Cultural Recovery
Urgency is the word that describes my writing agenda at the present time. Each day is one less day I have to get my thoughts together, get them on paper, and make them available, not only for the present time, but also for some future time, D.V. Since a culture represents a way of life, I want to say a few words about our present cultural situation and the need of cultural recovery.
Cultural recovery means a recovery of truth. When I use the word truth, I have in mind a conceptual idea that truth is reality and that truth affirms itself aesthetically, reasonably, and sensibly. Truth reveals itself in beauty, wisdom, rationality, and in the world of sense experience. Does that mean that ethics and morals are exempt from the meaning established for truth? Absolutely not and in fact an ethical system and the functions of morality are manifested (not established) in a reasonable world with aesthetically and sensibly derived propositions.
Cultural recovery will require a passion for truth. We have to remember how far we've fallen into the arms of modernity and the postmodern. We have to remember that our children, with rare exceptions, have not understood or even studied propositional logic. We have to remember that our children have been taught that truth is relative. We have to remember that our children have learned to make decisions based on emotional subjectivism, rather than rational objectivism. Professor David Wells, a Christian theologian, said "it is not theology alone in which I am interested but theology that is driven by a passion for truth." By analogy, I can say the same about culture, politics, or economics. We must have a passion for truth.
Cultural recovery will require a passion for absolute truth. The neo-dark age before us is prefaced with the postmodern hermeneutic called deconstructionism. It is nothing more than an interpretative device that allows one to deconstruct written literary forms and reconstruct them so that they become meaningful to the interpreter. This is not the same as relativism, because the meaning is absolute for the interpreter, but it certainly seems kin to relativism to me. How many times have I heard someone say that "truth is relative." I remember talking to a preacher (he had a Master's degree in divinity) many years ago about a particular Bible doctrine. When I objected to his interpretation of Scripture I began to develop my arguments logically, biblically, and apparently compellingly because he finally said "it really doesn't make any difference." Then I asked him this question: "Do you believe that both of us have found the truth, even though the views are opposite, and that we can hold these two opposing views in harmony at the same time and in the same relationship?" He said, "yes!" I said "then our conversation (debate) is useless and truth is relative." He agreed and we have had no real or intelligent conversation after that time. Truth cannot be relative. Truth is absolute. Truth is absolutely absolute.
In : Truth
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