"THERE ARE NO ABSOLUTES"

Charles Colson tells about having dinner with a media personality and trying to talk with him about Christianity. Colson told him how he had come to Christ. "Obviously Jesus worked for you," his friend replied, but went on to tell him about someone he knew whose life had been turned around by New Age spirituality. "Crystals, channeling — it worked for her. Just like your Jesus."

Colson tried to explain the difference, but got nowhere. He raised the issue of death and the afterlife, but his friend did not believe in Heaven or Hell and was not particularly bothered by the prospect of dying.

Colson explained what the Bible said, but his friend did not believe in the Bible or any other spiritual authority.

Finally, Colson mentioned a Woody Allen movie, Crimes and Misdemeanors, about a killer who silences his conscience by concluding that life is nothing more than the survival of the fittest. The friend became thoughtful. Colson followed with examples from Tolstoy and C. S. Lewis on the reality of the moral law. The friend was following him. Then Colson cited the epistle of Romans on human inability to keep the law. His friend then paid close attention to the message of Christ's atoning work on the cross.

Although the friend did not become a Christian, Colson felt that he finally had broken through at least some of his defenses. The difficulty was in finding a common frame of reference. Because of his friend's mind-set, the usual evangelistic approaches did not work. "My experience," says Colson, "is a sobering illustration of how resistant the modern mind has become to the Christian message. And it raises serious questions about the effectiveness of traditional evangelistic methods in our age. For the spirit of the age is changing more quickly than many of us realize."

THERE ARE NO ABSOLUTES

It is hard to witness to truth to people who believe that truth is relative ("Jesus works for you; crystals work for her"). It is hard to proclaim the forgiveness of sins to people who believe that, since morality is relative, they have no sins to forgive.

According to a recent poll, 66 percent of Americans believe that "there is no such thing as absolute truth." Among young adults, the percentage is even higher: 72 percent of those between eighteen and twenty-five do not believe absolutes exist.

To disbelieve in truth is, of course, self-contradictory. To believe means to think something is true; to say, "It's true that nothing is true" is intrinsically meaningless nonsense. The very statement — "there is no absolute truth" — is an absolute truth. People have bandied about such concepts for centuries as a sort of philosophical parlor game, but have seldom taken these seriously. Today it is not just some esoteric and eccentric philosophers who hold this deeply problematic view of truth, but the average man on the street. It is not the lunatic fringe rejecting the very concept of truth, but two-thirds of the American people.

Moreover, the poll goes on to show that 53 percent of those who call themselves evangelical Christians believe that there are no absolutes. This means that the majority of those who say that they believe in the authority of the Bible and know Christ as their Savior nevertheless agree that "there is no such thing as absolute truth." Not Christ? No, although He presumably "works for them." Not the Bible? Apparently not, although 88 percent of evangelicals believe that "The Bible is the written word of God and is totally accurate in all it teaches." Bizarrely, 70 percent of all Americans claim to accept this high view of Scripture, which is practically the same number as those who say "there are no absolutes."

What is going on here? Perhaps those polled did not understand the question or the implications of what they claimed to believe. Some of the evangelical sceptics in the 53 percent may be solid Christians who were only parroting what they heard on television, oblivious to the theological implications of this pop philosophy. The polls may reflect ignorance or confusion. Even so, it amounts to the same thing. Holding mutually inconsistent ideas is a sure sign of believing that there are no absolute truths.

The rejection of absolutes is not just a fine point in philosophy. Many of those polled no doubt took the question as referring not so much to epistemology as to morality. Relative values accompany the relativism of truth.

Up until now, societies have always regulated sexuality by strict moral guidelines. This has been the case in all ages, for all religions, and for all cultures. Suddenly, sex outside of marriage has become routinely accepted. In 1969, well into the "sexual revolution," 68 percent of Americans believed that sexual relations before marriage are wrong. In 1987, a supposedly conservative era already frightened by AIDS, only 46 percent — less than half — believed that premarital sex is wrong. In 1992 only 33 percent reject premarital sex.

In issue after issue, people are casually dismissing timehonored moral absolutes. The killing of a child in the womb used to be considered a horrible, almost unspeakable evil. Today abortion is not just legal. It has been transformed into something good, a constitutional right. People once considered killing the handicapped, the sick, and the aged an unthinkable atrocity. Today they see euthanasia as an act of compassion.

These moral inversions are taking place not only in the secular world, but within what passes as Christendom. A recent study claimed that 56 percent of single "fundamentalists" engage in sex outside of marriage. This is about the same as the rate for "liberals" (57 percent). (Ironically, the church with the strictest teachings about sexual morality and the greatest emphasis on the role of good works in salvation may have the most permissive members. According to this study, 66 percent of single Roman Catholics are sexually active. American Catholics may be even more permissive than secular Americans. The study claims that while 67 percent of Americans accept premarital sex, 83 percent of Catholics do, in complete opposition to the teaching of their church.) Along the same lines, 49 percent of Protestants and 47 percent of Catholics consider themselves "pro-choice" when it comes to abortion.Some 49 percent of evangelicals and a startling 71 percent of Catholics say they believe in euthanasia, apparently assuming that "Thou shalt not kill" is not an...