. . . and Nothing but the Truth

Sunflowers mentor truth

A recent discussion on an NPR’s TED Talk took aim at the meaning of truth and untruth in our day. These conversations aren’t new. Such discussion came up in relation to Literature in the classes I taught—and took at the U of A—, particularly around novel studies. I found that high school students were usually thinking factual when they said, true, as in, “I like true stories!” These concepts are hard to clarify; by the time we reach adulthood, we use the words true, false, lie glibly and with the assumption that we all mean the same things when we use them.

The discussion also came up when writers in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries began writing imagined lives at great length and were charged with publishing lies. In some conservative Christian circles today, reading novels for that very reason is frowned upon. But:

“[Early] novelists dropped pretense of writing history, because they were convinced that their new genre was truer than history. It was a new kind of biography—of ordinary people—and its truth was founded not in documentary evidence but in human nature.” (Jill Lepore, Book of Ages (quoted at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/goodletters/2014/08/fiction-is-truer-than-fact/).

For many, the use of the word truth in this way creates a dilemma of understanding. Is a novel, an essay, a painting true because it accurately outlines the details of something that happened, or is it true because it illuminates the nature of life? The parables of Jesus are fictional, but by what objective standard can the words true, false, factual, fable, myth,be applied to them? Especially when we understand them to shed light on eternal truths despite having no basis in fact?

The courtroom oath requires witnesses “ . . . to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” We get the meaning, and it’s not really a promise to tell the whole truth: I’m pretty sure nobody can claim to know the whole truth. A better oath might read, “I promise to report all the facts relating to the issue that I’m aware of, as accurately as I am able.”

It’s unfortunate that we occasionally allow ourselves to be drawn into absurd arguments about truth and non-truth. When we were on assignment in Europe with MCC, the church we attended was thrown into turmoil when it was discovered that the youth had engaged in a debate where the premise read, “Resolved that the Bible is true.” (The obvious assumption was that the negative side was arguing the opposite.) For one, it’s not truth that’s being argued in such a case, it’s factuality. One problem among many is that what was considered factual yesterday (e.g. aluminum pots and pans cause alzheimer’s) gets debunked today and so any such discussion eventually sinks into absurdity. Another problem is that what was written truthfully, but not necessarily factually, is defended as factual because to do otherwise would seem to deny its truthfulness. Most often, both problems are consequences of poor understanding of language and its relationship to thought, i.e. the fact that there are myriad ways in which language is used to point toward truth, as there are many ways that it’s used to obscure truth, and reportage is only one of those ways.

Truth only makes sense in the context of relationship: our relationship to creator and creation and our relationship to each other. “Truth is that which strives toward peace, justice, prosperity, harmony and joy. Whatever acts against these is false,” is one way of putting it. Relative to the debate in the youth group of Neuwieder Mennonitengemeinde back in 1988, the Bible is true when it shines a light on the way to peaceful, just, prosperous, harmonious, joyous life. Along with other revelations made available to us through nature, inter-human relationships and experiences of living, scriptures have for centuries shone a light on truth. Except when we allow ourselves to become entangled in the debate about its factuality, at which point the light becomes decidedly dim.

To defend the Scriptures as being factual does the whole project of peace, justice, prosperity, harmony and joy—the kingdom of God in the gospels—a mighty disservice, reducing them thereby to paper objects for semi-idolatrous worship, embroiling us in pointless argument, divisiveness, and estrangement. 

We’re living in an era of fake news, alternative truth, lying and false media, general confusion in which charges of falsehoods and lies and misinformation are bandied about as if they were real, consequential concepts, as if it makes a real difference that a president can say one thing emphatically on one day and deny having said it the next. Judging anyone against the factuality standard produces little except attention, even when it’s easily shown that “That’s a barefaced lie!” Striving for factuality is only a shadow of what the real struggle for humanity is about, and that is the quest for truth, an endeavour that makes no sense except in the experience of miraculous but fragile life on an insignificant, tiny planet in an infinite universe.

But once we apply rigorously the standard of truth (the struggle to bring about the kingdom of peace, prosperity, justice, joy and harmony for everyone) it’s not impossible to separate the sheep from the goats, the false acts and words from the true.

My apologies to goats everywhere.