Relativism Has Always Been with Us

Relativism has always been with us because of who we are. We are a spectrum from infantile to sublime. Our brains work well beyond the limitations of anything we create. They multitask whether we want them to or not, holding in one cluster our salacious dreaming, our tasks at hand, our bodily conditions, what we see and hear, and maybe five or ten other blinking lights on the multicolored spectrum that we are.

When we speak of absolutes, we either mean something we care passionately about or we commit idolatry (or both). Idolatry is the ascription of absoluteness to our own creations. We are all idolaters.

That is about as universal a statement as there is.

Now before you skewer me for either Calvinistic moralism or Nietzschean perspectivism run amok, be assured that both have a place in the spectrum of who we are.

Calvin's thinking is merely a summons to love your fate and be aware of the degree to which you do not control it.

Nietzsche, who embraced the spectrum almost entirely, was a proponent of amor fati but he also urged self-transcendence and the effort to attain a state of freedom.

The values I believe appropriate to an integral person rest on the bedrock of the primary value -- non-idolatry, which is much more than relativism.

Non-idolatry is a capacity to say no at any and every point

Upon this bed of iconoclasm, I lay

tolerance, in a tough, not a permissive, sense;

democracy, wed to universal human rights; and

helpfulness, in an enabling rather a controlling or paternalistic sense.

These three values work in tandem and vary in strength from situation to situation. They are subservient to the base value of non-idolatry.

As the world turns to these values, it discovers that the capacity for transcendence has been with us all along and that Jesus came to awaken us and turn us around, not to make us so guilty that we cannot exist as free and vital human beings.

Abba is within everyone and the values Jesus embodied are the ones that Abba cherishes.