Relatively True
TCF Sermon
November 17, 2002
Open with the illustration below using jar of M&Ms and favorite food choices (NOTE: adapt this and do it with your own examples among the congregation - it’s an effective "grabber")
A pastor named Stephey Belynskyj, starts each confirmation class with a jar full of beans. He asks his students to guess how many beans are in the jar, and on a big pad of paper writes down their estimates. Then, next to those estimates, he helps them make another list: their favorite songs. When the lists are complete, he reveals the actual number of beans in the jar. The whole class looks over their guesses, to see which estimate was closest to being right. Belynskyj then turns to the list of favorite songs. “And which one of these is closest to being right?” he asks. The students protest that there is no “right answer”; a person’s favorite song is purely a matter of taste. Belynskyj, who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Notre Dame asks, “When you decide what to believe in terms of your faith, is that more like guessing the number of beans, or more like choosing your favorite song?” Always, Belynskyj says, from old as well as young, he gets the same answer: Choosing one’s faith is more like choosing a favorite song. When Belynskyj told me this, it took my breath away. “After they say that, do you confirm them?” I asked him. “Well,” smiled Belynskyj, “First I try to argue them out of it.”
Then ask these questions:
- which guess of the number of M&Ms comes closest to being right?
- which one on the list of favorite foods comes closest to being right?
When it comes to your faith, is it more like guessing the number of M&Ms, or is it more like choosing your favorite food? The number or M&Ms is a knowable number, like our God is a knowable God.
Related to this idea, I found many studies revealing similar things, but let me cite just one that illustrates our theme this morning.
An estimated 74% of Americans strongly agree with this statement:
“There is only one true God, who is holy and perfect, and who created the world, and rules it today,"
However, an estimated 65% either strongly agree or somewhat agree with the assertion that "there is no such thing as absolute truth." Only 28% expressed strong belief in absolute truth, and only 23% of born-again, or evangelical Christians, accepted that there is absolute truth. So, three-quarters of those considering themselves Christians say nothing can be known for certain.
That means they may not be convinced Jesus existed, they may not believe Jesus is who He claimed to be, they may not believe God’s Word is authentic.
It’s all relative – nothing is for sure. If that’s true – if we cannot know anything, especially these very significant things, for sure, then we might just as well all go home now, because the time we spend considering what Jesus said is worthless.
All you need do to see the fruits of our theme this morning is read the newspaper. Pretty much any day of the week, pretty much any section of the newspaper.
In fact, it’s even in the comics section of the newspaper, which I’m not in the habit of reading, however, sometimes, someone will get an inspiration from God to send me an item, perhaps even hoping that it’ll end up as a sermon illustration.
Though I doubt that as a motive for Andy Obrochta, who, several weeks ago, sent me an email note telling me about a cartoon he reads called Mallard Fillmore. Andy’s email to me read:
Bill
Did you see Mallard Fillmore in yesterday’s comics? Mallard was talking about the current propensity to instill character in public school students without "all that Judeo-Christian stuff" and said it was kind of like trying to teach reading without "all of that alphabet stuff".
Andy
When Andy sent me that, I thought it was a wonderful illustration of where we are in the world today...after years of our public schools, in addition to the other “institutions” of our world, - politics – media – universities – literature...but after years of these institutions teaching the philosophy of ethical and moral relativism, that is, the idea that everything is relative to the individual, what’s true or right for you is right for you, and what’s right for me is right for me, we have people, with a straight face, asking questions like these:
What’s wrong with our kids?
Why is business stealing our money, as in Enron?
Why are our kids killing each other in schools?
Why is cheating, lying and stealing such a growing problem?
Mallard Fillmore had it right. These things are all true because we’ve experienced nearly a half-century of teaching ethics, minus all that Judeo-Christian stuff, and it’s just as useless as teaching reading without the alphabet.
It’s building a house without a foundation – doomed to fall under pressure.
This morning’s message, titled “Relatively True” is about equipping us, as believers in Jesus, to engage our culture, with a biblical worldview of truth...
vs. the prevailing worldview of relativism.
In John 17, when Jesus was praying for his disciples, He knew that they would be challenged in their faith, so He prayed for strength. He prayed for protection.
And He knew that, with them staying in the world while He ascended into heaven, they’d need to be changed into His image, and thus strengthened for the task before them, that task was twofold, and interconnected:
1. to live their lives of faith in holiness, without compromise
2. to evangelize the world with the gospel.
So, in His longest recorded prayer in John 17, Jesus prayed many things, specifically for his disciples, and by extension, for us – note the remainder of Jesus’ prayer in the verses that follow the passage we’ll read here.
In John 17:17, we see how this relates to our topic this morning. But we’ll begin reading a few verses earlier. Jesus, in verse 14, prays: John 17:14-19
"I have given them Your word; and the world has hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. 15"I do not ask You to take them out of the world, but to keep them from the evil one. 16"They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. 17"Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth. 18"As you sent Me into the world, I also have sent them into the world. 19"And for their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth.
The two key words we’ll look at in this passage this morning are: 1. word 2. truth
Word is used twice in this passage. In verse 14, Jesus notes that He has given His disciples God’s word, and the result is that the world hated them.
In verse 17, He says something very significant about God’s Word. He says, “Your word is truth.” Then, truth is also used two other times.
The first time is in verse 17 where Jesus asks the Father, “Sanctify them in the truth,” followed by the clear connection between truth and His word, when,
almost as if He anticipated the question Pilate asked Him, “what is truth?”
He answers: Your Word is truth. Then, finally in verse 19, Jesus prays:
19"And for their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they themselves also may be sanctified in truth.
Let’s examine these things a little more closely. Imagine Jesus’ disciples, who had to have heard Him praying this prayer. He’s praying for protection... they might have opened their eyes during that part of the prayer, maybe looked at each other and had expressions indicating, “now what’s that all about?!?”
Then, in verse 14, He prays that He has given them God’s Word, and that the world hates them. Now, you’d think that by now, the disciples would have understood some of this stuff, but it’s clear from what happens later that many were still sort of clueless.
Why would the world hate them? Why does the world hate us? Because we have His word, and proclaim that it’s the Word of God...
- it is our standard of faith and practice
- it does contain God’s words of eternal life
- it does give us patterns of right and wrong
That’s just it. When we say the Word of God is true, when we declare that certain things in God’s Word are not just right for us, but right and proper for all, the world hates us.
One commentary on this passage noted:
(the disciples) were in danger because the satanic world system hated them. It hated them because they are not a part of it. As believers share Jesus Christ, “Everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes, and the boasting of what he has and does” (1 John 2:16) loses its attractiveness. A believer’s commitment shows the world’s values to be trash or dung (cf. Phil. 3:8). Therefore the world hates the exposure of its sham values.
John 3:20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.
So, this part of Jesus’ prayer served not only to ask the Father for protection from the hate of the world, but as a warning of the reality to come. To say that there is absolute truth... to say that some things are absolutely right, or absolutely wrong, for anyone, anytime, anywhere, goes against the relativism that’s rampant in our society, indeed, that’s prevalent in most of the world.
In fact, to say there’s right and wrong, and then to add that these things are right and wrong because some religious book says so, makes the offense even worse.
Recognizing these things – and knowing the results, Jesus saw the need to pray for the strength and protection of His disciples, and specifically to pray that they’d be sanctified, that is, set apart, changed from unholy to holy, made more and more into the image and likeness of Jesus.
But how would this happen? They’d be sanctified in the truth...sanctified by the truth...and to leave no doubt about what the truth was, he noted immediately that God’s word is truth.
Truth is a huge theme in the book of John. If you want to start a study on truth in God’s word, there’s no better place to start than the book of John. But let me highlight a few key things related to our topic this morning. In John 1:1, it tells us:
John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Then later in the same chapter, verse 14 clearly identifies Jesus as the living word... John 1:14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
That’s Jesus! the Word became flesh. But then, John goes further still, and identifies Jesus as the embodiment of two key things: We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
Jesus is full of grace, and Jesus is full of truth. Then in one of Jesus’ most significant statements about Himself, He says in John 14:6: "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
So, John declared this truth about Jesus in chapter 1.... then Jesus declared it about Himself in chapter 14, and tied it all together in the passage we’re looking at this morning, in ch. 17.
Note the progression here:
1. Jesus is the Word
2. Jesus is the Truth
3. The Word is Truth
The Word of God that we have the privilege of reading, studying, knowing, the same Word of God for which heroes of the faith like William Tyndale died, so we can all have access to it in languages we can understand. That Word of God reveals God’s truth to us.
Jesus said it in His prayer to the Father...your Word is truth.
Now, we recognize that - as believers, though admittedly, we often take it lightly,
or take it for granted. But though we know that God’s Word is truth, because we live in a culture that’s infected with relativism, which in its worst form is really anti-truth, we have to be on guard for ourselves, that we don’t get sucked into relativistic thinking in areas the Word of God clearly identifies as right and wrong.
The impact in our culture, on our society, is very clear. As we noted at the outset, all you have to do is read the newspaper, or watch the news, or listen to what your kids come home with from school.
Two very big news stories in the last year illustrate clearly what’s happened,
so let me cite these examples to help us understand how deeply rooted in our society this idea that everything’s relative really is.
First, a little over a year ago, America was attacked by Muslim extremists. Terrorists, pure and simple. Easy to condemn their behavior, right?
Well, not in American universities, nor much of the Western world, either. And it illustrates how far down we’ve gone when our world cannot universally condemn what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.
Let me read from a column that appeared last December in Newsweek,
My Turn: The Question That We Should Be Asking
by Alison Hornstein (student at Yale University), NEWSWEEK, December 14, 2001
On the morning of September 11, my entire college campus huddled around television sets, our eyes riveted in horror to images of the burning, then falling, Twin Towers. By evening there were candlelight vigils where people sought to comfort and be comforted.
But by September 12, as our shock began to fade, so did our sense of being wronged. Student reactions expressed in the daily newspaper and in class pointed to the differences between our life circumstances and those of the perpetrators, suggesting that these differences had caused the previous day’s events. Noticeably absent was a general outcry of indignation at what had been the most successful terrorist attack of our lifetimes. These reactions and similar ones on other campuses have made it apparent that my generation is uncomfortable assessing, or even asking, whether a moral wrong has taken place.
I spent 14 years at a public school in Manhattan with students who came from a variety of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. I benefited immensely from the open-minded curriculum. In second grade we learned about the Inuit (who don’t like to be called Eskimos, our teacher taught us), and how, though they sometimes ate caribou hoofs and other foods that we generally did not find on our own dinner tables, they were essentially like us.
When my third-grade class read a story about one boy kicking another at a school-bus stop, our teacher talked about why the boy might have done what he did–maybe he was having a bad day or had had a fight with his mother that morning. The teacher stressed that the little boy had feelings that sometimes led him to do mean things. That these feelings did not necessarily justify his actions got lost in the discussion.
Later, in high school, my classmates and I learned about how women in some countries are circumcised and how, even though this seemed abhorrent to us, it was part of their culture. We discussed the pros and cons of imposing our standards on other cultures. And, overwhelmingly, we decided we should not.
We gained an important degree of emotional and psychological sophistication from looking at these issues. But being taught to think within a framework of moral and cultural relativity without learning its boundaries has seemingly created a deficiency in my generation’s ability to make moral judgments.
Just as we should pass absolute moral judgment in the case of rape, we should recognize that some actions are objectively bad, despite differences in cultural standards and values.
In a college seminar on Sept. 12 a professor said he did not see much difference between Hamas suicide bombers (who, he pointed out, saw themselves as "martyrs") and American soldiers who died fighting in World War II. When I saw one or two students nodding in agreement, I raised my hand. I wanted to say that although both groups may have believed that they were fighting for their ways of life in declared "wars," there is a considerable distinction. American soldiers, in uniform, did not have a policy of specifically targeting civilians; suicide bombers, who wear plainclothes, do. The professor didn’t call on me. The people who did get a chance to speak cited various provocations for terrorism; not one of them questioned its morality.
I had to drop the class.
The explanations students and professors give for the September 11 attacks–extreme poverty in the Middle East, America’s foreign policy in that region and religious motivation–are insightful, but they cannot provide absolution for wrongdoing. Even if a woman wears a very short, tight skirt, she should not be raped. Even if the rapist was abused as a child. Even if his wife just cheated on him. Even if the woman looked really, really good in that skirt. The rapist is still accountable. And he still did wrong.
Just as we should pass absolute moral judgment in the case of rape, we should recognize that some actions are objectively bad, despite differences in cultural standards and values. To me, hijacking planes and killing thousands of civilians falls into this category.
Continuing to neglect the place of moral evaluations in discussing current events is not only philosophically problematic; it is also potentially suicidal. There comes a point where the refusal to take a stand on what is wrong results in its victory.
I am so glad that I learned early on not to judge people who eat things that might make me gag, like caribou hoofs or cow brains (which I traumatically encountered years later in France). I am a little less enthusiastic about the conclusions my high-school class drew over the issue of female circumcision. I do know that much of the discussion on this campus since September 11 has failed to address the question of whether an absolute wrong has been committed.
I think it should.
Now, we might be encouraged to think that someone at Yale has enough conscience left to ask these kinds of questions. This is not written from a Christian perspective. I don’t know if this student is a Christian or not. But at least this student is sensitive to ask the question.
She makes another important point which is worth emphasizing. Let’s call this a related sidebar. Not all relativism is wrong.
She mentioned that the Inuit eat caribou hooves. That’s relative to the individual and the society. It’s really a matter of personal taste, rather than a conviction.
How you comb your hair is relative. Whether you like steak or seafood is relative. Whether you like sports or not is relative. Whether you drive on the right or left side of the road is relative to what country you’re in.
Here in America, if you drive on the left side, and you manage not to get into an accident, you’re likely to get ticketed, because here, it’s wrong – literally against the law.
But in Britain, you’d get the ticket for driving on the right side of the road rather than the left. This is one way of showing that certain aspects of relativism are true. Even scripture is clear that many things are relative.
Romans 14:19-15:2 Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification. 20Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, but it is wrong for a man to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble. 21It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother to fall.
22So whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the man who does not condemn himself by what he approves. 23But the man who has doubts is condemned if he eats, because his eating is not from faith; and everything that does not come from faith is sin.
15:1We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. 2Each of us should please his neighbor for his good, to build him up.
1 Cor. 8:9
Be careful, however, that the exercise of your freedom does not become a stumbling block to the weak.
Now, the use of the word “freedom” by Paul in 1 Corinthians, as well as the whole passage in Romans, makes it clear that for some people, certain things are wrong, and for others, those things are not wrong.
The emphasis here is respect for one another...as in Rom. 14:19: Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification.
The emphasis is not causing someone else to stumble...that’s the absolute these passages are talking about. Not the eating of certain foods, because those matters are relative to the individual.
So, all relativism isn’t wrong. But, is it valid to say that, because there is a valid type of personal relativism, we can then apply that principle to all areas of experience and knowledge, and say that they too are also relative?
Clearly, no, it’s not a valid assumption. First of all, to do so, that is, to say, everything is relative, would be an absolute assessment which, in itself, contradicts relativism.
Yet, that’s what we’re up against in our culture, in our society, in our Western world. The other news story which illustrates the damage relativism has done to our culture is Enron, and the larger scope of business scandals we saw earlier this year.
It occurs to me that since Americans seem to be more worried about their money than their nation’s morality, it’s ironic that the nation’s lack of morality in business is costing so many their personal fortunes.
Charles Colson tells this story: A friend of mine gave $20 million to Harvard to start a program to teach ethics at the business school. In response, I wrote an article contending that the ethics program was doomed. My thesis was that ethics depends on absolutes, and Harvard was thoroughly committed to philosophical relativism.
Provoked by the article, the Harvard administration invited me to lecture at Harvard’s Business School. To prepare, I studied the ethics course curriculum in depth and discovered that it was a four-week class in pure pragmatism. My opinion was confirmed by a Christian business executive who took it and summed up the course: "When you’re making a serious business decision, never do anything you think might end up in the newspapers."
No regard for rights and wrongs, in other words; it’s simply good business not to get in trouble—or get bad press.
On the day of the lecture, I dealt with the question posed by the great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Can man be good without God?
My conclusion was no. I contended that absolute truth is essential for the formulation of ethics. Otherwise, right and wrong is up for grabs, determined subjectively. We humans are very unreliable, capable of infinite self-justification, as I discovered from my own experience in the Watergate scandal. Since Harvard is committed to relativism, it can teach only subjective values, which can never withstand the pressures of life.
C. S. Lewis anticipated these consequences a generation ago. "We laugh at honor," he said, "and are shocked to find traitors in our midst." So when business schools reject the very idea of truth, we should not be shocked that the best and brightest of their graduates loot and betray.
So, as we’ve seen, moral responsibility comes from being sanctified, set apart,
changed by the truth. And truth is the Word of God, revealed in the scriptures, and embodied in the Living Word, the One who said clearly about himself, I am the Truth.
Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
The only way I know to guard against moral relativism is to know the Word.... and the one it points to.
To know Jesus the Living Word, and to know and understand His written Word,
His revelation to us. It’s the standard, it’s the foundation of our ethics, it’s the foundation of our morals.
It’s the standard for our behavior. And if it isn’t the standard in our lives, then the economy is not the only thing torn apart by relativism.
There is such a thing as absolute truth. It’s Jesus, absolutely. And the revelation of Jesus, the Word of God. We can choose to believe Jesus’ description of Himself as the the Way, the Truth, and the Life or not, but if we believe it,
we need to be shaped by what His Word says...
Is it true because we believe it, or do we believe it because it’s true? If we believe it because it’s true, it’s like the M&Ms, it’s knowable, discoverable.
Absolutely.
