How Does Truth Command Me?

The basic foundation of our culture today is moral relativism, and I call that a myth. In other words, we are basing our civilization and our culture on a moral concept, ladies and gentlemen, that can't possibly be true.

As a culture, we have forgotten God, and without God's truth, we've also forgotten how to think. This week on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. R.C. Sproul has provided us with a blueprint for thinking. Today his focus is on what determines right and wrong. Let's join R.C.

now. So far in our examination of the chief elements that are necessary to construct a Christian life and worldview, we've considered briefly epistemology, the science of knowing how we come to knowledge at all, how do we discern what things are true and what are not. We've looked briefly also at the task of metaphysics, which is man's attempt to probe those questions beyond what we can see and think and sense with the rest of our empirical powers. And then we looked at the character of God as being essential for understanding how we view the world and our lives. And then last we examined how our understanding of mankind influences how we treat people, how we respond to God and the like. Now in this fifth session, as we consider the elements of life and worldview, we're going to look now at ethics. And during these moments together, we've had this special guest be with us on each occasion, Mr. Rodin's The Thinker, and I've mused as we've gone along over what it is that possibly has him so absorbed continuously in such deep and provocative cogitation.

And I think I know the answer. During the interim between the last lecture and this lecture, I had a private conversation with the statue, and he revealed to me the subject matter of his heavy concentration. He said he's been thinking about the Beatles, not the musical Beatles. Rodin doesn't have time for that, but rather the bugs that we call Beatles. And The Thinker was pondering this question, do Beatles, Japanese Beatles, whatever kind of Beatle is your favorite kind of Beatle, he said, do Beatles have consciences? Do Beatles commit crimes against other Beatles? Are there Beatle courts and Beatle prisons? This is the kind of speculation that the artist has caught now and immortalized in stone.

Now, of course, I'm teasing, but the question is not a joke. Do other creatures in this world struggle with questions of guilt and of justice? Do other creatures in this world struggle with matters of righteousness? Do Beatles care whether other Beatles behave in a morally appropriate way? Or is the subject of ethics and morality uniquely a human concern? There are those who are convinced in our day and age that ethics should be as important to us as it would be to Beatles and no more, because we are nothing but more sophisticated garden variety Beatles. Again, our anthropology determines ultimately our ethics. How we view the importance of humanity will have tremendous influence on how we behave.

It's that simple. Now, as I've used the blackboard in various occasions, I keep walking past these bookcases, and I promise you that none of these books were placed here as stage props or any of that like, but my eye keeps falling on this little book here, which is a leather-bound edition of C.S. Lewis's immortal work now called Mere Christianity. As many years as Lewis has been dead, this book still sells over 100,000 copies every year, just in the English-speaking world, Mere Christianity. It's a book that in simple terms set forth the central claims of the Christian faith and has been useful, particularly among college students and intellectually oriented people, to give them an initial presentation of the cardinal tenets of Christianity.

And as I was just leafing through this for old times' sake, I noticed the title of the very first chapter. It reads, Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe. Right and wrong as a clue to the meaning of the universe. It was Dostoevsky who said, pondering the pessimism of his age of those who had declared the death of God. As he pondered the implications of that, Dostoevsky said, if there is no God, then all things are permissible. Immanuel Kant, who in many regards dug the grave of the classical defense of Christian theology. In spite of his agnosticism with respect to proving the existence of God, Kant declared in his final writings, practically speaking, as I mentioned before, we must live as if there is a God. And though Kant banished God from theoretical thought, he went around to the back door of the house, and where he banished God out the front door, he went around and opened the back door and ushered God back in on practical grounds.

His argument for the existence of God was not theoretical, not rational, not empirical, but moral. Kant argued in this fashion, for ethics to be meaningful, this is a simplified, shorthand version of it, for ethics to be meaningful, there must be justice. That is before anybody has a right to say, you must, you ought, or you should. And everyone in this room has said that to somebody else, you ought to do this. And you've all heard people give you rules and regulations. Kant said before any of that can possibly be meaningful, there must be justice. Why? Because if there's no justice, why should we be concerned about doing what is right or doing what is wrong?

Who cares? He went on to argue that we can look around the world and we can see manifest injustice. We can see people who are rewarded, who don't deserve to be rewarded, and people who are punished and afflicted, though they are innocent. Some even cry out in despair, there is no justice in this world.

Well, that's not altogether true. There is some justice, but I doubt if anyone in here would think there's enough justice in this world. And if justice is thwarted at any point, Kant says, why should we be concerned about ethics? So he says, there has to be justice. He said, well, what would there have to be for there to be justice? Well, there would have to be a judge, and the judge would have to be just, and the judge would have to be omnipotent, and all the rest, and he'd have to be righteous himself, and we would have to survive the grave in order to go to a place where there is justice. And by the time Kant's finished on his practical argument, he's constructed almost the whole of the Christian faith with a God who is just, who promises a last judgment and holds every human being accountable for every action that we perform.

But remember what he said. He said, that doesn't prove that God exists. Only, he is saying, that it proves the necessity of the existence of God for ethics to be meaningful.

And if ethics are not meaningful, somehow, Kant said, society ultimately becomes impossible. The nineteenth century saw people who were not inclined towards religious commitment and so on, throwing their hats in the air, rejoicing over their newfound freedom when God was banished from the universe. They said, no more teachers, you know, no more books, no more sassy, look, school's out. I don't have to listen anymore to this God who is dead, who is always running around shaking his finger in the face saying, thou shalt not do this, and thou shalt not do that, and if you do this, you're going to go to hell, and so on. Down with Moses, down with Yahweh, down with Jesus, man is free now to carve out his own destiny. The good news of nineteenth century philosophy was that man is no longer accountable to God. The message of twentieth century philosophy is that man no longer counts. And that's a simple step in logic, isn't it? If you're not accountable for your life ultimately, that means ultimately your life doesn't count. That's what Dostoevsky was getting at.

That's what Lewis is saying here when he says right and wrong is a clue to the very meaning of the universe, because if there is no right and there is no wrong, there can't possibly be any meaning. And yet we glibly hear in every quarter in the United States of America, there are no absolutes. We've gone through a moral revolution where preference has replaced duty, and special interests replace law. I've had discussion after discussion with those involved in the arena of politics and law, and I hear the cliché over and over and over again, you can't legislate morality. You can't legislate morality. You can't legislate morality. Now what that phrase used to mean, ladies and gentlemen, was that just because you pass a law does not guarantee that people's behavioral patterns are going to change. But now that phrase means that it is illegitimate for any branch of the government to be involved in the exercise of passing laws of a moral character, because morality is dead.

There's no such thing as black and white, right and wrong. Goodness or badness, morality has become a relative matter. We have lived through the relativization of ethics in our own generation. And I say to people who say you can't legislate morality, I say, what do you legislate? The state burner, the state bird? But even the state bird has moral ramifications and moral implications of ecology, if nothing else. We have lived through the relativization of ethics in our own generation. And I say to people who say you can't legislate morality, I say, what do you legislate?

The state bird? But even the state bird has moral ramifications and moral implications of ecology, if nothing else. How I drive my car with respect and with responsibility towards my neighbor is a moral matter. If you can't legislate morality, should we have laws against murder?

If you can't legislate morality, should we have laws against theft? These are moral matters. But our society really doesn't believe in total moral relativism because it understands, ladies and gentlemen, that in a situation, in an environment of pure moral relativism, society is impossible. Historians have told us that every civilization, every culture in world history has been built upon the foundation of a philosophy, a religion, or a mythology, something that gave unifying stability to the culture. We have gone through, I'm convinced, three stages in American history. We went through the initial stage when the pilgrims came here of a theological foundation for our civilization that then passed in the 18th century from a theological foundation to a philosophical foundation. And now we are teetering precariously, much as a fiddler on the roof, on the basis of a mythological foundation.

What do I mean by that? I mean by that that the basic foundation of our culture today is moral relativism. And I call that a myth because what it has in common with a myth is that myths have no real correspondence ultimately to objective truth. In other words, we are basing our civilization and our culture on a moral concept, ladies and gentlemen, that can't possibly be true. And that's why we can't live with it. That's why we approach more and more every day internal warfare between and among various preference and special interest groups.

I mean, we're in serious trouble. In Wichita, Kansas, thousands of people have been thrown in prison because they were involved in protesting abortion clinics where abortion in the third trimester was being performed legally. So far, that's the largest protest event centering on abortion. It would not surprise me to see that issue, which I think is the most serious ethical issue that the United States of America has ever had to wrestle with in its history. And the fact and the fact that it is as nonviolent as it has been so far in our culture is only further testimony to the fact that people don't care about ethics in our culture.

In any other generation, it would have provoked a civil war. And it may still in our culture. But what are the guiding ethical principles that control the life and worldview of the culture in which you live? I've mentioned Nietzsche already, and I mentioned Nietzsche's work on biological heroism. Nietzsche also had much to say about ethics.

Nietzsche made a distinction between what he called master morality and herd morality. When he called for the Superman to come down and create a new civilization, he was asking that someone who would have the courage to do what he wanted to do, to live by his own rules, to live by his own standards, Nietzsche described his existential hero as somebody who built his home on the slopes of Vesuvius. He sailed his ship into uncharted seas. He shook his fist in defiance of God. He created his own law. That's the existential hero. He doesn't answer to anybody else's rules, anybody else's regulation.

He does his own thing. That was Nietzsche's hero, the master morality, the Superman who would dare to do what he wanted to do to exercise his own will to power. Now, I disagree with all that. But one thing I agree with emphatically with Nietzsche in his analysis of 19th century Europe, he said that 19th century Europe in the main as a civilization, as a culture, lives according to a herd morality. Let me write that down, a herd morality.

Where have you heard that before? All we like sheep have been led astray. Did you ever really watch a flock of sheep move through a meadow and see the abrupt changes? They never go in a straight line.

They're all over the place. It's organized chaos if you want a contradiction in turn. Well, the one who happens to be in front, if it moves in this direction, everybody goes in that direction.

Sheep obviously don't give a whole lot of careful ethical analysis in making decisions about which step they're going to take next. They go with the flow. They go with the flow. That's the American ideal. Hey, sit loose. You know, just go with the flow.

Well, be cool. It's the herd morality. If ever there was a need for a reformation of ethics, it's now, not only in government and in the school, but especially in the church.

But for that to happen, it requires, among other things, moral courage. I saw something on television recently that I could hardly believe, but I was seeing. I mean, there aren't too many things that shocked me. But a newscaster came on and announced to the world that a catastrophic upheaval was taking place in the Soviet Union. They said a coup was underway in which the premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, had been overthrown and was being held hostage in his vacation, Dasha, in the Crimea with his family. And eight members of the inner council of the power structure of Russia and Moscow had seized control of the nation. And all of the hopes of the West for ongoing reform and for the total thawing of the Cold War and the establishment of peaceful, harmonious relationships among nations in one small announcement were shattered. And the films started showing tanks rolling down the center boulevards of Moscow because those who were leading the coup had the military behind them. And the tanks stopped, and the people, like people always in the herd, shrunk back in terror. And once again, the forces of tyranny and of evil were about to imprison a nation. And then I saw what I couldn't believe with my own eye.

Did you see it? One man. One man against the herd. One man steps out of the crowd. One man with courage in the presence of tanks and an organized political coup runs up and jumps on top of a tank and screams at the people who are saying, no. He said, this is wrong.

And at the day before, people hadn't heard the name of Boris Yeltsin. In that one moment, he became an international hero. I don't know what his religious convictions are, but I know he's a man with moral courage, a man who said no to the crowd, a man who said no to the herd, a man who said yes to what is right. That's what Christianity is about.

The bottom line of Christianity is that we are called to seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness. That's an ethical mandate. And if the rest of the world doesn't even believe there is such a thing as right or wrong, as I said, in a relativistic culture, nobody's a consistent relativist.

We know that. You can say that there are no absolutes except the absolute, that there's absolutely no absolutes. You know, that is a self-defeating statement. People say they don't believe in any ultimate rules of right and wrong until you steal their property.

The moment you take their private property, they're jumping up and down saying, that's not fair. That's not right. Now, the myth of moral relativism is modern man's attempt to create an ethical license for sin, to call evil good and good evil. But of course, if there is no God, there is no good. There is no evil.

And it doesn't matter who jumps on the tank and who jumps off. But a Christian life and worldview seeks to establish the rules of thinking, the rules of determining how we know what is true. Because not everything that everybody says is true.

Maybe that's what has him so preoccupied. Maybe he's sitting here wondering, who in the world is speaking the truth? Who do you trust? Who's telling the truth?

How do you know? That's a question of epistemology. Ultimately, what is the truth?

What is it? The question of is-ness. What is real? Ultimately, that's a metaphysical question. Who is the truth is a theological question. How does the truth relate to me and define me is an anthropological question. And how the truth commands me is an ethical question. These are the elements of a Christian life and worldview. Ignore one of them, and you will have a distorted view of the world and of your own life. You know, this is the kind of teaching that drew me to R.C.

back in the early 90s. I had only heard these concepts in a classroom, and they seemed rather abstract to me. But to hear Dr. Sproul bring a Christian biblical worldview to these concepts, I had only heard these concepts in a classroom, and I had only heard them in a classroom, and I had only heard them in a classroom. And that's why I hope you'll request this series. There are five messages, and we will add them to your online learning library when you give a donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. Once you've made your request, we'll also send you Dr. Sproul's series, The Consequences of Ideas. There are 35 messages there surveying Western thought through the centuries.

R.C. shows us the impact of these ideas on world events, theology, and culture. You can request it, along with the series Blueprint for Thinking, when you call us at 800-435-4343 or when you go online to renewingyourmind.org. Let me also invite you to take a look at our library of podcasts. You can travel back in time with Dr. Stephen Nichols and his podcast, Five Minutes in Church History, experience new moments of insight from Dr. Sproul's lifetime of Bible study on Ultimately with R.C. Sproul, and you can find biblical and theological answers on Ask Ligonier. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app to take this trusted teaching with you on the go. Well, within Christianity, two concepts will almost always cause controversy. Those are total depravity and predestination. Next week, Dr. Stephen Lawson joins us to show how those two doctrines are clearly taught in the Gospel of John. I hope you'll make plans to join us, beginning Monday, here on Renewing Your Mind. .