The truth as it is in Jesus

The Lord Jesus says that he is the truth.

It is normally sensible when someone says 'I know the truth' to ask 'the truth about what?'  What aspect of truth have you stumbled across?  What particular truth is it that we're discussing?

We could, I suppose, ask this question of Jesus.  He is making a rather different claim: not merely to know the truth, but to be the truth.  But we could ask: what truth exactly are you?  What subject are we discussing? What particular truth is it that you are claiming to embody?

We could even probably start to sketch an answer to this question.  It is the truth about God.  In claiming to be the truth, Jesus is making a claim to reveal God.  Yes.  But when he makes this claim, it is linked to his claim to be 'the way' and 'the life'.  It is linked to the idea of 'coming to the Father'.  A way joins two points; a life stretches from one time to another.  So when the Lord says he is the truth, we should think in terms of two things.  He is not just embodying the truth about God.  He is embodying the truth about the relationship of God to creation and specifically to humanity.  The Lord Jesus speaks in two ways throughout his ministry.  In one way, he calls people to himself, as if he is their destination; in another way, he points people beyond himself to the Father, as the place where they will find their rest.  He does this because he is the truth of God's relationship with humanity, and vice versa.  He does not teach this truth or show this truth.  He is this truth.  His life is this truth as he obeys the Father, trusts him, and prayerfully depends on him.  This lived life, this life in communion with God, is the truth.

At this point we ought to realise that we've burst through the limits of our question.  What particular truth?  In trying to answer we realise that we've stumbled onto something more: the universal truth.  It is true of creation, because it is true in Jesus, that it exists in relationship to God.  It is true of humanity, because it is true in Jesus, that it exists in dependence on God.

Every particular truth is, in an obvious or concealed way, a species of this truth.

There is no escaping this reality, even in the human absolute of contradiction.  It is possible to live in ignorance of this truth.  It is possible to live against this truth (to one's own destruction).  But the truth cannot be evaded.

True truth

If evangelicals know anything about themselves, it is that they are the truth people.  Evangelicals have fought the good fight against the postmodern assault on the very concept of truth.  They have enlisted cheerfully in the struggle against relativism.  They have contended for the truth in battle after battle.

But I wonder if in the midst of all the battles, we've neglected to fight the war.

I've expressed concern before about the number of evangelicals who responded to the restrictions on public worship by saying that we could not expect HMG to understand the importance of worship.  We, of course, believe that worship is important, but we shouldn't try to make that case to secular authorities; those who don't share our worldview will not be open to persuasion.  Similar arguments are sometimes expressed around ethical issues - of course we as Christians hold that position, but there is no point trying to argue this publicly, and certainly not to attempt to legislate (even in matters of life and death).  It is not to be expected that non-Christians will behave like Christians.

In each case, you seem to end up saying: this is objectively true, but I wouldn't expect anyone to be able to see that, nor would I consider it worthwhile contending for it.  Of course we would contend for it within the church - if there were those in our churches who thought that worship was unimportant, or that abortion was fine, or whatever, we would certainly argue, and we would do so on the grounds of truth.  God's truth is true regardless of our opinions.  But that doesn't seem to hold in the world outside the church.

Stepping back, it seems to me that something has gone wrong with our concept of truth.

We believe in objective truth, but it seems like that objective truth is private, only true for believers.  I understand the logic, I think - given the interconnectedness of truth claims, we are unlikely to persuade people of second order things if they don't share our commitments to high level truths about reality.  Sure.  But when we don't think it's even worth advancing those truth claims, or publicly stating them, what is happening?  Has our 'objective' truth actually become objective truth only within the church, and not in the world at large?

Is the gap between 'we can't expect non-Christians to believe this' and 'I have my truth and you have yours' all that big?

It seems to me they're practically the same.  The upshot of both positions is that I hold my truth claims without any expectation that they will be shared.  I worry that they are psychologically the same.  How long can you hold a belief that this claim is both true and important, and yet not to be advanced universally, without slipping into relativism?  And I can't for the life of me see any ethical difference.  If we allow people to pursue false beliefs about issues of human goodness and flourishing without a protest, because we can't see why we should hold non-Christians to Christian standards, how does our stated belief in objective truth help those who suffer as a result?

If the truth is true, it is true everywhere and for everyone.  If the standards of righteousness and goodness revealed in Scripture are from God, they are universal.  If we won't make the claim, are we really the truth people anymore?

Two books on truth

I had cause recently to do a bit of reading around the concept of truth, and two books in particular caught my eye.  This is not a review or even a detailed overview of either, but just some reflections on the different trajectories truth is taking at the moment in our culture.

Matthew D'Ancona is a political journalist, and his book Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back deals primarily with the apparent departure of truth from the public sphere in the UK and USA.  Most of his examples of post-truth are derived from the Donald or the Brexit Referendum.  The diagnosis of where we've got to, and the widespread loss of trust that follows a culture of pervasive lying, is good.  I think he doesn't go deep enough, philosophically, but maybe it's not that sort of book.  In particular, I think it would be worth spending more time pondering whether the practitioners of post-truth would see themselves as lying.  I think the situation is more like something 'beyond truth and falsehood' - the opposites of truth-telling and lying have both become outmoded as concepts, and instead we're left with politicians and other public figures telling stories for power.

The solution D'Ancona proposes is less good.  There is an alarming section where he seems very excited about the future potential to have AI weeding out 'fake news' from the internet.  Then there is a desperately naive attempt to return to modernity - he actually invokes the values of the Enlightenment a number of times.  We must demand that we be told the truth.  We must insist on facts.  But all this is to write as if the 19th and 20th centuries had never happened - as if Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud had never put pen to paper.  The insistence that there is a value-free, interpretation-free, straightforward truth to be had is really not going to get us out of this mess.  He seems to recognise this, because he also talks about the need for those who support Enlightenment values to work hard at telling a better story, constructing a more convincing narrative.  I'm afraid that within the framework of the book, this just comes across as a call for propaganda.  The 'new modernism' which D'Ancona appears to be advocating comes across as alarmingly totalitarian, for someone must surely be appointed to decide which truth is the real truth (at least until we can train the robots to do it for us!) and which narratives should be ruled out of court.

John Caputo's book Truth: The Search for Wisdom in the Postmodern Age is more philosophical, which is what you would expect from a professional philosopher.  It also takes a much longer historical view, dividing the story of Western culture into three periods - Ancient, Modern (Enlightenment), and Postmodern.  That perspective enables Caputo to see that something significant was lost at the Enlightenment.  For the Ancients, truth was something to be loved, something to be pursued, something that had a claim on us.  Truth was related to goodness and beauty and the good life.  The Moderns, on the other hand, separated truth out, made it just bare facts.  In Kant, truth is no longer something to be loved; 'truth' is just the label we give to whatever propositions and experiences come out when we make the right and appropriate use of our faculties.  Caputo uses religion as a test-case for how this view of truth works, and that enables him to show how much is lost.  For the Moderns, religion (along with most anything that gives life value) is excluded from the realm of truth, and therefore from having any real content at all.  Postmodernism is a response to this, an attempt to recover that sense of truth as something to be loved and lived.  But this not a return to the Ancient world; there is no going back.  Rather, this is living into an always-open future.  Caputo uses Derrida (whether accurately or not I couldn't say; Derrida is an unexplored land for me) to argue for a vision of truth that is closely related to whatever is open to the future.  That is true which will carry us into the future, which is open.  That is false which closes off the future.

So Caputo's response to the crisis of truth is to push deeper into Postmodernism.  From a Christian perspective, it's hard not to see this as some sort of eschatological project, but with an indefinitely delayed eschaton: the truth is always over the next hill.  Anyone who claims to have the truth is inherently proved wrong, because truth is always in the future.  There is, then, a criterion for deciding what is true and what is false - but it doesn't seem to have much to do with reality per se.

I think these are basically the two secular responses to the truth crisis: back to modernity or forward into deeper postmodernity.  The latter is more exciting and, to me at least, appealing.  But will it help us, really?  Won't we just end up with a series of competing eschatological visions, with their attendant narratives about the present?  When it hits the street, won't this just boil down to 'I have my truth and you have yours'?

Of course, I think the answer lies in the fact that the One who is the truth has been here amongst us - that one life amongst the many human lives of history is the truth to which every other life, every fact, every aspect of reality, is related.  But that is another story.

The new modernism

It has been interesting to see the backlash against the Trump administrations presentation of 'alternative facts'.  Given the obviously propagandistic use of such 'facts', it is not at all surprising that people have been unhappy.  But the reaction has gone beyond this, to an outright repudiation of the postmodern project, and an assertion of some pretty old school values: truth is truth, and is clearly perceived.  Or as someone else has put it:

Liberals are now interestingly revealing themselves as unreconstructed positivists on the question of 'facts'.

— john milbank (@johnmilbank3) 24 January 2017

For those of us - say, orthodox Christians - who have been upholding the objectivity of truth for a long time, this is fairly ironic.  But it's not something I think we ought to be particularly cheering for.  Instead, I think this may be the time to spring to the defence of the genuine and valuable insights of postmodern epistemology.

For starters, we need to recognise that the current trend in liberal thinkers particularly is not in any sense a move in the direction of a Christian epistemology.  Rather, the move is back to an Enlightenment view of truth, which could basically be summarised like this: truth is available to anyone who makes right use of their reason and who is educated in the basic uninterpreted facts of the world.  This is the very foundation of the Enlightenment project: that we have access to the truth, and that the access which everyone has is basically the same.  This is the liberation which the Enlightenment declares from all mere authority: we don't need anyone to tell us the truth, because we can work it out for ourselves.  This is a million miles away from a Christian epistemology which recognises the fallen state of humanity, and the inherent limitations of the creature, and which looks to divine revelation for the ultimate truth.  Let's not get too excited about the apparent resurrection of objective truth: it's actually just Zombie Kant, staggering from his grave to once again trouble the world.

Then again, it is useful to realise that postmodern thinkers helpfully underlined the fact that we human beings have no access to uninterpreted facts.  Every 'fact' is part of a story, and carries different force if transplanted into a different story.  Seeing the world (as even Kant saw, if he didn't quite follow through on the insight) is an active thing, not a mere passive receptivity.  We Christians ought to hold on to this as both an essential part of epistemic humility, and as an apologetic.  Just because liberal thinkers seem to be suddenly convinced (in theory; in practice they have been convinced of this for many years) that their view of the world is the view of the world, self-evident to anyone who just thinks straight, we must point out that no view of the world except God's own view is straightforwardly true in that way.

The question to be asking of the new modernists is: what possible justification do you have for thinking that your view of the world is the right one?  What reason do you have to believe that you have access to objective, uninterpreted truth?  In other words: justify your belief.  And I will wager whatever you choose that this cannot be done without a leap of blind faith.  And perhaps a follow up question, which has a more positive spin: like you, I want to contest the anti-truth stance of the Trumps of this world.  May I not humbly suggest that this is the cause of God, and must be fought under his banner or not at all?

Post-truth: a post-script to 2016

1.  There are no facts that are not embedded in, and dependent upon, wider stories.  It is not that isolated facts don't communicate the whole truth; it is that they communicate literally nothing.  If they seem to communicate, it is only because they carry with them unnoticed shreds of story, or because they are already a part of a story you know and believe in.

2.  In a culture where each person is encouraged to see their life as their own personal story, to be written as they choose, an overarching narrative that goes beyond 'everyone can be who they want to be' is impossible.

3.  That each person can be whoever and whatever they want to be is the lying story which we incorporate into all our children's films, presumably because we can't think of anything better to say.  But adults who still believe this story are surely to be pitied.

4.  In fact, this story is no story at all.  A story adds meaning, but this story negates meaning.  Within it there are no characters, because there is not even a shared world.  It is in principle impossible for us to interact with each other, because we are not characters but authors, writing private stories.

5.  Two things prevent us from actually living in this absurd state: the physical world, which is a given we can't easily deny (hence natural scientists are anchored, and tend to think post-modernity is nonsense, albeit often collapsing into a naive realism); and our own sense that we are not actually in control (reinforced by things that happen within our lives).

6.  Still, given we've spent the best part of two centuries as a culture arguing that there is no truth beyond my own personal sense of what is coherent with my life story as I like to tell it, it's a little bit rich for us to complain about living in a post-truth world.