Excerpt from, God: a Copernican Revolution: Another objection might run: “Okay, maybe I can agree that God is relate-ive in nature, but that is not what most people believe relativism to be. Surely you do not mean that God is relative as in the moral relativity found in situational ethics, or that truth is relative to the individual or culture. This, we are told, is part of the reason we need a return to absolutes. Without absolutes, they ask, how can there be any Right or Truth that is unchanging and universal, how can there be any meaning in terms of morality or truth? If truth and morals are subject to change, they have lost all meaning have they not?” Certainly God is not relative in the sense of pure subjectivity and individualism, or mere cultural relativism or the idea that “my truth is just as good as your truth, yet God is relative in many of the ordinary senses of the term. Rather than losing all meaning, right and wrong, truth and falsity, life itself becomes much richer in meaning for it. The Bible lays out no systematic theology, no abstract general principles, no announcement of universal truths, nor does it carefully define its basic terms. All these are conclusions we presume to draw from the Bible. Rather, everything in the Bible that is revealed about God and everything God does and says is related to some specific context, occurs in a situation, and is addressed to and in terms of that situation. This is a situational relativity. For instance, the Ten Commandments were not addressed to the entire world; they are not absolutes; they are not universals. Here God did not speak, as in an old Cecil B. DeMille Bible movie fashion, out of the sky with a Charlton Heston kind of voice, proclaiming the universal absolutes. Rather, God addressed the people with whom he is forming a covenant for the purpose of universal redemption. He addressed the people he has rescued from Egyptian slavery, and to these people who know him in a unique way and in terms of his covenant purpose for them, he presented the fundamental terms of the covenant in those Ten Commandments. The only appropriate understanding of these directives is relative to God=s covenant. Not to belabor the point, something similar obtains with all the commandments and truths of God related in the Old Testament. In like fashion, in the New Testament all Jesus’ teachings were presented relative to the formation of the new covenant community, the church. He did not lay out a blueprint for a new universal human society. For instance, in his Sermon on the Mount he addressed his core teachings relative to his disciples, not to the world.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 20:48:27 +0000
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