Relativism: Facts, Foolishness and Faith

“Philip found Nathanael and said to him, ‘We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and also the Prophets wrote — Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.’ Nathanael said to him, ‘Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’ ”

In my last post, I talked about relativism. I pointed out that there are two kinds — epistemic relativism and moral relativism — and that they need separate treatment, because they deal with very different issues. Then I started with epistemic relativism, the doubting of the existence of any facts, and showed how it is completely irrational.

Tolerance and Relativism

“What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.”

So wrote Sir Francis Bacon, the father of the scientific method. The man was not just a scientist, but a devout Christian as well. For him, the two were of a piece — truth in scientific inquiry was a road to knowledge of the Creator. So he wrote as much theology as science, and he stands as but one evidence of the long interaction between Christianity and scientific advancement.

In his 1601 essay “Of Truth”, he pointed out the embarrassing relativism of Pilate’s attitude. Pontius Pilate was standing next to the very One who could tell him definitively any truth he wished to know. He could have asked how planetary motion worked. He could have asked about the origins of life. He could have asked the meaning of our existence. And obviously, he could have asked what God required of him personally. He could have had forgiveness. He could have had salvation. He could have had life. And yet he walked away. And so he is remembered as one of history’s great fools.

Bottom of the Ninth

I’m beginning to think the ninth commandment is more important than I ever realized.

Traditionally, it reads, “Thou shalt not bear false witness” (KJV), or more colloquially, “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.”

Well … Duh!

“Okay,” I said to myself when I first read it, “that makes sense. In court, telling a lie about someone or something can get an innocent person into serious legal trouble. And to do that would be malicious. Fair enough.”

The Era of the Gentle and Reverent Lie

This morning a new video appeared on YouTube.

To my surprise, it had arch-atheist Bill Maher in admiring conversation with Dr. Jordan Peterson, the pro-Christian conservative.

This is Bill Maher, who personally coined the insult “religulous” to describe all religions. But here he was, literally stumbling over himself to give a platform to someone who claims that understanding religion, and particularly Christianity, is vital to the survival and future well being of Western culture.

Amazing.

Too Hot to Handle: Heretics Aplenty

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

According to Shane Morris of The Federalist, a LifeWay Research survey of 3,000 people found that significant numbers of Americans who identify as Christian actually embrace ancient heresies.

Tom: The survey results confirm my own prejudices, Immanuel Can. I’ve been reading for years that upwards of 80% of Americans claim to be Christian, and I’ve never been able to buy it. You can’t convince me Roe v. Wade has been law for the last forty-plus years because of 20% of the U.S. population.

Do you find the general public level of knowledge about Christianity surprising?

Protecting People from Truth

I was listening to a preacher a few days ago … just online, you know. And he said something that’s stayed with me and keeps running around in my head, because it’s just so smart. It’s something that solves a perplexity for me that I have to confess I’ve struggled with for years. I want to pass it on to you.

My perplexity has been this: When do you just say what the Bible says, and when do you hold back?

The preacher said this: “I’m through protecting people from scripture.”

Prophet and Loss

When truth is revealed, men have an obligation to hear it. The Lord will judge those who claim to speak it, and he will also judge the hearers for the way they receive it, which is to say that we need to accept and respond to the things we hear that are true, and reject the things we hear that are not.

What scripture doesn’t talk about all the time is how difficult that process can be for the onlooker.

Who’s Holding the Scales?

I have to admit I’m appalled by the debates flying around the Internet these days. More and more, they seem like merely the propaganda of angry factions, not the rational pronouncements of people who think things through.

And the sanctimony ... oh, the sanctimony! Every faction sees its perspective as not merely just, but as the only side a reasonable, compassionate, fair-minded, informed, civilized or decent person could ever be on.

Anonymous Asks (290)

“What does it mean that the Holy Spirit will guide you into all truth?”

The Lord Jesus promised his disciples that when the Spirit of truth came, the Helper from the Father who would convict the world of sin, righteousness and judgment, he would guide them into “all truth”.

Before we look into the meaning of this promise, we need to remember that every member of the Lord’s audience at the discourse that began in the upper room was in a unique and impossible-to-duplicate position.

The Heights of Accommodation and the Depths of Evil

“Well, you know, many roads lead up the mountain …”

So he said to me.

People say stuff like that all the time when they want to avoid facing God. “I can do it my way,” they say, hoping that saying it strongly enough will make it true. Or, they say, “Everybody’s got a piece of the truth, but nobody’s got it all,” like the story of the blind men and the elephant (if you know that little tale).

The Language of the Debate (9)

Elie Wiesel was a Holocaust survivor, a Romanian-born Jewish political activist who authored over fifty books and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. He died in 2016. In January 1968, he published a memoir in which he shared memorable encounters with “sages, mystics, teachers, and dreamers”.

Wiesel was not the earliest media figure to water down the concept of truth and make redundancies like “objective truth” an unfortunate necessity, but if you thought the problem originated with Jordan Peterson and his ilk, this 55-year old excerpt from Legends of Our Time may serve as a wake-up call. Satan has been working away at the meaning of words since the beginning of human history, and he has his cat’s-paws in every generation. Elie Wiesel, for all his creditable moments, was one of these.

Tracking True

So it was my birthday, and a friend says to me, “Why don’t we go sailing on the big water?”

I’d sailed in a small way before, but that sounded good. So off we set.

My friend let me take the tiller while he went up to the prow deck and relaxed in the sun. “Just keep your eye on the compass in front of you and trust that,” he said. “So long as it says what it says now, we’re going to be on course.”

Too Hot to Handle: Debby Boone Theology

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

“It can’t be wrong, when it feels so right.”

— Debby Boone, You Light
Up My Life (1977)

Immanuel Can: Okay, Tom. Remember that song?

Tom: I hated the song, but I was wildly infatuated with Debby. I think I even had her poster on the wall in the basement bedroom I shared with my younger brother. I could just barely slide a female pop star (completely and decorously attired, I hasten to add, in a beige dress that did up at the neck and went down to her ankles) past my parents because “She’s a Christian!” Of course, I was all of sixteen at the time. Sadly, nothing permanent came of that little obsession: Debby has since married a fellow believer and, unlike many celebrities, has stuck with it going on forty years now. Good on her.

IC: Uh … right.

Standing Up for Objective Reality

We live in interesting times.

Back in 2021, ideologically motivated onlookers in Leeds, West Yorkshire reported a forty-two year old street preacher to the Joint Counter Terrorism Team, resulting in his arrest. The Daily Mail did not specify the offenses with which David McConnell was charged and for which he was eventually convicted, but made reference to “harassment” and “illegally espousing an extreme point of view”. I missed the story at the time, but McConnell appealed his conviction last week, putting him back on the front pages for a moment.

What did this Christian “extremist” do? According to witnesses, McConnell quoted 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 in the presence of a man dressed up as a woman, and repeatedly referred to him as “this gentleman” and “a man in woman’s clothing”, which the gentleman in question apparently found distressing.

In short, McConnell stood up for objective reality. That shouldn’t be such a hard sell, should it?

Real or Not Real?

The following quote purports to come from a 2020 Facebook post written by a woman who holds herself out to be the Handbell Choir Director at First Congregational Church of Houston, Artistic Director at Houston Chamber Ringers and a former music teacher.

Honestly, my first instinct is that it’s got to be the product of internet trolling.

True Revolutionaries

Welcome back to our two-part treatment of the (post-)modern attitude to truth.

Last week, we were observing that the concept of an actual objective truth has gone out of fashion these days. More and more, the average person of today tends to disbelieve that anything can be, in any final and universally binding sense, “true”. Truth has been banished because there are so many voices shouting so many messages that most of us don’t know where to find it if it did exist. We’re overwhelmed by multiculturalism, media overload, the speed of modern life and the decline of the formerly-solid touchpoints of religion and tradition, even if we know nothing about the theory behind it, or about the new skeptical “hermeneutics” being taught in the contemporary academy. We’re all just pretty confused about truth.

The Trouble with the Truth

Some years ago I picked up a volume compiled by Walter Truett Anderson entitled The Truth About the Truth. It was a collection of essays, actually, each one detailing some way in which the modern conception of “truth” has been warped. It had chapters on reification (the modern tendency to mistake mere traditions for inevitabilities), the love of the ironic tone, the tendency to accept things at face value, the obsession with commercialism, gender fluidity, cultural pluralism and the loss of the integrated self, and so on … all very interesting, and some of it insightful. But so far as the concept of a stable, universal, actually-existing kind of truth, very cynical.

Anonymous Asks (196)

“Do the Bible’s claims to be true make it so?”

A claim is not proof, but neither is it nothing at all. If God really chose the medium of written communication to express himself to mankind, we would not expect him to be coy about his authorship.

As it turns out, scripture is quite frank about where it comes from.

Semi-Random Musings (24)

I have found myself thanking the Lord for some strange things lately. One of them is death. Another is the limits of human memory.

The mind of God is a staggering thing to contemplate. The moment we do so we are almost guaranteed to get something wrong. Nevertheless, enough has been written about it in scripture that we can be confident there is nothing God does not know, no prayer he does not hear, no burden of which he is not aware, and therefore no care or adverse circumstance in which he is unable or unwilling to provide grace.

That’s pretty amazing.

Relativism: Facts, Foolishness and Faith

The most recent version of this post is available here.