I spend a good portion of time in dialogue with people from around the world concerning ideas that we are working through. These conversations help me to continue to grow as a person, something I am constantly in need of (I just realized I'm using capital letters when I'm supposed to. I never do that and I'm not sure why I'm doing it right now) and growth is something I am never in abundance of it seems. Recently I've been working through some thoughts about 'absolute truth' in the context of our Postmodern society and particularly some Christian-minded responses from a specific rank of Christianity. The main idea here is that a response of some Christians is to label all Postmodern thought as merely 'relativism', and thereby ignoring any truth. Furthermore, I believe that these same Christians do everyone a diservice, including themseves, by not engaging the Postmordern person. Instead, opting to dismiss the Postmodernist immediately as a 'relativist'. One blog I frequent, Emergent Nazarenes, had a post concerning this topic and how God chose to relatively display truth through his son Jesus. Here is my portion of our dialogue.
I hope it gives some more insight into what I'm thinking about these days.
james,
i believe you are explaining this thought of yours well enough that i was able to take hold of it a bit and roll around with it. and i affirm that 'absolute truth' far too long has been in the mind of the modern christian, more as something dangling from the sky like an immovable pillar and less as a living, breathing person of Jesus who may have taken a leak behind a tree. that truth, love, hope, etc. were embodied in the person of jesus who in being human, by definition, related and was/is relative. so that, love he showed to an adulteress was relative in style to her needs compared to love he showed peter...whom he often rebuked and once even called satan.
im believing more and more that only a few post-modernists are so far to the extreme that they would say they don't believe in absolute truth. the majority do believe in truth, its just that truth can be so much 'bigger' than us, that they doubt the many claims of modern christians to be able to completely comprehend it and therefore, 'own' it in a sense that no one else can. brian mclaren has been able to put on paper some of my thoughts better than i can, so i'll share what he wrote in The Church on the Other Side.
"...what postmodern people tend to reject is not absolute truth, but absolute knowledge. And to the degree we seek to defend absolute knowledge, we show ourselves to be defenders not of biblical faith (which repeatedly affirms that we "know in part") but of modern rationalism (which displays an overconfidence about its autonomous powers of knowlege that is hard to overexaggerate). Having a universe full of absolute truth but a world full of people incapapble of grasping and conveying it with absolute accuracy is almost -but not exactly- the same as having no absolute truth at all. Failing to see this distinction, many Christians in the current transition zone keep beating the drum of absolute truth, and the harder they beat it, the more primitive and hopelessly modern they seem."
it is in this slight distinction that mclaren's words resonate within me so that all of who i am leeps up and says 'yes! i agree!' we must continue in humility with a less tight grip to what we 'claim' to be truth, and understand that in reality, it is simply our knowledge of the truth...namely jesus. we know him, but we can't completely comprehend him or know all about hiim. humilty.
please afford me to continue on a little more with this thread of relativism. a few pages later in the same chapter, mclaren encourages us to affirm some of the truth that God is trying to convey through the post-modern movement. that is, a LIMITED RELATIVISM:
"I am not recommending that we affirm absolute relativism (which is locically an absurdity), but rather honest, limited relativism. Postmoderns have been reared under the post-Einsteinian, quantum knowlege that even time and space are not absolute. So they are justly skeptical of absolutist claims and understandably sensitive to moral ambiguities, including some found in the Bible. Is it absolutely wrong to kill your own child? (Abraham was commanded to do so.) Is it absolutely wrong to worship in an idol's temple? (Naaman was given permission to do so.) Is it absolutely wrong to visit a prostitute? (Hosea was commanded to do so.) Is it absolutely wrong to have more than one wife? (Many good Bible characters had such.)_ Is it absolutely wrong to have slaves? (Then why does the Bible regulate rather than categorically forbid slavery?) Dare we acknowledge that many moral issues are relative to their situation--under God?"
this last sentence does justice to mr diggs' post i believe. mclaren continues on to suggest that we begin using the term 'universal truth' as opossed to 'absolute truth'. i begin to see myself agreeing with him. im sure many will criticize me for so often quoting a 'borderline heretic' like mclaren. (maybe not on this forum.) my response to this potential criticism is...well, the guy is smarter than me and more articulate than me, and i agree with him on these issues.
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