The Matter of Trust
Truth, Transparency, and Transcendence
St. Thomas Aquinas
“The greatest kindness one can render to any man consists in leading him to truth.”
Lately, many of us have sensed the ground shifting beneath the institutions we once took for granted. Trust in universities, the media, corporations, government agencies, and even parts of the church has eroded at an alarming pace. Scandals accumulate, contradictions multiply, and language grows increasingly performative—until the cumulative effect is not simple disappointment but a quieter, more unsettling recognition: something fundamental is wrong with the way we handle reality itself.
We feel it in the widening gap between what is officially proclaimed and what is actually practiced. We feel it in the pressure to affirm narratives we privately question, in the quiet memory-holing of inconvenient facts, and in the subtle ways honesty becomes costly while strategic performance is rewarded. It is not merely that institutions have failed us. It is that the shared capacity to name and evaluate truth has been compromised from within. As Krzysztof Szczawinski has recently articulated with rare clarity, this pattern echoes the “systemic lie” that once defined life under communism—a pervasive, institutionalized commitment to falsehood that hollows out trust, produces what he calls negative moral selection, and leaves people performing scripts they no longer fully believe. The same operating system, he observes, reappears today in new clothing, with the same deep structure: truth is no longer discovered but assigned; reality is narrated strategically rather than received honestly.
What is at stake, then, is not only political disagreement or the need for better policies. It is the question of truth itself—how we discern it, whether we can still speak it plainly, and whether a common life can be rebuilt upon anything more solid than managed perception. While I was the Apologetics specialist for the Alabama Baptist, I stressed the importance of Truth and the need to cultivate it personally and corporately. I often used an alliteration that a dear Baptist friend of mine once stated: that the three “Ts” needed for trust are (T)ruth, (T)ransparency, and (T)ranscendence.
Truth: The Foundation That Will Not Shift
Francis Bacon, in his essay “Of Truth” (1625), captured the posture of our age with a single devastating line: “What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.” Pilate asked the question, but he had no intention of lingering in its presence. He wanted the convenience of skepticism without the cost of commitment. He would not stay.
Jesus did the opposite. He was committed to truth not only in doctrine but in the whole fabric of His life and speech. He told the truth even when it cost Him everything. He defended sound language against the evasions of the powerful. He lived in perfect alignment with the good, the true, and the beautiful that flow from the Father. For Him, truth was never a weapon or a performance. It was the very ground on which trust could stand.
In a culture that prefers the jesting question to the patient answer, this commitment remains revolutionary. Truth cultivates trust because it refuses to build on sand. When we know what we are saying and are willing to defend it, others can rest their weight upon our words. When the church recovers this clarity—holding fast to what God has revealed without apology or dilution—it becomes a refuge where weary souls can finally stop performing and begin to believe again.
Iain McGilchrist reminds us that the right hemisphere remains faithful to the concrete, the unique, the real. The left hemisphere abstracts and then mistakes its abstraction for the whole. Truth, rightly understood, is the right hemisphere’s patient fidelity to what actually is. Without it, transparency becomes mere self-disclosure and transcendence collapses into vague feeling. Truth is the first T because, without it, the other two have nothing solid beneath them.
Transparency: The Honesty That Heals
Transparency does not mean the reckless broadcasting of every private thought. It means the honest openness, in the right context and under the Spirit’s leading, that allows others to see us as we truly are—sinners in the process of being sanctified. The early church in Acts lived this way. They held possessions in common, confessed their sins publicly, and welcomed the searching light of the Spirit into their common life. The result was a community whose witness moved mountains because it was credible.
By contrast, the church in Corinth protected reputation over repentance, hid factions behind polished speech, and chose self-deception over the pain of telling the truth. Division and spiritual stagnation followed.
Transparency cultivates trust because it removes the hidden places where suspicion grows. When leaders and ordinary disciples alike allow the Holy Spirit to move freely among us, healing happens. Discipleship deepens. The church becomes a place where people are not shocked by one another’s struggles but are drawn instead into the larger story of grace. In a culture that rewards performance and punishes vulnerability, this kind of transparency is itself a powerful apologetic. It declares, without words, that the Gospel is true enough to handle real human beings.
Transcendence: The Horizon That Gives Meaning
Transcendence is the deliberate refusal to let the immediate situation have the final word. It is the lifting of our gaze—personal, corporate, cultural—to the eternal purposes of God.
In the final canticle of the Divine Comedy, Dante is not merely taught about heaven. He is drawn upward through the celestial spheres by a love that grows stronger with every ascent. Beatrice leads him from the sphere of the Moon through Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn until he reaches the Fixed Stars and the Primum Mobile. At each stage, the light intensifies, his vision is purified, and his capacity to love expands. He is not climbing by his own effort alone; he is being attracted, lifted, and transformed by realities greater than himself. The higher he rises, the more he discovers that truth is not a static body of information but a living order that draws the soul into deeper participation with what is ultimate.
This is what transcendence does. It refuses to reduce the Christian life to the management of crises or the defense of positions. Instead, it lets the greater things—the eternal purposes of God—move us, shape us, and pull us upward. Truth, in this light, is not only something we are taught or something we must protect. It becomes something that draws us closer to the One who is Truth Himself.
Transparency finds its proper place within this ascent. We can afford to be seen as we truly are because we are already being lifted beyond ourselves. At the very end of the Paradiso, Dante is granted the final vision in which he is fully seen by God and accepted by Him. In that gaze, he does not discover condemnation but the deepest revelation of grace. He comes to understand that his worth is not grounded in his own achievements, his intellect, or his moral striving, but is bound up entirely in the love of God for him. Only because he has been drawn upward into that love can he bear to be fully known. Transparency, then, is not a technique of self-disclosure. It is the fruit of having been lifted into a love strong enough to hold us when everything hidden is brought into the light.
Conclusion
The three Ts do not stand alone. Truth gives us something solid to stand upon. Transparency allows us to walk together without masks. Transcendence lifts the whole journey above the tyranny of the immediate. Together they form a way of being that can be trusted—because it corresponds to reality, moves in honest relationships, and refuses to let anything smaller than Christ have the final word.
In Him these three become one. He is the Truth who does not merely inform but draws us upward into Himself. He is the One before whom we can be fully transparent, because in His light we are not condemned but accepted and transformed. And He is the horizon of all transcendence—the One in whom every ascent finds its end and every small fidelity participates in the reconciliation of all things.
This is the trust worth recovering. Not a fragile confidence in institutions or arguments, but a living trust in the One who rose from the dead and is even now drawing all things to Himself. May our churches become places where truth is spoken without fear, where transparency brings healing rather than shame, and where transcendence keeps us oriented toward the only horizon vast enough to bear the weight of human hope. In such a life, trust is no longer the conclusion of an argument. It is the atmosphere in which we walk—until faith gives way to sight and every upward glance is answered by the face of Christ.