Relativism: The Foundation of Postmodernism
Chuck Sligh
October 26, 2014
TEXT: John 18:37-38 – “Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. 38 Pilate saith unto him, What is truth?…”
INTRODUCTION
You may not know it, but you and I now live in a “POSTmodern” world.
The world has gone through three great eras in how it deals with truth and reality.
• The PRE-modern world understood reality in terms of the supernatural—that is, that everything owed its existence and meaning to a spiritual realm beyond the senses.
• The MODERN world was a result of the Enlightenment, a time when rationalism became the supreme tool to understand the world and it’s meaning. This brought us modern science and all its conveniences and inventions. But it also brought us a nightmare of repercussions—deplorable working conditions and child exploitation during the Industrial Revolution, slavery to advance capitalism in the 1700-1800s, and Communism, Naziism, a great depression, two world wars and nuclear weapons in the 20th Century and today we have environmental fears of global warming and AIDS.
• So today we live in what is called the POSTmodern world. – As people recognized the failings of the modern era, their outlook on life changed, producing a reaction that questions most of the underpinnings of the modern era.
Now that’s a distillation of months of study from several books to about six sentences. Years ago I planned to do a thorough critique of postmodernism as a sermon series, but as I studied it, one thing began to emerge that forms the foundation of everything that embodies postmodernism. Everything else about postmodernism is just the outworking of this one idea. That’s what I would like to talk about today.
That almost universal assumption has become practically universal in our society today and based on that assumption, people interpret reality in ways never thought of before.
That widely accepted assumption is simple this: That TRUTH IS RELATIVE.
Let’s talk about RELATIVISM today:
I. FIRST, LET’S CONSIDER THE PREVALENCE OF RELATIVISM.
The guy who first alerted America about how relativism has completely taken hold of the academic world and changed the intellectual landscape was Alan Bloom in his 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom is not in any way a Bible-thumper, but a first-rate academic, having taught at Yale, Cornell, the University of Paris and the University of Chicago. In this book, he says this:
There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question two plus two equals four. These are things you don’t think about. The students’ backgrounds are as various as America can provide. Some are religious, some are atheist, some are to the left, some are to the right, some intended to be scientists, some humanists or professionals or businessmen; some are poor, some are rich. They are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral intention. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight, but a moral postulate [a starting assumption], the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society.
“The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error, but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness—and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings—is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. (Bloom, p. 25-26, emphasis mine.)
Now don’t miss what he said. He was asserting that relativism is practically universally believed by students, not GRADUATING from college, but ENTERING college. I think nobody denies that college professors love to dismantle students’ faith and convictions, but what Bloom exposed in his book is not just that they’re getting this in college, but they’re getting this far younger than that!
In 1994, Barna Research Group polled American adults and found that 72% of Americans believe in some degree in relativism—that’s almost three out of four! And here’s the saddest part—which is one of the reasons I am dealing with this subject here at Grace Baptist Church—Barna found that 62 % of those who called themselves born-again Christians had the same view that truth is relative. Christian teenagers’ results were even worse: over 90% believed in relativism. And that was 20 years ago, and we know it has not gotten better, but worse.
So we had better understand what it is and how to counter it. So what exactly IS relativism?—It’s simply means that there is no objective reference point or standard for truth; that truth varies with people, places and time.
Illus. – Have you ever been at a stoplight and had that sensation that your car is moving and when you look up, you’re not sure if the other car is moving back or if you’re moving forward?
What do you do?—Well, typically you’d just push your brake a little harder just to make sure you’re not moving.
Well, what if you didn’t have a brake?—Well, you’d look for something fixed outside your car—like a tree—so you could figure if you were moving or not.
But what if the trees moved?—[PAUSE] and the buildings moved?— Well, obviously you’d never have a point of reference to determine whether you were going forwards, backwards or standing still.
That’s where our society is about truth.—There’s no point of reference—no standard by which you can say, “This it truth; this is error. This is right; this is wrong.”
II. NOW LET’S LOOK AT THE “RELATIVES OF RELATIVISM.”
Relativism manifests itself today in so many different forms that it can be so confusing. What are some the various ways that relativism shows itself in our society?
1) First is RELIGIOUS relativism, or what we call “pluralism.”
This is the idea that no religion is objectively true; that none can claim to be THE truth; that “all roads lead to God.” As one pluralist, Rosemary Radford Ruth writes, “The idea that Christianity or even the biblical faiths have a monopoly on religious truth is an outrageous, absurd religious chauvinism.” So if you make a truth claim about a religious tenet, you are a chauvinist.
2) Second is MORAL relativism, and this is the one that’s most pervasive in our society.
This is the idea that there are no moral absolutes; there’s no objective standard of right and wrong.
Illus. – like the single who moves from home and then visits her parents and admits that she’s now living with her boyfriend and the mother says to the daughter, “How could you DO this? We have taught you better than that.”
And the daughter says, “Mom, those were YOUR morals. Those are not MY morals. That was YOUR truth and morals for your generation. This is MY truth and MY morals, so don’t judge me for my morals.”
That’s moral relativism.
One clearly postmodern professor wrote, “What we believe today is easily displaced by something else tomorrow. Our beliefs are more a matter of our feelings than anything else and thus our confidence in them varies with our hormones, our situation and our friends. Most important, our beliefs are OUR beliefes and that we think them worthy and without dispute.”
Patterson and Kim put it this way, “When Americans want to answer a question of right and wrong, we ask ourselves.…”
Third is CULTURAL relativism, or what is often called “multiculturalism.”
Now there’s obviously a good side to multiculturalism. Christians are in a good way multicultural. Christians have a big view of the world; that God has created all people; and all people are therefore valuable; and so there’s a value in a variety of cultures and we can learn from one another and experience a variety of things and love one another and serve God together.
In that sense, it’s beautiful. But what multiculturalism typically means is something very different, which is that what may be wrong for one culture may be right for another culture.
Illus. – So in China, they’ve determined that you should have a small family and they’ve enacted laws allowing only one child per family. Families generally want boys for economic reasons, so girls can legally be killed in China either through abortion or infanticide. That’s just their culture.—Who are YOU to say that they’re wrong?
Illus. – In India, though now outlawed, in the past they practiced the custom of Suttee in which a widow was burned alive when her husband died. – That was the common practice in India, so who are YOU to judge that that practice was wrong just because your culture doesn’t do it?
In Holland, when you get old or sick you can be euthanized. Who are you to say it’s wrong? How can you judge another culture?
4) Number 4 is HISTORICAL relativism (deconstructionism).
Bloom sarcastically writes, “The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia [fear of foreigners], racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.” (Bloom, p. 26)
Postmoderns see history as just “constructs”—it’s CONSTRUCTIONS of how certain cultures or people interpret history, so if I want to make up history according to my liking, I can do that, and the facts don’t hinder me.
Illus. – An excellent example of this was The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. His claims that Jesus was married and there were 90 other gospels, and all this stuff have absolutely NO historical credibility, and have been disproved by numerous books that just DISMANTLE his arguments. But you see, that doesn’t matter!—You can just create your own history to prove whatever you want to prove.
5) Fifth is SCIENTIFIC relativism.
As one young postmodernist scientist said, “Science is not concerned with reality…. It is not for us as scientists to worry about ‘reality.’” This is a BIG shift in science. But science today has devolved into “scientism.” It’s no longer about just analyzing facts and looking at empirical evidence. It’s now deciding what we want to prove and using science to prove it.
Illus. – For instance, the late Dr. Carl Sagan said, “The cosmos is all there is, was, or ever will be.” Now is that a scientific statement?—No, that’s a DOXOLOGY! You could sing that at the end of science class, “The Cosmos; was and is and ever will be…” But folks, there is no scientific proof for that statement. That’s a PHILOSOPHICAL statement or more properly a THEOLOGICAL statement.
But science can make those statements and teach them in a classroom as if they are fact. But it’s not science; it’s scientism—it’s a RELIGIOUS persuasion. What relativism does is allow people to come in the cloak of science, and yet not deal with facts.
6) Number 6 is AESTHETIC relativism.
Their mantra is, “Beauty is in the eyes of the [WHAT?] beholder.” It is true that people will appreciate different forms of art or different styles. But that’s not what aesthetic relativism is saying. What they’re saying is that there is actually no objective basis to distinguish between rubbish and good art or pornography and the aesthetic.
Illus. – That brings us to that great theologian and philosopher…Dave Barry. – In a May 18, 2003 article he says what is obvious to sensible people:
It’s time for an update on the British art world which as far as I can tell exists mainly to provide me with material. As regular readers of this column are aware, British art institutions are taken to paying large sums of money for works of art that can only be described as extremely innovative. I’m using “innovative” in the sense of “stupid.”
Here are two examples I have written about. An artist named Martin Creed won the prestigious Turner Prize plus 20,000 Pounds [$30,000] for a work called, “The Lights Going On and Off” which consisted of an empty room in which the lights go on and off. Second, the prestigious Tate Gallery paid 22,300_ [$35,000] of British taxpayers’ money for a sealed can containing the excrement of a deceased artist.…
Bedford Creative Arts decided to pay an artist named Andre Stitt 12,200_ [$19,200] for him to, among other innovative things, kick an empty take-out curry carton through the center of town. In case you’re wondering why that would be artistic, the answer as far as I could tell is that Stitt was going to wear silver platform boots. Tragically, this work of art had to be cancelled. It got a lot of media attention and Bedford art officials were afraid that too many people would show up to watch. Don’t you just hate it when the public shows up for art paid for by the public. But don’t worry, Mr. Stitt still got his 12,200_. A Bedford art official is quoted as saying, “It was not important that Mr. Stitt did not actually perform his curry carton work because he had created a huge amount of publicity and thus it had already existed in the public arena. In other words he didn’t have to kick the curry carton to get paid to kick the curry carton because the public was aware of the curry kicking carton concept. I bet that Michelangelo, a loyal reader of this column is turning over in his grave right now. He’s thinking, “You mean I could have just announced that I was going to create a huge statue of David. I didn’t have to chip away at all that marble. Poor Michelangelo, born in the bad pre-innovative days of art.
7) Seven is LEGAL relativism.
Brown says, “If there is no Power higher than man, then man himself must make all his own laws. …From this perspective—law is what those in power choose to make it—law is truly man-made. It is not dependent on any higher Authority or super-sensory reality.”
I could spend hours just on this, but in a nutshell, get this: In the modern era, though there were many non-believers, it was generally understood that law was an attempt to regulate moral behavior based upon absolute truths, and most of them were rooted in a belief in God or in some universal concept of right or wrong.
That underpinning is no more: There is no God in their eyes and there are no morals to regulate. Ultimately life is about obtaining and wielding POWER for your cultural group over others. I could say much more about that, but I’ll have to leave it at that.
III. SO FINALLY, HOW DO WE RESPOND TO THIS?
1) The first way to debunk relativism is with a LOGICAL response.
The basic laws of logic just show how all this is rubbish.
I want to share two of them with you.
• One is the LAW OF NON-CONTRADICTION.
This says that “A is not the same as non-A.” That is, if something is self-contradictory, it cannot be true.
Illus. – If you come to my wife and I and ask, “Hey, do you guys have three kids?—and I say “No” and she says “Yes”—there’s a problem. Maybe we’ve got some basic marital communication problems here, or maybe this woman next to me is not my wife, or maybe I’m thinking of SPIRITUAL children and she’s thinking of PHYSICAL children, or some other confusion. But if both of us are answering the question directly and we both understand it properly, one of us is WRONG.
You can’t have self-contradictory statements, and that’s what relativism is.
• Second is THE LAW OF THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE.
“Either something is A or non-A, but not both at the same time.” Either I’m a Christian or a non-Christian—I can’t be both.
That wipes out all of religious pluralism, because two contradictory statements cannot both be true at the same time. Christianity asserts that Jesus died for my sins; Islam asserts that Jesus did NOT die for my sins. – Both of these statements can be untrue, but both cannot be true because they are mutually exclusive. Likewise, Christianity posits that God exists in three persons; Islam says He exists as one person; Hinduism says He is not even a person. – All of these cannot be simultaneously true.
2) Let me close with a BIBLICAL response to relativism.
There is much I could say here, but let me give you three basic tenets to hang your hat on:
• First, truth is grounded in the Godhead—God the Father, son and Holy Spirit.
Isaiah 45:19b says, “…I the LORD speak righteousness, I declare things that are right.” – The Bible unequivocally asserts that there IS right and wrong and there is truth and IT IS GROUNDED IN HIM.
In Jeremiah 10:10 we read, “But the LORD is the true God…” God is described as the “true God”—the God of truth. There’s no such thing as truth apart from God.
Jesus said John 14:6, “…I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” Reality and truth are grounded in the Godhead.
• Second, God’s truth is revealed in His Word.
John 8:31-32 says, “Then said Jesus to those Jews wh[o] believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; 32 And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
Are postmoderns free with their own made-up belief systems?—No, they’re enslaved to habits and destructive behaviors. Their belief systems have caused untold havoc in their lives.
If postmodernism is so great, why is that in every country where it reigns supreme, the suicide rate is higher than ever before in history. Postmodernism has caused untold suffering as people have lost all moral bearings. If your husband is addicted to pornography, he’s probably justifying it by saying that HE doesn’t see anything wrong with it, so leave him alone. But that doesn’t take away your pain, and it enslaves him and devalues all women and just increases his guilt before God.
Postmodernism has created a devaluation of human worth by allowing horrific practices in the name of multiculturalism. It has cultivated a culture of death through the promotion of euthanasia and abortion, and I could just go on and on.
But when you turn to Christ and follow His word, you can be FREE—from addictive, destructive habits; from a culture of death; and most of all, from the penalty of sin—hell.
• Lastly, the Gospel is truth.
Three times Paul uses the phrase, “the truth of the Gospel” (Galatians 2:5, 14 and Colossians 1:5). The Gospel is that forgiveness of sins is not obtained by our own works or religious practices, but only by trusting in Jesus Christ who died, was buried and rose from the dead to pay the penalty for your sins.
There’s no salvation in Buddha; or Mohammad; or any other god. There’s no salvation in a church or religious system, including being a Baptist. Salvation is secured only by faith in Jesus Christ.
CONCLUSION
Have you turned to Jesus, the way, the truth and the life for salvation? If so, are you continuing in God’s Word, and thereby finding freedom?
