Letters
Dear Christis,
I write in regard of Fleur Anderson’s article, Worlds Apart? (Issue 15). I wish to note, with thanks, Fleur’s perceptive comments concerning the dominant world views of our own environment, that of York University in 1992, etc. To be constantly aware of informing world views and to keep one’s own in check is certainly an absolutely essential task for all Christians.
However, I would wish to mention a brief point which was made in the said article, a point which I feel needs a little qualification. I refer to the article’s insistence that, outside Christianity, “Reality is seen as highly subjective and Absolute Truths are banished” and that it is the believer’s task to “resurrect Absolute Truths”. Now, this all sounds very solid and noble, but does it in fact mean anything very much? Well, I would suggest that yes! life is highly subjective, and would ask if anyone really has any other understanding than that? It is, in fact, the way that understanding grows and that people act and react. If I try to act, or even think, I do so conditionally and RELATIVELY, relative to all the aspects of my lifetime’s experience, to the collective consciousness of my time and location. Any value-judgement which I try to execute will and must be socio-culturally and historio-geographically and psycho-linguistically determined. Academics may say that this is the great discovery of the post-modern, post-structuralist world, and in a sense it is, but it is also a revealed cipher which comes to us through Jesus through God’s Word, as well as tallying with our experience. For instance, when Jesus tells us to feed the sick he doesn’t furnish us with a cookery book, and when he tells us to clothe the naked he doesn’t design “Heaven’s Winter Collection” for us!! At the risk of sounding pedantic, I only make these analogies to instance the fact that Christian understandings of value are relative to the conditioning factors that bring them into play. What I mean to ask, in fact, is the question: what are the Absolute Truths?
Well, as a Christian, one has to say that they boil down to loving God more than yourself and loving other people more than yourself, and if that is too ethereal then we reduce it still further to the Golden Rule,”Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Now, these ideas stand as ‘truths’ (they are, in fact, ‘truths’ that most people, Christian or otherwise, would agree with, at least in vague principle), yet they will find their expression in RELATIVE manners. Just as there is no such thing as an ‘Absolute human condition’, there can be no such thing as an ‘Absolute Truth’ in the sense of being a specific, universal answer for universal problems. The only shared human universals are the shared discontinuities, and a moment’s further thought about either of these will soon reveal to us that birth and death are just as intimately tied to the peculiarities of socio-historical structurings as everything else.
I don’t wish readers to get the wrong idea here. I am not suggesting that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are in any sense meaningless concepts. Quite the opposite, in fact. I am suggesting that it is actually true that their values both are and must be worked out relative to one another if we are to engage with the demands and commands of our Lord, Jesus Christ.
It remains for me to add that there is one, final Truth (this time, with a capital ‘T’, I believe), and that is that Jesus Christ is Lord. There is also one question that is asked of all who live, and that is “What do you make of the Christ?”. Neither the concept nor the question allow for indecision, yet even here the manner in which the truth is known as such or the question is understood and then answered is relative, linked intimately to each individual who encounters it.
Paul Trathen