The idea of the university has long been that of a community dedicated to discovering truth and its application to life. Guided by this mission, students and teachers were enabled to find the noble and beautiful things in the world, discover their relationship to one another, as well as establish a concrete structure from which all thoughts, words and actions flowed in their proper order. However, many Western universities forsook their original purpose as they became increasingly permeated by relativism. Ambivalence toward truth claims over time, gave way to the outright rejection of the potential for discovering objective truth.
According to relativism, there is no absolute right or wrong, and no situation will ever be black or white. Instead, each individual sculpts their own personal vision of truth and consents to the idea that everyone’s truth is simultaneously correct, at least for themselves. Eric Metaxas, in his article on his own experiences with relativism as an undergraduate at Yale, describes the narrow intellectual climate relativism creates and its deep aversion to absolutes.
Relativists pretend that the only alternative to relativism is authoritarianism and fundamentalism. If you want to talk about truth—or God forbid, about Truth—they immediately attack you as patriarchal, like those Dead White Males who dared declare anything to be concrete and specific and historical. They will probably suggest that you have violent and oppressive tendencies. They’re sincerely threatened by the idea of truth.
Thus, in many colleges and universities, radical subjectivity has now become the norm:
Relativists find the idea of moral truths especially problematic. To them, moral truths have no validity independent of the “values” treasured by the person or society that asserts them.
Students attending universities which fully subscribe to this paradigm can challenge the assumptions and claims of relativism. Metaxas explains:
But as a Christian, I cannot dismiss the idea of truth as relativists do. Christians believe in moral laws and in doctrine. We believe in a moral order and in rules about how we are to conduct ourselves, physically and otherwise. For example, we believe that marriage is sacred and that adultery is wrong. We’re crazy like that…
To treat truth as authoritarianism and fundamentalism is to set up a straw man. The Bible itself strongly condemns the Pharisees, who were full of moral rules and judgment but had no love and grace for those who struggled morally. People who try to turn the God of the Bible into an authoritarian figure who merely thunders judgment may rather quickly flip their wigs and worldviews when they encounter the figure of Jesus. He famously showed grace to the woman taken in adultery and did not condemn her as the Pharisees did. So Jesus was no authoritarian or fundamentalist. But neither was he a relativist. He said to the woman, “Go and sin no more.” He didn’t wink at sin; he acknowledged it as sin and then he forgave it. To have only half the truth is to have none.
Most American colleges and universities today are steeped in relativism. It may be assumed by many fellow students, professors, and even by the curriculum. Students will undoubtedly be inundated with the idea that truth is a matter of perspective, and to say anything more definitive than that is positively unenlightened.
Each of us, whether student or not, can play a part in challenging the premise of relativism, that we each create our own truth, with the assurance that truth is something that can be known and is worth pursuing. Christianity has a powerful motivation for education and research. It assumes that an all-powerful, rational, self-revealing God has created a world that can be known, in all of its dimensions, and has endowed human beings with the capacity to learn and understand His creation. Sharing this perspective, whether in the classroom or dorm, or with a neighbor or colleague, is a meaningful step toward guiding culture away from the ethical muddle of relativism and toward a clearer understanding of God’s good intentions for His Creation.
