Relativism

THE “ISMS”
RELATIVISM
DR. JIM DIXON
JOHN 18:37-38
NOVEMBER 21, 2010

Who was Pontius Pilate? Was he a saint? You might find this hard to believe, but the Egyptian Coptic Church has declared Pontius Pilate a saint. They have beatified him and they have canonized him. His feast day is June 25. Also, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has declared Pontius Pilate a saint. His feast day in Ethiopia is also June 25. In the Greek Orthodox Church, Procula, the wife of Pontius Pilate has been declared a saint. That is in the Greek Orthodox Church.

The these churches have declared Pontius Pilate or his wife a saint is because of the early writings of some of the early church fathers, particularly Tertullian and Origen, both of whom write that Pontius Pilate and his wife accepted Christ, that after he was governor of Judea he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior and he and his wife began to serve the church. We don’t know if it is true though. What we do know is that Pontius Pilate, in the time of Christ, was the Roman governor of Judea. We know that he presided over the trial of Christ in Jerusalem. We believe that he died in 39 AD by the order of the insane Roman Emperor Caligula, whose birth name was Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. He went by Caligula, and he was crazy. By his order, by his decree, Pontius Pilate was executed.

We also know that when Jesus appeared before Pilate, Pilate was a very confused man. He had been educated in Rome and he knew the Roman religion, he knew the Hellenized Greek religion, he knew about Jupiter, Zeus, he knew about the Pantheon. Since all roads from around the world lead to Rome, the religions of the world were known to him. He didn’t believe any of them. Now, here stood before him one who is or was proclaimed to be the Messiah, the Christ. Jesus said, “Ego Eimi He Aletheia!” “I am the truth.” “For this I was born, for this I came into the world.” Pilate’s response is classic: “What is truth?” He would have made a perfect 21st century American. What is truth? That is relativism.

We live in a world that is enveloped by the thinking of relativism. You have your truth, I have my truth, there is no absolute truth. It is absolutely true that there is no absolute truth and let’s just get along. So, today as we look at truth and we look at relativism. I want to begin by looking at the claims of modernity and postmodernity. I think if we look at the claims of modernity and postmodernity, we will kind of understand what has gone on in the last couple centuries with regard to the subject of truth.

First of all, we look at modernity. Modernity is a movement, a philosophy really, which grew out of the European Enlightenment, the so-called Age of Reason. Modernity consists in the belief that we can only come to knowledge, and we can only know truth through reason, through the faculty of reason. Reason alone can lead us to the truth. Through reason alone can we attain knowledge of the divine, if there is a God, and through reason alone can we create a better world and perhaps a utopian society. From modernity and the epistemology of the Enlightenment we received the scientific method. There is a sense in which you can trace modernity all the way back to the Greek philosophers, Socrates and Plato and Aristotle but basically out of modernity, after the Age of Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, we received the scientific method.

The scientific method is, in the view of modernity, a kind of the litmus test for truth. There has been a huge buy-in by the church. If you look at the church over the last couple of centuries and even before the Enlightenment, a huge buy-in that we really need to defend the faith by reason. If you look at church leaders over the centuries many of them have sought to defend the faith by means of reason and the faculty of reason. The church developed the ontological argument. The only reason we can imagine a perfect being is because there is one.

The church developed the cosmological argument, that in the universe there is movement and if there is movement there must be a mover and if you trace the sequence back from movement to mover, movement to mover, you will eventually come to an unmovable mover and that unmovable mover is God.

The church developed the teleological argument, that if in the universe we see purpose and we see design there must be an architect.

The church also developed the moral argument. It was first crafted by Immanuel Kant and more recently expanded by C.S. Lewis. The moral argument is simply the statement that the only reason that we have morality is because there is a God. The reason we care about right and wrong almost assumes the existence of a God.

All of these arguments—the cosmological, ontological, teleological, moral—are good. None of them prove God, but they all make God reasonable. So, the church has been able to say, “It is reasonable to have faith, it is reasonable to believe in God. The claims of Jesus Christ and the Christian faith are reasonable claims.” So, the church has sought to defend even the claims of Christ by the faculty of reason. There’s been benefit that has come out of that, but then we live in a changing world. We live in a changing world.

If you go to college or university today you will find that many professors speak of our current American culture as reflected in postmodernity—not modernity but post­ modernity. We are entered into a new time with a new worldview and a new way of thinking. Postmodernity denies that we can reach any truth through the faculty of reason. It denies that we can reach any absolute truth, and in fact that there is absolute truth. In postmodernity you have your truth, I have my truth, what is true for you is not necessarily true for me, let’s just get along.

This is kind of the thinking of postmodernity and in a sense it all began in the scientific world. The scientific world began to be at the end of the 20th century and as we moved into the 21st century the scientific world was kind of turned on its head by new theories and suddenly the realm of science itself became kind of mysterious. With the quantum revolution, the whole concept of matter was turned on its head, and with the biomolecular revolution, the world of biology, the whole concept of life, was turned on its head. With the computer revolution, the whole concept of the mind has kind of turned on its head. Today, many scientists speak of combining the biology of the human brain with nanotechnology and creating a so-called singularity, a kind of super mind.

A lot of this stuff is so amazing to so many people that they just don’t know how to process it. With quantum theory and quark theory, the whole role of the atom has become mysterious. With the multiverse, the whole concept of the universe and the cosmos has changed. There is not just one universe, there may be multi-universes. It is all so amazing. The concept of the time-space continuum is changing, with concepts like folding space and worm holes and leaking universes. With all of these concepts it just kind of feels like truth itself is up for grabs. Even in the world of science, there’s great mystery.

A lot of these theories are just theories, and there’s very little evidence for some of these theories, but still, for many people today it just seems like there is no absolute truth. They would say there is no absolute truth scientifically. There is also no absolute truth morally; there is no scientific truth theologically. Scientifically, it may be true that gravity is a foundational law in this universe but that doesn’t mean it would be true in the multiverse or other universes. Even in this universe, it may be that gravity isn’t as foundational as we think it is. It kind of feels like it is all up for grabs. You have your truth, I have my truth; you have your universe, I have my universe. That is true not just scientifically but morally and theologically.

There is a certain kind of palatability to all of this. It is politically palatable to say, “Hey, we don’t know truth.” It is politically palatable today because you don’t have to offend anybody. You could run for office today because you don’t have to tell anybody they are wrong, the whole world is your voting block, because there is no truth. It is certainly socially palatable. You can have friends of every persuasion and you don’t have to suggest to anybody that they might be wrong because there is no truth. Personally, it is amazingly palatable because personally, you can live however you want to live. You have your own morality. Who is to say that your morality is wrong? It may be wrong for somebody else, but it is not wrong for you. You are large and in charge. This kind of view of the world is, obviously, very popular and palatable.

Let’s take a look at the claims of Jesus Christ. Christ said, “Ego Eimi He Aletheia!” “I am the truth!” Scholars today recognize that this statement is amazingly profound and actually amazingly controversial. He didn’t just say he was a truth in a sea of truths; he said, “I am THE truth.” I am the truth incarnate. In fact, a reference to the Tetragrammaton is veiled within the statement.

What is the Tetragrammaton? It is the name of God, the divine name that God gave to Moses on Mt. Sinai or Mt. Horeb when Moses said, “Who shall I say has sent me? What is your name?” God revealed himself and revealed his divine name as Yahweh. “I am.” “I am that I am.” “I am He who is.” Yahweh. That is the Tetragrammaton, because in the Hebrew script, there are no vowels, just consonants. In the Tetragrammaton there are four consonants: Y-H-W-H, and therefore Tetragrammaton, four letters, the name of God.

You look at the claim of Christ, what is the Greek equivalent to the Hebrew Tetragrammaton? It is the Hebrew word Ego Eimi, YWHW. Jesus was famous for many “I Am” statements where he took the Tetragrammaton and applied it to himself. So, when he said, “Ego Eimi He Aletheia!” He wasn’t just saying, “I am the truth,” he was saying, “I am God, the truth.” This fits what the rest of the Bible proclaims. “His name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, mighty God, Prince of Peace, Emmanuel, God with us.” The title given in the prologue of John’s gospel: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” This title the Word is different in Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. The Jews in the day of Christ spoke Aramaic. In the Greek language this title is logos and it was used to describe the mind of God. Plato used the term logos, to describe the divine mind. In fact, we get the word logic from the Greek word logos. To say Jesus is the Word, to say he is the logos, is to say that he is the mind of God.

Now, that is in the Greek. In Hebrew, the title of the Word is expressed through the term dabar. Dabar was used by the Hebrew people to describe the creative power of God. So, God created the universe by his Word. He spoke the universe into being ex nihilo. So, to say that Jesus is the Word is to say that he is the creative power of God, not just the mind of God, but the creative power of God.

In the Aramaic this title, the Word, is memrah, and for the Jews, the Aramaic speaking Jews in the time of Christ, memrah was circumlocution of the name of God. So many of the Aramaic speaking Jews who were afraid to say the divine name, were afraid to say Yahweh whenever they came to the point where they were about to say Yahweh would say memrah instead. When the Bible calls Jesus the Word, it is saying he is the mind of God, he is the power, the creative power and energy of God and he is God. That is why he can say, “Ego Eimi He Aletheia,” “I am God, the truth.” Revelation 3:7 Jesus wrote to the church of Philadelphia and he said, “The words of the true one,” as he introduced himself, the words of the true one: the words of the one who is true.

In Revelation 3:14 Jesus introduces himself to the church at Laodicea and he says, “The words of the Amen.” He says, “I am the amen.” What does amen mean? You know what amen means? I am sure you have all said amen. In fact, some of you, maybe most of you say the word amen every day, if you pray before meals or you have a little prayer time conclude your prayers with the word amen. The last word in the Bible is amen. “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with all the saints. Amen.” We use this word all the time, but what does it mean? What does it mean when Jesus said, “The words of the amen”?

Some years ago, Barb and I went to Egypt; we went with some of you. We went down to Luxor, down to the temple of Karnak, across the Nile from the Valley of the Kings. We were in the temple of Karnak, led by our Egyptian guide through many of the rooms. We went from one room to another room to another room and finally we came to this space and our guide said that that room that we just entered was the Holy of the Holies. This is where the Jews, he said, got the concept of the Holy of Holies, they got it from us Egyptians, he said. I can tell you that is historically bogus. Then he also went on to say, “They also got the word amen from us. Because whenever we want to take an oath,” and historically whenever Egyptians wanted to take an oath, whenever they want to say this is true, that this is absolutely true, they swore by Amun-Ra, the Egyptian deity Amun, he claimed, is how the Hebrews came up with amen.

I came home and I thought, oh, I have got to research this. I really researched it in tons of texts. Really the etymology of the word amen is very difficult and a mystery and this guide was probably wrong. But it is true that the word amen means truth. So, when Jesus began statement after statement and said, “amen, amen” “truly, truly I say to you.” “Amen, amen” “Verily, verily I say to you.” The meaning of amen is true. So, when Jesus said the words of the amen, he was saying the words of the true one.

So, consistently in the Bible Jesus claims to be the truth. He is the truth absolutely. He is the truth theologically and he is the truth morally. He is even the truth scientifically for he did found the earth in the beginning and the heavens are the works of his hands, but he didn’t come into the world to reveal scientific truth. He came into the world to reveal theological and moral truth. So, he is theologically true because he is the Son of God, he is the visible image of the invisible God. He bears the very impress, it says in Hebrews one, of God’s nature. He has come to reveal the Father, he is God the Son. He is theologically truth and we see God through him.

This proclamation is not well received by the world. When we say that Jesus Christ is the Son of God that is offensive to Muslims; it is offensive in the world of Islam to say that God had a son. If you read the Quran, or if you study the Hadith, which was formed perhaps 100 or 200 years later, you will find the constant statement, “God has no son.” So, in the world of Islam, they view Jesus as a prophet. They do not believe that he died on the cross, they deny the crucifixion, they deny the substitutionary atonement. In Islam you have got to atone for yourself. There is no one who can save you, no one who died for you; you have got to atone for yourself. In Islam, there is no resurrection from the dead. Jesus Christ is not the Son of God.

Now, what is true? If Islam is true, then Jesus is lying. That is why relativism doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. If Jesus is who he said he is then Islam is wrong. You can go to a Buddhist or a Hindu and you can say, “Jesus Christ is the Son of God,” and they are not going to be as offended. They are going to say, “Ok, God has many sons, and there are many gods.” In philosophical Buddhism, there is really very little theology, but if you look at theological Buddhism, you will find pantheism and you will find animism and polytheism. Theological Buddhism is very similar to Hinduism, and very polytheistic. To the Buddhist, Jesus is more than a monk, he is an ascending master, but there are countless ascending masters. To the Hindu, Jesus is more than a guru. He many even be viewed by some Hindus as an avatar, but it doesn’t matter because there are countless avatars. So, if you say, “Jesus is the Son of God,” they say, “Ok, many gods, many children of God.” But, if you say, “Jesus is the only begotten Son of God,” they are offended.

In Judaism, there’s total rejection of the sonship of Jesus Christ, total rejection, although the Hebrew Scriptures all point to Christ. The prophets prophesied about Jesus. If you read Isaiah 53 and even Psalm 22, you see incredible prophecies concerning the Messiah; that he would die by crucifixion, every detail is described. Remember, Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 they were written before the Romans even invented crucifixion as a means of punishment. God knew. God foreknew. The Scriptures all point to Jesus that is not just true in the prophetic writing. Even the feast and festivals of Israel, by their symbolism all point to Christ.

If you look at Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the high priest goes into the Holy of Holies and sprinkles the blood of animals on the Mercy Seat of the Ark of the Covenant, seeking to atone for the sins of the people. The sacrificial lamb, the scapegoat is sent into the wilderness into Azazel. What is that all about? It is about Jesus. Ultimately, it all represents him. Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world and Jesus is the scapegoat, he is our scapegoat who forever removes the sins of his people from them, by his blood. It all points to Jesus Christ, it all points to him. The message of Jesus, the Gospel of Christ, is offensive to many in the world and we know that. As we are commanded by Christ to take his Gospel to every nation, to go into all the world, to be his witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the uppermost parts of the earth. That call is still upon us today. It is not an easy call. Jesus said, “You will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake,” and he said, “I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves.”

In this day and age in which we live it is not PC in a world of relativism to say, “Jesus is the truth. He is the Son of God. He is unique. He is the way and the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father but by him. There is no other name under heaven given amongst men whereby we may be saved. He is savior. He is lord, the hope of the world who died for the sin of the world in substitutionary atonement. Death could not hold him. He rose, he conquered death, he is alive today.” This is the message we are to take to the world. It is not popular, not everywhere. It is what we are to take to our neighborhood; it is what we are to take to our place of work. It is what we are to take to friends. We are to do this in love. Whenever the truth is not wrapped in love and mercy and grace, something gets twisted.

Jesus is not just the truth theologically; he is the truth morally. He is the moral truth. He is not just the Son of God who reveals the father, but he is Son of Man. He is everything man was meant to be. This title, Son of Man, you find all through the Bible and it is really a very deep and complex title, even more complex title than the Son of God. Sometimes it refers to the eschatological Son of Man as in the book of Daniel when the prophet Daniel looks through the portals of time and he sees the Son of Man coming on the final day, descending from the heavens in power and glory to judge the nations. Jesus sometimes used the title that way. He used it to refer to himself again and again and again in the Olivet Discourse Jesus said, “When the Son of Man comes, when I come, when the Son of Man comes in all his power and great glory and all of his angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne, before him shall be gathered all the nations. He shall separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.”

This title, the Son of Man, sometimes this title is used in the sense of the second Adam. Through the first Adam sin came into the world. The first Adam fell. Jesus is the second Adam. He is the representative man, the Son of Man who represented humanity and he did not sin. He lived the righteous life that Adam was meant to live, the righteous life that we were meant to live, that he might become a lamb without spot or blemish and die for the sin of the world. He is not just the truth theologically, not just the Son of God, he is the truth morally. He is righteous. He is the Son of Man, the heavenly Son of Man.

He has given us the Holy Scriptures. The Old Testament all points to him, the New Testament centers on him. In the Gospels we have his story, we have his words. His words in some of your Bibles are scripted in red, red-letter Bibles. You look at the rest of the New Testament and you have books that have come from his apostles by the command of Christ. Jesus said to John, “Write what you see in a book.” Jesus said to the rest of his apostles and disciples, he said, “When the Holy Spirit comes, he will take what is mine and declare it to you. He will bring to your remembrance everything that I have said to you.” That is how we have the New Testament. He said, “My word is truth.” So, he is moral truth.

When you look at the Old Testament and you see the moral law, understand that when you look at the Old Testament there are three different kinds of law there. There is the moral law, the ceremonial law and the civil law. It is very important to understand that distinction. The ceremonial law is different than the moral law. The ceremonial law covered everything from the Levitical dietary laws to the Jewish feasts and festivals and all the laws that regulated those feasts and festivals, to ablutions and ceremonies of purification and even the laws that governed the sacrificial system that was all part of the ceremonial law. The ceremonial law was given by God to a particular people for a particular time and it has been repealed in the New Testament. The ceremonial law has been repealed clearly in the New Testament and you are not to equate that to the moral law which centers on the Decalogue or the Ten Commandments. The civil law is the lex talionis, an eye for an eye, and it was tempered from the words of Jesus Christ. So, it too is different than the moral law.

But the moral law centers on the Decalogue or the Ten Commandments. Don’t think for a second that Jesus repealed the moral law. In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter five, Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to destroy the law. I have not come to destroy it but to fulfill it. I tell you, not one jot or tittle of the moral law will pass away. Heaven and earth will pass away but the moral law will not pass away.” Not one jot or tittle will change. The moral law centers on the Ten Commandments.

“I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt out of the house of bondage, you will have no other gods before me. You will not make for yourself any graven image or any likeness of anything in the heavens above or on the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me but showing steadfast love—showing unquenchable, undying love, showing constant love—to those who love me, to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. Do not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him blameless who takes his name in vain. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days shall you labor and do all your work but the seventh is a Sabbath holy unto the Lord. Honor your mother and father as the Lord has commanded you that your days may be extended and you may be blessed in the land in which the Lord your God has placed you. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou shalt not covet; thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor thy neighbor’s house, nor thy neighbor’s land, menservants, maidservants, etc.” The Decalogue.

Jesus said that not one jot or tittle of the moral law will pass away. The word for jot is the Greek word iota but remember Jesus did not speak in Greek. He may have known Greek in the Hellenized world but he spoke in Hebrew or Aramaic and remember that the Gospels were originally written in Hebrew. Instead of iota it would have been the Hebrew word yod. Iota is the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet, in the Greek language, and yod is the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet, in the Hebrew language. So, Jesus is saying not even the smallest letter will pass away from the law. That is jot.

Tittle comes from titulus, a Latin word, but it is really based on the Greek word keraia, and it refers to the smallest point of a horn, but it was also used to describe the markings placed above the words in both the Greek and Hebrew languages. So, Jesus is saying, with regard to the law, not even the smallest letter will pass away, and not even the smallest mark placed above those letters will pass away from the law. Heaven and earth will pass away. What Jesus did because he is “He Aletheia,” because he is the truth, is expand our understanding of the moral law. So, in the Sermon on the Mount he said, “You heard it said of old, ‘thou shalt not kill.’ Whoever kills shall be liable for judgment. I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother or sister will be liable for judgment. Whoever calls his brother or sister morose will be liable to the Sanhedrin whoever calls his brother or sister ‘raca,’ fool, will be liable for hellfire.”

So what Jesus is doing is taking the moral law and helping us understand it more fully, that murder begins in the heart. The same thing is true when he said, ‘you have heard it said of old, ‘thou shalt not commit adultery,’ I say to you whoever looks upon a woman with lust has already committed adultery in his heart.” He is taking the moral law and he is helping us understand it more fully, again, as he is showing us that adultery also begins in the heart. He is the truth theologically, revealing the Father, but he is the truth morally, the Son of Man who is righteous and fulfilled all righteousness on our behalf.

I love that song “Fairest Lord Jesus.” It is one of my all-time favorites. The final verse of “Fairest Lord Jesus” are, “Beautiful savior, Lord of the nations, Son of God and Son of Man, Glory and honor, praise, adoration now and forever more be thine. It’s a beautiful song written by Roman Catholic Jesuits in Germany in the year 1622. For almost 400 years Christians have sung those words, “Son of God, Son of Man.” You see, he is the truth theologically and he is the truth morally. We have this charge that is given to us that we are to take his truth to the world. Remember, though, if you hold his truth, you must also hold his love. The truth that we take to the world must be wrapped in his love, his mercy, and his grace. Otherwise, it gets twisted. Even if we wrap it in love, mercy and grace we are not going to always be popular, Jesus promised us we wouldn’t, but we are called to be faithful. We are called to be faithful to the end. No matter what the culture, no matter the time, no matter how relativistic or how much relativism exists in the communities that surround us.

Some of you say, “You know, I like Jesus but I just don’t like Paul.” I hear that a lot from red­ letter Christians. You know what red-letter Christians are? We were talking about red-letter editions of the Bible. There are Christians out there that say, “If Jesus said it that’s okay, I just read the red letters. Don’t give me any of this Paul stuff.” What a horrible mistake. Jesus met Paul on the Damascus Road, turned his life on his head, transformed him, indwelt him, empowered him, anointed him and called him and sent him to the nations and charged him to write so that Jesus speaks through Paul.

You might say, “You know Paul talks a lot about sex stuff, seems overly concerned with our sexual behavior, Jesus doesn’t say much about that. I kind of feel better about Jesus.” You have got to understand what is going on there. I mean, Jesus came to the Jews and to the nation of Israel and to the culture of the Jews. In Israel there were sex laws and those laws were stern and strict and the boundaries were clear and there were consequences in Jewish communities for sexual misconduct. Adultery was punished. By the letter of the law, it was punished with execution and stoning. Fornication was called sin. Homosexuality was called an abomination. This was the Jewish culture to which Christ came. Christ affirmed the moral law, but he wanted them to have compassion and he wanted them to have love, in a community and a culture that was full of self-righteousness.

Jesus sends Paul to the gentiles and in the gentiles, there is virtually no sexual mores. He goes to the Hellenized world, he goes to the Greek and Roman world, he goes into towns and cities and villages. He sees in each city an acropolis, and on the acropolis prostitutes—male prostitutes, female prostitutes, prostitutes for homosexuals, prostitutes for heterosexuals. Everything is okay. There is no moral right or wrong sexually. There is just rampant promiscuity. So, Paul says what he says inspired by Christ, inspired by Jesus to say every word. So be very careful if you think, oh, I will take one part of the New Testament and I will just reject the rest. Jesus is okay, everyone else not so much. Be careful. Jesus has given us the truth, we are to live it out, submit our lives to it. We are to proclaim that truth to the world. You are the light of the world; you are the salt of the earth. Don’t hide your light under a bushel. The charge of Christ is clear, not easy, but it is clear.

As we conclude our “isms” series, we know we live in a world where there are many isms, many philosophies, many world views, many of them that challenge the community of Christ and the call that is upon them. Be faithful. Fight the good fight. Keep the faith. Finish the race. He has laid up for you a crown of righteousness that will be rewarded one day to all who love his appearing. This is the clear teaching of the Word of God. This call is upon our generation, we may be the final generation, or close to it, but we will be judged by our faithfulness. We are saved by his grace. We are saved by his mercy. We are saved by his shed blood but are still called to faithfulness. Let’s look to the Lord with a word of prayer.