It has become conventional wisdom in our postmodern culture that all truth is personal and subjective. This malignant denial of objective truth is metastasizing through the body of our society.
It has become conventional wisdom in our postmodern culture that all truth is personal and subjective. This malignant denial of objective truth is metastasizing through the body of our society.
Yesterday, we discussed the courage that is needed in a “post-truth” culture to tell people truth they don’t want to hear. Today, let’s close our week-long conversation about truth by focusing on the courage God’s people have always needed to follow him fully in a fallen world.
In a culture where so many are convinced that “their” truth is “the” truth, it takes genuine courage to speak truth that others don’t want to hear. But such courage is part of what it means to follow Jesus in a fallen world.
Relevance is the currency of our culture. While Paul quoted Greek philosophers to reach Greek philosophers (Acts 17:28) and quoted the Hebrew Bible to reach Jews (cf. Acts 17:1-4), you and I live in a society that measures “truth” by its results in its adherents.
In our culture, sincerity is enough. If England's prime minister sincerely believes he is a Christian (albeit a “very, very bad” one as he recently said), he must be a Christian. Sincerity has replaced truth in our culture. Why won’t this work? One answer is logical: Our postmodern, relativistic culture rejects the existence of absolute truth, which is an absolute truth claim.
Obeying God’s word when we don’t understand his ways is one of the great challenges of the Christian life and a significant obstacle to faith for many skeptics.
Truth matters, ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims. This is why we cannot love someone without speaking the truth.
According to a recent poll published in Reason magazine, trust in American political parties is at a historic low. For the first time, more than 50 percent of the electorate now identifies as Independent, as opposed to Republican or Democrat.
One of the great contributions of Christianity to human history is the very idea that all people should be treated justly. As the influence of Christianity spread across the world, God’s instructions for how Israel should treat the poor and the disabled and the unborn and the foreigner spread as well. Today, both inside and outside of the church, demands to address injustices are ubiquitous.
I appreciate the American impulse to protect and support the rights of minorities, in this case the transgender population. And I want to state clearly that God loves all people, whatever their sexual orientation or gender identity (John 3:16). We are all broken people (Romans 3:23). We are all loved by the God who is love (1 John 4:8).
At the same time, transgender Americans constitute only 0.6 percent of our population. How do we also protect the rights of the majority?
