For 2,000 years Christians have known that God is absolute: The Absolute. This has been axiomatic for the finest Christians the church has produced. This is the judgment of all the great doctrinal statements of Christian history. As I challenge this historical and traditional understanding of God, I understand that these are not the bad guys; they are the epitome of the Christian religion.
Clearly, at least in our ordinary usage of the word, the biblical God appears to be absolute. This is the strong consensus all across Christian history. Obverse, in the way we ordinarily use the word, we have a hard time believing that the biblical God is relative.
Good people, great people, truly devout and highly intelligent people have thought, felt, proclaimed, and defended the absolute, unchanging, all-knowing, totally sovereign and transcendent character of God. Yes, it is easy, perhaps natural, to read the Bible and see it a God who is absolute, in total control, and who changes not. On the other hand, it is natural and easy to see that God is love, is trinitarian, and holds us responsible for out decisions and subsequent actions.
I am "absolutely" certain that there are no absolutes, but I cannot say "absolutely" that everything is relative. But of this I am sure: everyone, everything that I know and have known, seen, heard, smelled, tasted, or touched was related to other things. Likewise, every emotion, hope, fear, love, ambition–never isolated, always related to. Everything is always connected to something else, and that something else is always connected to something else, ad infinitum.
Nothing happens always; nothing is everywhere. All happens somewhen; all happens somewhere. You say, all except God, and truth, and right and wrong, and maybe more.
"Common sense" knows intuitively that there is no way everything, God included, is relative. Something has to be absolute if for no other reason, to supply the relativities something thing to be relative to.
Relativity is relative. Everyone has their own idea of what the word means, just as everyone knows that God–if there is a god–is absolute. That is what "God" is understood to mean: absolute, authority, power, control.
Relativity is relative? Yes. There is no fixed, standard definition of the word; it depends on who is using it. Einstein’s general theory of relativity is an idea that differs widely from moral relativity, or the relativity of color, or of truth, or of cousins, grandchildren, and all the rest of our kinfolk–our relatives. In what sense is God relative? Is he our relative?
I assume that if God is not absolute, there are no other contenders for absolutism; everything would be relative if God is not absolute. But, someone might say, is not that claim absolute? No. It is total, conclusive, all in all: everything is related, directly or indirectly, to everything else, and all is relative to God, just as God is relative–related–to all.
What is more, and foundational to all the rest, God is relative to God. God the Father relates to God the Spirit, who is relative to God the Son, the Son relative to the Father and the Spirit, always, eternally the Christian trinitarian God, who is the one God, is relating internally. Since God is relative, everything else follows suit.
God is love.
We’ll have to revisit this from other directions because most if not all, of what is told in the biblical story is relative one way or another.
2 comments:
Dr. Roark,
In your estimation what is the difference between “essential truth” and “absolute truth?” When people say “absolute truth” do they generally mean “essential truth?” Can a particular truth be both “relative” and “undeniable.” Certainly, any truth can be denied but by “undeniable” I mean that even if this truth is denied by all people, it is still true. I’m using quotation marks in places where they shouldn’t be because I haven’t figured out how to use italics in comment boxes.
In the way you are using "undeniable," yes, truth could be relative and undeniable. Jesus, in a variety of ways is relative, and incarnate, was relative, but he is still The Truth. Something can be relatively reliable, yet unacknowledged as such. To emphatically affirm its reliability is to say, "It is true."
Absolute means: apart from any relations, unconnected, apart from, independent. Absolute truth does not exist except as a fuzzy mental idea.
Essential means: necessary, that which makes--or helps make--a thing what it is. There is essential Truth, also essential truths.
Revisit Aristotle on the difference between essence and accidence.
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