Pluralism and Relativism

Floralism says not only are all views equally tolerable, but all views are equally valid. And if that's the case, then we're saying if every view has as much validity as the next view, truth is slain. You can have truths, but truth is impossible. Then you realize that once you destroy truth with a capital T, even truths aren't true. Does it bother you when you hear someone say, well, that's just your truth? It seems that your truth, my truth, is the motto of the day, and to offend anybody is to make the claim, as R.C. Sproul just called it, to knowing the truth with a capital T. It's good to have you with us for this Thursday edition of Renewing Your Mind.

I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. It's not an overstatement to say that truth is under attack today. We see it in the world, and we can also see it in the church. The desire to proclaim, teach, and defend truth, the truth about who God is, and the truth of His word is why Renewing Your Mind was launched almost 30 years ago, and why Ligonier Ministries does what we do day in and day out. So know that when you support Renewing Your Mind and Ligonier, you really are joining what could be called a fellowship of truths.

So thank you for your continued prayerful and financial support. Your truth, my truth, it's a saying that's born out of a pluralistic and relativistic society. And that's our topic today.

Here's Dr. Sproul. In this session, we're going to consider the last of the ideologies that together make up the cultural foundation in which we live that we put under the general heading at the beginning of secularism. And in this session, we're going to be concerned with pluralism and relativism. And I'd like to begin by going back to the board and to this line of demarcation that I've been talking about throughout this series that separates this time from the eternal world, that barrier to the transcendent realm that many have seen to be the reason why man is confined and restricted to this time and this place being cut off and isolated from any contact with the eternal and the transcendent. We mentioned already that the transcendent realm is where we find unity. The world in which we live is the world of diversity. By the same token, the universals are beyond the line, the particulars of our experience are here in the now, and also the transcendent realm is the realm of the absolute, and this side of the line is the realm of the relative. Now when we talk about pluralism, which you've heard much about I'm sure in the culture, the basic idea of pluralism is that we have diversity but no ultimate unity to bring the diverse things of our experience together into a coherent whole. We have particulars but we have no universals. We have the relative but no absolute. One of the ways I like to illustrate this is by calling attention to the motto for the United States of America.

What is it? What's our motto? E pluribus unum, which means from the many out of the plural one, and it calls attention to the dream of our forefathers that people from diverse backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds, various religious orientations, and so on came to this country from all of the nations of Europe and other parts of the world, and they formed one nation. Out of that plurality and diversity of background, unity emerged, and the idea in our Constitution and Declaration was that we would have one nation under God so that there was a transcendent being and transcendent truth that would be the basis to unify all these disparate groups and ideas that were coming together. Now, in our day, once we get to pluralism, we take a significant step away from the original idea upon which this nation was founded. Originally, the idea was you take from the diversity or the plurality and bring them together into harmony, but now modern man is saying he's cut off from God, cut off from the transcendent point of unity so that all we are left with is the plurality. So the new motto for the new understanding of the culture would be what?

Something like e pluribus pluris, okay, from the many, many. Now there's a big difference between talking about plurality and pluralism. To speak of a plurality simply describes that there are many diverse views or peoples or backgrounds. As soon as again you add that suffix "-ism-" on the end of the word plural, what are you saying? You're saying that the plurality is all that there is.

There is plurality but no unity, nothing that brings ultimate coherence to bear. Now the buzzword for our century is the word relativity. I think it's fascinating that we see certain buzzwords that become captive terms during various time periods in Western civilization. In the 19th century the buzzword was what?

The word that was sort of used as the open sesame, the key, the magic lantern that would illumine all of the problems of human development. The key in the 19th century was the word evolution, and when you think of evolution, what science do you think of it with? Biology or anthropology, we think of it simply as a scientific term to describe the progressive development of the human race or of the planet from its early origins. But in the 19th century, in the intellectual world, evolution was applied not just to the development of the species or to the progress of mankind, but it was applied across the boards to all different kinds of sciences.

All of history was now being interpreted in the scheme of evolution, a movement from the simple to the complex, from the primitive to the sophisticated. Theology was understood in the 19th century through categories of evolution. With the rise of the higher critical school and biblical scholarship, the idea came to the foreground that the emergence of monotheism, of the belief in one God, was a relatively late development in the history of religion, in fact as recent as the 8th century B.C. with the advent of the prophets. That Moses wasn't really a monotheist and Abraham certainly wasn't a monotheist.

They were primitives, they were animists, and only later on in biblical history did the idea of monotheism emerge. And so this critical approach to the Old Testament was provoked and stimulated by the application of categories of evolution to the Bible. Not only did we find it there, but we found it in theories of politics and in economics and so on.

That is to say philosophy, theology, economics, history, all of these different disciplines were working under the influence of this all-embracing concept of evolution in the 19th century. But the 20th century has seen a new word replace evolution as the buzzword, and that buzzword is relativity. I mean if you think of the changes in your life that have been brought about by the scientific revolution of our century that keys on Einstein's theory of relativity. We call this age the atomic age with the threat of nuclear war hanging over your heads daily and new possibilities of power generated from nuclear energy.

Our lives have changed. Our culture has been reshaped by a massive breakthrough in the world of physics, teed by the theory of relativity. Well, in its simplest form, relativity on a scientific basis simply has to do with descriptions of motion and that we can say that motion can be considered from more than one reference point, that it doesn't matter if I am moving towards you, we can consider my motion from my perspective or from your perspective, we can have a different reference point, and that there's a sense in which that motion is relative. It is relative to what? To a particular reference point. So relativity in motion is defined or determined by various reference points.

But again, it's a big jump from relativity to relativism, and the jump takes place at this point. It's one thing to say that motion is relative to a reference point. It's another thing to say everything is relative. How many of you have ever heard that statement? Everything is relative.

You use it. You go ahead and perpetrate the myth of the contemporary culture. Everything is relative. If everything is relative, then nothing is concrete.

Nothing is ultimately real. Nothing is ultimately true, because if everything is relative to everything else, there is no ultimate reference point, and that's precisely where modern secular man finds himself in the 20th century, that he lives his life with no ultimate, fixed, stable, absolute reference point that defines his life or the meaning of his existence. See, if everything is relative, you are relative, and there's no substance to the meaning of your very life. That's the crisis that we find in pluralism, no ultimate point of reference.

I've mentioned it this way before, but I want to repeat it for the sake of relating it to the question of pluralism and relativism. What this means is that, as I say, you have particulars but no universals, you have relatives but no absolutes. Now, that's very abstract.

Let's make it just a little bit less abstract for a moment, and then we'll try to make it even more relevant to where you live. This means that you have values but no value. You have truths but no truth, purposes but no purpose, things that are beautiful but no beauty.

That is, you have no fixed standards by which to measure or to judge values, truth, purpose, beauty. You live in a world of ultimate chaos once you embrace pluralism. Now, pluralism has not only been accepted as a working ideology in the secular culture, but the great tragedy of our day is that it has been widely embraced in the church. How many times have you heard it said of a church, we are a pluralistic church, which means we have all different kinds of theology, all different kinds of viewpoints. And it's not just a question of diversity within unity where the Bible describes the body of Christ as a body that has diversity and unity, but pluralism suggests more than just diverse opinions running around. It involves contradictory views of Christ, of God, of the very essence of the Christian faith, and that's alright. Once a church embraces pluralism, it's said it doesn't matter whether we agree on even the essential points of the Christian faith because it's all relative. I was asked to speak at a conclave of religious leaders a year ago, and I said at that point, I said, if anybody comes to you and tries to sell you on the virtue of pluralism as a basis for church renewal, run for your life because pluralism as a philosophical idea is the very antithesis of Christianity.

No church can survive for long in that kind of chaos. And when I was finished with my address, one of the members of the group stood up and started to speak in favor of pluralism, and I couldn't be a hypocrite as soon as he started to talk in favor of pluralism. I ran away from the podium and ran out the door to his shock and everyone else's consternation. I ran. I ran right out of the room and left hundreds of people sitting there looking for a speaker who had just vanished. And finally, I popped my head back in the door, and I said, I just told you people ten minutes ago if anybody tries to enjoin the virtues of pluralism to run for your life, so I had to live it out myself and run, and so I did.

But then I came back and dueled with him a little further. But I want to illustrate this in more concrete ways, and my favorite illustration for how this works out goes back to when our daughter entered kindergarten for the first time at a very progressive school in Boston, very sophisticated curriculum, and I was aware of the fact that when we turned her over to the public school system, at that moment there was a sense in which we were no longer the dominant or the primary influence of the shaping of her mind and of her ideas because now she was going to be sitting under somebody else's tutelage for six or seven hours a day, and that's a traumatic thing for those who are concerned about the development of the mind of the child. And so I wanted to monitor very closely the education that she was getting, and she would come home after the first couple of days of kindergarten, and I said, what did you do today in school?

And she said, well, we played with this puzzle, and we played with that puzzle, and we worked with modeling clay and so on, and I thought, well, that doesn't seem too dangerous, and I wasn't too alarmed. And after about six weeks, we got a notice in the mail that there would be an open house for parents where the principal of the school would explain carefully the curriculum for the children. And Vess and I went to that open house, and I'll never forget it because the principal of the school was a very congenial and articulate man who wanted to put our fears at rest. He said, I know you parents are feeling the loss of your role in education with your children. He said, I want you to put the rest.

We want you to understand that everything that is done in this school is done with a very carefully thought-out purpose in mind. And then he proceeded to unveil the curriculum in a way that absolutely knocked me over. He said, from 9 o'clock to 917 every morning, the children play with these puzzles, and he held up the puzzles. And he said, I know that when the kids come home from school, you say, what did you do today, honey? I said, well, we played in puzzles, and you think that all they're doing is just sitting around here having a good time, and we're just a sophisticated babysitter. He said, but I want you to understand that these puzzles were designed by a team of experts from Harvard, neurosurgeons, and they were designed in such a way as to develop the motor muscles of the last two fingers of the left hand.

And I said, wow. And then he said, and from 917 to 932, they involved themselves in this particular activity, and this activity was put together by a group of researchers at the University of Wisconsin and so on. And they went through the whole curriculum, and the point that he was making was that every single dimension of that curriculum had a specific purpose.

Nothing was left to chance or to arbitrary action. And after he went through the whole curriculum, we were overwhelmed. He then smiled and said, are there any questions? And when he asked that question, are there any questions, the response of the audience was spontaneous laughter. I mean, they laughed. They're like, who's going to ask any questions about this?

We can't believe it. And there was spontaneous applause for the principal. I'm sitting in the back room. I raised my hand. I said, I have a question.

He said, what's that? I said, you've carefully explained that every item on this curriculum has a definite and specific purpose attached to it, and I'm impressed by that. He said, but my question is, what is the overarching purpose of the curriculum?

You only have so many hours in a day. There are only so many possible individual purposes that you can implement in the curriculum. And so you have to make decisions about that. So you must have some overarching blueprint that is governing the selection of the individual particular purposes that you have here in the curriculum. And I said, what I'd like to know is what is that overall purpose?

Or to put it another way, what kind of a child are you trying to produce? And instantly he turned red, white, and I have to give him credit for his honesty at this point. He looked at me and he said, I don't know.

And I said, well, I very much appreciate your honesty, but your answer terrifies me. Purposes without purpose, it's all relative. Who decides? And on what basis is the decision made? Let me illustrate it again from our culture. One of the most controversial issues, indeed perhaps the moral watershed issue of our day is the issue of abortion that's tearing this country apart politically, economically, every other way, pending legislation in every state house in the United States over this question of abortion. And the issue is not over whether or not it's okay to have an abortion if a child is subjected to rape or if the mother's life is in danger. Those are moral questions that theologians and students of ethics work with. But the issue publicly today is on the question of abortion on demand.

Okay, that's the issue. And as we see how this thing lines up, we see that there is a group of people that line up on one side vehemently opposed to abortion on demand, and they've caused the movement called pro-life. And then you have a group of people on the opposite side who are equally vociferous and totally committed in favor of abortion on demand. They are pro-abortion, but there is a mass of people in the middle who elect to stand in middle ground, and they call that position pro-choice. You have pro-life, pro-abortion. Now at the legislative realm, the difference in our society is determined by this middle group, and you hear people saying again and again from this group, they are saying things like this, I personally would not choose to have an abortion, but I believe everybody has the right to make that choice for themselves. Now at a practical level, at a legal level, at a legislative level, there is no difference between pro-choice and pro-abortion. A vote for pro-choice is a vote for pro-abortion, do you understand that? So everybody who takes this position in terms of the legislation supports this position, and a vast number of mainline Christian churches have gone on record adopting this position – pro-choice.

Now the issue has to go deeper than that. The question I ask you is this, does anybody ever have a right to do that which is wrong? Well, when we ask a question like that, we have to ask, what kind of right? I mean you have the right to be wrong legally. In our country, we say, I may disagree with you, but I will defend to the death your right under the law to state your views, and the idea of certain rights of freedom and including the freedom to be wrong is very important to our society as a tolerant democracy so that we have a legal right to be wrong.

But does God ever give us a moral right to be wrong? Now we have to distinguish between legal rights and moral rights, don't we? And so can we say, well, what we're really arguing about here on the pro-choice position is legal rights – we're not talking about moral rights – but that's exactly what is under dispute, whether or not there should be a legal right for a person to choose abortion. And if that's the issue, you beg the question by saying, my argument for having a legal right is that I have a legal right. And so what is behind the philosophy of pro-choice is something far beyond legal right. The idea is that everybody has the moral right to choose for themselves to have or not have an abortion. I want to ask this question. From whence cometh that right?

I have yet to hear a single person or read in the press anyone who has raised that question. Everybody's talking about rights – women's rights and the right to choice, the right to choose. And I say, where do you get that right? What is the foundation for that right? Is it natural law?

I would hate to defend on the basis of natural law the right for abortion. Is it a right that is given to you by your Creator? Does God give you the right to choose abortion? Does God provide the right? Does nature provide the right? Who provides the right? That concept upon which this huge group of people establish is hanging in thin air. If you analyze the question on the right to choice, and again, my discussion here is not about abortion. This is simply an illustration. So when you claim a right to choose, what do we really say?

What is it based on? Preference. I want to be able to choose.

It's one thing to say, I want something or desire something. It's another thing to say, I have a right to it. And isn't it strange that this position emerges in a context of pluralism and relativity? In other words, it comes out of the idea that no one in a pluralistic society ever has the right to impose their standards on somebody else because everything is relative, and abortion is relative to you and to you and to you and to you. And if you want to have an abortion, you have that right. The reason why you have that right is because morality is relative in a pluralistic society. And the one thing that our country cannot tolerate is one group of people imposing their views upon another group of people.

And if we say that is wrong in principle, then the only logical conclusion of that is to eliminate the vote altogether. Now, I just want to say that in pluralism, a view of toleration emerges where there's a subtle little shift. In the classical theories, toleration and patience and long-suffering with people who differ from us is a Christian virtue, and there is a foundation for it.

God's law requires that we be tolerant and charitable with each other. But it's one thing to say that all different views are tolerated under the law. It's a short step from there to say all different views are equally valid. But pluralism says not only are all views equally tolerable under the law, but all views are equally valid. And if that's the case, then we're saying if every view has as much validity as the next view, truth is slain. You can have truths, but truth is impossible. Then you realize that once you destroy truth with a capital T, even truths aren't true. Even values have no value. Even purposes have no purpose, and life becomes impossible.

That was R.C. Sproul on pluralism and relativism on this Thursday edition of Renewing Your Mind. We see these ideas all around us today and their destructive effects, but we might not always know the origins and the names of these ideas. That's why I found this series so helpful and would encourage you to work through all twelve messages in the series when you call us at 800-435-4343 and make a donation of any amount or when you give your gift at renewingyourmind.org. In addition to the series, you'll also receive digital access to the study guide and we'll send you Dr. Sproul's companion book, Making a Difference. Give your donation today at renewingyourmind.org or by clicking the link in the podcast show notes. But be quick as this offer ends tomorrow. What worldview seeks to optimise pleasure and avoid pain, and in what ways do we see that in society today? Find out tomorrow here on Renewing Your Mind. you