Category: Ethics

The Surprising Path to Truth

“We each have our own truth.”

You’ve probably heard that or something like it for years. We can’t determine absolute right or wrong, it is said, and we certainly shouldn’t try to impose our view on anyone else. Instead, let’s be tolerant of each other, and give everyone space.

Christians often see a major problem with viewpoints like this, sometimes called relativism, because we believe God revealed himself and his truth through Scripture and through Jesus who is “the way, the truth, and the life.” As a result, we can know right from wrong.

If people could just get on board with there being a way to know truth, wouldn’t we all be better off? We certainly don’t need a jumble of different viewpoints confusing the landscape. Right?

This way of thinking, however, may miss something valuable. It’s wrong to say that valuing different opinions means we can never find the truth. Rather, valuing different opinions is one of the best ways to arrive at the truth.

Why is that so? Other people probably know things and can see things we don’t. After all, we are finite. Therefore, humility is a virtue.

In addition, because “the heart is deceitful above all things,” we may fool ourselves into thinking we only have the best intentions in voicing our beliefs. We may unknowingly be acting and speaking from less than honorable motivations. Therefore, once again, humility is a virtue.

As Shirley A. Mullen has written in her much needed book, Claiming the Courageous Middle, “Allowing a measure of legitimacy for diverse opinions is, in the long run, not at all necessarily giving way to relativism. Rather, it can be part of an ultimate commitment to the truth, as society makes space for an appropriate exchange of ideas within the circle of its larger commitments.”*

If we always think we are right, we’ll miss the truth. If we are willing to admit that we may sometimes be wrong (which realistically is not hard to imagine for any of us), we then have a better chance of arriving at what is good, true, and beautiful.

Because iron sharpens iron, because we all need each other, Mullen goes on to say, “We often need the animating challenge of dissent to keep us thinking at our best and to keep pushing us toward new possibilities.”* Rather than trying to suppress contrary opinions, we are better together.

If we can’t know everything and yet care about the truth, we will say, “Relativism, no. Pluralism, yes.”

* Shirley Mullen, Claiming the Courageous Middle (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2024), pp. 127, 133.

Image by Mirosław i Joanna Bucholc from Pixabay

God Said to Them . . . Rule

My mom and dad offered me a wonderful model of married life (as I wrote here). They led our family as partners. Interestingly, my dad (though not a religious person) nonetheless related to my mom in a way that I later found was very consistent with a biblical perspective. And what did I find?

At the very beginning, Genesis 1 offers this picture:

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. (1:27)

Humanity, male and female, is created in God’s image. This is emphasized by repeating it in three slightly different ways. Together we bear God’s image. And what does it mean to do that? The answer is in the very next verse:

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” (1:28)

The image of God is not a character trait (like kindness) nor an innate capacity (like consciousness). Rather it is a role, a responsibility. God calls us to be his priests in the cosmic garden he has just made. We are to be his representatives, his vice regents for the world he has created. And note how this is to be done! Men and women are to rule together—“God blessed them and said to them, ‘…Rule over…’” They are to be a team.

This joint project, tragically, was bent by sin. The result was a disruption of God’s original design in two ways. First, instead of harmoniously ruling jointly, husbands would rule over women (3:16). Second, instead of enjoying their rule over “every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth” (1:29), “through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life” (3:17).

God’s project over and over through the Bible has ever since been to undo the effects of sin by restoring our relationship with him, with each other, and with nature. The primary means for achieving this was through the person and work of Christ (Ephesians 2:8-10, 13-16).

Much could be said about this theme throughout the Old and New Testaments, but consider just one remarkable passage from Paul. He writes, “The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife” (1 Cor 7:4). In the new humanity that Christ creates, the effects of the fall are reversed so that husbands don’t only rule over wives. They rule together, over each other.

This would have blown the minds of the patriarchal world of Paul’s day. That’s just not how Romans, Greeks, or Jews commonly thought. Paul was instead calling on his readers to return to God’s original design of Genesis 1. And we shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that such mutuality only concerned this one aspect of marriage. When introducing how husbands and wives should relate, he offers a very broad instruction to both, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5:21).

“Ephesians 5? The Ephesians 5 which notoriously says wives should submit to their husbands, you’re going to tell me that that Ephesians 5 is about mutuality and about ruling together?” I do in fact have a few more things to say about Ephesians 5. That will be my next installment in this series.

—

St. Louis Botanical Garden image by Andrew T. Le Peau.

Why Did Malcolm Succeed? (Outliers 2)

Why did Malcolm Gladwell succeed? Is he a self-made bestselling writer? Is his story different than the story of why some succeed and others don’t that we looked at in my previous blog about Gladwell’s book Outliers? Does he have none to thank except his own hard work and native talent? In the epilogue to his book, he offers an answer.
Continue reading “Why Did Malcolm Succeed? (Outliers 2)”

No Ordinary People

While sitting in a limo in Manhattan wondering if she is overdressed for the party, Jeannette Walls looks out the window and spots her homeless mom rummaging through garbage in an alley.

Walls’ astonishing memoir, The Glass Castle, begins here and then chronicles a childhood in which alcohol, dysfunction and bad choices conspired to keep her whole family

i-11bca8ca7cce5f4b44c4e02502f49fa3-glass castle.jpg

destitute. After she and her siblings moved to New York City and clawed their way out, her well-educated parents continued to live in poverty. And when the pair moved to New York to join their children, ultimately the two of them were without a home.

The book contains one incredible episode after another of pain, hardship and disappointment. Yet one that struck me the most took place after Jeannette had scraped together enough funds to go to college. There she took a course from a professor she enjoyed who began teaching about the effects of economic and social forces on people.
Continue reading “No Ordinary People”

Redeeming the Office

I admit I’m a fan of The Office with it’s all-too-painfully-true portrayal of life in the cubes. One time I found myself yelling at the screen, “But I don’t want to be Michael!” There was nothing to do but admit the truth, of course.

A colleague at work recently drew our attention to a brief parody of The Office from the folks at Rightnow.org. The camerawork and the writing are spot on. No doubt it has a bit more redeeming social value than even the original. So check it out here.

Ban the Next Book Clause

Every so often I am talking to an author about a potential book and he or she will say, “Well, I will have to check with my previous publisher first. In my contract I gave them first option on my next book.”

I am always amazed when I hear this. We got rid of the “next book clause” from our contracts thirty years ago. I thought such arrangements disappeared with the era of the dime novel. Apparently not.
Continue reading “Ban the Next Book Clause”