POETRY: "If All is Relative"

This is from the August/September 2009 issue of First Things

If All Is Relative

An interrogative:

If all is relative

And truth (like time and space)

Has no fixed thought or place

Where God has said, "be still,"

Why can't I simply will

That truth be as it seems

In all my ego-schemes?

So, spinning on my heel,

I'll deem this cosmic wheel--

The whole, not some few stars,

But galaxies as far as

Light itself extends

Or human thought ascends--

May be just what I see,

One vast complexity

All orbiting around me!

--N.E. Dunkle

Rampant Relativism

This morning I received this from one of my Interdisciplinary Studies students who is taking the class online. It is even more painful considering that just last night I watched Hilary and Jackie, the story of the two musical du Pré sisters.

"We are learning about philosophy and religion. Those two subjects are like art, in my opinion. You can look at a picture a thousand different ways and every way you look at it is right, even if that's not the what the artist intended on the picture symbolizing, because that's what you got out of the picture; that's what is important to you. I'm sorry, I just don't understand why I've been graded so harshly on something that I truly believed in....and I really sat down for 2-3 hours and tried to figure out these readings. Then, in just two minutes, I read over what you wrote and find out that what I thought was right the whole time was apparently "wrong"...in something I didn't think had a set 'truth'."

Some people are missionaries to those who have never heard the gospel. Some people are missionaries to those who need to hear it more fully. And some people are missionaries to those who have heard it and can't make the distinction between truth and significance. Count me as one of the latter.

I guess sometimes you don't have to leave your desk to be "missional."

Stoning in Nigeria: You can't have it both ways

Two gay men in Nigeria may face death by stoning if they are convicted under Sharia law..

How to respond to this?

1) Those who are moral relativists will say every person/culture creates his/its own values. But then

a) culturally, we may allow homosexual behavior, but we can't condemn other cultures that don't. Thus we can't condemn the stoning of these Nigerian men.

b) if we do condemn this stoning, we are not simply moral relativists, but epistemological and metaphysical relativists. Contradiction rules! But as Al Plantinga so often says, anything can follow from a contradiction. So stoning these men is simultaneously "appropriate" and not "appropriate." We must both approve and dissaprove, and so we are hamstrung in responding.

2) Those who are not moral relativists will either say:

--stoning these men is right, because
a) homosexual behavior is morally incorrect and stoning is right

--stoning these men is wrong because
a) homosexual behavior is morally correct and and stoning is wrong
b) homosexual behavior is morally incorrect but stoning wrong.

You can't have your cake and eat it, too. As C.S. Lewis has written, "He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."