“Relativity has replaced absolute truth,” is a common Christian complaint.  While we are working very hard to maintain our worldview of absolute truth, have we fully understood where relativity comes from?

Did you know that, metamodern thinking cannot traffic in “absolutes” out of humility?  “Absolute” is not a functioning word for a generation who is willing to admit they don’t know everything.  In modernism we thought we knew everything, or could know everything, but we’ve come full circle and the result is that no one wants to be so brazen as to make that claim anymore.  It was a notion of Modernism that absolutes were discoverable and held authority.  However, the affects of Modernism on the globe have been catastrophic.  History has proven that what we thought to be “absolute” birthed evil.  Here’s a window into that:

Modernity provoked Relativity 

“If your truth is so universal…how come your modern, universal worldview has oppressed so many people and animals?

YOU CALL THAT ENLIGHTENMENT?

Let’s start with indigenous cultures. So when modern civilization show­ed up at Greenland and “civilized” the Inuits (by the hand of those pesky Danes), their culture crumbled like a house of cards. Unbelievable misery ensued and many of them became alcoholics at the very bottom of Danish “modern” soc­iety. If you go a little farther back in time, the Europeans consciously and delib­erately conquered and exploited others in the name of civilization and moder­nity, claiming that this was the scien­tifically supported order of things. But even if you don’t go back to colon­ialism, today most indigenous and traditional cultures around the world are taking heavy hits as they face an endless onslaught of commercial­ization, instrumentalization, bureaucratiz­a­tion and social degradation. Are those just road kill on the path to the univer­sal truth you say you found in a high school physics class?

Or how about the process of modernization itself. You said there are no science wars. But did you ever notice there are other wars going on, stemm­ing directly from the vanity of the modern project? Look at how China and the Soviet Union modernized – millions and millions of people died. Oh, that wasn’t realmodernization? Only Western modernization is real? They did become modern countries, you know. And what about the US, if it’s so en­lightened, how come its black book of human rights abuses is so thick? Those victims don’t get a say in the universal truth found in chemistry 101? Speak­ing of chemistry, did you know that the British Em­p­ire started using chemical dyes and then instantly collapsed the Indian indigo cloth dye market – that the Empire had created – and let millions starve to death? Oh, that wasn’t real modernity either, was it? How about the Indian traditional society, they don’t get a say on this? Do you know that the biggest and bloodiest war going on right now is in the Congo? A long-term result of some of the worst atrocities in recorded history, committed by enlightened, modern Wester­ners who used their oh-so-hailed rationality to force native Africans to produce cocoa and rubber instead of food so that you can enjoy that delicious fine Belgian choc­olate. Have you thought about that? Oh, and where do the minerals in your Smartphone come from?

And if every individual is being freed by this universal order of enlighten­ment that you are so graciously sharing with the rest of the world, how come a Bangladeshi female semi-slave made the shirt you are wearing, not under direct threat perhaps, but lest her kids be prostituted to Western tourists? Once she does work at the sweatshop, though, she is physically threatened – and her phy­sical health is certainly compromised. What a beautiful universal order that is.

 ….Or how about the patients? Modern medicine is powerful, you’re right. Vacc­­ines are good, most of the time. But the history of modern medic­ine is a marathon of abuses by doctors who were convinced they had objective sci­ence on their side. How much power have they not misused to lobo­tomize and lock up and castrate people – until political, not scientific, currents in society changed? Oh, those patients were weak and crazy. They don’t get a perspecti­ve on universal truth, of course.

And how come, with these super-objective sciences, that the paradigms keep shifting every generation or so, depending on who wins the acad­emic power struggles? You go from a Newtonian universe to Einstein’s universe, and now Einstein turned out to be wrong about quantum phy­sics, and the uni­verse really does do “spooky things at a distance” after all –and God plays a whole lot of quantum dice. Everyone is so sure of themselves, that they have the real reality, that they are being objective, but all the time they turn out to be wrong – their understanding again and again found to be more bound by their culture, their time and their own interests, than anybody had expected. Not so universal, after all, it is?”  – Hanzi Freinacht

In light of this, how can we refer to anything as deserving the title, “absolute” unless it can be verified as having transparent results that elevate humanity without any blind spots, favourtism or injustice.  From the world’s perspective, who would be so bold as to claim we are going to achieve any absolutes?

Ultimately, the world is no longer interested in “objective” (or inter-subjectively verified) truths.  The world is interested in solutions.  Whatever provides the highest results gets to take the high seat presiding over reality – it doesn’t have to be absolute, it just has to be progressive.  This is an evolutionary worldview applied to society.  It is the belief that we are always bettering ourselves, we are not perfect, and may never be, but we can take one step at a time toward something better.

Without the faith that there is a personal Creator with a loving character who made the world and is redeeming it from its root problem:  sin,  can we blame secular society for arriving at these conclusions?  As Christians, we should respect this worldview and understand its context, so that we can converse with those who hold it.

More than one Stamp of Approval

In order to more fully understand relativity, we have to do some critical thinking about axiom.  In this worldview, something that merits authority is no longer prescribed on the basis of sinlge-faceted axiom.  This means that if Christians want to stand up and speak with authority, their timeless truth also has to be verifiable on a multi-faceted bases.

Think about the failures of axiom.

Until the late 1990s, scientists thought that gravity must be slowing down the expansion of the universe. “Recent discoveries told us that the universe is flying apart—faster and faster,” It changed everything we ever knew about the cosmos. (article here).

Thus, axioms are true until proven wrong, and replaced with new axioms.  This demonstrates their imperfect relationship to reality.

The Beauty of Truth – Unadorned

The problem is that, as modernists, Christians approached the Bible as axiom. Modernism treated the Bible as a law book, full of useful phrases we could spout off or attach to any situation that required knowledge & correction.  

Interestingly enough, Christians can take some heat out of this battle on absolute truth simply by dispensing with the word “absolute” and going back to the Biblical word unadorned, truth.  

“Absolute” is a modern notion that provides a false sense of security.  But if we are humble and say instead, that we know Truth (the person), then we are experiencing and witnessing His example.  Truth becomes our life-giving relationship rather than our axiom to prove.   This is the shift, and also our starting point for engaging the world.  We humble ourselves and meet them where they are at (and where we might have gone before).  

The world has been rightly humbled by modernism.  We meet them by being humbled by the same thing and stripping ourselves of an authority that Jesus did not sanction.  Do we know Truth?  Yes, in part (I Cor. 13:9-12).  Do we speak Truth?  Yes, according to the revelation of the Scriptures.  Do we have the corner on Absolutes?  Only God does.  We’re the followers.  Let’s slow down and keep in step with those whom we are seeking to share Jesus with.

Come back for the next post and we’ll take this thinking on “absolutes” a step further.  In spite of “absolute truth” not being a very lovely or useful way to relate to the world, there is a container for 100-proof truth, and its got a familiar name.