A short treatise on absolutes and postmodernity

The post below has got me thinking. There are two basic options for understanding what someone might mean when they argue against absolute truth.

Someone may be denying an independent reality 'out there'. They would see our environment as somehow constructed in the interaction between subject (the perciever) and object (the percieved). This is the sort of radical relativism that people like Chuck Colson get upset about. It's the 'make your own truth' sort of stuff. Reality is what I make it.

Ontheotherhand. It is perfectly possible to affirm an independent reality 'out there', beyond the subject, and yet deny that any description of it is absolute, as I have done below. This is a way of acknowledging subjectivity.

This subjectivity concerns embeddedness. Every perciever has a vantage-point; there is no such thing as a 'view from nowhere'. Nobody is neutral. And the tools of perception (such as senses and language) are not universally identical. No view can be identically generated for all people, of all times, in all places.

That last statement sums up the crux of the issue, I think. For, the tools of perception and meaning are constructed from the interaction of human action with God's creation. Out of such interaction comes all the varied and wonderful means we have to speak to one another: cultural forms, language, symbols, imagery, clothing, address, ritual. This is the same material from which the bible is constructed.

The shaping of such tools has limits. There are some things that the creation can't be made to do or to mean, because it has a God-imposed constitution - as I have written about previously. For instance, sharing our bodies sexually cannot be made a casual affirmation of friendship. The creation under God's rule rebels against such uses, and rebukes us in the judgment of pain, broken relationships, cursed offspring, and disease. The lesson that God's meaning will win was the one that Adam and Eve learnt when they pitted themeselves and the serpent against God in the Garden, over the issue of a certain fruit.

But insofar as our shaping of creation - our working with it - is in harmony with God's intentions, we can create a truly staggering array of beautiful, trustworthy meaning-bearers. And in each of the various times and places in which humans are, such arrays become unique and differentiated.

This richness is the origin of the tremendous variety of cultural forms and features that we find throughout the world. At the tower of Babel God fast-tracked this process of differentiation, but that's beside the point: it would have happened anyway. And hence, as different communities develop, we find the need to translate meaning.

Now, one of the things that Chuck Colson gets wrong in his book on worldviews is precisely this: he doesn't engage intelligently with what it might mean to dismiss absolutes. Reacting uncritically, as if no such dismissal can be a good one, he uses the language of absolutes against 'relativism' to discuss the distinctives of a Christian worldview.

The problem with this is the cultural embeddedness of his readers. Postmodernism, rejecting the philosophy of modernism, has for various reasons (not all of them good) rejected the idea that anyone can speak absolute truth. It has, in the last 50 or so years, taught people to speak a a different kind of language. Colson's language is now therefore alien to our society. I find this approach less than ideal from a Christian educator.

Recall the apostle Paul, speaking on Mars Hill in Athens, using the language and poetry of the Gentile greeks to tell them about the gospel? The gospel does not require a particular type of language in which to take shape. We must therefore speak the language of our hearers if we are to be effective in our communication. We must be all things to all men.

Colson's approach is disappointing because postmodernity does offer genuine pearls. It is a valuable correction to the idolatrous knowlege of modernity, to which Christians have been as susceptible as anyone. And yet he not only leaves his readers without any critical understanding of their own cultural tradition, but affirms this ignorance as effective Christian witness.

His approach is doubly disappointing because what he wants to affirm as orthodox is easily available to the biblically grounded Christian, speaking the language of postmodernity with discernment. Christian users of 'absolute' langauge want to affirm that there is a reality 'out there', that it cannot be manipulated by man's desires; that it is in fact God's reality. Yet I can say all that, and still maintain the sense of relativism that I outlined earlier. Framing the discussion in terms of God's creation and God's rule allows me to speak faithfully about the state in which we find ourselves, while affirming the riches of fully embedded, viewpoint-differentiated perception and meaning.

In short, while denying absolutes, I can still say, with the biblical writers, that "It is a trustworthy saying that...". All I must ensure is that I am selecting linguistic tools that have meaning for my hearers.