A wise and learned professor of philosophy was asked by a student: "Do you believe that truth is relative." He looked at the student and said: "That depends." The battle lines have long been drawn in our culture between the absolutists and the relativists. I think the question needs to be reframed because both positions have something important to say about how we know, what we know, and about the nature of truth itself.
We often make the mistake of turning the discussion about relativism versus absolutism into an either-or proposition which it is not. Christians should not forget that modernism (the champion of absolutistic statements about reality) fiercely opposed biblical Christianity by denying miracles and insisting that only empirically verifiable information can be labeled as "truth."
Postmodern thought recognizes the undeniable presence of human perspective. The recognition of the importance of perspective can be traced back to Immanuel Kant's treatise, The Critique of Pure Reason. Kant has been criticized by Christian apologists, but my impression of his work is that he made some very legitimate points (at least he did in the parts that I understood). He was responding to centuries of scholasticism that tried to use pure reason to "prove" the church's metaphysical truth claims.
Kant's argument was that all knowledge comes to us through the senses; therefore, anything outside of that perception cannot be "proven." I don't think that Kant went as far as some relativists who deny the very existence of anything "out there" beyond our perceptions. All he was saying was that the conception of truth that we have in our minds came to us in some fashion through the senses and that anything beyond that is an illusion
The one thing, however, that Kant failed to address is the value of historical testimony. I think this is the heart of the Christian claim to truth. The Christian faith relies not on pure reason but on the testimony of others who saw, heard, and touched (1Jn 1:1). In other words, there is a sense in which our truth claims fit Kant's criteria for verification. It just does so by proxy, that is, though the testimony of history.
But even with this testimony, there comes a point where we "choose" to believe and choice is a step beyond proof. So, there is a sense in which all truth statements are approximations because they are all made by humans. That's not to say, however, that all truth claims are of equal value. There are criteria for judging the trustworthiness of some approximations over others. I believe that my faith that God created the universe meets a higher standard of judgment than does Michael Dawson's theory that Aliens of some higher intelligence may have launched the universe. Neither of us can prove our theory empirically; but I think the Christian theory has a foundation that is more logical and that better fits the evidence provided by nature, not to mention how it gracefully flows from a total system of prophetic expectation and fulfillment.
Christians should not view postmodernism as any more the "enemy" of our faith than was modernism. Neither system is Christian and both offer important insights into reality. Postmodernism challenges our theological systems, thus exposing them to the fact that they may not be as airtight as we once thought they were. But I think that's a good thing. Has not the body of Christ divided again and again because we were unwilling to admit that there are unsolved mysteries in all of our systems and that God's "truth" which is "out there" refuses to be completely stuffed into any one system? That's not to yield to relativism; that's just to recognize that God's mind is bigger than all of ours put together.
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