Dec 9, 2016 | Truth
Eric Metaxas, famous Evangelical author and speaker, went off to college like many Christian kids, naive and ignorant about the environment he would encounter there. He learned about something there called relativism, a concept every Christian parent needs to be familiar with, and needs to guard their kids against. I’ll let him explain what it means:
I first encountered relativism when I went to college at Yale. Before that I had lived in a working-class world where truth was a real concept. In my parents’ world, truth was something noble and beautiful; it was something that people lived and died for, like freedom. To be an enemy of the truth was to be about the worst thing there was. Since Yale’s motto is Lux et Veritas—Latin for “Light and Truth”—I was eager to get there so that I could begin learning what truth really was. I was genuinely excited about the idea of searching for it.
But by the time I got there—in the 1980s—Yale had abandoned the outdated notion that truth was something real, something to be sought after and discovered and treasured. That onetime seminary had instead espoused a winking, postmodern attitude, in which the notion of a singular truth had been replaced by the relativistic theory that there are many “truths” . . . which is to say no truths at all.
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Nov 27, 2016 | Theology, Truth
Make it all about them!
Yes, I know this is a blog, and book, about keeping our kids Christian, but what we must warn them against is also important if we are to make that keeping more likely.
I recently learned about a Christian women. a famous “mommy blogger,” who was divorced, and recently announced she’s started dating a famous soccer star who happens to be a woman. Yes, this famous Christian author (New York Times Best Seller, no less), blogger, and speaker is now a confirmed lesbian. What makes this particularly especially problematic for conservative, orthodox Christians isn’t the so much the lesbian part of it, but the rationale she gives for engaging in a lesbian relationship. It makes her happy! Oh, so very, very happy! As she put it in her Facebook announcement about the relationship: (more…)
Nov 1, 2015 | Truth
How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves – flung from one extreme to another: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth. Every day new sects spring up, and what St Paul says about human deception and the trickery that strives to entice people into error (cf. Eph 4: 14) comes true.
Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be “tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine”, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.
We, however, have a different goal: the Son of God, the true man. He is the measure of true humanism. An “adult” faith is not a faith that follows the trends of fashion and the latest novelty; a mature adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ. It is this friendship that opens us up to all that is good and gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deceipt from truth.
—Homily of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Dean of the College of Cardinals, Mass for the Election of the Supreme Pontiff, St. Peter’s Basilica, 18 April 2005
Sep 23, 2015 | Truth
There is a nice piece by Joel Miller at Theology Sticks about the essentially public nature of religion. As much as the secularists of our day might try to distort the First Amendment and keep Christians silent and docile, it will never happen. This is not just about the nature of the Christian faith either, as Miller points out, but about human nature and the nature of religion itself. Faith is never simply personal because all faith is a function of our view of the world, of all reality and our place in it.
Modern people want to turn religion into a merely subjective experience, something that doesn’t say anything about the real world; as long as it makes us happy, or whatever. Americans and Westerners in general are basically relativists who think what is true for one person doesn’t necessarily have to be true for another person. Of course this is patently absurd on the face of it, but logical consistency is not at the top of many people’s priority list. All the world’s religions make competing truth claims, and the law of contradiction says two contradictory claims cannot be true at the same time. Whatever these claims happen to be, and whatever religion it happens to be, even if it is atheistic religion, it will seek to influence society in some way, and that includes its politics. There is no neutral ground, and there is no naked public square, as the late Richard John Neuhaus once argued persuasively. Ironically, when people took truth claims seriously, tolerance as a virtue actually made sense. Today so called tolerance is an excuse for totalitarian leftist group think, the fruit of a relativism that is as absolutist as any religious fundamentalist.
Jul 17, 2015 | Truth
Now that we know Planned Parenthood has a bustling trade in fetal body parts, you wonder how much longer the progressive/liberal wing of our body politic can pull the wool over America’s eyes that abortion kills little human beings. Everybody has to know that now, right? But the left’s response to a Planned Parenthood executive caught on video discussing little fetus body parts is indicative of a moral blindness that is breathtaking to behold. One example of what passes for progressive moral insight is a piece at the reliably liberal Slate by Amanda Marcotte. (more…)
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