Truth

Julian Allwood

2020 was a punishing year for the word “Truth.” After President Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, a journalist asked his press secretary Jen Psaki if her priority was to promote the interests of President Biden, or to provide “the unvarnished truth.” But 2020 showed us just how implausible this question is. The “unvarnished truth” about the virus changed throughout 2020, as our understanding and experience evolved. Many experts contributed well-evidenced insights with care, but none had sufficient foresight to describe a “truth” that would last in time. The “unvarnished truth” about Brexit is still far from clear. The predictions made ahead of the referendum by both sides have not yet been borne out, and the long-term consequences of Brexit will never be “unvarnished” as they will be revealed in the context of parallel stories, not least the pandemic. The “unvarnished truth” of the US election revealed like no previous event, how our tendency to read only the news stories that reinforce our existing positions allows a wide divergence in sincerely held beliefs about the “truth” amplified by our pride in justifying our own choices.

The alluring goal of a single “unvarnished truth” is an unattainable chimera. “Truth” evolves in time, is inseparable from its context and is coloured by pre-conceptions. This is challenging to my engineering background, where we teach a single “truth” based on the extent to which the blue-line of experimental measurement matches the red-line of mathematical prediction on a graph. And the history of Christianity reveals how, just as with the virus, Brexit and the US election, multiple and conflicting perspectives have been held up as Christian justification for actions that we now see as misguided, mistaken, irrelevant harmful or at worst, evil. “Unvarnished morality” is as tempting but impossible as “unvarnished truth.”

 In seeking any certainty about Christian truth, we have more chance to recognise wrong than right – what I understand has been called the “Via Negativa”. Eight of the Ten Commandments proscribe rather than prescribe, and our main knowledge of Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness is that he rejected the temptations of the Devil.

There cannot be an “unvarnished truth” about how to express our faith in our life choices. But, as experience and insight sharpen our understanding of what not to do and strengthen our resolve to resist it, the unique truth on which we can pin our Christian identity, is the offer of forgiveness for the wrong steps on our journey of attempt.