EngineeredTheology

I hear often the informal critiques of the emergent church movement as dangerous because of relativistic thinking. Usually it plays out as “they don’t believe the bible is true” or “they don’t believe Jesus is the only way” or “they don’t believe in X” – substituting X for whatever astounding point is that makes the critique more sensational. I suspect the real frustration with relativism (and I’ve hard this used against Rob Bell) is that many in the emergent church find ways to not give straightforward answers to yes or no questions. It is not due to an attempt to be evasive or dishonest, but some questions cannot be so simply answered.

To begin the explanation, we must start with the idea of a worldview. As we grow up, we learn facts. If, as someone was growing up, they also told by their parents often that they are really smart. They learn to read before their friends, they head to school and their teacher comments how well they are doing. We would expect the child to take these facts and put them together in a logical fashion to build a worldview – I am smart. Once this is put together, every piece of evidence is measured against their worldview. If the child gets an A on a test, it agrees nicely with their worldview. If an F, they will need to explain that in terms of their worldview (I am smart, but I must have been tired, or the teacher was bad, or the test was unfair). As time goes on, the worldview can change. If a student begins to do more an more poorly on tests, these facts begin to get more difficult to explain; the worldview must be modified to accommodate this new information. So, the worldview is deconstructed, and a new worldview is built with the new pieces of data – I am average.

Raw data has no meaning of its self. It must be filtered and assembled together with other data to create meaning. Raw data is always objective “I was driving 60 MPH”, “John 1:1 is X in the NIV” and comes from standard measurements. Meaning is always subjective “I was driving too fast”. Making sense of data (providing meaning) is the process of taking a new piece of data, comparing it with the other data we have assembled (worldview) and assembling it together in a logical way to create meaning.

It is because of this that statements such as “I read the bible for what it says (objectively)” is nonsensical. It would imply that if they were asked what the bible says about a topic (say abortion) they would pick a verse out at random and allow the hearer to make their subjective analysis. Any organisation automatically puts meaning behind the text, which means their own personal worldview has been read into it, and therefore must be subjective. This is where my standard (and understandably annoying) response to “but the bible says X” comes from (e.g “the bible says a lot of things”). What scares many people is that if we cannot ever definitively say the bible says X about something, it then implies the bible says nothing.

The way out of the dilemma is to understand the reason why I can not say “the bible says X”. The reason is because my worldview is built on a very small sample size of all the data. I respect people who have different worldviews because they have different pieces of data to work with than I do. It is no longer an argument between “right” and “wrong”, but a give and take to understand why someone would put the puzzle together in a certain way. Hopefully by understanding them, I can strengthen my worldview to more fully encapsulate more data, and take one step closer to truth. Truth, much like perfection, is a target – never a destination.

Truth does exist, but I am not so arrogant to believe that I have it pinned down.