No Freedom without Truth - Os Guinness

Would you say, then, that freedom is not freedom from, but freedom for?

Paraphrasing Lord Acton, “Freedom is not the permission to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.” The trouble is that, today, freedom is purely negative: freedom from parents, from teachers, from the police, and so on. We have lost sight of it as freedom to be that which we can be or ought to be. We need to recover the idea that, as Lord Acton stressed wisely and as the present pope has written of so well, freedom is the power to do what we ought. That assumes, however, we know the truth of who we are and what we ought to do. That is the freedom the modern secular liberal tends to forget.

And does being a follower of Christ tutor us in how to exercise our freedom in relation to the truth?

Absolutely. To me, one of the most appalling things in this country at the moment is the capitulation to the postmodern view of truth—the view that truth is relative, socially determined, and all a manner of human construction, and that any truth claim is really a disguised bid for power.


What proponents of this view do not realize is that when all claims to truth are reduced to forms of bids for power, you just open yourself up to power games. That is an incredibly dangerous, Nietzschean moment.

When Vaclav Havel and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn resisted the Soviet regime, they did so on the basis of truth. “One word of truth,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, “outweighs the entire world.” Or in the words of Havel, “Truth prevails for those who live in truth.” Many Western liberals applauded them at the time, but they do not have the same, strong concept of truth to do the job today.


People thought that postmodernism promised a brave new world of knowledge, but they are suddenly beginning to realize it is a highly manipulative and very dangerous world. And when you see the dangers, suddenly you see the enormous significance of the words of Jesus: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” There is no freedom without truth.

- Os Guinness, the great-great-great grandson of Arthur Guinness (founder of the Guinness brewery)