Knowing Good from Evil

Knowing Good from Evil Josh McDowell

Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. Wheaton, Illinois

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Visit Tyndale’s exciting Web site at www.tyndale.com Knowing Good from Evil copyright © 2002 by Josh McDowell Ministries. All rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked “NKJV” are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the Holy Bible, King James Version. Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible, © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

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Special Copyright Notice The text of this book is an ebook file intended for one reader only. It may be used by that reader on computers and devices that he or she owns and uses. It may not be transmitted in whole or part to others except as stated above. Up to 500 words of this work may be quoted without written permission of publisher, provided it is not part of a compilation of works nor more than 5 percent of the book or work in which it is being quoted. The full title, author's name, and copyright line shall be included. No more than 500 words of this work may be posted on a web site or sent electronically to other users. In all uses of quoted material from this book, the full copyright line (below) shall appear in a readable type size where the text appears. The author's name shall not be used in the title of a web site or in the advertising of the site. The author's name may not be used on the cover of any other book in which a portion of this material is quoted without written permission of Tyndale House Publishers. Quotes in excess of 500 words, use of the text as part of a compilation, use of text that is greater than 5 percent of the book in which it will be quoted, or other permissions requests shall be directed in writing to Tyndale House Publishers, Permissions Dept., P.O. Box 80, Wheaton, Illinois, 60189.

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Contents Acknowledgments 1. The Day That Changed Everything 2. From Evildoers Come Evil Deeds 3. The Truth of the Matter 4. The Door to the Truth Appendix: Is It Right for a Christian to Judge? Bibliography for Moral Relativism About the Author

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Acknowledgments I wish to thank my wife, Dottie, who has been a constant encouragement to me. My assistant, Christy Karassev, has given me invaluable help. Without her help, this book would not have been completed. And thanks to Pat Zucharan, an excellent researcher who has compiled many of the outstanding quotations you will read in this book. Josh McDowell

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1 The Day That Changed Everything At 8:45 A.M. on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 that had departed Boston for Los Angeles, slammed into the north tower of the 110-story World Trade Center in New York City, killing all ninety-two passengers and setting the tower ablaze. Within minutes, news cameras focused on the burning tower, and crowds gathered along the streets of lower Manhattan to witness a startling tragedy. At 9:03 A.M. a second jet, United Airlines Flight 175, pierced the steel and concrete façade of the World Trade Center’s south tower. At 9:43 A.M. —less than one hour after the first attack—a third aircraft, American Airlines Flight 77, shattered the fortresslike walls of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. At 10:00 A.M. a fourth airliner, United Airlines Flight 93, plummeted to the ground in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, with forty-five passengers and crew. Each of these acts—and the resulting collapse of the World Trade Center towers and fires at the Pentagon, which claimed thousands more lives—was the work of nineteen terrorists who had hijacked the flights by killing and terrorizing crew members and passengers. Once the hijackers had seized control of the planes, they resolutely used them as flying bombs to accomplish the worst

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terrorist act in U.S. history, killing not only themselves but also thousands of innocent men, women, and children, including many police, firefighters, and rescue workers who had sprung into action to save life and minimize suffering.

The Raw Hand of Evil People around the world watched the horrific events of September 11 unfold on their television and computer screens. They looked on in shock and horror as flames engulfed the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon. They watched with dread as people plunged to their deaths from the skyscrapers’ burning façades, choosing to die suddenly rather than endure the heat of the blaze. They witnessed an unimaginable catastrophe as the World Trade Center’s south tower buckled and collapsed in a plume of ash and debris, killing or trapping thousands—followed less than thirty minutes later by the collapse of the north tower. They heard the accounts of doomed passengers or tower occupants calling their loved ones on cell phones to say “I love you.” They learned of panicked New Yorkers who were escaping the disintegrating towers while stone-faced firefighters passed them as they rushed into danger to save others. Those who saw or heard the disaster unfold knew that something horrible—evil—was happening in their midst. People of every nation and political persuasion were quick to condemn the terrorists’ actions without mincing words. President George W. Bush repeatedly referred to the hijackers and to their terrorist network as “evildoers.” England’s prime minister, Tony Blair, said, “This mass terrorism is the new evil in our world today.”1 1

Tony Blair, “Blair Condemns Terrorist ‘Evil,’” BBC News, September 11, 2001; .

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India’s prime minister, A. B. Vajpayee, declared, “We must, and we will, stamp out this evil from our land, and from the world.”2 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel called the terrorists “forces of evil,”3 as did democratic senator Harry Reid, on the floor of the United States Senate.4 Majority Whip Tom DeLay issued a press release that referred to “the raw hand of evil [that] struck our nation.”5 Swanee Hunt, the founder of Women Waging Peace, called the attacks “an act of evil that cannot be ignored.”6 Princeton professor of politics and international affairs Richard A. Falk, writing in The Nation, referred to the cks as a “massive crime against humanity” and to global terrorism as “demonic.”7 And newspapers and magazines around the world, from the conservative National Review to the far-left-leaning Boston Phoenix, used phrases like “acts of unspeakable evil” to describe what the hijackers and their sponsors did.8 Who could argue with such sentiments, such judgments? Seldom before—if ever—did the line between good and evil, right and wrong, seem so clearly drawn, so plainly seen. 2

A. B. Vajpayee, “Prime Minister’s Address to the Nation on Terrorist Attacks on the United States,” September 14, 2001; <www.indianembassy.org/special/cabinet/Primeminister/pm_september_14_2001 .htm>. 3 Ariel Sharon, “We Can Defeat Forces of Evil,” September 11, 2001; <www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/east/09/11/terror.reax/>. 4 Harry Reid, “Senator from Nevada Statement on the Terrorist Attacks,” September 12, 2001; . 5 Tom DeLay, “Majority Whip DeLay: Civilization Will Defeat Terrorism,” October 5, 2001; <www.majoritywhip.gov/News.asp>. 6 Swanee Hunt, “Inclusive Security: A Statement on the Terrorist Attacks,” Women’s Enews, October 13, 2001; <www.womenwagingpeace.net/content/whatwedo/newsevents/6statement.asp>. 7 Richard A. Falk, “Defining a Just War,” The Nation (October 29, 2001): 11. 8 Editorial, The Boston Phoenix, 13 October 2001.

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Evil Walks the World “Evil does indeed walk the world,” wrote columnist Jack Dunphy, the day after the September 11 attacks that rocked the United States—and the world.9 Like many, many others, my world was rocked when I heard the news. I was in Denver, Colorado, when I heard the first news reports of the attacks. Knowing, of course, that all air traffic was grounded, I started the long drive home to Dallas that morning. As I drove, I listened to the nonstop radio coverage of the events and occasionally pulled off the road to rest, pray, or seek out a television—or other people—for more information. Even then, in those first hours, the brutality and wickedness of the attacks was on everyone’s lips, including television and radio news anchors and reporters. I noticed immediately how people who normally eschew moral and spiritual terminology spoke quickly and easily of good and evil, of praying for the victims and their families, of the need to turn to God. I was struck by the seeming ease and conviction with which such words of moral certainty rolled from their lips. After several such stops, however, I suddenly came to a startling realization while sitting behind the wheel of my car, a realization that shocked me by its stark accuracy amid all the pronouncements about “evil” and “evildoers.” I came to two conclusions: First, an overwhelming majority of Americans have surrendered the ability to call the terrorist attacks of September 11 “evil.” The vast majority of those who condemn the slaughter of

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Jack Dunphy, “‘Senseless?’ No,” National Review Online, September 12, 2001; <www.nationalreview.com/dunphy/dunphy091201.shtml>.

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more than 3,000 innocents are being woefully inconsistent and arbitrary in doing so. Indeed, they have no more moral grounds to judge those acts as evil than they do to herald as heroic the sacrificial response of firefighters and rescue workers at the site of the World Trade Center.10 Second, I saw the dedication, religious fervor, or blind obedience of one of the masterminds of the attack, one of the hijackers who flew one of the planes into the tower: Mohamed Atta. My emotions immediately questioned how anyone could judge a man of such devotion as “evil.” No matter how I consciously tried to bring my emotions in harmony with my mind at that moment, I couldn’t. Somewhere deep down in I sensed a certain admiration for such courage. Soon my thoughts were comparing two men: President George W. Bush and Mohamed Atta. They both · · · · · · · · · · 10

believed in God; believed in a holy, sacred book; believed they were doing God’s will; believed they were morally right; believed the other was evil; believed the people were supporting them; believed their cause was noble; prayed for guidance; were judgmental; were “intolerant” (as defined by culture). Many people—Christian or otherwise—react negatively to the use of the word judge as I use it here, citing Matthew 7:1-6 as a prohibition against judging anyone’s actions as evil. For a complete exegesis of this passage and the biblical perspective on such “judgments,” see <www.josh.org>.

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One of these two men went to his death; the other put his entire presidency on the line. All this came crashing down on me emotionally and intellectually. Can you make a moral judgment on Mohamed Atta? Have President Bush and the American public been morally right to judge a man who truly believed he was doing the “will of God”? What then flashed through my consciousness was that America and the church are hypocritical. With deep anguish and sadness, my heart and mind dictated to me that we as a “people” and the church as an institution have lost the moral right to judge! When the second plane hit the tower, it should have been the death knell to “moral and cultural relativism.” Newsweek reports that for many students “the future is increasingly unpredictable and that long-held beliefs and assumptions will be severely tested in the next few years.”11 Other people argue that the concepts of the “new tolerance” and “moral relativism” have a downside. Author David Brooks, senior editor of The Weekly Standard, visited Princeton University after 9-11. He found a “surging interest in global affairs and issues of right and wrong, but also a frustration [by the students] with the moral relativism of much of the curriculum. One student told him that he had been taught how to deconstruct and dissect, but never to construct and decide.”12 Alison Hornstein, a Yale University student, concluded that at Yale University students are “being taught to think within a framework of moral and cultural relativity without learning its

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Barbara Kantrowitz and Keith Naughton, “Generation 9-11: Terror, War and Recession Hit Home on Campus,” Newsweek (November 12, 2001): 48. 12 Ibid., 49.

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boundaries [which] has seemingly created a deficiency in my generation’s ability to make moral judgments.”13 A Newsweek study shows that “68% of young adults believe the terror attacks have made people their age more serious about their work and studies.”14 This is very healthy for the country. But what can be even better for the country is for students in both high school and college not only to take more seriously the origins of their personal beliefs and values and how they arrive at their worldview but also to not accept at face value how their professors and textbooks try so hard to convince them to accept that “the only truth is that there is no truth.”15

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Alison Hornstein, “The Question That We Should Be Asking,” Newsweek (December 17, 2001): 14. 14 Kantrowitz and Naughton, “Generation 9-11”: 56. 15 John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the

Hermeneutic Project: Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987), 192.

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2 From Evildoers Come Evil Deeds (From evil beliefs come evildoers) Soon after the September 11 tragedy, I was the subject of a live radio interview for the American Association of Christian Counselors. The scheduled topic for the interview was my book (coauthored with Bob Hostetler) Right from Wrong. I was also scheduled to conduct a second interview on a different topic. With only three or four minutes remaining until the end of the first interview, I happened to mention my September 11 epiphany on the drive from Denver to Dallas. “A full 78 percent of Americans and 68 percent of Christians,” I said, “have lost the right to judge the actions of the terrorists.” (Since I made that statement, Barna Research Online’s latest poll [since September 11] shows only 22 percent of Americans and 32 percent of Christian evangelicals believe in absolute truth).1 My statement shocked the hosts of the program—and lit up the call-in show’s switchboard like a pinball machine! The host asked me to explain my statement, but with only a few minutes remaining, I was able to offer only an elementary clarification. The host called me the next morning before the second interview to see 1

Barna Research Group, “How America’s Faith Has Changed Since 9-11,” Barna Research Online (November 26, 2001); <www.barna.org/cgibin/PagePressRelease.asp?PressReleaseID=102&Reference=B>.

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if I would change my plans and revisit my startling statement and elucidate the reason for such a provocative claim. The reason for wanting to continue on the same subject was that their switchboard had lit up after the first interview for six hours, with callers demanding an explanation. I agreed to continue the discussion on the next broadcast, and the next morning we revisited my statement.

The Amoral Majority You may be wondering, like the hosts—and callers—of that radio program, how I could make such an outrageous claim. How could I possibly say that the majority of Americans have surrendered the ability to say that the September 11 terrorist attacks were “evil”? Let me explain. Studies conducted by the Barna Research Group have revealed that in 1991, 67 percent of the American public agreed with this statement: “There is no such thing as absolute truth; two people could define truth in totally different ways, but both could still be correct.”2 In 1994, the same question elicited 72 percent agreement.3 Such thinking is strikingly common even in the church. Barna reports that in 1991, 52 percent of “born-again Christians” did not believe in absolute truth. In 1994 that proportion had increased to 62 percent, a faster rate of increase—ten percentage points—than among the movement from 67 percent to 72 percent among the general public.4 A study of American values showed that 84 2

Barna Research Group, “The Churched Youth Survey” (Dallas: Josh McDowell Ministry, 1994), 55. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 61.

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percent of Americans believe that “there are many different religious truths and we ought to be tolerant of all of them.”5 However, the latest research after 9-11 exposes a staggering reality of American culture and the church. And among young people in the church, a belief in standards of right and wrong that apply to everyone is even more rare. Barna’s earlier research shows that more than 70 percent of young people agreed with this statement: “When it comes to matters of morals and ethics, truth means different things to different people; no one can be absolutely positive they have the truth.” Most of them say that everything in life is negotiable, and that “nothing can be known for certain except the things that you experience in your own life.”6 All this means that a broad majority of the American public— including a majority of Christians and church attenders—don’t believe in absolute truth: a truth that is true for all people, for all times, in all places. They don’t believe in a standard of truth and morality that applies universally to everyone. They don’t accept that some truths are objective, universal, and constant. Instead, most people subscribe, to one degree or another, to a very fluid and flexible concept of truth, one that suggests that there are no absolutes, that all truth is relative and subjective, and that right and wrong differ from person to person and from culture to culture. This view of truth and morality is most commonly referred to as postmodernism.

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Alan Wolfe, Moral Freedom: The Impossible Idea That Defines the Way We Live Now (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 62. 6 Barna Research Group, “The Churched Youth Survey,” 58.

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Living in Postmodern Times “Between 1960 and 1990,” writes Stanley J. Grenz, in his book A Primer on Postmodernism, “postmodernism emerged as a cultural phenomenon [in America].”7 Postmodernism is a rapidly spreading and constantly changing way of thinking that influences many people’s views of truth and morality—even among those who may be unfamiliar with the word postmodernism. Postmodernism is complex, and its individual points are sometimes contradictory, but it can be summarized by the following statements: · ·

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Truth does not exist in any objective sense. Instead of “discovering” truth in a “metanarrative”—which is a story (such as the Bible) or ideology (such as Marxism) that presents a unified way of looking at philosophy, religion, art, and science—postmodernism is characterized by “incredulity toward metanarratives.”8 In other words, postmodernism rejects any idea that there exists any “grand story” that explains an individual, local story, or any universal Truth by which to judge any single “truth.” Truth—whether in science, education, or religion—is created by a specific culture or community and is “true” only in and for that culture. Individual persons are the product of their cultures; individuality is an illusion, and identity is constructed from cultural sources.

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Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), 17. 8 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv.

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·

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All thinking is a “social construct.” That is, what you and I regard as “truths” are simply arbitrary “beliefs we have been conditioned to accept by our society, just as others have been conditioned to accept a completely different set of beliefs.”9 Since human beings must use language in order to think or communicate and since words are arbitrary labels for things and ideas, there is no way “to evaluate or criticize the ideas, facts, or truths a language conveys.”10 Any system or statement that claims to be objectively true or that unfavorably judges the values, beliefs, lifestyle, and truth claims of another culture is a power play, an effort by one culture to dominate other cultures (i.e., acting intolerant).

People often hold or reflect these concepts without even realizing that they’re reflecting a particular philosophy or way of thinking. But whether they realize it or not, their postmodern worldview is reflected in such common statements as these: · · · · ·

“No one has the right to tell me what’s right or wrong!” “I can’t tell you what’s right or wrong; you must decide that for yourself.” “It’s wrong to try to impose your morals on someone else!” “I have the right to do whatever I want as long as I’m not hurting anyone.” “You have to do what you think is right.”

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Jim Leffel, “Our New Challenge: Postmodernism,” in The Death of Truth: What’s Wrong with Multiculturalism, and the Rejection of Reason and the New Postmodern Diversity, ed. Dennis McCallum (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1996), 35. 10 Ibid., 40.

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· · ·

“Those may be the values your parents taught you, but my parents taught me different values.” “Look, that may be true for you, but it’s not true for me.” “The Bible says that we are not to judge.”

But such statements signal the death of truth—and morality. As the late author and philosopher Francis Schaeffer said, “If there is no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong. By absolute we mean that which always applies [to all people], that which provides a final or ultimate standard. There must be an absolute if there are to be morals, and there must be an absolute if there are to be real values. If there is no absolute beyond man’s ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions.”11 Researcher George Barna writes that the “world of the postmodern is a universe that is decentralized. There is no ultimate authority beyond oneself; moral anarchy rules the day.”12 He asserts that postmodernists “turn inward and suggest that the best decisions are based upon human will and emotion: Autonomous people will do what is best and work out the rough edges of those choices. The keys to life comprehension are experience and emotion: Absent any kind of universal truth, the only reality that cannot be denied is what you feel or experience.”13 Barna’s conclusion on postmodernism is this: “Without any insight into the vacuous and dangerous philosophy that they have 11

Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? (Old Tappan, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell, 1976), 145. 12 George Barna, Real Teens (Ventura, Calif.: Regal Books, 2001), 94. 13 Ibid., 94–95.

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unwittingly accepted, teenagers are facing a rapidly changing world armed with a worldview that places them at the center, lifts up personal experience and emotion as the arbiter of decency and righteousness, and rejects historical experience as relevant to today’s world. . . . It will ultimately undermine the capacity of America to be a beacon of goodness, sanity, morality, and purposeful faith.”14 This has been precisely my experience as I have traveled around the world speaking to audiences on the subject of truth and morality. At such events, I will typically launch out into the audience with a cordless microphone and take an informal poll of my audience. One recent example was a convention of Christian educators—schoolteachers, administrators, and other educational professionals. I found a willing volunteer in the audience. Sharing the microphone with the woman, I asked, “Do you believe that lying is wrong?” “Oh yes,” she answered emphatically. I nodded. “Why is lying wrong?” “Well,” she said, hesitating, “because that’s what my parents taught me.” I thanked her and moved on. I soon found another volunteer and asked her the same question: “Do you believe lying is wrong?” “Yes,” she said. “Why is lying wrong?” I asked. She answered confidently. “Because the Bible says it’s wrong.” “Why does the Bible say it’s wrong?” I asked.

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Ibid., 97.

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She was clearly unprepared for that question. “I . . . I don’t know,” she said. The next person who volunteered was a tall man, an outgoing, confident sort. “Do you believe lying is wrong?” I asked. “Absolutely!” he responded. “Why is it wrong?” “Because God said so!” he answered, even more emphatically. I held up a Bible in my hand. “Do you believe this is the Word of God? Do you believe it is truth?” “Absolutely!” He must have expected another fastball because he simply blinked at the next question I threw at him: “Why do you believe that?” “Well, I . . . ,” he stammered. “It just is.” I receive similar answers every time I conduct this little exercise—whether at Starbucks, in an airport lobby, or with the person in the seat next to me. Often someone will respond to my questions about why lying (or stealing or killing) is wrong by saying, “Because I personally feel it’s wrong,” “Because our culture [or government or laws] condemns it,” “Because my parents taught me it is wrong,” or “Because the majority of people think so.” But I seldom receive an accurate or even sensible answer. Of course, most people speak much more confidently of right and wrong, good and evil, when something tragic and horrifying occurs, such as the September 11 attacks on America. But while politicians, pundits, and news anchors may feel more comfortable saying that it’s wrong—even evil—to hijack airplanes and fly them into skyscrapers and government buildings in an effort to kill as many people as possible, the reasons for the proclamations are no

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more clear or coherent than the answers I get when I survey my audiences about their views of right and wrong. That’s because people who live in postmodern times and absorb postmodern ideas are poorly equipped to condemn even the most horrific actions in a truly coherent and consistent way.

To Tell the Truth There’s only one accurate and satisfying answer to the question “Why is it wrong to hijack airplanes and fly them into skyscrapers and government buildings in an effort to kill as many people as possible?” There is only one answer in judging Mohamed Atta. However, before I explain what I perceive the answer to be, let me try to explain many answers people give for making moral choices, answers that seem to be inadequate and fall short. In doing this you will understand the “one answer” so much easier. My father once gave me some profound advice that I would like to apply here: “Son, a problem well defined is half-solved.” So true! Let us look at various ways people make moral choices. I have found nine common responses: 1. “I believe there is no ultimate truth.” 2. “I believe we cannot judge truth because all truth is of equal value.” 3. “I believe what I do because it’s what my family and community taught me.” 4. “I believe something is true when it reflects my personal value system.” 5. “I believe something is true when it works for me.” 6. “I believe something is true if a majority believes it is true.” 7. “I believe something is true if it is true for my culture.”

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8. “I believe something is true because I feel it is right.” 9. “I believe something is true if the Bible tells me it is so.” After looking at these nine responses, I will present what has come out of my struggles over the years as I have tried to teach my children, whom I love and cherish, how to discern good from evil.

1. “I Believe There Is No Ultimate Truth.” Don Closson of Probe Ministries points out postmodernism’s contention that “since there are multiple descriptions of reality, no one view can be true in an ultimate sense . . . since truth is described by language, and all language is created by humans, all truth is created by humans.”15 Richard Rorty, professor of comparative literature at Stanford University, states language is manmade and, “Where there are no sentences, there is no truth, and sentences and their respective languages are human creation [i.e. truth-values are human creations].”16 Greg Dening, retired professor of history at the University of Melbourne, is emphatic that “words do not mirror the world but make it.” Dening goes further and endorses the view that history is fiction. He says that while teaching undergraduates at the University of Melbourne, he has “always put it to them that history is something we make rather than something we learn. . . . I want to persuade them that any history they make will be fiction—not far from fiction, something sculpted to its expressive purpose.”17 15

Don Closson, “Multiculturalism,” PROBE Perspectives (Richardson, Tex.: Probe Ministries, 1998); <www.probe.org/docs/multicul.html>. 16 Richard Rorty, quoted in ibid. 17 Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering the Past (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 77, quoting

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When it comes to historical truth, French theorist de Certeau teaches that history is merely a form of writing, and therefore all history is fiction: “The past is the fiction of the present.”18 As a result then, “When historians write, they are not recording history; rather they are manufacturing history.”19 Many Americans go further and state there is no truth. John Caputo, professor of philosophy at Villanova University proclaims that “the cold, hermeneutic truth is the truth that there is no truth, no master name which holds things captive.”20 Richard Rorty maintains, “For the pragmatist, true sentences are not true because they correspond to reality, and so there is no need to worry what sort of reality, if any, a given sentence corresponds to—no need to worry about what ‘makes’ it ‘true.’”21 Hayden White, professor of the history of consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz, says bluntly, “Truth is produced, not found.”22 White went on to apply this to historic truth: “What historians produce are imaginative images of the past that have a function rather like the recall of the past events in one’s own individual imagination. . . . [There is no contradiction between

Greg Dening, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge, Eng.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 366. 18 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. T. Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 10. 19 Windschuttle, The Killing of History, 34. 20 John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project: Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997), 192. 21 Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 16. 22 Hayden White, quoted in Ewa Domanska et al., Encounters: Philosophy of History after Postmodernism (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 20.

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imagination and the real] because what would be meant by the real is always something that is imagined.”23 Karl Popper, a philosopher and former professor of logic and scientific method at the University of London, reinforced the relative approach to truth: “There can be no history of the past as it actually did happen; there can only be historical interpretations; and none of them final; and every generation has a right to frame its own.”24 Historical truth, according to Carl Becker, one of America’s most influential historians of the early twentieth century, is “an imaginative creation, a personal possession which each one of us . . . fashions out of his individual experience, adapts to his practical or emotional needs, and adorns as well as may be to suit his own aesthetic tastes.”25 In his book The Killing of History, Australian historian Keith Windschuttle critiques the postmodern historians approach to truth: One of the principles of Enlightenment rationality is the idea that the truth is something that cannot be altered by subsequent human influence. The Enlightenment believed that the truth was something we discovered, not something we decided. Most historians over the last two hundred years have accepted the view that the truth about the past is something independent of themselves. However, the current generation of social theorists, and quite a few historians today as well, believe that the past is not 23

Mark Noll, “History Wars II,” Books and Culture 5, no. 4 (July/August 1999): 22. Gary Habermas quoting Karl Popper, “Defending the Faith Historically” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society, Philadelphia, 1995); <www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/ets-mtg.html>. 25 Mark Noll, “Traditional Christianity and the Possibility of Historical Knowledge,” Christian Scholars Review XIX (June 4, 1990): 388–406. 24

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something we discover but something each age invents for its own purposes.26 While making a trenchant criticism of postmodernist theory’s rejection of traditional values, Harry Oldmeadow, literary critic who teaches at Latrobe University in Victoria, Australia, nonetheless accepts its critique of truth. “The epistemological objections to the liberal ideal of a disinterested pursuit of truth are more difficult to counter. The positivist rubric of ‘objectivity’ is now quite rightly in tatters. Kuhn, Rorty, and others have shown how the apparently objective basis of the scientific disciplines themselves is illusory (never mind the more absurd pretensions of the positivist sociology or a behaviorist psychology).”27 The feminist historian professor Ann Curthoys, of the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, has claimed, “Most academics in the humanities and the social sciences, as far as I know in the physical and natural sciences as well, now reject positivist concepts of knowledge, the notion that one can objectively know the facts. The processes of knowing, and the production of an object that is known, are seen as intertwined. Many take this even further and argue that knowledge is entirely an effect of power, that we can no longer have any concept of truth at all.”28 Ewa Domanska, assistant professor of the methodology of history and of the history of historiography at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, posed a question to Hans Kenner, professor of rhetoric and historical discourse at the University of 26

Windschuttle, The Killing of History, 30. Harry Oldmeadow, ‘The Past Disowned,” Quadrant (March 1992): 63. 28 Ann Curthoys, “Unlocking the Academies: Responses and Strategies,” Meanjin 50 (February 3, 1991): 391. 27

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Texas at Arlington, about truth in relationship to reality or personal judgment: “I would like to clarify my position,” stated Kenner in response, “and say that truth ceased to be a relation and has become a judgment.”29 Relation means a corresponding relationship between truth and fact (or reality). Judgment means your personal perspective (i.e., judgment) of the reality is what is “personally true.” However, as Mortimer J. Adler, a philosopher and educator, explains: “The truth or falsity of a statement . . . derives from its relation to the ascertainable facts, not from its relation to the judgments that human beings make. I may affirm as true a statement that is in fact true. My affirmation and your denial in no way alter or affect the truth or falsity of the statements that you and I have wrongly judged. We do not make statements true or false by affirming or denying them. They have truth or falsity regardless of what we think, what opinions we hold, what judgments we make.”30 Adler thus distinguishes between the subjectivity of our judgments about truth and the objectivity of truth itself. Again Adler makes the point: “We may differ in our judgment about what is true, but that does not affect the truth of the matter itself.”31 Can you imagine the serious implications if postmodern historians were right about historical research? In light of many scholars’ declaring that all history is “manufactured,” that it is all “personal perspective” (and one is as good as another), think about people’s criticism of the Holocaust (or Waco or Pearl Harbor or the Cambodian genocide or the Oklahoma City Federal Building 29

Ewa Domanska et al., Encounters: Philosophy of History after Postmodernism, 39. 30 Mortimer J. Adler, Six Great Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1981), 41. 31 Ibid.

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bombing, or the attacks on the World Trade Center. If you say, “That’s not history,” I would respond, “Yes it is. It was history one minute after it happened.” Let’s take the Holocaust. Pastor and educator Tom Dixon writes: There are few events as historically well-documented as the Holocaust. The twentieth-century slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis left behind a churning wake of [objective] historical evidence, and the waves created by the dark ship’s passing can still be felt fifty years later. We can still inspect the camps, the gas chambers, and the warehouses full of documentation, and many who were directly involved in the gruesome events remain to tell of it. Such are the kind of sources and documentation historians dream of: a vast number of eyewitnesses whose accounts are in agreement, and a whole corpus of virtually harmonious evidence. Historically speaking, it doesn’t get any better than that.32 Dixon observes: In the last few years, however, thousands of people have bought into the remarkable suggestion that the Holocaust was a grand hoax. Most historians have brushed aside this theory as ridiculous, thinking that if the Holocaust is not historically proven, probably nothing else is. But surprisingly, the idea has established a firm foothold in the 32

Tom Dixon, “Postmodernism and You: History,” The Crossroads Project (Xenos Christian Fellowship, 1996); <www.crossrds.org/dothist.htm>.

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nation’s universities and news rooms, and a Gallup poll conducted in January of 1994 showed that 33 percent of Americans think it seems possible that the holocaust never happened.33 Scholars used to “view ‘history’ as the investigation into what actually happened in the past and why. Today’s postmodern historians view history more as a study of people’s images and thoughts about their society and their past. What actually happened is no longer the historian’s primary concern, and in fact, can never be known. Instead, what matters is what people thought happened.”34 If the “relativistic” scholars are right, then why all the fuss of the lawsuits and international tension and political debate over those who deny that the Holocaust ever happened or that only a few thousand Jews were exterminated. British historian David Irving challenged the scope of the holocaust but says that he “does not deny Jews were killed by the Nazis, but challenges the number and manner of Jewish concentration camp deaths.”35 Deborah Lipstadt, director for the Institute for Jewish Studies, maintains in her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory that Irving “denies the Holocaust and distorts statistics.” Irving sued her for libel, but the suit was thrown out by a British court that declared there is too much evidence to claim what Irving was saying. Wait a minute, if no objective history or truth exists and if all history is personal perspective and manufactured, then isn’t it possible that 33

Ibid. Ibid. 35 Karin Laub, “Overseer of Holocaust Plays Down Role in Prison Memoir,” Associated Press release, February 29, 2000. 34

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Irving’s “personal perspective”—what he “manufactured”—is just as true as another’s “truth”? Distorted? Must there be a real “truth” to have “distortion”?36 Why did Austria’s decision to include Joerg Haider and his Freedom Party in the government cause such an uproar throughout Europe and Israel?37 Haider’s crime was “playing down the crimes of the Nazis.”38 There must be the “facts” then that cause one person’s manufactured truth to be better than another’s manufactured truth. Jorn Rusen, president of Kulturwissenschaftliches Institute Essen at the Wissenschaftszentrum Nordrhein-Westfalen and professor for general history and historical culture at the University of Witten/Henleche, takes issue with those who say people create values or truth. He asserts the postmodernist belief that “since there is no such thing as truth and plausibility, it is completely open to what people (or critics) want to know about the past. Apply this concept to the Holocaust [or the Taliban] and the questions of the so-called revisionists, and you see its limits. There is something like evidence, information, experience, and there is no doubt that it happened. Historians cannot create values. It is nonsense to say that history has the task of creating meaning. It can’t create, it only can translate meaning.”39

36

Irving v. Lipstadt and Penguin Books, Ltd., The English Court of Appeal before Lord Justice Pill in the Royal Courts of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division, I. no. 113 (1996), trial transcript (January 11, 2000). 37 William Drozdiak, “Austrian President Approves Coalition with Haider Party,” International Herald (Frankfurt) Tribune, 4 February 2000; John Reed, “Austrian Voters Are Alarmed by EU Heat,” Wall Street Journal, 3 February 2000. 38 Richard Murphy, “EU Sanctions Caught Chancellor Unaware,” USA Today, 9 February 2000. 39 Domanska, Encounters, 142.

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Even agnostic philosopher Bertrand Russell argued that truth is not relative to minds: “It will be seen that minds do not create truth or falsehood. They create beliefs, but when once the beliefs are created, the mind cannot make them true or false, except in the special case where they concern future things which are within the power of the person believing, such as catching trains. What makes a belief true is a fact, and this fact does not (except in exceptional cases) in any way involve the mind of the person who has the belief.”40

2. “I Believe We Cannot Judge Truth Because All Truth Is of Equal Value.” Grasping the supposed logic and reasoning of the preceding arguments is crucial to understanding how some people view moral truth. If all truth is created by humans, the reasoning goes, and all humans are “created equal” (as the American Declaration of Independence says), then what is the logical next step? It is this: All “truth” is equal, i.e., all “equal people” have “equal truth/values.” ABC News writes, “How about getting your nose out of the Bible (which is only a book of stories compiled by many different writers hundreds of years ago) and read the Declaration of Independence (what our nation is built on) where it says ‘All Men Are Created Equal’ [i.e., “All” means are equal in beliefs, values, lifestyles, and truth claims]—and try treating them that way for a

40

Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (New York: Oxford University, 1959), 129–30.

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change!? Or better yet, try thinking for yourself and stop using an archaic book of stories as your crutch for your existence.”41 In his book El Mito Nacionalista, Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater states: “Tolerance, the doctrine currently in vogue, is that all opinions are equal. Each one has its point, and all should be respected or praised. That is to say, there is no rational way to discern between them.”42 Teacher and political theorist Willmore Kendall, a leftist turned right, acutely observed four decades ago that “American liberalism [maintains]. . . that everyone is entitled to his point of view, that in general one man’s opinion is as good as another’s. . . . All questions are open questions.”43 Thomas A. Helmbock, executive vice president of the national Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity, offers a critical analysis of the new tolerance when he states: “[This postmodern view] is that every individual’s beliefs, values, lifestyle, and perception of truth claims are equal. . . . There is no hierarchy of truth. Your beliefs and my beliefs are equal, and all truth is relative.”44 Did you catch that? All values, beliefs, lifestyles, and truth claims are equal. In the words of Edwin J. Delattre, dean of Boston University’s School of Education, today’s “enlightened” approach involves “the elevation of all values and beliefs to (a position worthy of equal) respect.”45 41

Larry P. Arnn in response to ABC Online Webmaster, “In Littleton’s Wake”; <www.claremont.org>. 42 Fernando Savater, El Mito (Madrid) Nacionalista, 1996. 43 Sam Tanenhaus, “The Trouble with Enemies,” Wall Street Journal, 19 October 2001. 44 Thomas A. Helmbock, “Insights on Tolerance,” Cross & Crescent (summer 1996): 2. 45 Edwin J. Delattre, “Diversity, Ethics, and Education in America,” Moral Education Journal 19 (December 1992): 48–51.

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According to The Scholastic Children’s Dictionary, the new definition of tolerance is “the willingness to respect or accept the customs, beliefs, or opinions of others.”46 British philosopher R. M. Hare states, “Tolerance equals a readiness to respect [or praise] other people’s ideals as if they were his own.”47 Alasdair MacIntyre, professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, explains that in contemporary America, “All moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.”48 Alan Wolfe, professor of political science and director for the Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, after extensive research on values and morals of middle class Americans, concluded that “the judgmentalism of Americans has its own form of philosophical undergirding. When our respondents expressed a reluctance to pass judgment, they were, in their own way, indicating commitments to two important political ideals: respect for others and equality [morally].”49 After surveying a significant number of Americans on values related to “moral freedom,” Wolfe concluded that the almost noncritical passion for nonjudgmentalism “is the readiness with which some of them rely on genetic or medical factors to explain why people sometimes do harmful things, both to themselves and to others.”50 America’s greatest commitment to nonjudgmentalism (the new tolerance) is to moral freedom or equality. One of the people

46

The Scholastic Children’s Dictionary (New York: Scholastic Books Inc., 2002), s.v. “tolerance.” 47 Ryszard Legutko, “The Trouble with Tolerance,” Partisan Review 61, no. 4 (1994): 617. 48 Alasdair MacIntyre, quoted in Wolfe, Moral Freedom, 167. 49 Ibid., 82. 50 Ibid., 79.

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Wolfe quotes says it best: “I don’t think anybody is better [morally speaking] than anyone else. I really don’t.”51 “So strong is the culture of nonjudgment in America,” writes Wolfe, “that even those who believe that they ought to make the self-destructive behavior of others their business generally do so defensively.”52 After conducting his extensive research, Wolfe said he was disturbed because his research showed, “Americans seemed to be copping out of their obligations to others by adopting a version of moral laissez-faire in which seeming tolerance became an excuse for not taking others seriously.”53 After Wolfe’s first study—One Nation, After All—he wrote, “Americans had become more reluctant to tell other people how to live.”54 Writing about middle-class America’s serious moral handicap, Wolfe says that “they are reluctant to impose their values on others, they are committed to tolerance to such an extent that they have either given up finding timeless morality or would be unwilling to bring its principles down to earth if, by chance, they came across it.”55 Writing in the essay section of Time, Roger Rosenblatt, professor of English at Southampton College, says: One would like to think that God is on our side against the terrorists, because the terrorists are wrong and we are in the right, and any deity worth his salt would be able to discern that objective truth. But this is simply good-hearted arrogance cloaked in morality—the same kind of thinking that makes people decide that God created humans in his 51

Ibid., 83. Ibid., 80. 53 Ibid., 79. 54 Ibid. 55 Alan Wolfe, One Nation, After All (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998), 298. 52

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own image (See the old New Yorker cartoon that shows a giraffe in the field, thinking, ‘And God made giraffe in his own image.’) The God worth worshipping is the one who pays us the compliment of self-regulation, and we might return it by minding our own business.56 Meredith is a student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. She also taught a Sunday school class in my church. She was asked about the relationship between her Christian faith and other religions she learned about in her class on comparative religions. She explained, “Although I am a Christian, I do not feel that other religions are wrong. I understand that Christianity is not for everyone.”57 Pat Zucharan, writer and researcher for Probe Ministries, was eating dinner with Tuwin, a graduate student in literature from the University of Michigan. He had already accelerated into the graduate program after two and a half years of undergraduate work and was looking forward to a earning a Ph.D. After a few minutes, they got on the subject of truth. Pat articulated the position that absolute truths exist and must exist for a society to maintain justice and freedom. Tuwin turned red with anger as he listened to Pat articulate his point. He responded, “This is the kind of thinking that makes me angry. We cannot say absolute truth exists. All truth is relative. We cannot make moral judgments on people’s actions.” Pat then responded, “If what you are saying is true, then we cannot say what Hitler did in exterminating six million Jews [or

56

Roger Rosenblat, “Essay: God Is Not on My Side. Or Yours,” Time (December 17, 2001): 92. 57 Mary Jacobs, “Faiths under Construction,” Dallas Morning News, 31 May 1997.

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murder of more than 3,000 innocent people on September 11, 2001] was wrong.” Tuwin looked Pat right in the eye and said, “Yes, that is correct. If what Hitler believed he was doing was right, then it is right in his own eyes.” Can the same be said of Mohamed Atta? Answers such as this one should not surprise or shock you because it is so typical of moral understanding by many in America before 9-11. Is it the conclusion one must arrive at if one embraces moral relativism? A friend of mine was speaking at a Baptist church in southern California on why the Bible is true. During the question-andanswer time a student asked a pointed question about a social issue that the Bible explains as “sin.” Immediately a young woman in the crowd raised her hand. She stated, “I do not think any of us has the right to judge. The Bible clearly states, ‘Judge not, lest you be judged.’ We cannot say this is wrong.” My friend glanced around the room and asked, “Who agrees with her position?” A number of hands went up. Then a young man stated, “I probably disagree with her, but can we really condone it? She is quoting a biblical principle from Matthew 7:1: ‘Judge not, lest you be judged.’ I may disagree, but can I say I am totally right?” Much of the class agreed with this young man’s comments. My friend then asked the class, “Is this a sin in the Bible?” They all agreed it was. My friend continued, “Then, if it is a sin in the Bible, we can judge whether it is a wrong lifestyle based not on our opinion but on God’s Word.” A young woman responded, “Yes, but I don’t think we can judge those who choose not to live by our standard.” She went on to say, “Our beliefs are individual and should not be imposed on

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others. It’s wrong to try to impose your morals on someone else, and I should not impose my biblical morals on you.” If that is true, then how in the world can anyone call terrorists piloting the planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center evil? Alison Hornstein is a student at Yale University. Finding it extremely difficult to remain silent in light of Yale’s students’ and professors’ response to the 9-11 murders, she finally had her say in an article in Newsweek: “The Question That We Should Be Asking—Is Terrorism Wrong?” She wrote: My generation may be culturally sensitive, but we hesitate to make moral judgments. . . . Student reactions expressed in the daily newspaper and in class pointed to the differences between our life circumstances and those of the perpetrators, suggesting that these differences had caused the previous day’s events. Noticeably absent was a general outcry of indignation at what had been the most successful terrorist attack of our lifetimes. These reactions and similar ones on other campuses have made it apparent that my generation is uncomfortable accessing, or even asking, whether a moral wrong has taken place. . . . [At a Yale seminar one day after the terrorists murdered more than 3000 people] a professor said he did not see much difference between Hamas suicide bombers (who, he pointed out, saw themselves as ‘martyrs’) and American soldiers who died fighting in World War II. When I saw one or two students nodding in agreement, I raised my hand. I wanted to say that although both groups may have believed that they were fighting for their ways of life in declared “wars,” there is a considerable distinction.

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American soldiers, in uniform, did not have a policy of specifically targeting civilians; suicide bombers, who wear plainclothes do. The professor didn’t call on me. The people who did get a chance to speak cited various provocations for terrorism; not one of them questioned its morality.58 When someone today questions another’s “moral” choice or beliefs, the response so often is, “Who are you to say?” Then it is expressed that you are “a narrow-minded, intolerant bigot!” Why wouldn’t it then be appropriate for Osama bin Laden to say to America, “Who are you to judge me [us]? Why do you think you have the right to impose your ‘moral’ values on us?” Could he rightly conclude that Americans are “narrow-minded, intolerant bigots—i.e., infidels”? One of the most penetrating accusations by people today is to say, “You are being judgmental!” It is almost always followed by this statement: “The Bible says you should not judge.” The person then quotes Matthew 7:1, where it is recorded that Jesus said, “Judge not . . .” It’s as if America has added an eleventh commandment: “Thou shall not judge.” My wife, Dottie, and I were recently having lunch with a pastor and his fifteen-year-old daughter. During our conversation, someone used the word judgment. Instantly his daughter spoke up, “I don’t think you should be judgmental. You should never judge. The Bible says, ‘Judge not, lest you be judged.’” I glanced at her father, and he was beaming with joy. My immediate response was to say, “Carolyn, do you know what you 58

Alison Hornstein, “The Question That We Should Be Asking—Is Terrorism Wrong?” Newsweek (December 17, 2001): 14.

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just did? You just gave up the right to discern the moral difference between Mother Theresa and Osama bin Laden: ‘Judge Not.’ You just gave up the ability to discern the difference between Todd Beamer and Mohamed Atta. ‘Judge Not.’” Author and seminary professor Paul Copan writes: It has been said that the most frequently quoted Bible verse is no longer John 3:16 but Matthew 7:1: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.” We cannot glibly quote this, though, without understanding what Jesus meant. When Jesus condemned judging, he wasn’t at all implying we should never make judgments about anyone. After all, a few verses later, Jesus himself calls certain people “pigs” and “dogs” (Matt. 7:6) and “wolves in sheep’s clothing” (7:15)! Any act of church discipline (1 Cor. 5:5) and rebuking false prophets (1 John 4:1) requires judgment. What Jesus condemns is a critical and judgmental spirit, an unholy sense of moral superiority. Jesus commanded us to examine ourselves first for the problems we so easily see in others. Only then can we help remove the speck in another’s eye—which, incidentally, assumes that a problem exists and must be confronted.59 What is interesting in these charges of arrogance and judgmentalism is this: Besides failing to define what is meant by “judgmentalism,” the accusers often act just as “arrogantly” and “judgmentally” as the “judgmental” ones. If the Christian (or an exclusivist) is denounced for 59

Paul Copan, “True for You, But Not for Me” (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1998), 32, quoting D. A. Carson, The Sermon on the Mount (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1978), 97.

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judgmentalism, he can respond that his accuser is judging him for being judgmental!60 To be consistent, judgmentalism cannot mean “being in disagreement with someone” or “considering someone to be wrong.” It is undeniable that the relativist disagrees with the absolutist, which makes the relativist just as “judgmental” as the absolutist. If judgmentalism is to be understood correctly (in keeping with the context of Matthew 7:1), it should be defined as an inappropriate sense of moral superiority over another because of that person’s moral failure.61 Judgmentalism, then, is that ugly refusal to acknowledge that “there but for the grace of God go I.”62 Furthermore, it is an act of theological blindness to cite the “judge not” passage while ignoring Jesus’ charge to make proper judgments: “Stop judging by mere appearances, and make a right judgment” (John 7:24).63 Even the American courts have endorsed this definition of new tolerance by declaring (in the words of Judge Danny Boggs of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit) that not only do “adherents of all faiths deserve equal rights as citizens” but also “all faiths are equally valid as religions.”64 In other words, not only does everyone have an equal right to his beliefs, but all beliefs are 60

Copan, “True for You, But Not for Me,” 32. Ibid., quoting Caroline J. Simon, “Judgmentalism,” Faith and Philosophy 6 (July 1989): 275–287. 62 Copan, “True for You, But Not for Me,” 33. 63 Ibid., 32. See extensive explanation of “Judge Not” in Matthew 7:1 in the Appendix on page 165. 64 Stephen Bates, “Religious Diversity and the Schools,” The American Enterprise 4, no. 5 (September/October 1993): 18. 61

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equal. All values are equal. All lifestyles are equal. All truth claims are equal. Is that as true for Christianity as for the radical Islamic fundamentalists? the Ku Klux Klan? white Christian supremists? When my daughter Katie was fifteen years old and a sophomore in high school, I asked her, “What is the one thing you most fear being called at school?” She instantly replied, “Intolerant.” My son Sean was just ready to graduate from high school. I asked him if he had been taught any absolute truth at Julian High School. Even though I had expected a negative answer, he said, “Yes!” I asked him what it was. He replied, “Tolerance.” What Sean was taught is that all truth claims are equal—except truth claims that say all truth claims are not equal! I shared with Sean that the essence of what he had been taught was that “you are to be tolerant of the tolerant, and you have the right to be intolerant of those who are intolerant.” He said, “Dad, you’re right!” Professor Gene Edward Veith, author of Postmodern Times, described the label of intolerance as “perhaps our cultures worst term of abuse.”65 Stephen Bates, literary editor of the Wilson Quarterly, concludes that “tolerance [nonjudgmentalism] may indeed be the dominant theme of the modern curriculum. The authors of a recent study of American high schools concluded that ‘tolerating diversity is the moral glue that holds schools together.’ One study of

65

Gene Edward Veith, “The New Multi-Faith Religion,” World (December 15, 2001): 16.

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American history books found toleration presented as ‘the only religious idea worth remembering.’”66 In a postmodern society—a society that regards all values, beliefs, lifestyles, and truth claims as equally valid—there can be only one universal virtue: tolerance. And if tolerance is the cardinal virtue, the sole absolute, then there can be only one evil: intolerance. And that is exactly the attitude we see among the proponents of the new tolerance and postmodernism. If tolerance is America’s cardinal virtue, then it makes it very agonizing to call the murders at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon “evil.” If we do that, we will be labeled as intolerant because we are making a “moral judgment.” Dr. Frederick W. Hill, a school administrator, said, “It is the mission of public schools not to tolerate intolerance.”67 Leslie Armour, a philosophy professor at the University of Ottawa, proposed, “Our idea is that to be a virtuous citizen is to be one who tolerates everything except intolerance.”68 Kenneth Stern, the American Jewish Committee’s specialist on anti-Semitism and extremism, writes, “They [students] all have to be encouraged through forums, presidential statements, and campus debate to remold the institution into one that will be stimulating, relevant, and comfortable [i.e., tolerant] to all its members [some of the terrorists were students].”69 But what does it mean to be intolerant? According to the United Nations “Declaration of Principles on Tolerance,” 66

Bates, “Religious Diversity,” 19. Ibid. 68 Bob Harvey, “Wanted: Old Fashioned Virtue,” Montreal Gazette, 19 February 1995. 69 Kenneth S. Stern, Bigotry on Campus: A Planned Response (New York: The American Jewish Committee, 1990), 8. 67

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“Tolerance . . . involves the rejection of dogmatism and absolutism.”70 Ironic, isn’t it, that the proponents of the new tolerance are so dogmatic about dogmatism and so absolute in their opposition to absolutism? Researcher Pat Zucharan writes: If all religions are true, as George Lucas [see Rogier Bos, “The Theology of Star Wars,” Time (April 26, 1999): 94] and so many others claim, then all religious practices are valid and cannot be judged good or evil. Even just a brief study of the world religions reveals they are contradictory on their basic truth claims and therefore mutually exclusive. For example, let us look at their understanding of the Religious ultimate or God. Atheists believe there is no God. Southern Buddhist schools also hold to an atheistic worldview. Hindus, Northern Buddhist schools, the New Age movement, and other Pantheist groups believe that God is an impersonal force made up of all things in the universe. In other words, the universe contains God, and the universe is God. Islam believes in a Unitarian monotheism. Allah alone is God, and to associate anyone else with Allah is blasphemy. Christians believe in a Triune, personal God. Aristotle’s law of noncontradiction states that two contradictory truths in a relationship with one another cannot be true at the same time. When it comes to religious 70

“Declaration of Principles on Tolerance,” The Member States of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, meeting in Paris at the twenty-eighth session of the General Conference, from October 25 to November 16, 1995.

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truth, we cannot say that no God exists and a God exists, and conclude that both statements are true. If there is a God, the monotheists are correct and the atheists and Southern Buddhist schools are wrong. We cannot say that God is personal and impersonal at the same time. If He is a personal God, the Pantheists cannot be correct. The doctrine of God [held by] Christians and Muslims cannot be both true. Either God is Unitarian or triune. One is blasphemy, and the other is true. Philosopher and apologist Ravi Zacharias says, “Most people think all religions are essentially the same and only superficially different. However, just the opposite is true.”71 The new tolerance is a cherished and protected value in our postmodern culture. In legislation regarding the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, the U.S. Congress declared: “The arts and the humanities reflect the high place accorded by the American people to the nation’s rich cultural heritage and to the fostering of mutual respect for the diverse beliefs and values of all persons and groups. Congress is seeking to promote acceptance for the diverse beliefs and values of all persons.”72 Would that include the terrorists? Osama bin Laden? the Taliban? Timothy McVeigh? A policy accepted by the New York State of Regents states, “Each student will develop the ability to understand, respect, and accept people of different races; sex; cultural heritage; national origin; religion; and political, economic, and social background, 71

Personal research by Pat Zucharan of PROBE Ministries for Josh McDowell, October 11, 2001. 72 Delattre, “Diversity, Ethics, and Education in America,” 48–51.

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and their values, beliefs and attitudes.”73 Again, does that include the intolerant? Al-Qaeda? the terrorists? Osama bin Laden? Timothy McVeigh? The ideas of every person are to be understood and accepted and not to be criticized or evaluated. It is important in the above use of the word respect to understand that it means, “Your values, beliefs, lifestyles, and truth claims are equal to mine, and I mean it from the heart.” Sam Tanenhaus, contributing editor at Vanity Fair, concluded after analyzing congressional debate on the anti-terrorism bill that the opposition had not only a “fear for our civil liberties” but also a greater doubt “about whether we have the right to condemn any beliefs at all, even beliefs that threaten our existence.”74 Accept everyone’s values no matter how extreme it may seem? Challenging the New York State Regents policy, American Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker wrote: Do we really want [students] to respect and accept the values, beliefs, and attitudes of other people, no matter what they are? Do we want them to respect and accept the beliefs that led Chinese leaders to massacre dissenting students in Tiananmen Square? And what about the values and beliefs that allowed the Ayatollah Khomeini to pronounce a death sentence on Salman Rushdie. . .? Is exposing unwanted children to the elements and certain death, a custom still widely practiced in some countries in Asia and Africa, to be respected and accepted because it is part of somebody else’s culture? Is female circumcision? 73

E. Calvin Beisner, “The Double Edged Sword of Multiculturalism,” The Freeman (March 1994): 109. 74 Sam Tanenhaus, “The Trouble with Enemies,” Wall Street Journal, 19 October 2001.

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Must we respect the custom of forcing young children in the Philippines or Thailand to work in conditions of virtual slavery? And must we look respectfully on Hitler’s beliefs and actions?75 Must we also look respectfully at the beliefs and actions of Ted Kaczynski or Osama bin Laden or the Taliban or Eric Harris or Timothy McVeigh? If truth is relative and all truth statements are created equal, then we must inevitably conclude we cannot criticize anyone’s beliefs no matter how extreme. Albert Shanker asked, “Must we look respectfully on Hitler’s beliefs and actions? Relativists must and indeed do so.”76 Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota “slams organized religion.” Governor Ventura said, “Legalizing prostitution should be considered but is an unpopular idea because of religion. Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people’s business.”77 Is this one way of calling someone intolerant? Is it another way of saying, What right does anyone have to question another person’s values or behavior? Would Governor Ventura say, “Don’t stick your nose in AlQaeda’s business”? Another result of postmodernism or the new tolerance is that “moral indignation” is prohibited. Why? If all values, beliefs, lifestyles, and truth claims are equally valid, then when we call something or someone evil or when we abhor an action, behavior, 75

Albert Shanker, quoted in Beisner, “The Double Edged Sword of Multiculturalism,” 109. 76 Albert Shanker, quoted in Closson, “Multiculturalism.” 77 Carolyn Batz, “Reform Party, Christian Coalition Leaders Criticize Ventura Comments,” Dallas Morning News, 1 October 1999.

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or person, we are making a “moral judgment.” Our children are taught that such an attitude is intolerance, judgmentalism, narrowmindedness, and bigotry. Or, as Governor Ventura might shout, “You are sticking your nose in other people’s business.” Can you see that the moment we express moral indignation— by saying, for example, that something is evil—we are saying our belief, value, lifestyle, or claim to truth is better or more acceptable than someone else’s? And that, we are told, is intolerant. Girl Scouting is committed to the new tolerance: In most societies, different peoples, with different religions, cultures, lifestyles live together peacefully. Yet throughout the world, discriminating against minority groups, attacks on refugees, and immigrants, religious extremism, ethnonationalist conflicts, acts of violence, and hate crimes continually make the news headlines. Tolerance is respect for the rights and freedoms of others, for individual differences, for cultural diversity [i.e., all different, diverse cultural values are equal]. It means having a positive attitude toward others, with no trace of condescension.78 Does that mean having a positive attitude toward Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden and Ted Kaczynski? By having “no trace of condescension,” it means that we are not to “judge” others’ values, lifestyles, beliefs, or truth claims. A friend of mine is taking a course on humanities at Collin County Community College in Plano, Texas. The students are 78

“Girl Scouting Is Committed to Cultural Diversity,” Daily Clay County Advocate Press, 15 March 1996.

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encouraged to respond to the professor and each other regarding truth, faith, and reason. The on-line “postings” reveal the depth or breadth on moral and cultural relativism in today’s American culture. Message #2016 posted by Laurette on Tuesday, October 30, 2001, states, “No one can say that other religions aren’t correct in their teachings. We each have our own thoughts and beliefs about things. . . . No one has the right to say their belief is the right one. Your belief comes from what you feel in your heart.” On the same day another student responded, “What proves God? Your own belief. If you believe in God, God exists to you. . . . I feel love, therefore it exists to me.” Edwin J. Delattre, dean of Boston University’s School of Education, questions the new tolerance credence that “all values, beliefs, lifestyles, and truth claims are equal.” All values, beliefs, lifestyles, and truth claims do not deserve to be respected for (their) own sake without regard to . . . content. . . . The values of the Ku Klux Klan do not deserve respect; nor of any racial, gender, or ethnic supremacist group. Neither do we owe respect to the values and beliefs of the organized crime cartels operating in the United States. We do not owe respect to the values of countless other individuals and groups you can think of as well as I, that are ambitious for power and use without regard to considerations of morality.79 What would the world look like today if we had left it to the individual to decide if the anti-Semitism of the Nazis in Germany was truly evil and immoral? If in reality all virtues and values are 79

Delattre, “Diversity, Ethics, and Education in America,” 49.

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equal, then the only way “right or moral” would be determined is by “might” (i.e., the moral view with the greatest “might is right”). As I wrote the previous paragraph, I thought about the worldwide observance of January 1, 2000, when we launched the twenty-first century and celebrated the hope for the future and people’s memories of the past. I reflected that in the previous century a multitude of atrocities have been committed by a progressive, nonjudgmental world. In his book The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Isaiah Berlin acknowledged, “It is by now a melancholy commonplace that no century has seen so much remorseless and continued slaughter of human beings by one another than our own. Compared with it, even the wars of religion and the Napoleonic campaigns seem local and humane.”80 James Hitchcock in What Is Secular Humanism concurs with Berlin: “In the twentieth century, mass slaughter [was] perpetuated not by religious believers in opposition to heresy but by secularists convinced that their plan for a worldly utopia [was] the only possible one.”81 You would think that those who hold—and promote—such views as tolerance and nonjudgmentalism (i.e., appeal to Matthew 7:1) would have trouble condemning any act, no matter how hateful or destructive, as evil, wouldn’t you? And you would be right. The high school textbook Economics Today and Tomorrow asks these questions of students: “Can we say that the growth of government is good or bad? Everyone knows that government in 80

Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 175. 81 James Hitchcock, What Is Secular Humanism? (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Servant Publications, 1982), 141.

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the United States has grown in the 1900s—particularly during the Depression and during the 1960s and 1970s. Can we say whether there is a good or bad society? Is there an answer to such a debate? Not really, because the side that one takes depends on one’s values. No right or wrong answer exists when values are at stake.”82Does that include the value of human life in the World Trade Center? Kenneth Stern points out that “students and faculty alike should learn that people interpret their own realities differently, that there is no one perspective that necessarily defines the truth.”83 Josh Weidmann, a student in Littleton, Colorado, wrote to me shortly after the Columbine tragedy: [I was recently] sharing the gospel with a guy who sits next to me in class. After he let me share, he turned to me and said, “I respect you, Josh. I respect what you believe, but it’s not what I believe.” I said, “Thanks, but it is the truth!” He replied saying that it “was only my truth, not his.” Josh, my generation is so confused. We live in a world that prides itself with many truths. We have been taught and encouraged to be tolerant; everything and every way is right. We hear that it is “politically correct” to think that there is not only one truth but many; that no way is above another’s; that no religion is all truth. How one person chooses to believe may not be another’s, but that is okay.

82

Roger LeRoy Miller, “Government Spends, Collects and Owes,” chap. 17 in Economics Today and Tomorrow (New York: Glencoe Division of Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, 1991), 415, emphasis added. 83 Stern, Bigotry on Campus: A Planned Response, 8.

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While speaking about the new tolerance and the popular concept that all truth is relative at the Fishnet music festival in Virginia, eight students from a public university that is conservative in comparison to most public universities approached me. They said in unison, “Josh, everything you said [about tolerance], we’ve experienced. In fact at our school if you are accused of intolerance—just accused—you have to take a class in cultural sensitivity before you can take another university course.” Then one student, a senior, spoke up and said, “Josh, I’m very committed to Jesus, but it’s been the hardest year of my life. I am a resident’s assistant, and last summer they took all of us to a conference center for two days. For those two days all we heard about was tolerance, tolerance, tolerance. They brought in gays, lesbians, pedophiles, and the like, and they said we had to be tolerant. They told us to determine what is right for us and what is wrong for us and that we are not to share or impose our values on others. We are to allow others the freedom to determine what is right for them and what is wrong for them and to live it out unhindered. By the second day of the conference, they threatened us at every session: ‘If we catch you trying to change anyone as an RA, you will not only be fired but it will go on your record, and it will follow you for the rest of your life.’” Young people are badgered in our high school as well. One young person was asked in class by his high school teacher whether he believed Jesus Christ was the Son of God and the only way of salvation. He muttered almost incredibly, “Yes, I do.” He said that the teacher immediately responded with unmitigated fury. In front of the class with a voice as loud as a rocket launcher, she yelled at him, “That is the most narrow-minded, bigoted, and arrogant statement I have ever heard in my life! You must be a

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supreme egotist to believe that your way of religion is the only way.”84 The impact of moral relativism is also felt in classes on comparative religion studies. Formerly when students took a class in comparative religions, it was to “understand and evaluate” the truth claims of various religions. That is no longer true in most universities. Now students take the class to “understand in order to appreciate” the various truth claims. When I made this observation to a group of two hundred youth directors and pastors in Chicago, a youth pastor stood to his feet and said, “Josh, I am a graduate student at Northwestern University, and I’m taking a class in comparative religions.” I immediately asked him, “Is the purpose of the course to evaluate the truth claims?” He said, “Oh no. It is to understand and appreciate.” Courses in comparative religion and philosophy are not offered in order for students to evaluate “truth claims”; to do so would commit the “sin” of moral hierarchy and intolerance. To do so would judge someone else’s beliefs, values, lifestyle, or truth claims, and that is anathema. Another development in the notion that all truth is relative only to the individual or culture is the response to a person’s truth claims. Over the years now, I have given more than twenty-two thousand talks in close to eight hundred universities and 83 countries. So I have a little experience to state the following: Eight or ten years ago when I would make “truth” statements about the Bible, Jesus, or the Resurrection in universities and high schools, I would be challenged or heckled. Students would say things like 84

As told in James D. Kennedy, Skeptics Answered (Sisters, Ore.: Multnomah, 1997), 102.

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these: “I don’t believe that.” “Prove to me that Jesus is the Son of God.” “I don’t believe Christ was raised from the dead.” “I don’t think God exists.” “Give me some proofs or evidence.” Today I am still heckled, but the content of the heckling is quite different: “What right do you have to say that?” “You’re intolerant.” “You have no right to say that.” “You’re a bigot.” The issue is no longer the truth of what I say but my right to say what I do. Australian historian Keith Windschuttle writes: In recent years, some textbook committees of secondary school authorities in Berkeley, California, have been trying to ban history and social science textbooks that assert the native American populations arrived on the North American continent from Asia towards the end of the last Ice Age. These origins, confirmed by generations of archeologists, anthropologists and prehistorians, run counter to the myths of the native Americans themselves. Academic supporters of the native Americans are now arguing that there is no reason why the findings of nonindigenous scientists should be privileged over the narratives that the indigenes tell about themselves.85 Under postmodernism or the new tolerance it doesn’t matter what the facts or evidence shows because whatever the indigenous culture believes is just as valid as whatever reality the facts might

85

Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 247–48, as quoted in Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering the Past (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 303.

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indicate. Remember, we are taught to “act out” our own personal behavior based upon our own “personal truth.” George Lucas, film director and creator of the Star Wars series, recalls, “I remember when I was 10 years old, I asked my mother if there’s only one God, why are there so many religions? I’ve been pondering that question ever since, and the conclusion I’ve come to is that all the religions are true.”86 Is the religion of the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, and the other terrorists true? In the first episodes in the latest Star Wars series, “Episode One: the Phantom Menace,” Anakin Skywalker mounted the floating machine, Pod Racer, to race for his life. Qui-Gon Jinn, his mentor, approached him and said, “Focus. . . . Your focus determines your reality. . . . Depend on your feelings.”87 Remember, our youth are taught that they should act on their “own truth.” This is what Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold did when they murdered thirteen students and faculty at Columbine High School. John Leo, writing in the Washington Times, points out the bizarre results of this view that all values, beliefs, lifestyles, and truth claims are equal: In 30 years of college teaching, Professor Robert Simon has never met a student who denied that the Holocaust happened. What he sees increasingly, though, is worse: students who acknowledge the fact of the Holocaust but can’t bring themselves to say that killing millions of people is wrong.

86 87

Bill Moyer, “The Theology of Star Wars,” Time (April 26, 1999): 92. Ibid., 92–94.

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Simon, who teaches philosophy at Hamilton College, says that ten to 20 percent of his students are reluctant to make moral judgments—in some cases, even about the Holocaust. While these students may deplore what the Nazis did, their disapproval is expressed as a matter of taste or personal preference, not moral judgment. “Of course I dislike the Nazis,” one student told him, “but who is to say they are morally wrong?”88 Would the same student say that he disliked what the terrorists did on September 11, 2002, but refuse to say that they were morally wrong? Postmodernism has created a climate in which people can no longer say that the systematic murder of six million men, women, and children is morally wrong! And a person who cannot condemn the killing of six million innocents would certainly be inconsistent to judge as “evil” the murder of more than 3,000 at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, and in a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

3. “I Believe What I Do because It’s What My Family and Community Taught Me.” One of the more frequent responses I get when I ask audiences whether lying or stealing or killing is wrong is what social scientists call behavioral conditioning. As I mentioned earlier, when I ask, “Why is lying wrong?” people sometimes reply, “Because that’s how I was raised,” or “That’s part of the value 88

John Leo, extracted in “It’s All Relative,” Reader’s Digest 152, no. 910 (February 1998): 75.

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system my parents taught me.” This view would define right and wrong according to information passed on from parent to child, from one generation to the next. In fact, the Barna Research Group reports that “roughly onesixth of the adult public (17 percent) . . . credits the values they were taught by their family as the dominant influence on their moral considerations.”89 However, if such “family values” are the basis for moral truth, then what happens when the value system your parents taught you differs wildly from the value system my parents taught me? Take, for example, the terrorists who attacked the citizens of over forty nations on September 11, 2001. What if their parents taught them (and some did) that it’s okay under certain circumstances to kill thousands of men, women, and children in the name of Allah? What if they were raised to believe that performing such an act in the name of their race or religion was noble and righteous? By what reasoning can you—whose parents taught you that killing was wrong—condemn the September 11 hijackers, whose parents may have taught them that killing is right? The answer is, you can’t. If the basis for your sense of what is right and what is wrong goes no deeper than what your parents taught you, then you have no grounds on which to judge those who wantonly kill innocent men, women, and children because their parents taught them it is right. The New York Times research showed that before making moral choices, instead of consulting parents, Americans often 89

Barna Research Group, “Practical Outcomes Replace Biblical Principles As the Moral Standard,” Barna Research Online (September 10, 2001); <www.barna.org/cgi-bin/PagePressRelease.asp?PressReleaseID=97& Reference=F>.

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consult various sources of moral wisdom: popular TV shows, self-help books, Jesus Christ, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, William James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Dorothy Day, Winston Churchill, and Rabbi Hillel.90 It wouldn’t surprise me that Mohamed Atta consulted the “moral wisdom” of Osama bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri (founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad), Mu‘ammar Gadhafi, Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, or Mullah Mohammed Omar.

4. “I Believe Something Is True When It Reflects My Personal Value System.” Sometimes the best a person can do in explaining his or her concept of right and wrong is conclude that something is wrong because “I personally feel it’s wrong,” or “It goes against my personal value system.” Many people consider a carefully constructed personal value system to be the fundamental basis for moral and ethical standards. The Humanist Manifesto II, for example, states unequivocally, “All persons should have a voice in developing the values and goals that determine their lives.”91 Many would argue that’s exactly what Eric Harris, Mohamed Atta, Timothy McVeigh, and Ted Kaczynski had. Reflecting that perspective, many textbooks and educational resources since the mid-twentieth century have promoted a process called values clarification, a process that discourages individuals from adopting “the old religion, the old culture . . . the old values, 90 91

Wolfe, Moral Freedom, 196. Edwin H. Wilson et al., The Humanist Manifesto II (Amherst, N.Y.: The American Humanist Association, 1973).

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the old standards,” in favor of new, individual personally constructed “truths” and “morals.” George Barna, after analyzing the extensive research on culture and individual beliefs and values, observed that today’s postmodern culture implores each individual to: 1. Determine what is right and wrong for themselves. 2. Define their own understanding of God, based on their experiences and perception, without the restraints that religious texts and traditions impose upon the human mind.”92 Barna’s in-depth research indicates that “seven out of ten [Christian] teens say there is no absolute moral truth, and eight of out ten claim that all truth is relative to the individual and his or her circumstances.”93 The Third Millennium Teens study by Barna showed that only ”15 percent say that there are moral absolutes which are unchanging.”94 This way of thinking—which has reached the status of dogma throughout much of the public school system in the United States, Canada, and other western nations—is defined quite clearly in the extremely influential 1972 book Values Clarification. The book’s back cover explained that the book was designed “to engage students and teachers in the active formulation and examination of values.” It does not teach a particular set of values. There is no sermonizing or moralizing. The goal is to involve students in practical experiences, making them aware of their own feelings, their own ideas, their own beliefs, so that choices and decisions

92

Barna, Real Teens, 92. Ibid. 94 Ibid., 90. 93

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they make are conscious and deliberate, based on their own value systems.95 A myriad of textbooks promotes the values clarification message, that the basis of morality is the development of a personal value system. The following text from marketing copy on textbooks illustrates that point: Everyone must develop his own set of principles to govern his own sexual behavior. (Webster/McGraw-Hill )96 The particular patterns of behavior that one accepts for himself is a decision that adults must make. (Webster/McGraw-Hill ).97 The moral has been purposely omitted in order that the children when talking about the story, may come to their own conclusions. (Heath)98 [The goal of this text is] helping children to form the ideas, values and habits of mind. (Macmillan/McGraw-Hill)99 No right or wrong answer exists when values are at stake. (Glencoe/McGraw-Hill)100

95

Sidney B. Simon, Leland W. Howe, and Howard Kirschenbaum, Values Clarification: A Handbook of Practical Strategies for Teachers and Students (New York: Hart Publishing Co., 1972), back cover. 96 Psychology for Living (New York: Webster/McGraw-Hill), 189. 97 Ibid., 190. 98 Communicating, 2d grade (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath). 99 The World Past and Present, teachers ed. (New York: Macmillan/McGraw-Hill, 1993), T20. 100 Roger LeRoy Miller, Economics: Today & Tomorrow, teachers ed. (New York: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 1995), 4.

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Designed to engage students and teachers in the active formulation of values. . . . it does not teach a particular set of values. There is no sermonizing or moralizing. The goal is to involve students in practical experiences, making them aware of their own feelings, their own ideas, their own beliefs, so that choices and decisions they make are conscious and deliberate, based on their own value systems. (Hart Publishing Co. Inc.)101 America has marveled at the broad diversity of its people . . . prided itself on its ability to accept and borrow from the lifestyles and values of many different nationalities. . . . [Pluralism] means that people must compromise . . . by yielding on certain points. Americans [must] exercise tolerance . . . for the lifestyles of others. (Houghton Mifflin)102 The adjusted individual conforms where it is mutually beneficial to himself and society—to laws, to rules of etiquette, to modes of dress, for example. He does not conform when his principles or his best judgment advise against it. (Webster/McGraw-Hill)103 One of the most important parts of any culture is its values. . . . Many people’s values are shaped by religious beliefs. As a Hindu, for example, Azeez believes that all living things have souls and are “a fraction of God.” . . . Think about how the way you live at home reflects your family’s 101

Simon/Howe/Kirschenbaum, Values Clarification, back cover. “Understanding Pluralism,” in A More Perfect Union, 8th grade social studies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 50. 103 Psychology for Living, 319. 102

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beliefs and customs. Cultures [i.e., truth, values] do not stay the same forever. They constantly change through their interaction with other cultures. (Macmillan/McGrawHill)104 [This part of the book] describes [the] . . . goal of helping students to progress to higher-order skills in thinking. . . . Critical Thinking: Thinking that is focused on deciding what to believe or what to do. (Houghton-Mifflin)105 In other words, these authors and publishers believe that children should have the right to define their own values, free of religious doctrine or parental guidance. Keep in mind, humanism does not believe in absolute truth; therefore, “critical thinking” is not based on the discernment of truth. Rather, it becomes a process for developing your own personal values and truth. Furthermore, the development of a “higher order thinking skill” is designed to help children think critically of their parent-instilled value system. Many authors of public school textbooks use all opportunities to instill “politically corrected” values instead.106 The authors advocate that children should be able to create their own values and truth, free of their faith or parents. What is actually meant by the wonderfully sounding concept of critical thinking? It is not based on truth. Raymond English, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in a speech to the National Advisory Council on Education Research and Improvement, 104

World: Adventures in Time and Place, 6th grade (New York: Macmillan/McGrawHill, 1997), 14–15. 105 This Is My Country, 4th grade social studies teacher’s guide (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), T30–31. 106 Ibid.

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explained: “Critical thinking means not only learning how to think for oneself, but it also means learning how to subvert the traditional values in your society. You’re not thinking ‘critically’ if you’re accepting the values that Mommy and Daddy taught you. That’s not ‘critical.’”107 Charles Reich in the 1995 best-selling book The Greening of America, which popularized moral freedom, wrote, “The foundation of Consciousness III is liberation. It comes into being the moment the individual frees himself from automatic acceptance of the imperatives of society and the false consciousness which society imposes. . . . The meaning of liberation is that the individual is free to build his own philosophy and values, his own lifestyle, and his own culture from a new beginning.”108 The values clarification message is also buried in children’s literature and story collections, many of which teach—often subtly, sometimes overtly—that the source of moral truth is within each individual. But if forming a personal value system is the answer, we can hardly condemn others—such as terrorists, hijackers, or school shooters—if their personal value system conflicts with ours. For example, take Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two teenagers who killed thirteen people at Columbine High School in April 1999 before taking their own lives. The weeks of investigation and analysis following that tragic day revealed that each of those young men had developed his own set of principles to govern his own behavior. Both of them had come to their own conclusions about right and wrong. And when seventeen-year-old Rachel Scott told her attackers, “Yes, I believe in God,” she was 107

Cited by Berit Kjos, Brave New Schools: Guiding Your Child through the Dangers of the New School System (Eugene, Ore.: Harvest House, 1995), 20. 108 Cited by Wolfe, Moral Freedom, 216.

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killed . . . by a young man who had formed his own personal value system. The previous examples profile a concerted effort by many people within and without the American educational system to destroy the concept of universal, absolute truth. The Humanist magazine declared, “The battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith. . . . The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new—the rotting corpse of Christianity [or Islam or Judaism, etc.] . . . and the new faith of Humanism . . . will finally be achieved. . . . Humanism will emerge triumphant.”109 James Q. Wilson, author of The Moral Sense, in a book review of Alan Wolfe’s Moral Freedom comments about the moral laissez-faire often depicted in American culture: “To me, Americans have been persuaded by several generations of intellectuals that virtue is simply a personal preference, akin to liking the Red Sox more than the Yankees. The new view of virtue has converted the Ten Commandments into the Ten Suggestions for Helping Other People.”110 Phyllis Schlafly in her report “What Caused Columbine?” gives an acute analysis to better understand how students create their own values today: For the past 25 years, the prevailing dogma in public school teaching has been Values Clarification (as in the tremendously influential 1972 book of the same name by 109

John Dunphy, “A Religion for the New Age,” The Humanist (January/February 1983): 26. 110 James Q. Wilson, “Bookshelf: The 11th Commandment Seems to Be ‘Judge Not,’” Wall Street Journal, 5 April 2001.

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Sidney Simon). That means teaching students to reject “the old moral and ethical standards,” and instead “make their own choices” and “build their own value system.” Indeed, Eric Harris and his sidekick, Dylan Klebold, did “build their own value system,” which allowed them to kill 13 people at Columbine, then take their own lives. Harris and Klebold were not dumb or underprivileged: They came from affluent two-parent families. Professionals who evaluated them concluded that Harris was “a very bright young man who is likely to succeed in life,” and that Klebold was “intelligent enough to make any dream a reality.” Values Clarification teaches that, since there are absolutely no absolutes, students should engage in personal “decision making,” about behavior instead of looking to God, the Ten Commandments, parents, church, or other authority which teaches that behavior should conform to traditional morality. Values Clarification is a book of 79 dilemmas for the teacher to present to the students. The most frequently used classroom dilemma is the “lifeboat game” (and its numerous variations, such as the fallout shelter). The student is told there are ten people in a sinking lifeboat and four must be thrown out to drown so that the other six may live. The student is vested with the authority to decide who lives and who dies. Shall it be the famous author, or the pregnant woman, or the rabbi, or the Hollywood dancer, or the policeman? Any answer is acceptable—whatever each student feels comfortable with is OK, and the students can choose

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different drowning targets because there are no right or wrong answers. No wrong answers, that is, except one. One mother told our Eagle Forum Parents Advisory Center that her child answered the question by saying, “Jesus brought another life boat and nobody has to drown.” That child got an F for giving an unacceptable answer. The worldview of Cassie Bernall, who looked into the barrel of a gun and said, “Yes, I believe in God,” is not acceptable within the rubric of Values Clarification. She was killed by a fellow student who had built his own value system. As in the “lifeboat game,” Harris and Klebold had already decided that it was their right to decide who would live and who would die. Harris posted on the Internet: “My belief is that if I say something, it goes. I am the law. . . . Feel no remorse, no sense of shame.” “Your children,” Harris proclaimed, “who have ridiculed me, who have chosen not to accept me, who have treated me like I am not worth their time, are dead. THEY ARE (expletive) DEAD.”111 May I add that like Harris and Klebold, other people such as Osama bin Laden, Timothy McVeigh, and Mohamed Atta decided it was their right to decide who would live and who would die. Susan Ager, a journalist from the Detroit Free Press, wrote, “I realize that everyday human frailties like hypocrisy and dishonesty trouble me far less than these two: intolerance and gratuitous cruelty. . . . The intolerant are those who deride and reject other 111

Phylllis Schlafly, “What Caused Columbine,” Eagle Forum Newsletter (April 12, 1999); <www.eagleforum.org/column/1999/may99/99-05-12.html>.

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human beings for having rings in their noses or for doing things under the covers that they imagine—wrongly—are vastly different from what they and their friends do.”112 According to Ager, intolerance is cruel, narrow-minded, and unloving. She regards it as one of the worst prejudices one can have. Those who hold to absolute truth and a universal moral code are intolerant. Her attitude reflects the sentiments of popular culture today. Again it would appear that the two killers at Columbine High school did exactly what Susan Ager encouraged students to do: “We each might spend a few invigorating hours someday charting our [own] moral standards, ranking human behavior from most to least offensive.”113 It is also what people such as Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, and the September 11 terrorists did. In his book One Nation Alan Wolfe quotes Ian Dobson, an electrical engineer, who expressed his desire to have his children grow up to be good citizens. Dobson said that he was “trying just to make sure they grow up to be reasonable people and don’t steal, cheat or lie or do any of the things that are on my list of values.”114 Alison Hornstein is the Yale University student who struggled with the university’s lack of discussion addressing “the question of whether an absolute wrong has been committed.”115 Alison, however, agonized that professors did not pass “absolute moral judgment” on the murder of more than 3000 innocent civilians on 9-11 as “objectively bad.” She then goes on to leave all “morality,” “moral judging,” and “objectively bad” discernment to the 112

Susan Ager, “Ruminations on Morality, Cruelty and Intolerance,” St. Louis Post Dispatch, 20 March 1996. 113 Ibid. 114 Wolfe, One Nation, 271 (emphasis added). 115 Hornstein, “The Question That We Should Be Asking,” 14.

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individual’s choice or determination. “Just as we should pass absolute moral judgment in the case of rape,” admonishes Hornstein, “we should recognize that some actions are objectively bad, despite differences in cultural standards and values. To me, hijacking planes and killing thousands of civilians falls into this category. Others may disagree. It is less important to me where people choose to draw the line than it is that they are willing to draw it at all.”116 Think this through: “It is less important to me where people draw the line than it is that they are willing to draw it at all.” It appears that what you personally determine is “objectively bad” is morally wrong; that is, you draw the line that if terrorists kill more than 3,000 people, it is “objectively bad”; however, if they kill only 3,000 innocent civilians, it is “objectively good” and therefore, is “moral” because you “drew the line” that at more than 3,000, dead is “objectively bad.” This is similar to columnist Susan Ager’s determinate of good and evil: “We might spend a few invigorating hours someday charting our [own] behavior from the most to least offensive [objectively bad decided by the subjective individual].”117 Mike Kelly, a columnist for the Washington Post, had a reaction to Hornstein’s “something is morally wrong.” After analyzing Hornstein’s comments, Kelly writes: At some point soon after Sept. 11th, listening to Yale students and professors offer rationalizations for the mass murders (poverty in the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy, etc.), Hornstein had an epiphany. Some things were just 116 117

Ibid., emphasis added. Ager, “Ruminations on Morality, Cruelty and Intolerance.”

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wrong. “Just as we should pass absolute moral judgment in the case of rape, we should recognize that some actions are objectively bad, despite differences in cultural standards and values. To me, hijacking planes and killing thousands of civilians falls into this category.” Hurrah! A breakthrough! A moral judgment! Yes, Ms. Hornstein, murdering thousands of people in fact is bad. But wait. A lifetime of instruction is not sloughed off quite so easily as all that; Hornstein’s bold moral judgment is not quite so bold as all that. Look at her conclusion again: “To me,” it begins. To me, hijacking planes and killing thousands is not objectively bad after all. It is objectively bad only in Hornstein’s opinion. Indeed, she rushes to reassure [us] on this point: “Others may disagree.” Others may disagree. And she adds: “It is less important to me where people draw the line than it is that they are willing to judge it at all.” Oh, dear. It is astonishing, really. Here you have an obviously smart, obviously moral person trying nobly and painfully to think her way out of the intellectual and moral cul-de-sac in which the addled miseducation of her life has placed her— and she cannot, in the end, bear to do it. She cannot judge.118 Joan Montgomery Halford, senior associate editor of Educational Leadership, interviewed Nel Noddings, professor of philosophy and education at Teacher’s College, Columbia University. Professor Noddings instructs teachers of philosophy 118

Michael Kelly, “Non-Judgment Day at Yale,” Washington Post, 19 December 2001.

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and religion that when it comes to faith and truth, “We don’t have to tell them as ‘the truth.’ I would never do that.” Noddings pointed out, “Educators don’t have to end such inquiry by saying, ‘Which position is right?’ But students should be familiar with some arguments that good thinkers have put forth. Educators never need to say, ‘I think,’ but they can say, ‘Biologically and historically, here are some of the things people have said about religion.’” She concluded that “philosophers have tried for a long time to reconcile philosophy and faith, but there’s never been any universally convincing argument. It isn’t the sort of story that can be told convincingly except from a personal perspective.”119 Isn’t that exactly what the terrorists had—a personal perspective? The Quest for Excellence, a book designed to help young people to make moral choices, sums up the observation of values clarification teaching: “Early on in life, you will be exposed to different value systems from your family, church, mosque or synagogue, and friends. You may accept some of these values without questioning whether or not they are the right values for you. But you may eventually realize that some of these values conflict with each other. It is up to you to decide upon your own value system to build your own ethical code. . . . You will have to learn what is right for yourself through experience.”120 Another section of the book pronounces that “your sexual identity can be defined in any way you choose. . . . Only you can decide what is

119

Joan Montgomery Halford, “Longing for the Sacred in School: A Conversation with Nel Noddings,” Educational Leadership (December 1998/January 1999): 30–31. 120 Robert Hatcher et al., The Quest for Excellence (Decatur, Ga.: Bridging the Gap, 1993), 3.

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right and comfortable for you.”121 I wonder, does that include date rape? The title of the article grabbed my attention: “How to Teach Values to Your Children.” I purchased Parenting magazine and immediately went to the featured article by Ron Taffel, who holds a Ph.D. in child and family therapy. At the beginning he boldly stated, “Now it’s not my business (or anyone else’s, for that matter) to proclaim what you stand for. But it is my job as a family therapist to help families communicate about the issues that mean the most to them. Here, then, are five truths I’ve learned that will help you express your values so that children can understand.”122 David A. Noebel, an expert on worldview analysis and the decline of morality and spirituality in Western civilization, looks at the Columbine murders and challenges: Ask yourself the question: Where did Harris learn, “My belief is that if I say something, it goes. I am the law. . . . Feel no remorse, no sense of shame.” From his parents? I doubt it. From his church or Sunday school? I doubt it. How about a class entitled, “Values Clarification”? Here students are taught that no outside authority (parents, God, the school, the government, the Bible, the church) must dictate their values. Their values must come from within where everyone makes up his own values system. Values imposed from above (God) or from outside one’s self (parents, the school, the Bible) are considered nonhumanistic values and harmful to being truly human. Being 121 122

Ibid. Ron Taffel, “How to Teach Values to Your Children,” Parenting (October 1996): 134.

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a mature human being means focusing on one’s self, one’s own will and desires. Man is beyond the notions of good and evil as found in Western Civilization.123 A teacher said to me recently that schools don’t really teach that. Really? My daughter Katie came home from school two years ago and gave me the following exercise she had to do in class. Who Should Survive? Task: Choose seven of the following people to survive. List them in the order in which you would choose them, and indicate the reasons for your selection, i.e., why you chose these particular persons and why you placed them in this particular order. (“X” represents the four the class chose as a whole to die!) A. Dr. Dane: thirty-seven, white, no religious affiliation, Ph.D. in history, college professor, in good health (jogs daily), hobby is botany, enjoys politics, married with one child (Bobby) X

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B. Mrs. Dane: thirty-eight, white, Jewish, rather obese, diabetic, M.A. in psychology, counselor in mental health clinic, married to Dr. Dane, has one child (Bobby)

Dr. David A. Noebel, “Execution at Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado,” The Journal, a Summit Ministries publication (June 1999): 4.

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X

C. Bobby Dane: ten, white, Jewish, mentally retarded with IQ of 70, healthy and strong for his age D. Mrs. Garcia: twenty-three, Spanish American, Catholic, ninth-grade education, cocktail waitress, worked as a prostitute, married at age sixteen, divorced at age eighteen E. Jean Garcia: three months old, Spanish American, healthy F. Mary Evans: eighteen, black, Protestant, tradeschool education, wears glasses, artistic G. Mr. Newton: twenty-five, black power advocate, starting last year of medical school, suspected homosexual activity, music as a hobby, physical fitness buff H. Mrs. Clark: twenty-eight, black, Protestant, daughter of a minister, college graduate, electronics engineer, single now after a brief marriage, member of Zero Population Growth

X

I. Mr. Blake: fifty-one, white, Mormon, B.S. in mechanics, married with four children, enjoys outdoors, much experience in construction, quite handy, sympathizes with anti-black views J. Father Frans: thirty-seven, white, Catholic, priest, active in civil rights, former college athlete,

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farming background, often criticized for liberal views X

K. Dr. Gonzales: sixty-six, Spanish American, Catholic, doctor in general practice, two heart attacks in the past five years, loves literature and quotes extensively

You might say this is exactly what the nineteen terrorists did at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Or they followed columnist Susan Ager’s advice about making “moral choices”: “We each might spend a few invigorating hours someday charting our moral standards, ranking human behavior from most to least offensive.”124 The New York Times study “The Way We Live Now” found that 73 percent believe that all people are born inherently good.125 There is a basic dislike by Americans for a theology with a dim view of human nature. Alan Wolfe makes the observation that “when people believe that individuals are born with a blank slate and are unlikely to be radically evil or radically good, it is a short step to believing that the best place to turn for moral guidance is themselves.”126 Most people today “find themselves quite comfortable with the idea that a good society is one that allows each individual maximum scope for making his or her own moral choices.”127 124

Ager, “Ruminations on Morality, Cruelty and Intolerance.” “The Way We Live Now,” study by the New York Times, as quoted in New York Times Magazine, 7 May 2000; <www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000430poll-results.html>. 126 Wolfe, Moral Freedom, 194. 127 Ibid., 195. 125

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Pollster George Barna, after analyzing postmodernism in today’s culture, concluded that many Americans believe that “autonomous people will do what is best and work out the rough edges of those choices.”128 William Spady, the man often referred to as the father of Outcome Based Education encouraged teachers to eradicate the concept of absolute truth: “Despite the historical trend toward intellectual enlightenment and cultural pluralism, there has been a major rise in religious and political orthodoxy, intolerance, fundamentalism, and conservatism with which young people will have to be prepared to deal.”129

5. “I Believe Something Is True When It Works for Me.” Not everyone looks to the Bible or to family or even to a personal, internal value system to differentiate between the rightness or wrongness of an action. An increasing number of people—many as a result of what they’re taught in school—believe that the answer to questions about right and wrong can be found in what I would call pragmatism. In other words, an increasingly popular way to view morality is by “evaluating whether an action or attitude brings about generally desired [personal] results or consequences.” On September 10, just one day before the killing of more than 3,000 at the World Trade Center on 9-11, the Barna Research Group released a report about moral standards: “When asked the basis on which they 128 129

Barna, Real Teens, 94. William Spady, “Future Trends: Considerations in Developing Exit Outcomes,” (September 1987), quoted in James R. Patrick, comp., Goals 2000 Research Manual (Moline, Ill.: Citizens for Academic Excellence, 1994), 121.

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[Americans] form their moral choices, nearly half of all adults (44 percent) cited their desire to do whatever will bring them the most pleasing or satisfying results. Roughly one-sixth of the adult public (17 percent) bases its moral decisions on what they believe will make other people happy.”130 It sounds as if Americans did their homework in school and took their textbooks seriously. Stop! Think about those statistics for a moment. A combined total of 61 percent (44 percent and 17 percent) of Americans just validated the “moral” choices of the radical Islamic terrorists. Understand that such a standard, if applied to the perpetrators of the September 11 tragedies, justifies their decisions. The attacks on the World Trade Center and other sites clearly brought about desirable, pleasing and satisfying results for Osama bin Laden, Mohamed Atta, and their Al-Qaeda terrorist network. One imagines that they could hardly have been more pleased at the murderous results of their actions. Are a person’s actions morally justified because he or she truly believes they will bring “personal joy and pleasure to yourself or to others”? One of the suspected hijackers on September 11 was Ziad Samir Jarrah. He wrote a letter to his Turkish girlfriend of five years: “You should be very proud because this is an honor and in the end will bring happiness to everyone.”131 Remember that the moral standards of 61 percent of Americans say you should make choices based on your own personal joy or pleasure (44 percent) or the personal joy and pleasure it brings to others (17 percent). Does this make Jarrah’s decision moral and right? 130

Barna Research Group, “Practical Outcomes.” The study reports a 95 percent degree of certainty. 131 Carol J. Williams, “Love Letter Written by Suspected Hijacker Reportedly Surfaces,” Los Angeles Times, 18 November 2001.

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This method, which appears in numerous public-school textbooks, encourages students to construct “good values” based on their own personal pragmatic considerations. The following is an example from a junior-high-level civics textbook: When faced with a decision, you should ask yourself three questions: (1) What are my alternatives? (2) What are the likely consequences, or outcomes, of each alternative? (3) Which consequence do I prefer? . . . Decisions lead to consequences. When you choose one alternative over another, you choose one outcome rather than another. So, an important step in decision making is to predict the good and bad results of each alternative. Your choice of a course of action will be influenced by what you think are the outcomes of each alternative. . . . Careful decision making is choosing the alternative most likely to lead to the outcome you want. You need to think about your goals in order to make good decisions.132 Is this how Timothy McVeigh, the September 11 terrorists, Eric Harris, and Dylan Klebold made their moral choices? A high-school-level world history text gives students similar advice: When you make a decision, you are making a choice between alternatives. In order to make that choice, you must be informed and aware. There are five key steps you

132

Civics for Americans (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman and Company: 1982), 21– 23, emphasis added.

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should follow that will help you through the decisionmaking process. 1. Identify the problem. What are you being asked to choose between? 2. Identify and consider various alternatives that are possible. 3. Determine the consequences for each alternative. Identify both the positive and the negative consequences. 4. Evaluate the consequences. Consider both the positive and the negative consequences for each alternative. 5. Ask yourself. Which alternative seems to have more positive consequences? Which seems to have more negative consequences? Then make your decision.133 And from a social sciences textbook for elementary-age children: “This values clarification program is packaged in a box and includes forty individual investigations presenting the child with a conflict in values within his own frame of reference. He is

133

Mounir A. Farah and Andrea Berens Karls, “Learning the Skill,” in World History: The Human Experience, teacher edition (New York: Glencoe/Macmillan McGraw-Hill, 1999), 179.

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led to explore the alternative solutions to the conflict, prompted to choose a solution and examine the consequences of his choice.”134 These textbooks teach people to make “sound” decisions based on what is best for them. That is what the terrorists did! The hard drive of a computer found in the Al-Qaeda headquarters in a twostory brick building in Kabul, Afghanistan, contained strategic information and letters by the Al-Qaeda leadership. Abu Yaser wrote a letter to top Al-Qaeda Lieutenant Ayman Al-Zawahiri, stressing that “hitting the Americans and Jews is a target of great value and has its rewards in this life and, God willing, the afterlife.”135 Abu Yaser, chose, as Americans are taught to do, the “consequences which I [he] prefer[red].”136 The high school textbook World History: The Human Experience teaches students that the critical issue is that they “evaluate both positive and negative consequences. Make a sound decision about which alternative is best for [them].”137 “The defining characteristic of the moral philosophy of the Americans,” concludes Alan Wolfe, “can therefore be described as the principle of moral freedom. Moral freedom means that individuals should determine for themselves what it means to lead a good and virtuous life . . . [by] what consequences follow from asking one way rather than another.”138 The Quest for Excellence, a book produced for early teens and written by a national board member of Planned Parenthood, says it 134

Principles and Practices in the Teaching of the Social Sciences: Concepts and Values (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975). 135 Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins, “Computer Gives Inside Look at Al-Qaida,” The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune, 1 January 2002. 136 Ibid. 137 Farah and Karls, World History: The Human Experience, 179. 138 Wolfe, Moral Freedom, 195.

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“helps today’s younger teens make responsible sexual decisions.” The Quest for Excellence promises to help teens “achieve an ethical code that belongs to you. What’s right; what’s wrong.” Early on in life, you will be exposed to different value systems from your family, church or synagogue, and friends. You may accept some of these values without questioning whether or not they are the right values for you. But you may eventually realize that some of these values conflict with each other. It is up to you to decide upon your own value system—to build your own ethical code. Your own value system will be important, especially for helping you through difficult times. You have to learn what is right for yourself through experience. Developing your own ethical code takes time. In fact, it takes a lifetime.139 Would the previous statements justify twenty-year-old Suleyman al-Faris (John Walker Lindh) to go to Afghanistan, betray America, and fight for the Taliban? The Quest for Excellence continues to admonish children that “the choice about sex or any form of sexual expression is yours— not your parents’, your friends’, your church’s, your boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s, but YOURS. No one can tell you what is right or wrong for you, because you are the only one who knows your needs, values, and desires. Talking to someone else about your thoughts and feelings may help you sort things out, but remember,

139

Hatcher et al., The Quest for Excellence, 3.

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the final decision is yours. In the end, you may decide to do certain things and not others—that’s okay.”140 If you’re a parent, listen to warning about you in The Quest for Excellence: Even if your parents haven’t talked to you specifically about sex, you probably have a good idea of how they feel anyway. If your parents are very protective, or if they expect you to be a virgin for the rest of your life, their message may not be very realistic. If they fear your sexuality or don’t want you to be sexual at all, you may feel a need to tune out their voices. Sometimes your parents’ voices may be strong enough to make you feel guilty. But if your parents trust your judgment and only want you to take care of yourself, their advice can be very helpful. Whatever the message, it will be a powerful one, and one you should be aware of.141 America’s concept of moral equality “corresponds to a deeply held populist suspicion of authority and a corresponding belief that people know their own best interest.”142 Mel and Norma Gabler, whose lives are given to analyzing textbooks, make an observation about the ideas so many classes on decision-making present: Tautologies instead of values. They stress that responsible decisions are made after analyzing alternatives and considering consequences. But what decisions are these? 140

Ibid., 65. Ibid., 66. 142 Wolfe, Moral Freedom, 226. 141

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Those decisions which are good. Furthermore, they emphasize that genuine values are those which are freely chosen. But what values are these? Those values which are genuine. These are meaningless, redundant formulae. They all avoid defining good values. First, they assume that peer groups form only good consensus. But of course peer groups may also form bad consensus. Second, they assume that only people of good character analyze alternatives and consider consequences. In fact, people of bad character analyze alternatives and consider consequences too. They, however, judge by bad standards and make bad decisions. Analyzing alternatives and considering consequences therefore trains bad character as efficiently as good character.143 “Morality,” for Americans, “is not likely to be based on abstractions but on consequences. Because they live with the choices they make. . . .”144 I wonder if Alan Wolfe was prophetic when he said before September 11, 2001, that “moral freedom is bound to have consequences we will regret.”145 Did you notice that in all the previous textbook references there’s no mention of any moral considerations beyond pragmatic concerns. Do you see in the above there is no consideration of what is “true,” but rather of what is “personally rewarding”? That reflects the view of many who believe that the best way to determine the rightness or wrongness of an action or attitude is to consider whether it brings about personally desirable results. If you 143

Mel Gabler and Norma Gabler, “Moral Relativism on the Ropes,” Communication Education 36, no. 4 (October 1987): 356. 144 Wolfe, Moral Freedom, 17. 145 Ibid., 231.

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agree with the 61 percent of Americans who held to this standard of morality, then you just justified the motives and decision of the nineteen terrorists on September 11, 2001.146 For their moral choice of murdering more than 3,000 people on 9-11 was based on their personally desirable results. If making value decisions based on “the alternative most likely to lead to the outcome you want” is the path to moral truth, must we call the events of September 11 (or the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building on April 19, 1995, for that matter) as moral—as righteous—as any outcome anyone may pursue?

6. “I Believe Something Is True If a Majority Believes It Is True.” Another answer to the question of what distinguishes right from wrong was most recently suggested to me by a flight attendant. I had asked her if she believed that killing other people was wrong. When she said yes, I asked her, “What makes it wrong?” “Well,” she said, “most people would agree that killing is wrong; therefore it’s wrong.” Yesterday I telephoned a well-known northeastern university professor who writes extensively on moral relativism. I asked him, “How would the average American judge 9-11?” He replied, “They would call it evil.” I responded, “On what basis would they call it ‘evil’?” He said, “There are certain actions that everyone will say are ‘evil’—killing civilians, abusing children, that kind of thing.”

146

Barna Research Group, “How America’s Faith Has Changed Since 9-11.”

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Immediately I reacted, “That’s not true. The Taliban doesn’t agree. The Nazis didn’t. Thousands of radical militant Muslims don’t agree. Maoists guerrillas don’t agree. I can think of many other who wouldn’t agree: Americans who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Palestinian bombers, Israeli terrorists, Irish terrorists, Sudan’s Muslim guerrillas.” The phone was silent on the other end. Many people may not be aware that they reflect the view of scholars such as Hans Kellner, professor of rhetoric and historical discourse at the University of Texas, who says, “Truth would be what is plausible or convincing to a universal audience.” However, Kellner goes on to admit that “I am skeptical about the existence of a universal audience within any human experience. The universal audience is a kind of ideal concept, like the idea of truth. What we have are stories that are true for a time and a place.”147 American philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, writing about whether authentic truth or values are those accepted by the majority of the people, explains: Statements such as “That may have been true in the Middle Ages, but it is no longer true,” or “That may be true for primitive people, but it is not true for us” are based on two sorts of confusions. Sometimes truth is confused with what a majority of people at a particular time or place think is true, as in the following example: A portion of the human race some centuries ago held it to be true that the earth is flat. That false opinion has now been generally repudiated. This should not be interpreted to mean that the objective truth has changed—that what was 147

Hans Kellner, as quoted in Domanska, Encounters, 142.

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once true is no longer true. . . . What has changed is not the truth of the matter but the prevalence of an opinion that has ceased to be popular.148 Many people today follow Emanuel Kant’s decision on moral restraint: the categorical imperative. That is, each person must act on or make moral choices based on what would happen if others made the same moral decisions we are tempted with. For some people this is a deterrent; for others it is an encouragement. For example, isn’t this exactly what Mohamed Atta chose to do? I imagine that Osama bin Laden, Mohamed Atta, the Taliban, and the Al-Qaeda wish the entire Muslim world would represent “all others” and commit devastating terrorists activities. This is why Osama bin Laden called for a global jihad against the infidels.

7. “I Believe Something Is True If It Is True for My Culture.” French sociologist and philosopher Emile Durkheim detected that without a sense of morality, culture could not exist. To him “morality” was based on the “collective conscious” of particular cultures. This universal morality would be possible because of the popular view that humans in each culture would follow their conscious rather than their personal passions, desires, or consequences. Durkheim went on to declare: It can no longer be maintained nowadays that there is one, single morality which is valid for all men at all times in all 148

Adler, Six Great Ideas, 41.

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places. We know full well that morality has varied. . . . The moral system of the Romans and Hebrews was not our own, nor could it have been so. For if the Romans had practiced morality with its characteristic individualism, the city of Rome would never have been, nor consequently would the Roman civilization. The purpose of morality practiced by a people is to enable it to live; hence morality changes with societies. There is not just one morality, but several, and as many as there are social types. And as our societies change, so will our morality. It will no longer be in the future what it is today.149 These comments, as well as previously cited comments by Hans Kellner, reflect the typical postmodern view that truth and morality are created by a specific culture or community and thus are “true” only in and for that time and place. In other words, as theologian Stanley J. Grenz points out in his book A Primer on Postmodernism, “Truth is relative to the community in which a person participates. And since there are many human communities, there are necessarily many different [and all equally valid] truths.”150 In The Killing of History Australian historian Keith Windschuttle writes that French poststructuralist historian and writer Michel Foucault “also argues that knowledge is relative not only to historic eras but to social groups as well. Those who have power generate the kind of knowledge that they need to maintain their power; those who are subject to this power need their own, 149

Cited in W.S.F. Pickering, ed., Durkheim: Essays on Morals and Education, trans. H. L. Jutcliffe (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 12–13. 150 Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism, 14.

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alternative kinds of knowledge in order to resist.” Foucault is also committed to a relative concept of truth. Truth for him is not something absolute that everyone must acknowledge but merely what counts as true within a particular discourse.”151 “Each society,” writes Foucault, “has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true: the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the statue of those who are changed with saying what counts as true.”152 “However,” points out Windschuttle, “it is not difficult to show that a relativist concept of truth of this kind is untenable. If what is true is always relative to a particular society, there are no propositions that can be true across all societies. However, this means that Foucault’s own claim cannot be true for all societies. So he contradicts himself. What he says cannot be true to all.”153 Sean McMeekin, author and writer for Error! Reference source not found., analyzed postmodern cultural relativism this way: “If every culture must be interpreted according to its own values, is there any place for ethical judgment of another culture? . . . If historians cannot evaluate the actions of cultures according to standards of rational judgment . . . then we may as well throw up our arms and accept the cultures of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, as ‘equal but different.’”154 Would McMeekin say of the 151 152

153 154

Windschuttle, The Killing of History, 143. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,

1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 131. Windschuttle, The Killing of History, 143. Sean McMeekin, “Is History Dead?” Salon Magazine (January 1999); <www.salon.com/it/feature/1999/01/cov_11feature4.html>.

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Taliban’s Afghanistan and of Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda the same thing he has said about Germany and Russia? Therefore, if the majority of people in a given community or culture agree that killing is wrong—well, then, according to postmodernism, it’s wrong. If that is true, it must follow that if the majority of people in a given community or culture agree that killing is right—well, then, it’s right. Isn’t that what the Taliban, the Nazis, and Mohamed Atta would say? If cultural relativism is the answer—if truth and morality are “true” only in and for a specific person or community or culture— then our culture has no business condemning Hitler for the Holocaust or Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda terrorist network for what they accomplished on September 11. If the Taliban, for example, in their specific culture, have defined the murder of the infidel American men, women, and children and the horrible treatment of women as acts of righteousness that will earn the favor of God, then according to their value system, the hijackers did no evil on September 11. But then according to many American’s value system, is it wrong for America to morally judge the terrorists? When Cultures Clash But what happens when two cultures have opposing or destructive values? When cultures collide morally, people respond from one of two approaches: nonjudgmentalism and consensus. (a)

Nonjudgmentalism

If truth is relative to the community in which a person participates, there is no standard by which cultural values and truth claims can be judged as better or worse by that which exists in another

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culture. If truth and morality are cultural creations that cannot be adequately understood between differing cultures, there are no grounds for any person or nation to protest such abhorrent cultural practices as widow burning (burning living widows on their husband’s funeral pyres), slavery, the cruel treatment of women in Afghanistan, child abuse, the forced abortion and infanticide that results from China’s severe reproductive laws, or the murdering of more than 3,000 people at the World Trade Center. Jim Leffel, director of the Crossroads Project, drives this point home when he writes: “What happens . . . when culture decides a certain race or gender is non-human, and those non-humans are targeted for extinction? If reality is culture-bound, it would be an act of imperialism for another culture to intervene. Without an absolute standard, there is no basis for judging a Nazi or misogynist.”155 One could add, there is no basis for judging Osama bin Laden, Timothy McVeigh, Mohamed Atta, or Al-Qaeda. Indeed, one feminist columnist admitted as much in a widely discussed 1992 editorial on the forcible genital mutilation performed on young females in many Islamic countries. In a clitoridectomy the clitoris is cut off, often without an anesthetic, to prevent the woman from experiencing sexual pleasure and thus, it is thought, preclude the possibility of sexual promiscuity and adultery. Journalist Andrea Park wrote that though she despised the oppression of women and wished to condemn the custom, she had no standard by which to judge other cultures: “How can I argue against a culture I haven’t tried to understand? Is it relevant that I,

155

Jim Leffel, “Our New Challenge: Postmodernism,” quoted in The Death of Truth, ed. Dennis McCallum (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1996), 41.

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an outsider, may find the practice cruel? As hard as it is for me to admit, the answer is no.”156 True to her postmodernist principles and ideals, Park’s editorial should have sounded the death knell of human rights. If all beliefs, lifestyles, and truth claims are culturally defined and equally valid, Park and her culture have no right to question the practices (or defend the rights) of those living in other cultures. You and your children would also have no right to question them. Alison Hornstein, who questions Yale University’s nonjudgmentalism when it comes to values and morality, struggles with the fact that “in high school, my classmates and I learned about how women in some countries are circumcised and how, even though this seemed abhorrent to us, it was part of their culture. We discussed the pros and cons of imposing our standards on other cultures. And, overwhelmingly, we decided we should not.”157 If what is taught in our schools, universities, and textbooks is true about truth and values, then we would have to remain silent, exercise “tolerance,” and be very nonjudgmental about the killing of a pregnant woman in Nigeria “for having premarital sex.”158 Then in Afghanistan we would have to accept that “women were beaten until they bled. Women were arrested because they ran away from their husbands who beat them.”159

156

Andrea Park, as quoted in David O. Sacks and Peter A. Thiel, The Diversity Myth (Oakland: The Independent Institute, 1995), 32. 157 Hornstein, “The Question That We Should Be Asking,” 14, emphasis added. 158 “Pregnant Woman Ordered to Be Stoned to Death,” Baltimore (Md.) Sun, 13 October 2001. 159 Molly Moore, “Aid Workers Recount a Time of Contrasts in Prison,” Washington Post, 16 November 2001; <www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/world/articles/release111601.html>.

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Almost equal to the fear of Americans’ being labeled “judgmental,” is the accusation of being a “moralist.”160 (b)

Consensus

Again, there are those who claim that consensus defines morality not only within cultures but also between them. Professor Arthur C. Danto, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, says as much when he proclaims: “There is no moral knowledge because there are no moral truths. That does not make for moral relativism, of course, since consensus is as wide as it is. Take the case of human rights: Rights are declared. The declaration of human rights in the United Nations structure is universal.”161 The Christian strongly advocates “human rights” because we are all created in God’s image and are his personal creation with infinite value and dignity. The United Nations, on the other hand, advocates “human rights” based on consensus: Might is right. Danto’s statement begs the question, of course: If consensus (either within cultures or between them) determines morality, what happens when cultures clash? What happens when one culture (such as the Taliban, for example) comes to a moral consensus that prompts it to attack and kill members of another culture? I had a memorable conversation with a superintendent of schools in San Diego County. I had driven my daughter Katie to the countywide science fair to set up her booth and discovered that only the students were permitted to go inside until a certain time. So I waited outside, and before too long I found myself engaged in conversation with a man whom I knew to be a superintendent in that school system. Stephen Spielberg’s tragic Holocaust epic, 160 161

Wolfe, One Nation, 27. Ibid.

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Schindler’s List, had been showing in theaters at the time, so I brought that up to him. The conversation went something like this: “Do you believe the Holocaust was wrong, morally wrong?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “Do you believe that killing is wrong?” “Yes.” “Let me ask you a couple other questions. Do you believe in individual relativism? In other words, that each individual must determine what is right and wrong for himself or herself?” “Yes.” “Do you believe in cultural relativism, that is, that each culture must determine what is right or what is wrong in and for that culture and then live that out?” “Yes.” “Then how can you say the Holocaust was wrong? If Hitler and the Nazis, who were in power, determined—individually and culturally—that killing Jews was right and that it served a “just end” and the consequences were positive from their perspective, then how can you morally judge them if each culture determines what is right or what is wrong in and for that culture?” “Because killing is wrong,” he answered. “But why is it wrong?” “Because it just is.” “Does it make it right,” I asked, “if I say killing is right just because it is?” “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Then how can you say the Holocaust was wrong?” “Because we won the war.”

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“Okay,” I said. “Let me ask you another question. If Hitler and the Nazis had won the war, would that have made the Holocaust righteous?” “Yes.” “Sir,” I said, “are you saying that might is right?” “Of course,” he answered. “Whoever has the most bullets or the biggest guns or most votes is right.” “Then, tell me, why do I send my daughters to school here in San Diego County to learn citizenship and good character, to learn civics, and so on? Why don’t I instead show them that whenever they have conflict with someone, they should throw that person to the ground, put their heel to the person’s throat, and kill ’em?” I suspect his answer reflected his frustration at that point. “You know,” he said, “that might not be a bad idea.” That’s a fundamental—and untenable—problem with cultural relativism: When cultures clash, it comes down to “might makes right.” Is the only way to establish right from wrong in such an event a gun or a nuclear device? Steve Brown of Reformed Seminary in Canada wrote me his experience with a guest lecturer who visited his class: The visiting professor was the tenured dean of a mainline divinity school at a major university. He articulated his belief that each culture develops their own reality or truth. He stated, “Just as Santa Claus doesn’t need to be real to have an effect, so different religions or beliefs are equally real regardless of their foundation in truth or fact.” When I asked the professor, “Do you believe there is absolute moral truth?” he answered no. The professor went

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on to state, “Each culture and even subculture determines its own reality or truth.” I then asked, “If there is no absolute truth, does that mean what Hitler did was right in his culture but wrong in our culture?” The dean stated that is correct. Then I asked, “How do we determine whether or not Hitler was right or wrong? Was might right?” To this question the answer was very vague and unclear.162

8. “I Believe Something Is True Because I Feel It Is Right.” A study by the New York Times observed that “our respondents are guided by subjective feelings more than they are by appeals to rational, intellectual, and objective conceptions of right and wrong.”163 Could you say the same for Mohamed Atta? Quoted earlier in this chapter is an on-line conversation two students had about beliefs. One student said, “Your belief comes from what you feel in your heart.” Later on the same day, another student responded, “What proves God? Your own belief. If you believe in God, God exists to you. . . . I feel love, therefore it exists to me.”164 According to these students, feelings lead us to truth. George Barna sees the postmodern culture as one that implores “each individual to determine what is right and wrong for themselves, given the conditions, their feelings and their past

162

Personal correspondence with Steve Brown, 2 June 1997. Wolfe, Moral Freedom, 223. 164 Humanity’s Class Postings, message #2016, posted by Laurette on Tuesday, October 30, 2001, Collin County Community College, Plano, Texas. 163

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experiences.”165 Barna continues that in today’s American culture where there is an “absence of any kind of universal truth, the only reality that cannot be denied is what you feel or experience.”166 The most common source “of guidance regarding moral decisions trusted by Americans are feelings (28 percent).”167 Marvin Olasky, professor of journalism at the University of Texas, stated that the response of so many Christian students in his classes to moral choices is this: “Sometimes my personal beliefs contradict those taught by the church. I make my decisions upon what I feel is right.”168 So did Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Mohamed Atta, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, and Osama bin Laden. Yale University student Alison Hornstein writes, “When my third-grade class read a story about one boy kicking another at a school bus stop, our teacher talked about why the boy might have done what he did—maybe he was having a bad day or had a fight with his mother that morning. The teacher stressed that the little boy had feelings that sometimes led him to do mean things. That these feelings did not necessarily justify his actions got lost in the discussion.”169 George Lucas, creator and producer of the Star Wars series, was asked in a Time magazine interview titled “The Theology of Star Wars” how to access truth, the force. Lucas replied, “You’ll notice Luke uses that quite a bit through the film—not to rely on pure logic, not to rely on computers, but to rely on faith. That is what ‘Use the force is,’ a leap of faith. There are mysteries and 165

Barna, Real Teens, 96. Ibid. 167 Ibid. 168 Marvin Olasky, World (May 9, 1998): 30, emphasis added. 169 Hornstein, “The Question That We Should Be Asking,” 14. 166

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powers larger than we are, and you must have to trust your feelings in order to access them.”170 Is that what Mohamed Atta did—trusted his feelings as he flew the plane into the tower?

Not Perspective, But Objective We’re convinced that what nineteen men did to nearly 3,000 people on September 11 was evil. We’re confident that Hitler, Stalin, and Osama bin Laden were not acting righteously when they ordered the deaths of innocent Jews, Russians, and Americans and other citizens—from dozens of countries—who died in the World Trade Center attacks. As Charles Sanders Pierce, founder of philosophical pragmatism, said, “Every man is fully satisfied that there is such a thing as truth, or he would not ask any question.”171 And every one of us confirms the existence of objective truth—a truth that is independent of our own opinions, ideas, beliefs, and perspectives—nearly every time we speak or act. People could not function or live very long if they consistently acted as if truth were a matter of personal perspective, rather than one that is objective. They would bounce checks because their bank account has money “to them”; drink poison, which “to them” is lemonade; fall through thin ice that is thick “to them”; or get hit by a bus that is not moving “to them.” Thus, all of us not only sense that truth exists or that there is an objective reality independent of our family background, personal perspective, or cultural conditioning; we acknowledge its existence daily. 170

Rogier Bos, “The Theology of Star Wars,” Time (April 26, 1999): 94, emphasis added. 171 Charles Sanders Pierce, Collected Papers, vol. 5 (Reprint Services Corp., 1931), 211.

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“But on occasion,” writes political analyst James Q. Wilson, “a real, concrete case of a particular human being behaving in an unmistakable manner intrudes and suddenly the moral ambiguity of Americans disappears.”172 Can that be said of Mullah Mohammed Omar and Mohamed Atta, of planes crashing into the World Trade Center towers? Writer Paul Kern observes: The handful in intellectual circles who advocate the quaint idea that there is no distinction between right and wrong have the luxury of doing so only in the abstract, while living and working among those of us who do espouse such distinctions. Let them miss a paycheck, have their car stolen or a daughter raped, and suddenly right and wrong will come into a sharp relief. At that point it will not matter to them where the idea of right and wrong came from, but only that it exists, and the legal infrastructure is still thankfully based upon this.173 What we crave, however, is a clear and simple grasp of the truth. What truly distinguishes right from wrong? It is far more than a philosophical question, and the answer is far more than academic. If we fail to answer it accurately, we—and those we love—will pay dearly for it.

172 173

Wilson, “Bookshelf: The 11th Commandment Seems to Be ‘Judge Not.’” Paul Kerr, The Secular Christian (Carlsbad, Calif.: Hampton Press, 2001), 44.

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Can We Cry Out for Justice? In a speech following the terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush stated, “This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time.”174 In an inspiring and heroic speech given on September 20, President Bush stated, “Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.”175 Over and over President Bush repeated the theme of justice. The idea of justice must be established on the foundation of universal truth. If there is no such thing as universal truth, then there can be no universal basis on which to determine right from wrong in a pluralistic world where different countries, religions, and cultures hold to different values. If we cannot determine a system of universal right and wrong—and 78 percent of Americans say there isn’t one—we cannot establish a universal code of justice.176 If that is true, then with the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden, we are merely imposing our own personal view of “American” justice, and it is not a universal “moral” justice or cause. Don Closson of Probe Ministries writes, “While (advocates of the new tolerance) might refer to justice occasionally, it cannot be the foundation of their movement. This is for the simple reason that justice is not possible without objective truth. In order for someone to say that actions or words (are unjust), they are 174

President George W. Bush, “Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation,” White House Press Release (September 11, 2001); <www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/print/20010911-16.html>. 175 Ibid. 176 Barna Research Group, “How America’s Faith Has Changed Since 9-11.”

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assuming that a moral order (apart from one’s self or culture) really does exist. Injustice implies that justice exists, justice implies that moral laws exist, and laws imply that a law giver exists.”177 Therefore, if we evaluate the killing of more than 3,000 at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon according to a postmodern grid, can we say what the terrorists did was morally wrong? Those nineteen terrorists were products of their culture. They were simply living out their beliefs, which young people are told are as equal as and as valid as any other individual or culture. The terrorists’ convictions taught them it is just to punish the American infidels for what wrongs they had done to their homeland or their faith. They were just in killing thousands of civilians on September 11. According to their faith, the terrorists were doing what was right, moral, and just. Therefore, according to “America’s” morality, how can we judge their actions since in their eyes they truly believed they were right (i.e., all truth and values are personal, cultural)? Since the majority (78 percent) of Americans believe all truth is relative and no one individual can determine right from wrong for another person, can we say what the terrorists did was morally wrong? Our correct response, then, should be not to seek justice but to seek tolerance. Understand that these men were simply living out their faith, which those who advocate “tolerance” say is equal and valid to anyone else’s. If we truly believe what we say about our values, then America does not have the right to seek justice or the moral ground to ask countries to buy into our value

177

Closson, “Multiculturalism.”

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system and join our cause. It is for pragmatic survival and not a “moral-just” cause. If a God does not exist, then the postmodernists are right: There is no absolute truth. If there is no absolute truth, there can be no universal moral code. If there is not a way to determine right or wrong objectively, then a universal code of justice is impossible. As a result, right and wrong will be determined by pragmatism: what works best for you individually or for the greatest number of people or by the philosophy “might makes right.”

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3 The Truth of the Matter It is wrong—demonstrably evil, in fact—to hijack an airplane and use it as a flying bomb in order to kill as many men, women, and children as possible—no matter how sincere, devoted, or committed the hijackers might have been to their “truth.” Understanding why it’s wrong is a matter of great importance, not only for us as adults and for our society, but also for all those we love. As Mark Hartwig, science and worldview editor for Focus on the Family magazine, writes: “Truth exists, and . . . we are obligated to heed it. There really is an objective world, created by an all-powerful God. There really are objective moral laws, established by that same God. And if we ignore those truths, our make-believe world will one day come crashing down upon us, 1 and we will bewail our mistake for eternity.” One person confessed, “If life were a game with nothing at stake, perhaps I’d play along. But the stake is my eternal soul. And that’s nothing to play with.” I couldn’t agree more. The stakes are inexpressibly high—for us, our children, our churches, our nation, and our world.

1

Mark Hartwig, “Tell Me the Truth!” Teachers in Focus, March 1999; <www.family.org/cforum/teachersmag/firstwrites/a0004868.html>.

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High Stakes Coming to grips with moral truth—that is, understanding what truly distinguishes right from wrong—is necessary if we hope to establish any basis on which to condemn the horrors of the Holocaust, the excesses of the Taliban, the evils of terrorism, and the selfishness of the Columbine shootings or to prevent such evils in the future. But the stakes involve not only those sometimes distant threats; they also affect your home, school, church, and community—and your loved ones who inhabit those places. A number of years ago, with the cooperation of thirteen evangelical church denominations, we conducted the most extensive ever research of young people who attend church. Under the expert direction of the Barna Research Group, a scientifically designed process randomly selected youth groups from thousands of churches throughout the United States and Canada. More than 3,700 young people were extensively and confidentially surveyed. The participants were young men and women who are regularly involved in church activity (Sunday school, worship, youth group, Bible study) and who overwhelmingly identified their parents as loving and their family experience as positive.2 The study—and the analysis it made possible—revealed a startling correlation between what those young people believed about moral truth and how they lived in relationship to others.

A Portrait of Confusion The portrait that was revealed by the study showed that Christian young people are ambivalent and confused regarding truth. An 2

Barna Research Group, “The Churched Youth Survey” (Dallas: Josh McDowell Ministry, 1994), 4.

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intense emotional, intellectual, and spiritual battle is raging within them. A significant portion of our church youth—better than half—acknowledged the existence of truth in certain circumstances but then denied that view when the question was phrased differently. For example, 72 percent said that the Bible provides a clear and indisputable description of moral truth, yet only 44 percent asserted that humans are capable of grasping the meaning of truth. Apparently, they recognized a relationship between God’s Word and moral truth, but their answers to other questions revealed a high level of confusion about that relationship. Our survey included seven statements about objective standards of truth and morality. The reactions to the statements revealed that our young people are not at all sold on the biblical view of right and wrong. For example, 57 percent could not even say that an objective standard of truth exists; when the same question was asked after September 11, 2001, that statistic jumped to 68 percent.3 Though that percentage is not as high as among unchurched youth (87 percent), it revealed that even if your children are actively involved in church, they are likely to approve the view that “there is no such thing as absolute truth; people may define truth in contradictory ways and still be correct.”4 Only 15 percent of evangelical churched youth disagreed with this statement: “What is right for one person in a given situation might not be right for another person who encounters the same situation.” In other words, 85 percent of evangelical churched kids are likely to reason, “Just because it’s wrong for you doesn’t mean 3

Barna Research Group, “How America’s Faith Has Changed Since 9-11,” Barna Research Online (November 26, 2001); <www.barna.org/cgibin/PagePressRelease.asp?PressReleaseID=102&Reference=B>. 4 Ibid.

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it’s wrong for me.” Their idea of the distinction between right and wrong is fluid, something that is subject to change, something that is relative and personal—not constant and universal.5 A mere 29 percent disagreed with this statement: “When it comes to matters of morals and ethics, truth means different things to different people; no one can be absolutely positive they have the truth.” This means that less than one in three of our youth believe that recognizable standards of right and wrong apply to everyone.6 Just over one-third (38 percent) of our kids disagreed with this statement: “Nothing can be known for certain except the things that you experience in your life.” Such matters as morality and ethics are up in the air for two-thirds of churched youth.7 Just under half (45 percent) of our Christian youth could not disagree with this statement: “Everything in life is negotiable.” The astounding implication of that statistic is that almost half of our young people are unable or unwilling to recognize some things in life as nonnegotiable [such as 9-11]. It’s unlikely, of course, that they realize the devastating effects of such a view, but that’s part of the whole problem.8 More worrisome than any single response, however, is the fact that on a cumulative basis, only 9 percent of our churched youth provided a “pro-truth” reply to each of the seven statements. In other words, less than one in ten could articulate a cohesive, consistent view of objective morality!9 As we examined our children’s views about truth and morality, it became apparent that most of our Christian youth lack the most 5

Barna Research Group, “The Churched Youth Survey,” 55. Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 58. 9 Ibid. 6

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basic moral perspectives that previous generations took for granted. Many of our young people are struggling with the concept of truth and how they are to apply it to their own lives and experience when making moral choices. Their inconsistent response to the above statements reveals that even when they express a “pro-truth” position, they do so with little conviction or assurance. Even our Christian kids are confused about what truth is and who defines it; they are uncertain about what truths are absolute and what makes them absolute.

Reactions to Statements about Absolute Truth The following chart tallies the results of the 1994 Churched Youth Survey conducted by the Barna Research Group for the Josh McDowell Ministry:10 Statement

Agree Disagree Not Sure

What is right for one person in a given situation might not be right for another person who encounters that same situation.

71%

15%

15%

When it comes to matters of morals and ethics, truth means different things to different people; no one can be absolutely positive they have the truth.

48%

29%

23%

10

Ibid., 55.

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Nothing can be known for certain except the things that you experience in your life.

39%

38%

23%

God may know the meaning of truth, but humans are not capable of grasping that knowledge.

31%

44%

25%

There is no such thing as absolute truth; people may define truth in contradictory ways and still be correct.

29%

43%

28%

Everything in life is negotiable.

23%

56%

22%

All Statements: Took a pro-truth position.

9%

91%

In One Nation, After All Alan Wolfe concludes, “The idea that this is a Christian nation, blessed by one particular God, no longer describes the reality of the country’s religious belief.”11 To the surprise of many, the truth views of Americans have radically been altered since September 11. George Barna, director and founder of Barna Research, Inc., explains that one of the most startling shifts culturally since September 11 has “been in people’s views about moral truth. . . . Given the nature of the terrorists attack, one might have expected Americans to become more convinced of the presence of good and evil, and that there are absolute moral principles that exist regardless of cultural realities and personal preferences.”12 11 12

Alan Wolfe, One Nation, After All (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998), 319. Barna Research Group, “How America’s Faith Has Changed Since 9-11.”

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However, even to Barna’s surprise and expectations, “Research showed exactly the opposite outcome.” The most recent research, done in late 2001, shows: Prior to the attacks, the most recent inquiry concerning truth views was in January 2000, some 20 months prior to the terrorist activity. At that time, people were asked if they believed that “there are moral truths that are absolute, meaning that those moral truths or principles do not change according to the circumstances” or that “moral truth always depends upon the situation, meaning that a person’s moral and ethical decisions depend upon the circumstances.” At the start of 2000, almost four out of ten adults (38 percent) said that there are absolute moral truths that do not change according to the circumstances. When the same question was asked in the just-completed survey, the result was that just two out of ten adults (22 percent) claimed to believe in the existence of absolute moral truth.13 Now, those least likely to believe in absolute moral truth were people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-six, and of those only 13 percent embrace absolute moral truth. Of born-again, evangelical Christians only 32 percent give any credence to absolute moral truth.14 The most common source “of guidance regarding moral decisions trusted by Americans are feelings (28 percent).” The

13

Ibid. The research was done in late October to early November 1, 2001, with a ± 3 percent factor of error; i.e., a 95 percent confidence level. 14 Ibid.

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second most common source were “the lessons and values they remember from their parents (14 percent).”15 An interesting finding of the study was that “when people were further queried as to the source of the principles or standards on which they base their moral and ethical decisions, the post– September 11 survey discovered that only one out of eight adults— just 13 percent—cited the Bible.”16

Truth Matters As I’ve said, however, the consequence of this confusion is not merely academic. It affects our kids, our families, our churches, our schools, and our communities in many ways. The study revealed to us that people’s view of truth intimately—and often tragically—affects not only their lives but also the lives of those around them. We Americans pride ourselves that we can’t be prosecuted for our beliefs but only for our actions. (Right now in light of 9-11, hundreds of Arab-Muslim descendants are being retained and questioned because of their “beliefs.”) However, we better wake up. Beliefs have consequences—both negative and positive. For example, the study indicated that when our church youth do not accept an objective standard of truth, they become · · · · · 15 16

36 percent more likely to lie to their parents; 48 percent more likely to cheat on an exam; 200 percent more likely to try to physically hurt someone; 200 percent more likely to watch a pornographic film; 200 percent more likely to get drunk; Ibid. Ibid.

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· · ·

225 percent more likely to steal; 300 percent more likely to use illegal drugs; 600 percent more likely to attempt suicide!17

The study also revealed that young people who lack a strong and cohesive groundwork for the moral principles that underlie their behavior will be · · · · ·

65 percent more likely to mistrust people; 200 percent more likely to be disappointed; 200 percent more likely to be angry with life; 200 percent more likely to be lacking purpose; 200 percent more likely to be resentful!18

That same study indicated a correlation between young people’s beliefs about moral truth and their sexual opinions and behaviors. Youth who do not affirm the existence of absolute truth are twice as likely to classify fondling of breasts (between unmarried persons) as moral and three times as likely to regard fondling of genitals (between unmarried persons) as morally acceptable. And kids who do not accept truth as absolute are four times as likely to approve premarital sexual intercourse as a “moral” choice. The research indicates that possessing a conviction regarding objective standards of truth and morality will double, triple, even quadruple a young person’s chances of experiencing purity and faithfulness in their dating and marital relationships.19 The study also suggested that convictions about truth provide a network of roots for our children’s concepts of marriage and 17

Barna Research Group, “The Churched Youth Survey,” 57. Ibid., 69. 19 Ibid., 5–7. 18

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family. For example, those youth who have formed a strong protruth view are more likely to say that God intended marriage to last a lifetime. Conversely, kids who lack a pro-truth view are 65 percent more likely to accept divorce as an option, even when children are involved. Youth who lack a pro-truth view are much more accepting of cohabitation (unmarried couples living together) and four-and-a-half times (450 percent) more likely to say that two homosexuals—male or female—living together constitute a legitimate family! In short, if a young person cannot evaluate moral matters in an objective way, he or she is likely to see marriage as an unnecessary (and usually negative) institution. These young people will tend to view divorce as an appropriate solution to marital difficulties, and they will be more likely to regard “alternative” arrangements (such as cohabitation or homosexual unions) as acceptable “family” settings.20 The study also reflected a relationship between the possession of objective standards of truth and morality (beliefs) and spiritual practices, such as regular church attendance and the spiritual disciplines. If young people see truth as absolute and eternal, they are 32 percent more likely to develop a daily habit of prayer and more than twice as likely to read their Bible daily. Their perspectives about truth also affect whether or not they make a lasting personal commitment to Jesus Christ. Youth who have formed a pro-truth view are 48 percent more likely to say that they will go to heaven when they die because they have confessed their sins and accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior.21 In short, the study suggests that young people’s views of moral truth are influential in determining the choices they will make (for 20 21

Ibid., 15. Ibid., 71.

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example, whether they engage in premarital sex, whether they cohabit or divorce, and whether they trust Christ for salvation, among others) and in the attitudes they adopt (whether they will claim to be mistrustful of others, disappointed, or resentful, among others).

Beliefs Have Consequences The obvious conclusion that children’s perspective of truth affects their choices and lifestyles is cogently reflected in an extensive study of American teenagers. The research data was for the 2000 “Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth,” a comprehensive national survey on the ethics of young people. The study was conducted by Michael Josephson, founder and president of the Josephson Institute of Ethics and Character Counts Coalition. Josephson called on political and educational leaders “to recognize the vital importance of dealing with ‘shocking levels of moral illiteracy.’” The survey results of 8,600 teenagers show that there is “a hole in the moral ozone.” Josephson added that “being sure that children can read is certainly essential, but it is no less important that we deal with the alarming rate of cheating, lying, and violence that threatens the very fabric of our society.”22 Here are a few highlights of the preliminary results of the nationwide “Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth”:

22

“New Survey Reveals ‘Moral Illiteracy’ Problem That Needs to Be Addressed in Educational Reforms,” Character Counts (October 16, 2000): 1.

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·

·

· ·

·

Cheating: 71 percent of all high school students admit they cheated on an exam at least once in the past twelve months (45 percent said they did so two or more times). Lying: 92 percent lied to their parents in the past twelve months (79 percent said they did so two or more times); 78 percent lied to a teacher (58 percent two or more times); more than one in four (27 percent) said they would lie to get a job. Stealing: 40 percent of males and 30 percent of females say they stole something from a store in the past twelve months. Drunk at school: Nearly one in six (16 percent) say they have been drunk in school during the past year (9 percent said they were drunk two or more times). Propensity toward violence: 68 percent say they hit someone because they were angry in the past year (46 percent did so at least twice), and nearly half (47 percent) said they could get a gun if they wanted to (for males, 60 percent say they could get a gun).23

The moral ambiguity expressed in these responses was confirmed after extensive research on middle-class American morality. Alan Wolfe concluded that “Americans do feel that they have lost the distinction between right and wrong.”24

Without Truth, Moral Choices Are Random After the extensive research on America’s values, George Barna wrote out a definitive progression of truth once absolute truth is denied by a culture: 23 24

Ibid. Wolfe, One Nation, After All, 289.

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If a person does not accept the existence of absolute moral truth, then we will not get very far describing to them the consequences of their sin. Why not? Because if there is no absolute moral truth, then there can be no difference between right and wrong. That then means there is no such thing as sin, which implies that there cannot be judgment. Without judgment there is no condemnation, and without condemnation there is no need to be saved. Without a need for salvation, Jesus becomes a good teacher who performed some mighty works. But the eternal need for such a savior is eliminated—simply because there is no absolute moral truth.25 So many people don’t “connect the dots” between the belief that “all truth is personal” and its implications in life. While speaking to a group of parents in Texas, a youth pastor of a Baptist church handed me a newspaper with a column that one of his sixteen-year-old students wrote for her campus newspaper. He identified her as one of his most spiritual students, and her parents had been leaders in the church for years. The alarming issue with her column on “What Is Truth” would be echoed by at least 68 percent of evangelical church youth.26 She writes: “What is truth? Is it always the same? I don’t think so!! Truth changes constantly with time. It always varies from person to person, and from the different circumstances. What is true today will not be absolutely true tomorrow. What was truth yesterday is not absolute truth today; therefore there is no absolute truth.”27 According to this 25

Barna Research Group, “Third Millennium Teens” (Ventura, Calif.: Barna Research Group, 1999), 64. 26 Barna Research Group, “How America’s Faith Has Changed Since 9-11.” 27 Article in a high school newspaper written by a student at First Baptist Church.

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student’s perspective, legitimate truth varies with Timothy McVeigh, Eric Harris, Osama bin Laden, and the Al-Qaeda. Alan Wolfe’s research showed that “never have so many people been so free of moral constraints as contemporary America. . . . Now, for the first time in human history, significant numbers of individuals believe that people should play a role in defining their own morality.”28 You know, there is a moral majority in America, and it is “one that wants to make up its own mind. . . . The old adage that America is a free country has, at last, come true, for Americans have come to accept the relevance of individual freedom, not only in their economic and political life, but in their moral life as well.”29 For nearly all Americans, “When a moral decision has to be made, they look into themselves—at their own interests, desires, needs, sensibilities, identities, and inclinations—before they choose the right course of action.”30 Is this what Osama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta did? The culture’s desire to define “morality” to individual tastes and inclinations is also reflected in a Wall Street Journal article about how Americans are even “redefining” God to their own desires.31 After years of studying American values and morality, author Alan Wolfe acknowledged two complete surprises:

28

Alan Wolfe, Moral Freedom: The Impossible Idea That Defines the Way We Live Now (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 199. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 195–96. 31 Lisa Miller, “Redefining God,” Wall Street Journal, 21 April 2000, W1.

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1. Americans are unbelievably relativistic. 2. “What so many philosophers and theologians for so long considered an impossible idea [individual moral freedom] has become the everyday reality in which modern Americans live.”32 Norman O. Brown, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, and Charles Reich—all moral relativists—must be ecstatic about the unapologetic praise of moral freedom eschewed in America. It would be interesting to see how each one would personally deal with the moral choice of Osama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta on September 11. Alan Wolfe in Moral Freedom makes a very poignant observation of many people’s consensus: “For if there are no binding moral rules—if individuals are as free to drop or add their moral beliefs with the same alacrity [cheerful readiness] with which they can buy or sell stocks—then all social relations, including those of free exchange, will be threatened.”33 Friedrich Hayek, one of the most noted theorists of economic freedom in the twentieth century, says that “voluntary economic exchange can exist only when morality is treated in a nonvoluntary fashion. Our capacity to act rationally is dependent upon a morality that evolves outside our cognitive control.”34 The discernment of a sound, defensible standard for objective moral truth is as important as it is close to every one of us. But the question remains: Where do we find that standard? What truly

32

Wolfe, Moral Freedom, 223. Ibid., 201. 34 Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 156–66. 33

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distinguishes right from wrong? If moral truth is not determined by each person or each culture or by my parents’ values or my school or even my church’s teachings, then where do I go? Stephen L. Carter presents the problem this way in his book The Culture of Disbelief: “The hypothesis that dropped objects tend to fall to earth is a hypothesis about the natural world. If one wants to test it according to the rules of natural science, one would . . . set up an experiment that would yield one result if the hypothesis were false, another if the hypothesis were true— dropping lots of objects, say, and seeing whether they all fall to earth. . . . The trouble with claims about moral knowledge is that even today, more than two centuries after the Enlightenment, we have no settled rules by which to try to determine their truth.”35 The majority of people today would tend to agree with Stephen Carter. But unless we are willing to attribute righteousness to terrorists and their sponsors, we must discover how to determine the truth of “claims about moral knowledge,” as Carter puts it.36 We must discover our basis for attributing unrighteousness to the terrorists. What we need is a way to discover—and convey—what is right and what is wrong. What we need is an identifiable, ultimate standard of truth, one that exists outside ourselves (i.e., objective) and above ourselves (i.e., universal) and beyond our own place and time (i.e., constant). It seems that without any prompting, we instinctively know that certain things are morally wrong or morally right. There are certain situations that we know are wrong: extermination of six million 35

Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief (New York: Basic Books, August 1993). 36 For an extensive treatment of the question “Is Truth Knowable?” see Josh McDowell, The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1999).

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Jews, rape, child abuse, torture, genocide, or murdering more than 3,000 people in the World Trade Center towers, for example. There are certain people whom we instinctively know have done evil acts: Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, Ted Kaczynski, Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Josef Stalin, Idi Amin, Jeffrey Dahmer, or David Berkowitz, for example. Similarly, there are certain people we know have done good, moral acts: Todd Beamer, Billy Graham, Mother Teresa, Albert Schweitzer, Helen Keller, Hudson Taylor, Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and Louis Pasteur, for example. Many find it hard to connect moral or immoral instinctiveness with a personal creator God. To me there is a direct relationship between a deep sense of morality and a personal God. The connection is personhood, both God’s and ours. Theologian Paul Copan writes: If objective moral values exist, as even atheists like Kai Nielsen [and others] believe, it seems plausible to argue that a personal, transcendent, perfect God is the source of and ground for morality. We resemble God—created as valuable persons by a person Being, divinely endowed with a conscience, with a capacity for morally significant relationships, and with certain objectively correct moral institutions. We are moral beings because we have been created in the image of a moral God. Even those who don’t believe in God possess an ingrained moral sense that corresponds in some measure to God’s moral sense. This explains how an atheist can know the content of morality without acknowledging God’s existence. For instance, we read in Amos 1 and 2 that God threatens

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judgment on the neighbors of Judah and Israel. Why? Because they have flagrantly violated an objective moral law that they knew and should have obeyed. Syria treated its enemies barbarously (1:3); Philistia, with utter inhumanity, sold whole communities into slavery (1:6); Tyre broke a pact and treated Edom treacherously (1:9). The citizens of such nations should have known better. In Romans 2:14-15, we read: “Indeed when Gentiles, who do not have the law [of Moses], do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, not even defending them.” Scripture assumes that God has written this binding law on the hearts of people. Although the awareness of these objective standards is clouded by the Fall, a seared conscience, and social decline, this doesn’t mean people can’t form moral beliefs or act virtuously through God’s common grace to all.37

9. “I Believe Something Is True If the Bible Tells Me It Is So.” Judging from the responses I get from my audiences, many people believe that the ultimate source of right and wrong is the Bible. But when I ask people why the Bible says lying (or stealing, or killing)

37

Paul Copan, True for You, But Not for Me: Deflating the Slogans That Leave Christians Speechless” (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1998), 65, footnote 8.

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is wrong, they are usually baffled. The most common response is a sheepish, “I don’t know.” Now, don’t misunderstand. I acknowledge the Bible’s truth and authority; I wholeheartedly testify that it is “full of living power. It is sharper than the sharpest knife, cutting deep into our innermost thoughts and desires” (Hebrews 4:12). For generations, people have found the answers to their moral and ethical questions in the Bible. But, if that’s as far as we can go in determining the rightness or wrongness of things like the September 11 attacks on America, we’re no better able to come to moral conclusions about Osama bin Laden and his followers than the moral relativist who can pass judgment on Hitler and the Holocaust. After all, each of the terrorists on those four fateful flights of September 11 believed that he was following the dictates of “Holy Scripture.” As a matter of fact, each man believed that his sacred writings not only justified, not only permitted, but dictated the murderous actions. We may choose to follow the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as our map of morality, but many who cheered rather than mourned the events of September 11—Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network, for example—claim to follow a different scriptural map of their own.

God Said It; That Settles It Some people, like a confident teacher at the Christian educators’ convention, assert confidently that what makes right “right” and wrong “wrong” is not simply that “the Bible tells me so” but because “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

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In other words, it’s not the Bible itself that delineates right from wrong but the words, the declarations, of God. Bible-believing Christians affirm—as do many who are only nominally Christian—that when God speaks, he establishes moral truth. But, once again, what do we make of the fact that Mohamed Atta and the other pilots and hijackers who caused the devastation of September 11 believed that they were obeying the words and will of Allah? Mohamed Atta, in a letter apparently written to the terrorist teams the night before the attacks, urged his comrades to take courage from the words of God: “As God says, strike above the necks and strike from everywhere . . . and then you will know all the heavens are decorated in the best way to meet you.”38 The apparent ringleader of the terrorists seemed to sincerely believe, “Allah said it; that settles it.”

The True Standard In the town of Sevres, a suburb of Paris, is the headquarters of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, an organization that standardizes units of measure. The bureau establishes standards for metric measurements and ensures a reliable standard for physical measurements around the world. If I wanted to obtain the most precise measurement possible, I would refer to the standard they maintain. If I wanted to be absolutely certain that the millimeter divisions on my ruler are accurate, I would compare them against the bureau’s standards. If I wanted to know whether the bottle of Diet Mountain Dew in my 38

Lenny Savino, “Suspect’s Letter Gives Hijackers Instructions,” The Akron Beacon-Journal, 29 September 2001.

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refrigerator contained exactly two liters of liquid, I could check it against the bureau’s measurements. Now, suppose you and I had a dispute about a length of wood I had cut for you. I measured it and told you it was one meter long; you measured it with your own meter stick and pronounced that it was less than one meter. How could we determine who was right? We could appeal to the standard; an objective and universal standard has been determined in Sevres, France. To determine the validity of our individual measurements, we need only refer to the original. That is just what we need. We need to be convinced that a standard exists for settling claims about moral knowledge, a standard for right and wrong, a standard that exists outside, above, and beyond ourselves. Webster’s dictionary defines truth as “fidelity to an original or to a standard.” When we try to discern right from wrong, when we try to determine moral truth, we must do the same thing we do when we measure meters. We must ask, How does it compare to the original? The next logical question is, of course, what—or who—is the original?

God on the Stage Back in the days of Julius Caesar, the Roman poet and playwright Horace criticized the laziness of many playwrights of his day. He strongly criticized those writers who, every time a problem occurred in the plot of their play, brought in one of the many Roman gods to solve it. Horace instructed, “Do not bring a god on

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to the stage unless the problem is one that deserves a god to solve it.”39 The challenge of distinguishing right from wrong is one that deserves—in fact, demands—a God to solve it. It is impossible to arrive at an objective, universal, and constant standard of truth and morality without bringing God onto the stage. If an objective standard of truth and morality exists, it cannot be the product of the human mind (or it will not be objective); it must be the product of another Mind. If a constant and unchanging truth exists, it must reach beyond human time lines (or it would not be constant); it must be eternal. If a universal rule of right and wrong exists, it must transcend individual experience (or it will not be universal); it must be above us all (universal). Yet, absolute truth must be something—or Someone—that is common to all humanity, to all Creation. Those things—those requirements for a standard of truth and morality—are found only in one person: God. God is the source of all truth. As Moses said, “He is the Rock, his work is perfect: . . . a God of truth and without iniquity, just and right is he” (Deuteronomy 32:4, KJV). You see, it is God’s nature and character that defines truth. He defines what is right for all people, for all times, in all places. But truth is not something he decides; it is something he is. The basis of everything we call moral, the source of every good thing, is the eternal God who is outside us, above us, and beyond us. The apostle James wrote, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows” (James 1:17, NIV). The 39

Horace, Horace’s Satires and Epistles, trans. Jacob Fuchs (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 89.

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reason some things are right and some things are wrong is because there exists a Creator, Yahweh God, and he is a righteous God. The reason we think that there are such things as “fair” and “unfair” is because our Maker is a just God. The reason love is a virtue and hatred a vice is because the God who formed us is a God of love. The reason honesty is right and deceit is wrong is because God is true. The reason chastity is moral and promiscuity is immoral is because God is pure. Thus, it is futile to measure right and wrong by our own ideas instead of by God’s character. It’s not a matter of conditioning or consensus. It doesn’t matter what I think or what you think. It is only—and always—who God is that makes a thing morally right or wrong. It is God and God alone who determines absolute truth. Truth is objective because God exists outside ourselves. Truth is universal because God is above all. Truth is constant because God is eternal. Absolute truth is absolute because it originates from the original. Throughout the pages of Scripture, God reveals himself as the source of absolute truth. He disclosed himself to Noah as a righteous God who rewards righteousness and punishes wickedness. He proved himself to Abraham as a trustworthy God who keeps promises. He showed himself to David as a God of mercy. And through Jesus Christ, God proved supremely that he was a personal God of transcending love. The revelation of God—in the Bible, in the Incarnation, and sometimes even through his body, the church—reveals him as the fountain of truth, the origin of morality.

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The Ten Commandments, which were given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, represent the most famous codification of absolute truth in the history of humanity. But it’s important to recognize that God didn’t just invent the Ten Commandments because he was all alone on a secluded mountain with nothing else to do or because he just had a sudden urge to write. The Ten Commandments were given not only to the newborn nation of Israel but to all humanity to reveal God’s nature and help them enjoy the benefits of moral behavior. God commanded the Israelites to worship only him because he knew the truth: “The gods of other nations are merely idols, but the Lord made the heavens!” (Psalm 96:5). He instructed his people not to murder because he is the author, preserver, and governor of life (see Acts 3:15). He forbade lying because he is a God of truth, “and he cannot lie” (Titus 1:2). The commandments of God are given to provide us practical knowledge of the character and nature of God and instructions for living in relationship to him. His precepts point to his nature and in turn point to truth that is true for all people, for all times, in all places. The laws he gives flow out of who he is. It is my desire as a father not to take my children to the commandments of the Scriptures to discern right from wrong, good from evil, but to take them to the God of the Bible. Every commandment in the Bible is a direct reflection of the person, character, and nature of God himself. As a result, children (and adults) can respond to moral issues out of a personal relationship with their Creator and not just the codification of morality.

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Precept Your first days in school may have been occupied with such mathematical concepts as 1+1=2, 2+2=4, and so on. Those were your “baby steps” in mathematics. Your five- or six-year-old mind may have been proud of your newfound ability to understand such quantities. Little did you know, of course, that you were not dealing in quantities; you were learning to express quantities through the use of numbers. Similarly, few people realize that learning the precepts—the rules, regulations, codes, and requirements of Scripture—is but the first step in understanding basic morality. God said, “You shall not murder,” “You shall not covet,” and even, “Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind” (Exodus 20:13, 17; Leviticus 19:14, NIV). He issued specific commands, like a parent telling a child not to touch the hot stove, in order to provide concrete boundaries for human conduct. But the precepts of the Lord not only serve as a long list of do’s and don’ts that define right and wrong in explicit terms; they also point to larger moral principles. The Bible tells us that the law leads us by the hand, like a child going to school, to learn deeper lessons. The apostle Paul wrote to the churches of Galatia, “The Law has become our tutor [literally, child-conductor] to lead us to Christ, that we may be justified by faith” (Galatians 3:24, NASB). In the Greek-speaking world of Paul’s day, there was a type of household servant called the paidagogos (the root of our word pedagogue). He was in charge of the child’s moral welfare; it was his duty to oversee the child’s character development. One of his responsibilities was also to take the child to school each day. He

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was not the child’s teacher, but he was responsible to see that the child was, in fact, under the teacher’s care. Paul borrows this picture from the culture of his day and says, in effect, that the law has the same function. The commandments and precepts of Scripture are designed not only to say “Do this” and “Don’t do that” but also to lead us beyond the precepts to a universal principle (one that applies to everyone) and, ultimately, to the God who expresses himself through precepts.

Principle If all of God’s commands are the first step toward knowing him and distinguishing right from wrong, principles are the intermediate step on the stairway leading us from precepts to the person of God. God began his revelation of right and wrong with a single command: “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17, NIV). In giving it, he also warned his creation, “If you eat of its fruit, you will surely die” (NLT). Therefore he established the most basic principle governing human conduct: “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Behind each specific command or precept, God gives us a principle. A principle is a norm or standard that may be applied to more than one type of situation. Principles express the fundamental truth on which a precept is based; they help explain the why behind a command. For example, a concern for safety is one of the principles behind a mother’s command for her children to look both ways before they cross the street. Reverence for life is the principle behind the command “You shall not kill.” A principle

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behind the command “You shall not give false testimony” is honesty. God’s commands—his precepts—point to universal moral principles, which, in turn, spring from the very person of God himself.

Person Nearly twenty centuries ago a high government official trained in politics and the law asked a question that has echoed all the way into the latter years of the twentieth century. The official’s name was Pontius Pilate; he stood in his elaborate palace, bedecked in his regal clothes, and asked, “What is truth?” Ironically, Pilate was not just discussing the truth in his Jerusalem palace the day he met Jesus; he was literally looking at it. Truth was standing before him, clothed in human flesh! Jesus Christ, “who came from the Father, full of grace and truth,” who said of himself, “I am the way and the truth and the life,” is the very embodiment and essence of absolute truth itself (John 1:14; 14:6, NIV). You see, absolute truth is far more than a concept; it is a person. Absolute truth isn’t so much something we believe as it is someone we relate to. Absolute truth has flesh. And, thus, truth is not just conceptual; it is intrinsically relational. To know what we believe about God’s precepts (and even the principles of truth that lie behind those precepts) and not know the person from whom they derive is worthless. Too many times we focus on God’s law and never see its extensions—what it teaches us about the character of God. The ultimate purpose of God in every precept is to bring people to the knowledge of himself.

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Moses, who received the law on Mount Sinai, apparently understood this progression of precept-principle-person. The Bible says that after God spoke to Moses “face to face, as a man speaks with his friend,” Moses prayed, “If you are pleased with me, teach me your ways so I may know you” (Exodus 33:11,13, NIV, emphasis added). Moses recognized that learning God’s ways— understanding his precepts and the principles behind them—would acquaint him with the person of God himself. Many Bible readers are tempted to skip over the chapters in Exodus and Leviticus that detail thousands of regulations concerning dress, food preparation and consumption, construction of the tabernacle, the forms of worship, and so on. Altars and acacia wood and cubits and blended fabrics seem totally irrelevant to us. But such prescriptions, instructions, and codes reveal the character of God. The purpose of those laws was to give Israel a lesson in purity, separating good from bad, clean from unclean. The principle behind the law—purity of life—flowed from the character of God himself. Specific laws prohibiting mixing threads in the same garment or hitching different types of animals to the same yoke were tangible lessons in the character of God. His commands were intended not only to benefit his people but also to help them understand what he is like, that he is a God who did not tolerate sin. Their obedience to those laws was to point them to the perfect model of God’s holiness. God’s law is not an end in itself. Some of his commands were illustrative, others were practical, but all were—and are—an expression of his character. King David acknowledged, The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy,

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making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes. The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever. The ordinances of the Lord are sure and altogether righteous. (Psalm 19:7-9, NIV) Note carefully the words David used to describe God’s law: perfect, trustworthy, right, radiant, pure, sure, and righteous. Why do you think the law possesses those qualities? Because they are qualities that belong to the Lawgiver, God himself. You see, ultimately, moral authority does not reside in the commands; it resides in God. The truth would not cease being true if the law were to disappear from the face of the earth; the truth would not cease being true if there were no humans to discern the principle— because the truth resides in the person of God himself, who is eternal. The only reliable measure of truth and morality, of right and wrong, is the nature and character of God himself. His truth, which flows out of the nature of God into his laws, is right for all people, for all times, in all places.40 This is why I propose the following formula or steps to help people make right, moral choices that reflect the very nature of God and his love for his creation:

40

For a more complete development of this thesis, see Josh McDowell and Bob Hostetler, Right from Wrong (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1994).

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1. 2. 3. 4.

Consider the choice. Compare it to God. Commit to God’s way. Count on his blessings.

But that’s not all there is to that. There is still a problem—a big problem—we must confront.

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4 The Door to the Truth On September 11, 2001, a young man rose before sunrise and slowly, methodically, washed and dressed before turning to prayer. He prayed every day about this time, and today was no different. He knew that many people—millions, even—didn’t pray every day, and some never prayed at all. But he didn’t understand those people. He couldn’t imagine a day without prayer, any more than he could imagine a life without Allah. Sometimes standing, sometimes kneeling, he poured out his prayers and petitions, frequently using the words of the holy book, as familiar to him as his own name. “Glory be to my Lord, the greatest!” he said, adding a moment later, “Our Lord is worthy of all praise. Glory be to my Lord, the highest!” He finished his impassioned praying in a seated position, as he always did, praying that Allah would accept his prayer and forgive him, his parents, and all believers. He rose from his time of prayer feeling confident that Allah had heard him and would provide strength for the battle that lay ahead of him. He finished packing his bags for his early morning flight just as his friend, who had slept in the hotel room next to his, knocked on the door. Before answering the door, he checked the pocket of his carry-on bag; the box-cutter knife was there. He opened the door, greeted his friend in Arabic, and they went together to meet the

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other three members of their party, who were waiting in a rental car for the ride to the airport. In just a few more hours they would be on the last flight of their lives, a flight they would hijack and, if Allah gave them strength as they had each prayed that morning, fly into a building with tons of fuel, killing thousands of men, women, and children. I stated in the last chapter that the only reliable measure of truth and morality, of right and wrong, is the nature and character of God himself; his nature and character defines what is right (or wrong) for all people, for all times, and in all places. But, as we are reminded by the paragraphs above, which imagines a scene that might have happened in the early morning hours of September 11, 2001, the nineteen men who attacked America that day were all religious men. Judging from all we’ve heard and read, they were fervent believers in Allah. Many—if not all—of them most likely prayed five times a day. And there’s every indication that they believed they were doing Allah’s will. For example, we need only to compare the statements made by President George W. Bush and the Al-Qaeda mastermind, Osama bin Laden, to see that each man not only believed in God but believed that his words and actions were a reflection of God’s moral truth. President Bush, in his September 20 address before a joint session of Congress, said: “Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them. Fellow citizens, we’ll meet violence with patient justice, assured of the rightness of our cause and confident of the

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victories to come. In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom and may he watch over the United States of America.”1 Just over two weeks later, Osama bin Laden made a videotaped statement that was aired on nearly every major news network in the world the day American troops initiated air strikes against Taliban and Al-Qaeda strongholds. Osama bin Laden said: I bear witness that there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is his messenger. There is America, hit by God in one of its softest spots. Its greatest buildings were destroyed, thank God for that. There is America, full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that. When God blessed one of the groups of Islam, vanguards of Islam, they destroyed America. I pray to God to elevate their status and bless them. . . . These events have divided the whole world into two sides: the side of believers and the side of infidels, may God keep you away from them. Every Muslim has to rush to make his religion victorious. The winds of faith have come. The winds of change have come to eradicate oppression from the island of Muhammad, peace be upon him. To America, I say only a few words to it and its people. I swear by God, who has elevated the skies without pillars, neither America nor the people who live in it will dream of security before we live it in Palestine, and not before all the

1

Address to Joint Session of Congress, September 20, 2001; <www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/20/gen.bush.transcript/>, emphasis added.

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infidel armies leave the land of Muhammad, peace be upon him. God is great, may pride be with Islam. May peace and God’s mercy be upon you.2 Both statements—that of President Bush and that of Osama bin Laden—refer to God as the standard of righteousness, the “original” against which human actions and attitudes must be compared. And yet each beseeches God for protection from—and justice against—the other. Who’s right? Saying that God is the only objective, universal, and constant standard of truth still leaves one question unanswered: Who is God? In our quest for a “final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict,” have we come to the point theologian and apologist Francis Schaeffer predicted, where we “are merely left with conflicting opinions,” only this time about who is God and is he the absolute standard of good and evil?3 I believe the only way to determine who God is, is by a careful, open-minded consideration of the evidence. John W. Montgomery, former professor of law and humanities at the University of Luton, England, says, “Without an objective criterion, one is at a loss to make a meaningful choice among a prioris” (that is, claims based on presuppositions).4 When faced

2

Osama bin Laden, videotaped remarks translated from Arabic in The (Akron) Beacon-Journal, 8 October 2001. 3 Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? (Old Tappan, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell, 1976), 145. 4 John Warwick Montgomery, The Shape of the Past (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Edwards Brothers, 1962), 141.

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with such competing claims, the careful observer must weigh the claims according to the evidence for each. For example, if I were to claim that the moon is made of green cheese and if you claimed that it is comprised largely of rocks and dust, how would we make a meaningful choice? We would, quite naturally, seek objective criteria. You might call NASA and corral the evidence supporting your view; I might assemble as many story books and nursery rhymes as possible to support my claim. In the end, you might not convince me, but there would probably be enough evidence to sway most open-minded people. Now, I’ve chosen a rather lighthearted example, of course, but the task of differentiating right from wrong based on the absolute person of God—the God whose nature and character define truth— is not much different. The only way to arrive at a meaningful conclusion on the subject is by investigation. The only way to proceed beyond the a priori assumptions, say, of President Bush and Osama bin Laden is to weigh the evidence for those two contrasting visions of God. The central question, then, is this: Has the one true God, who is the source of the universe, the Creator of all, revealed himself? And if so, how? where? in what way? In order to come to any meaningful conclusions about right and wrong, good and evil, we must—now more than ever—examine the evidences for the reliability of the Bible and the veracity of its claims about Christ’s being the Son of the one true God. Anyone who does that can well discover that the claims of Christ are uniquely refutable—or verifiable—because they are based on facts of history that are clearly recognizable by and accessible to everyone. If Christianity were merely a philosophy or a system of ethical teachings, it would be different; even Jesus

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Christ’s teachings—great as they are—are not the centerpiece of the Christian faith. Similarly, it would be a totally different matter if Christianity posited a set of “spiritual truths” alone. If, for example, Christianity relied on a “mystical” revelation or a “spiritual” resurrection, it would be irrelevant and impossible to examine any “objective criterion” for its validity. But Christianity, D. E. Jenkins would say, “is based on indisputable facts.”5 Many of the contrasting visions of God that exist in the world today rely on an external following of the truth— obeying commands, chanting mantras, or channeling positive energy—to achieve some level of being, increased consciousness, goodness, or heaven. By contrast, Christianity does not revolve around a list of rules or spiritual practices but around a core of verifiable—or refutable—historical facts about a person and his claims to be God: · · · · ·

Jesus of Nazareth was born of a virgin and lived on earth as a man. Jesus claimed to be the Son of God and performed miracles as signs to buttress his claim. Jesus was crucified, suffering a cruel death as payment for human sin. Jesus rose from the dead and appeared alive to more than five hundred eyewitnesses. Jesus ascended to heaven from the Mount of Olives.

As Clark Pinnock, professor of systematic theology at McMaster Divinity College, asserts, “The facts backing the 5

J.N.D. Anderson, Christianity: The Witness of History (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1970), 10.

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Christian claim are not a special kind of religious fact. They are the cognitive, informational facts upon which all historical, legal, and ordinary decisions are based.”6

One Man’s Quest for Truth As I discovered when I set out as a young man to refute Christianity and the Bible, those facts can be investigated—and verified. And those facts, those objective criteria, represent our best hope for coming to a meaningful conclusion about right and wrong, good and evil, as they point us to God and his Son, Jesus, whose nature and character define truth. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “There is within every soul a thirst for happiness and meaning.” As a teenager, I exemplified that statement. I wanted to be happy and to find meaning for my life. I wanted the answers to three basic questions: Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? These are life’s tough questions. I would estimate that 90 percent of people age forty and younger cannot answer those three questions. But I was thirsty to know what life was about. So as a young student, I started looking for answers. Where I was brought up, everyone seemed to be religious. I thought maybe I would find my answers in being religious, so I started attending church. I got into it 150 percent. I went to church morning, afternoon, and evening. But I guess I got into the wrong one because I felt worse inside church than I did outside. About the only thing I got out of my religious experience was seventy-five cents a week. I would put a quarter into the offering plate and take out a dollar so I could buy a milkshake! I was brought up on a farm in Michigan, and most farmers are very practical. My dad, who 6

Clark H. Pinnock, Set Forth Your Case (Nutley, N.J.: The Craig Press, 1967), 6–7.

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was a farmer, taught me, “If something doesn’t work, chuck it.” So I chucked religion. Then I thought that education might have the answers to my quest for happiness and meaning. So I enrolled in the university. What a disappointment! You can find a lot of things in the university, but enrolling there to find truth and meaning in life is virtually a lost cause. I was by far the most unpopular student among the faculty of the first university I attended. I used to buttonhole professors in their offices, seeking the answers to my questions. When they saw me coming, they would turn out the lights, pull down the shades, and lock the door so they wouldn’t have to talk to me. I soon realized that the university didn’t have the answers I was seeking. Faculty members and my fellow students had just as many problems, frustrations, and unanswered questions about life as I did. A few years ago I saw a student walking around campus with a sign on his back: “Don’t follow me, I’m lost.” That was how everyone in the university seemed to me. Education was not the answer. Prestige must be the way to go, I decided. It just seemed right to find a noble cause, give yourself to it, and become well known. The people with the most prestige in the university were the student leaders, who also controlled the purse strings. So I ran for various student offices and got elected. It was great to know everyone on campus, make important decisions, and spend the university’s money doing what I wanted to do. But the thrill soon wore off like everything else I had tried. Every Monday morning I woke with a headache because of the night before. My attitude was, Here we go again, another five boring days. Happiness for me revolved around my three party

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nights: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Then the whole boring cycle started over again. I felt so frustrated, even desperate. My goal was to find my identity and purpose in life. But everything I tried left me empty, without answers. About that time I noticed a small group of people on campus— eight students and two faculty members—and there was something different about them. They seemed to know where they were going in life. And they had a quality I deeply admire in people: conviction. There is a certain dynamic in the lives of people with deep convictions, and I enjoy that dynamic. But there was something more about this group that caught my attention. It was love. These students and professors not only loved each other, they also loved and cared for people outside their group. They didn’t just talk about love; they got involved in loving others. It was something totally foreign to me, and I wanted it. So I decided to make friends with this group of people. About two weeks later I was sitting at a table in the student union, talking with some members of this group. Soon the conversation got around to the topic of God. I was pretty insecure about this subject, so I put on a big front to cover it up. I leaned back in my chair, acting as if I couldn’t care less. “Christianity, ha!” I blustered. “That’s for the weaklings, not the intellectuals.” Down deep, I really wanted what they had. But with my pride and my position in the university, I didn’t want them to know that I wanted what they had. Then I turned to one of the young women in the group and said, “Tell me, what changed your lives? Why are you so different from the other students and faculty?” She looked me straight in the eye and said two words I never expected to hear in an intelligent discussion on a university campus: “Jesus Christ.”

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“Jesus Christ?” I snapped. “Don’t give me that kind of garbage. I’m fed up with religion, the Bible, and the church.” She quickly shot back, “Mister, I didn’t say ‘religion.’ I said ‘Jesus Christ.’” Taken aback by the woman’s courage, conviction, and forthrightness, I apologized for my attitude. “But I’m sick and tired of religion and religious people,” I added. “I don’t want anything to do with it.” Then my new friends issued a challenge I couldn’t believe. They challenged me, a pre-law student, to examine intellectually the truth claim that Jesus Christ is God’s Son. I thought it was a joke. These Christians were so dumb. How could something as flimsy as Christianity stand up to an intellectual examination? So I scoffed at their challenge. But they didn’t let up. They kept challenging me day after day, and finally they backed me into the corner. I became so irritated at their insistence that I finally accepted their challenge, not to prove anything, but to refute them. I decided to write a book that would make an intellectual joke of Christianity. So I left the university and traveled throughout the United States and Europe to seek the evidence that Christianity was a sham. One day I was sitting in a library in London, England, and I sensed a voice within me say, “Josh, you don’t have a leg to stand on.” I immediately suppressed it. But just about every day after that I heard that inner voice. The more I researched, the more I heard that voice. I returned to the United States and to the university, but I couldn’t sleep at night. I would go to bed at ten o’clock and lie awake until four in the morning trying to refute the overwhelming evidence of the three pillars of the Christian faith:

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1. Jesus Christ is God’s Son. 2. The Bible is God’s personal revelation and is accurate and trustworthy. 3. The resurrection of Christ on the third day was a true historic fact. I began to realize that I was being intellectually dishonest. My mind told me that the claims about Christ, the Bible and the Resurrection were indeed true, but my will was being pulled another direction.7 I had placed so much emphasis on finding the truth that I wasn’t willing to follow it once I saw it. I had sensed Christ’s personal challenge to me in Revelation 3:20: “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me” (NIV). But becoming a Christian seemed so ego-shattering to me. I couldn’t think of a faster way to ruin all my good times. I knew I had to resolve this inner conflict because it was driving me crazy. I had always considered myself an open-minded person, so I decided to put Christ’s claims to the supreme test. One night at home in Union City, Michigan, at the end of my second year at the university, I became a Christian. Someone may say, “How do you know you became a Christian?” I was there! I got alone with a Christian friend, and I prayed four things in response to God’s invitation for me to trust him. In doing that, I established my relationship with God. First, I said, “Lord Jesus, thank you for dying on the cross for me.” I realized that if I were the only person on earth, Christ would 7

Part of the investigation that eventually influenced my personal decision to trust Jesus as the Savior and Lord is described in The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1999).

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have still died for me. You may think it was the irrefutable intellectual evidence that brought me to Christ. No, the evidence was only God’s way of getting his foot in the door of my life, of getting my attention. After being convinced that Jesus is God’s Son, that the Bible is true and trustworthy, and that the Resurrection actually happened, what brought me to Christ was the realization that he loved me enough to die for me. Second, I said, “I confess that I am a sinner.” No one had to tell me that. I knew I was doing things that were incompatible with a holy, just, righteous God. The Bible says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9, NIV). So I said, “Lord, forgive me.” Third, I said, “Right now, in the best way I know how, I open the door of my life, and I place my trust in you as Savior and Lord. Take over the control of my life. Change me from the inside out. Make me the type of person you created me to be.” The last thing I prayed was, “Thank you for coming into my life.” After I prayed, nothing happened. There was no bolt of lightning. I didn’t sprout angel’s wings. If anything, I actually felt worse after I prayed, almost physically sick. I was afraid I had made an emotional decision I would later regret intellectually. But more than that, I was afraid of what my friends would say when they found out. I really felt I had gone off the deep end. But over the next eighteen months, my entire life changed. One of the biggest changes occurred in how I viewed people. At the university I had mapped out the next twenty-five years of my life. My ultimate goal was to become governor of Michigan. I planned to accomplish my goal by using people in order to climb the ladder

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of political success because I figured people were to be used. But after I placed my trust in Christ, my thinking changed. Instead of using others to serve me, I wanted to be used to serve others. Becoming other-centered instead of self-centered was a dramatic change in my life. Another area that started to change was my bad temper. I used to blow my stack if somebody just looked at me wrong. I still have the scars from almost killing a man during my first year in the university. My bad temper was so ingrained that I didn’t consciously seek to change it. Then one day I was faced with a crisis that ordinarily would have set me off, but my bad temper was gone. I’m not perfect in this area, but the change in my life has been significant and dramatic. Perhaps the most significant change has been in the area of hatred and bitterness. I grew up filled with hatred, primarily aimed at one man whom I hated more than anyone else on the face of the earth. I despised everything that this man stood for. I can remember as a young boy lying in bed at night plotting how I could kill this man without being caught by the police. That man was my father. When I was growing up, my father was the town drunk. I hardly ever knew him sober. My friends at school joked about my dad’s lying in the gutter downtown, making a fool of himself. Their jokes hurt me deeply, but I never let anyone know. I laughed along with them. It was a very secret pain. I would sometimes find my mother in the barn, lying in the manure behind the cows, where my dad had beaten her with a hose until she couldn’t get up. My hatred seethed as I vowed to myself, “When I am strong enough, I’m going to kill him.” When Dad was drunk and visitors were coming over, I would grab him around the

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neck, pull him out to the barn, and tie him up. Then I would park his truck behind the silo and tell everyone he had gone to a meeting so we wouldn’t be embarrassed as a family. When I tied up his hands and feet, I looped part of the rope around his neck. I just hoped he would try to get away and choke himself. Two months before I graduated from high school, I walked into the house after a date to hear my mother sobbing. I ran into her room, and she sat up in bed. “Son, your father has broken my heart,” she said. Then she put her arms around me and pulled me close. “I have lost the will to live. All I want to do is live until you graduate, then I want to die.” I graduated two months later, and the next Friday my mother died. I believe she died of a broken heart. I hated my father for that. Had I not left home a few months after the funeral to attend college, I might have killed him. But after I made a decision to place my trust in Jesus as Savior and Lord, the love of God inundated my life. God took my hatred for my father and turned it upside down. Five months after becoming a Christian, I found myself looking my dad right in the eye and saying, “Dad, I love you.” I did not want to love that man, but I did. God’s love had changed my heart. After I transferred to Wheaton College, I was in a serious car accident, the victim of a drunk driver. I was moved home from the hospital to recover, and my father came to see me. Remarkably, he was sober that day. He seemed uneasy, pacing in my room. Then he blurted out, “How can you love a father like me?” I said, “Dad, six months ago I hated you; I despised you. But I have put my trust in Jesus Christ, received God’s forgiveness, and he has changed my life. I can’t explain it all, Dad, but God has taken away my hatred for you and replaced it with love.”

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We talked for nearly an hour, then he said, “Son, if God can do in my life what I’ve seen him do in yours, then I want to give him the opportunity.” He prayed, “God, if you’re really God and Jesus died on the cross to forgive me for what I’ve done to my family, I need you. If Jesus can do in my life what I’ve seen him do in the life of my son, then I want to trust him as Savior and Lord.” Hearing my dad pray that prayer from his heart was one of the greatest joys of my life. After I trusted Christ, my life was basically changed in six to eighteen months. But my father’s life was changed right before my eyes. It was as if someone reached down and switched on a light inside him. He touched alcohol only once after that. He got the drink as far as his lips, and that was it—after forty years of drinking! He didn’t need it anymore. Fourteen months later, he died from complications of his alcoholism. But in that fourteenmonth period, more than a hundred people in the area around my tiny hometown committed their lives to Jesus Christ because of the change they saw in the town drunk, my dad. You can laugh at Christianity. You can mock and ridicule it. But it works. If you personally trust Christ, start watching your attitudes and actions because Jesus Christ is in the business of changing lives. But Christianity is not something to be shoved down your throat or forced on you. You have your life to live, and I have mine. All I can do is tell you what I have learned and experienced. After that, what you do with Christ is your decision. Here are four principles that clearly explain the gospel message and the truth of what God has done through his Son, Jesus Christ, for every human being.

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1. God loves you personally and created you to know him personally. While the Bible is filled with assurances of God’s love, perhaps the most telling verse is John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (NKJV). God not only loves each of us enough to give his only Son for us, but he also desires that we come to know him personally: “Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3, NIV). What, then, prevents us from knowing God personally? 2. Men and women are sinful and separated from God, so we cannot know him personally or experience his love. We were all created to have fellowship with God; but because of our stubborn self-will, we chose to go our own independent way, and fellowship with God was broken. This self-will, characterized by an attitude of active rebellion or passive indifference, is evidence of what the Bible calls sin. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23, NIV). The Bible also tells us that “the wages of sin is death,” or spiritual separation from God (Romans 6:23, NIV). When we are in this state, a great gulf separates us from God because he cannot tolerate sin. People often try to bridge the gulf by doing good works or devoting themselves to religious practices, but the Bible clearly teaches that there is only one way to bridge this gulf. 3. Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for our sin; through him alone we can know God personally and experience his love. God’s Word records three important facts to verify this principle:

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1. Jesus Christ died in our place: “But God demonstrates his own love toward us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8, NIV). 2. Jesus Christ rose from the dead: “Christ died for our sins, . . . he was buried, . . . he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and . . . he appeared to Peter and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred” (1 Corinthians 15:3-6, NIV). 3. He is our only way to God: Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Thus, God has taken the loving initiative to bridge the gulf that separates us from him by sending his Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross in our place to pay the penalty for our sin. But it is not enough just to know these truths. 4. We must individually receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord; then we can know God personally and experience his love.The Gospel of John reminds us: “To all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12, NIV). What does it mean to “receive Christ”? The Scriptures tell us that we receive Christ through faith, not through “good works” or religious endeavors: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9, NIV). We’re also told that receiving Christ means to personally invite him into our lives. Jesus says, “Look! Here I stand at the door and knock. If you hear me calling and open the door, I will come in, and we will share a meal as friends” (Revelation 3:20).

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Thus, receiving Christ involves turning to God from self and trusting Christ to come into our lives to forgive our sins and to make us the kind of people he wants us to be. If you are not sure whether you have ever committed your life to Jesus Christ, I encourage you to do so today! Perhaps the prayer similar to what I prayed would help you: “Lord Jesus, I need you. Thank you for dying on the cross for me. Forgive me and cleanse me. Right this moment I trust you as Savior and Lord. Make me the type of person you created me to be. In Christ’s name, amen.” If this prayer expresses the desire of your heart, why not pray it now? If you mean it sincerely, Jesus Christ will come into your life, just as he promised in Revelation 3:20. He keeps his promises! Write this key promise indelibly in your mind: “And this is what God has testified: He has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. So whoever has God’s Son has life; whoever does not have his Son does not have life. I write this to you who believe in the Son of God, so that you may know you have eternal life” (1 John 5:11-13, emphasis added). That’s right. The man or woman who personally receives Christ as Savior and Lord is assured of everlasting life with him in heaven. And he or she will also discover that a relationship with Jesus Christ gives life purpose and meaning. For years I searched for the answer to the question, What will bring happiness and meaning to my life? Who or what can answer my questions about truth? Is there a God? Is he personal? Can I know him? How can I know right from wrong, good from evil? I thought I would find the answer in organized religion, education, and prestige, but I always ended up disappointed and unfulfilled. Ultimately, I discovered that the answer could only be found in the

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Lord Jesus Christ. I trust that you will begin the journey to make this discovery of truth in your own life. And if today the truth became clear to you and you made the decision to trust Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord, let me be the first to welcome you into the family of God! I heartily encourage you to attend and participate in a church where the Lord Jesus Christ is glorified, where the Holy Bible is honored and taught in a practical way, and where believers love, encourage, and pray for one another. Study God’s Word regularly, and apply it to your daily life. Share his love with your family, friends, and neighbors. And remember, when you received Christ by faith, as an act of your will, many wonderful things happened: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Christ came into your life (Revelation 3:20; Colossians 1:27). Your sins were forgiven (Colossians 1:14). You became a child of God (John 1:12). You received eternal life (John 5:24). You began the great adventure for which God created you (John 10:10; 1 Thessalonians 5:18).

We Need More Thomases I’m convinced we need more Thomases in the world today. You may remember Thomas as the “doubting” disciple. But I don’t quite agree with those who suggest that Thomas did something wrong when he insisted on seeing the evidence of Jesus’ resurrection. When he first heard reports that Jesus was alive, Thomas responded, “I won’t believe it unless I see the nail wounds in his hands, put my fingers into them, and place my hand into the wound in his side” (John 20:25).

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Thomas wanted verification. He wanted to see the evidence before he committed to that belief. Eight days later Jesus honored Thomas’s request, appearing to him and the other disciples in the midst of a locked room. Jesus showed Thomas his hands, saying, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Put your hand into the wound in my side. Don’t be faithless any longer. Believe!” (John 20:27). And Thomas acknowledged, “My Lord and my God” (John 20:27). The Bible itself repeatedly invites examination. The apostle John, who was there when Thomas saw the risen Christ, recorded that event and added, “Jesus’ disciples saw him do many other miraculous signs besides the ones recorded in this book. But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing in him you will have life” (John 20:30-31). In other words, John recorded some of the evidences that showed Jesus Christ to be the Son of the one true God so that we, like Thomas, could put faithlessness behind us and believe the objective truth with conviction. Let me suggest several excellent books that can help you to “check out” Jesus: The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict and He Walked among Us (Josh D. McDowell); A Case for Faith and A Case for Jesus (Lee Stroebel); Jesus (Ravi Zacharias); Scaling the Secular City (J .P. Moreland); Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (William Lane Craig). I believe we need today, more than ever, people who are willing to conduct a careful, open-minded consideration of the evidence. In many ways, the future of the church and even the world depends on it. I believe such a willingness is crucial to the survival of international law and order, justice, and peace. I believe that without a certain and credible understanding of right and

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wrong, good and evil, more and more of our fellow human beings will suffer at the hands of evildoers, as we lose the consensus—and the resolve—to oppose and resist evil. That’s why I have partnered with many others to launch a tenyear campaign we call Beyond Belief. It’s a multifaceted series of events and resources designed to help us—and our young people— move beyond mere belief . . . to convictions. I’m excited about exposing both adults and young people to the evidences for the Christian faith in new ways, ways that appeal not only to the head but also to the heart. I call this new approach a “relational apologetic”—rock-solid reasons to believe and a biblical blueprint for living out those beliefs in relationship with others. I can’t think of anything more needed in this age of moral confusion and spiritual indecision. This campaign is a critical answer to that urgent need. The key book in that campaign—Beyond Belief to Convictions—gives us a clear plan for grounding our youth in a solid relationship with Christ and for unlocking the answers to the fundamental questions of life itself: Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? When our kids embrace the Person of Truth, they will be fortified spiritually, morally, and emotionally to stand strong in the face of today’s culture.

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APPENDIX Is It Right for a Christian to Judge? Many people say that it is not right for Christians to judge others. After all, Jesus told his disciples, “Do not judge, or you too will be judged” (Matthew 7:1, NIV). Taking Matthew 7:1 by itself, isolated from the rest of Matthew’s Gospel (not to mention the rest of the Bible), there is little doubt that Christians should not judge others. But Matthew 7:1 is not an isolated passage of Scripture unrelated to the rest of Matthew’s Gospel. Matthew 7:1 is part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7). Rudolf Schnackenburg, internationally recognized New Testament scholar, provides a good direction, and a good caution, as we seek to interpret this passage of Scripture: “With sayings of Jesus, we must interpret them in his spirit, according to his intention. Thus the Sermon on the Mount cannot be treated as an isolated document; rather, one must take into account Jesus’ entire proclamation and his own behavior. . . . We must attempt to approach as nearly as possible Jesus’ original intention. Only then will we not run the risk of imputing our own thoughts and wishes to Jesus.”1 Unless we interpret Jesus’ prohibition against judging within the original context in which we find it written, we will invariably see Jesus’ words through our own preconceived beliefs. Instead, 1

Rudolf Schnackenburg, All Things Are Possible to Believers: Reflections on the Lord’s Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount, trans. James S. Currie (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox, 1995), 8.

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we want to understand Jesus’ intention when he gave those words, as recorded in Matthew’s Gospel. After we understand Jesus’ words as he intended them, then we can apply his words in our own culture and lives.

Immediate Context The central topic of the Sermon on the Mount is God’s kingdom.2 John the Baptist proclaimed the nearness of the kingdom (Matthew 3:2), as did Jesus (Matthew 4:17). Jesus went everywhere proclaiming the good news of the kingdom (Matthew 4:23). The Sermon on the Mount begins with a statement about those who enter the kingdom (Matthew 5:3). The kingdom is mentioned explicitly throughout the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3, 10, 19; 6:10, 33; 7:21). Given the immediate context, it is important that the entire Sermon on the Mount or any portion of the Sermon on the Mount be interpreted in accordance with Jesus’ kingdom message. Jesus is not proclaiming a universal ethic that applies to all of humanity.3

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D. A. Carson, “Matthew,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary: With the New International Version of the Holy Bible: Matthew, Mark, Luke, ed. Frank Ely Gaebelein and J. D. Douglas (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984), 127. While the term kingdom of God does not occur in Matthew’s Gospel until Matthew 12:28 and Matthew’s preferred term for the kingdom is the kingdom of heaven, there is little doubt that a reference to the kingdom is a reference to God’s rule. There is little reason to see a distinction between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven in Matthew, especially given the synoptic passages that use the “kingdom of God” in place of the “kingdom of heaven” (cf. Matthew 5:3, 10, among others). 3 R. T. France, The Gospel According to Matthew: An Introduction and Commentary, ed. Leon Morris, The Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 106. “The Sermon thus makes no claim to present an ethic for all men; indeed much of it would make no sense as a

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Instead, Jesus is providing instructions and guidelines that apply to life in a kingdom context. Given the fact that Jesus is proclaiming to people that are in various stages of relationship to the kingdom (the crowd knows little about Jesus, his teachings, and the kingdom of God), the Sermon on the Mount will proclaim different messages to individuals with whom Jesus is speaking. To some, they must prepare for the coming judgment unless they take to heart the warnings that Jesus proclaims, for the kingdom of God is ready to appear. To those who are contemplating Jesus and his teachings, they must have the right attitude of submission to God and openness to Jesus and his message. They must also pursue a right relationship with those around them or be rejected from the kingdom. The Sermon on the Mount describes true discipleship.4 God has an ethical code that is binding upon all those under his rule. Some may respond by saying that the kingdom of God is not here on earth at this present time. After all, they say, where are the blessings of the kingdom? Certainly the Old Testament presentation of God’s kingdom is a more glorious time than we are experiencing today. While it is true that the Old Testament promises of the kingdom are more glorious than we experience now, that does not mean that some aspects of God’s rule as promised in the Old Testament are not currently in effect. The King, Jesus Christ, has arrived. The King has and is calling individuals to submit to his sovereign authority over their lives. While not all the Old Testament promises are yet fulfilled, the universal code. It is not concerned with ethics in general, but with discipleship, with man in his obedience and devotion to God, not with a pattern for society.” 4 Ibid. France states well the theme of the Sermon on the Mount: “It deals with the character, duties, attitudes, and dangers of the Christian disciple. It is a manifesto setting out the nature of life in the kingdom of heaven.”

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kingdom has come near in the person of the King. When the King returns, the rule that has already begun will be completely visible, worldwide, and in complete fulfillment of the Old Testament promises. What Jesus announced in the Sermon on the Mount is the ethic that he expects his disciples to follow. This ethic must still be in force since Jesus gave clear instruction to his disciples that they were to teach others to obey everything he commanded them (Matthew 28:20).5 It appears that the gospel message and the gospel of the kingdom must be the same message since Paul and other disciples proclaimed the gospel of the kingdom (Acts 8:12; 14:22; 19:8; 20:25; 28:23, 31). The main differences between the statements found in the Sermon on the Mount and the later New Testament writings concern timing; the Sermon on the Mount was written before Jesus’ death and resurrection. Truths proclaimed by the writers of the later New Testament, such as the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and freedom from the law, are not present in the Sermon on the Mount. Unless the chronological element is acknowledged correctly, it is likely that the interpreter will do one of two things: (1) dismiss the differences between the Sermon on the Mount and the later New Testament teachings, or (2) dismiss the Sermon on the Mount as not applicable to the life of the New Testament church. The proper approach is to acknowledge the importance of the Sermon on the Mount for the present age and yet make allowance for the chronological development that occurred following Jesus’ death and resurrection. 5

Ulrich Luz, The Theology of the Gospel of Matthew, ed. James D. G. Dunn, trans. J. Bradford Robinson, New Testament Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 43. Luz suggests that the command in Matthew 28:20 refers primarily to the Sermon on the Mount.

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Given the kingdom message in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 7:1-6 must be interpreted in the context of Jesus’ kingdom message. To reduce Jesus’ teaching on judgment to a universal ethic will undoubtedly distort the interpretation of Jesus’ words.

Exegesis of Matthew 7:1-6 Matthew 7:1-2—“Do Not Judge” Jesus begins his instruction about judging by giving a strong prohibition against it. In fact, the prohibition is an absolute prohibition—Jesus’ disciples are not to judge at all.6 Robert Gundry, professor of New Testament and Greek at Westmont College, explains that Jesus “does not merely prohibit habitual judging, as though occasional judging meets no disapproval.” Jesus’ words “carry the force ‘Stop judging’ or ‘Don’t ever judge.’”7 Jesus “leaves no room for harmonization attempts.”8 He makes a strong prohibition. We must not soften the prohibition by claiming that the prohibition is only against unfair judgment.9 (But 6

Georg Strecker, The Sermon on the Mount: An Exegetical Commentary, trans. O. C. Dean Jr. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1988), 143. 7 Robert H. Gundry, Matthew: A Commentary on His Handbook for a Mixed Church under Persecution, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 120. 8 Strecker, The Sermon on the Mount, 143. 9 Contrary to Donald A. Hagner, Matthew 1-13, ed. David A. Hubbard, Glenn W. Barker, and Ralph P. Martin, Word Biblical Commentary, vol. 33A (Dallas: Word, 1993), 168–70. Hagner explains that “the meaning here, accordingly, is that unfair or uncharitable judgments should be avoided.” He makes this assertion based upon the following information: “The command mē krínete, lit. ‘do not judge,’ should not be taken as a prohibition of all judging or discerning of right and wrong, since elsewhere in Matthew’s record of the teaching of Jesus—indeed, already in v. 6—the making of such judgments by disciples is presupposed (see

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see the conclusions below, where we will see that judgment in certain forms and in certain situations is necessary.) Also, there is nothing in the immediate context to indicate that Jesus is only describing the need to refrain from private judgment, without prohibiting communal judgment.10 The prohibition against judging refers to all of Jesus’ disciples, regardless of whether they are acting alone or as a group. The Greek verb krinō (“to judge”) can be used to describe anything from the expression of an opinion to the exacting of punishment.11 Where in that spectrum do the words of Jesus fit? The parallel statement in Luke 6:37 provides a clue: “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned.”12 The imperative katadikázete (“condemn”) is 7:15-20; 10:11-15; 16:6, 12; 18:17-18). Furthermore, v. 2a assumes the making of fair or charitable judgments and does not entail the avoidance of judgments altogether.” While we will ultimately agree with Hagner’s conclusion that Jesus is advocating proper judgment, we do not want to overturn the seriousness of the prohibition through the qualifying phrase “unfairly.” First, who would ever think they are judging unfairly? Unfair judgment is strengthened by community pressure to judge, and so even the most unfair judgment becomes the accepted (and expected) community standard. (We may think of the community pressure that strengthened the Nazi persecution of the Jews, as well as the harsh judgments in many legalistic churches.) Instead, it appears that Jesus provides a strong prohibition that must be heeded, while expecting his disciples to carry out proper judgment as needed (see, for example, 7:3-5 and 7:6). Another example where both the strong prohibition against judging and the need to judge fit together is Paul’s instruction in Romans 14. Second, we do not want to soften the prohibition against judging because of the eschatological overtones of the prohibition. 10 Contrary to Gundry, Matthew, 120. 11 S.v. “krínō” in Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 567–69. 12 There are differences between Matthew 7:1-6 and Luke 6:37-42. Our appeal to Luke is not to claim that Matthew and Luke are identical or even that they have the same perspectives throughout these two parallel sections (they do not have the same perspectives in all details). Luke has his theological perspective when he writes about Jesus, as does Matthew. Neither Gospel is the key to unlocking the

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parallel to and further explains the imperative krínete (“judge”).13 Jesus forbade condemnatory judgment, which was quick to pronounce another guilty and eager to hand down a sentence.14 That Jesus is forbidding condemnatory judgment finds support in Matthew’s Gospel, as well. The Sermon on the Mount addresses issues of the kingdom of God. Since the kingdom is ready to appear now that the King is present, the end-times judgments that were proclaimed in the Old Testament and throughout the intertestamental Jewish literature are ready to appear as well. The God who will judge his people and the world is ready to begin his reign. Jesus calls God’s people to be ready when God’s judgment begins. Since God will make his judgment, for God’s people to pronounce judgment is to usurp God’s role.15 Jesus did not come on earth to establish an authoritative ruling body—he came to establish God’s rule on earth. Jesus not only forbade the act of condemning, but the lifeperspective that accompanies it. Present imperatives (such as “Do

meaning of the other Gospel. But we can use the Lukan parallel to lend weight to an interpretation that appears to be present in Matthew, based on information that is available in Matthew. 13 E. Earle Ellis, The Gospel of Luke, ed. Matthew Black, 2d ed., New Century Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 116; I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text, ed. I. Howard Marshall and W. Ward Gasque, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 266. 14 S.v. “katadikázō” in Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, 516. 15 See Marius Reiser, Jesus and Judgment: The Eschatological Proclamation in Its Jewish Context, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 264. Reiser, quoting Luz, explains that the prohibition against judging must take into account the eschatological context—because of the proximity of the kingdom of God, judgment must cease. Reiser also suggests that Luke 6:37 provides the same perspective.

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not judge”) often prohibit an attitude that becomes a lifestyle.16 The picture, then, is that of a malicious person who continually seeks opportunities to condemn others and hold them in a perpetual state of guilt. Ultimately, such a person presumes to determine who can and cannot be forgiven by God and thus usurps his rightful position as Judge. In light of the above, we might say that the prohibition “Do not judge” is a call to exercise mercy, but without abandoning our moral sensibilities. (c)

God’s Judgment

If we judge wrongly, who will judge us? The passive verbs kríthēte (“you will be judged”; v. 1), krithēsesthe (“you will be judged”; v. 2) and metrēthēsetai (“it will be measured” v. 2) strongly suggest that God is the agent of judgment.17 Clear examples of the socalled “divine passive” are found earlier in the Sermon on the Mount.18 The passive verbs paraklēthēsontai (“they shall be comforted”; 5:4), khortasthēsontai (“they shall be filled”; 5:6), and eleēthēsontai (“they shall receive mercy”; 5:7) imply that God is the agent. Later in the Sermon we read that God will forgive those 16

See, for example, Matthew 6:25; 10:28; 24:6; Mark 13:11, 21; 16:6; Luke 12:29; John 5:28, 45; 10:37; 14:1; 20:27; Acts 10:15; 20:10; Romans 11:18; 12:16. On the use of the present imperative with mh, to describe the prohibition of creating a habit or lifestyle, see Richard A. Young, Intermediate New Testament Greek: A Linguistic and Exegetical Approach (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1994), 143. 17 France, The Gospel According to Matthew, 142; Gundry, Matthew, 120–21. The divine passive not only fits the context of 7:1-6 and the Gospel as a whole, but judgment is predominantly linked to divine retribution in the synoptics. This is consistent with later Jewish literature, where the “measure for measure” proverb referred to divine retribution (cf., e.g., m. Sotah 1:7). 18 For a brief discussion of the divine passive, see Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 437–38. See also the excursus in Reiser, Jesus and Judgment, 266–73.

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who forgive (6:14-15), so it is natural to assume that God will also judge those who judge. The divine passive best fits the overall context of Matthew, as well as the solemn tone of 7:1-6.19 A divine agent of judgment means that all judgment is measured by a standard that transcends us. We are to exercise judgment according to divine principle rather than personal preference if we aspire to judge legitimately. If the standard we apply in judging others is not consistent with the standard God uses in judging us, we are using a faulty scale. (d)

Extra-Biblical Judgment Statements

Statements about judgment are not restricted to the Bible. Extrabiblical Jewish writings contain warnings and instructions about judgment as well. Hillel was a prominent Jewish teacher who lived between 60 B.C. and A.D. 20.20 The Mishnah (written about A.D. 200) reports Hillel as making the following statement about judgment: “And do not judge your fellow until you are in his place” (m. Avot 2:4).21 One difference between Hillel’s statement and Jesus’ statement is that Hillel’s instruction does not indicate God’s role as divine agent. While Hillel provides a prohibition against judging, he is not opposed to judging. In the very next verse he makes a judgment about a number of individuals, most notably about the Am haarez (the “people of the land,” the 19

Carson, “Matthew,” 183. James H. Charlesworth, “Hillel and Jesus: Why Comparisons Are Important,” in Hillel and Jesus: Comparative Studies of Two Major Religious Leaders, ed. James H. Charlesworth and Loren L. Johns (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 4. 21 Mishnah numbering and translation is from Jacob Neusner, The Mishnah: A New Translation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988). The Mishnah naming conventions follow Patrick H. Alexander and others, The SBL Handbook of Style: For Ancient near Eastern, Biblical, and Early Christian Studies (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1999). 20

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common Jewish people). It is reported of Hillel that “he would say, (1) ‘A coarse person will never fear sin, (2) nor will an Am haares ever be pious, (3) nor will a shy person learn, (4) nor will an intolerant person teach, (5) nor will anyone too busy in business get wise’” (m. Avot 2:5). This attitude against the Am haares is not restricted to Hillel. The Jewish leaders in Jesus’ day also maintained a judgmental attitude against the common Jewish people since the common person was not as skilled in the law as were the Jewish leaders. See, for example, John 7:49, where the Jewish leaders appeal to the ignorance of the people as an argument that they are easily swayed to believe in Jesus: “No! But this mob that knows nothing of the law—there is a curse on them.”22 It is against statements like this that Jesus’ prohibition against judging is most clearly directed. Ironically it was the “ignorant” common people who recognized Jesus as the Messiah, while the self-righteous Jewish leaders did not. Matthew 7:3-5—“Remove the Beam, Remove the Speck” That Jesus wanted to emphasize the absurdity of hypocritical judgment is evidenced by the fact that he referred to the speck and beam three times.23 Jesus was amazed by a person’s ability to spot the tiniest speck in another’s eye, all the while oblivious to the

22

For other examples and further discussion of Jewish judgment statements, see D. Flusser, “Hillel and Jesus: Two Ways of Self-Awareness,” in Hillel and Jesus, 83; Hagner, Matthew 1–13, 169. 23 The phrase kai idou, in the second reference makes the point of hypocrisy even more emphatic. See Hagner, Matthew 1–13, 169. The force of the phrase becomes something like: “How can you say . . . when extraordinarily there is a beam . . .” See Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, 468. s.v. “idou.”

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beam hanging from one’s own face.24 The beam to which Jesus referred was no mere stake or plank. The term dókos (“beam”) refers to a heavy construction beam such as that used to build a roof.25 Jesus’ humorous point is solemnly clear: If the hypocritical judge is a self-proclaimed expert in spotting the tiniest flaws in others, then he should have no problem identifying the glaring faults of his own. Of course, this assumes that such a person is unaware of those faults. By including this illustration, it appears that “Jesus is not directing disciples never to judge others but stressing that their first responsibility is to purify themselves. They have not been called to be moral or theological watchdogs over others.”26 In giving this example, Jesus gives allowance for pointing out the moral failures in others.27 It is not wrong to rebuke a brother for sin.28 The problem arises when a person tries to rebuke others but has the larger sin of self-righteousness. “Self-righteousness makes the rebuke a hypocritical ‘act’ of showiness instead of a genuine attempt to ensure the well-being of the sinning brother.”29 The word hupókrita (“hypocrite”) is derived from Greek theatrical 24

Kárphos referred to a particle of straw, chaff, wood, etc., and was later used to describe anything minute. See Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, 510–11. 25 S. v. “dókos” in James H. Moulton and George Milligan, Vocabulary of the Greek Testament (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1997), 168. 26 David E. Garland, Reading Matthew: A Literary and Theological Commentary on the First Gospel, ed. Charles H. Talbert, Reading the New Testament Series (New York: Crossroad, 1993), 85. Garland appeals to an apparent chiasm in 7:3-5 to identify the main issue of these verses as the imperative of personal purification. 27 Such moral failures need not be glaring. The term kárphos in Matthew 7:3-5 represents the smallest of moral defects. See W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, The Gospel according to Saint Matthew, International Critical Commentary, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), 1:671. 28 Gundry, Matthew, 122. 29 Ibid.

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terms that mean to “play a part.”30 Hypocrites pretend to be something they are not; to portray one thing on the outside, while being another on the inside (cf. the Pharisees in Matthew 6:2, 5, 16; 23:25, 27). That Jesus identified some of his hearers as hypocritical judges implies that some form of deception was involved in their judgment. In other words, they knew what they were doing and were therefore without excuse.31 Proper judgment requires honest assessment, and honest assessment requires accurate appraisal. That is why Jesus said concerning the one who judges, “First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye” (7:3, NIV, emphasis added). Once the beam is removed and one can see clearly to make an accurate appraisal, Jesus implies that he is quite free to address the problem with his brother. This suggests that it is not wrong to judge, but rather it is wrong to judge while hypocritically overlooking one’s own sin. If a person can spot the speck in another’s eye, it indicates that the person can see (blépeis). But if that same person removes the beam in his own eye, he can then see clearly (diablépeis).32 This has two significant implications. First, rightly identifying and addressing our own faults makes us more charitable. Second, when we judge more charitably, we are inclined to judge without a 30

S. v. “hupókritēs” in Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, 1038. Hagner, Matthew 1-13, 139. Hagner explains that “the word hupókritēs in Hellenistic Greek commonly meant ‘actor,’ i.e., one who performs in front of others, pretending to be something he or she is not. In the NT it is used consistently in a negative sense. Matthew captures the duplicity inherent in hypocrisy when he juxtaposes the word with the quotation of Isa 29:13, ‘this people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me?’ (15:8).” 32 S. v. “diablépō” in J. P. Louw and Eugene A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains, 2d ed., 2 vols. (New York: United Bible Societies, 1989), 1:281. 31

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personal bias and thus more accurately. That is, we are more likely to measure others according to divine principle rather than personal preference. Matthew 7:6—“Do Not Give Dogs What Is Sacred” Matthew 7:6 provides a qualification to the prohibition against judging in 7:1.33 “Whereas 7:1-5 totally prohibits condemning others, 7:6 sets limits where discretion and discernment are necessary.”34 Just as a person should not improperly condemn another, he or she should not become lax in applying moral discernment.35 The metaphor of “dogs” and “pigs” stands for those who vigorously reject the truth of the gospel.36 We must learn to 33

Throughout the Sermon on the Mount we find black-and-white declarations qualified by a seemingly contradictory statement. The statements are close enough together that it is taken for granted the reader will make the implicit connection, thus arriving at a balance between the two statements. This literary balancing (known as parataxis) is common in contexts employing hyperbole and overstatement, both of which are prevalent in Matthew 7:1-6. See G. B. Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997) 117–21. 34 Robert A. Guelich, The Sermon on the Mount: A Foundation for Understanding (Waco, Tex.: Word, 1982), 353. Carson explains that “disciples exhorted to love their enemies (5:43-47) and not to judge (v. 1) might fail to consider the subtleties of the argument and become undiscerning simpletons. This verse guards against such a possibility.” Carson, “Matthew,” 185. 35 The need for discernment and proper judgment is not a trivial matter, for the “sacred” that is not to be cast to the “dogs” is the gospel of the kingdom. See Carson, “Matthew,” 185; Hagner, Matthew 1-13, 171. 36 See Carson, “Matthew,” 185. Carson states that “the ‘pigs’ are not only unclean animals but wild and vicious, capable of savage action against a person. ‘Dogs’ must not be thought of as household pets: in the Scriptures they are normally wild, associated with what is unclean, despised. . . . The two animals serve together as a picture of what is vicious, unclean, and abominable (cf. 2 Peter 2:22).” While Carson’s portrayal of dogs is accurate in this passage and Scripture in general, this is not to say that dogs were never household pets in antiquity. For a brief discussion and sources describing dogs as household pets, see Gerd Theissen, The Gospels in Context: Social and Political History in the Synoptic Tradition, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 62. To the

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distinguish between those who walk in truth and those who defiantly reject it. Failure to rightly discern in this area leads to the incorrect notion that all people are alike, and it risks subjecting God’s standards to unnecessary mockery. In other words, the dignity of the message we preach depends on our ability to handle the tension between avoiding improper judgment and rightly discerning the moral character of our culture and the people in it.

Judgment Elsewhere in Matthew Other places in Matthew’s Gospel indicate that Jesus sees the need for his disciples to judge others. The table below offers examples of judgment in Matthew: Matthew 7:15-20

Jesus commands his disciples to make a judgment about individuals who claim to be God’s prophets.

Matthew 10:11-15

When Jesus sent his disciples on an evangelistic mission, he instructed them to make a judgment about the households in the towns.

Matthew 16:6-12

Jesus tells his disciples to make a judgment about the teachings of the Pharisees and Sadducees and to beware of their teaching.

Matthew 18:15-17

Jesus instructed his disciples to take

Jews the dogs and pigs are Gentiles. But to Jesus’ disciples these terms would take on different meanings, especially once the Gentile ministry began. For the disciples, dogs and pigs refer to unbelievers, regardless if they are Jews or Gentiles. For further discussion, see Gundry, Matthew, 123; Strecker, The Sermon on the Mount, 146–47.

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appropriate action when a disciple is involved in sin. In order to carry out this action, it is necessary to determine what constitutes sin.

Judgment in the New Testament Many places in the New Testament describe situations in which making a judgment is presupposed, required, or discussed. Below is a representative list of passages from various parts of the New Testament. John 7:24

Jesus tells the Jewish leaders to “stop judging by mere appearances, and make a right judgment” (NIV). Jesus did not forbid the act of judging but rather insisted that it be exercised without hypocrisy, based on reality, and grounded in spiritual discernment.

Acts 5:1-10

Peter makes a judgment against Ananias and Sapphira.

Romans 2:1

Paul says we condemn ourselves if we pass judgment on another for doing the same things we do ourselves. Condemnation results from judging hypocritically.

Romans 14

While Paul forbids believers to judge one another concerning matters of Christian liberty, he also exhorts believers to make informed choices. This passage shows how the prohibition against judgment and the

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admonition to judge can exist simultaneously. 1 Corinthians 5:5

Paul commanded the Corinthian church to make a judgment concerning the sinning believer.

Galatians 1:8-9

Paul makes a strong judgment against those who distort the gospel message and asks the Galatians to do the same.

Philippians 3:2

Paul instructs the Philippians to watch out for evil men.

2 Thessalonians 3:14

Paul instructs the Thessalonians to take special note of undisciplined meddlers and to avoid associating with them.

2 Timothy 3:1-9

Paul describes the wickedness of certain people and instructs Timothy to have nothing to do with them.

2 Timothy 4:2, 14-15

Paul tells Timothy that his proclamation of God’s Word must involve reproof. Paul makes an implicit judgment in vv. 14-15, where he identifies Alexander the metalworker as being opposed to the gospel.

James 4:11

James 4:11 provides a prohibition against judging that is very similar to Matthew 7:1. It may, in fact, be dependent upon Jesus’ words given in the Sermon on the Mount.

2 Peter 3:16-17

Peter describes individuals who are ignorant and unstable, and who distort the Scriptures to their own destruction. These individuals

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scoff at the Lord’s return and the coming judgment. 1 John 4:1-3

John instructs the church to test whether a prophet is true or false.

3 John 1:9-11

John addresses the pride and gossip of Diotrephes and says that he will confront Diotrephes when he arrives.

Jude

Jude warns the church that there are godless, immoral men who have slipped into the church unawares. The church is to contend for the faith and not allow such men to corrupt the church with false teachings and wicked practices.

Conclusion It is possible to do a right thing the wrong way. Judging is one of those things. When Jesus’ words “do not judge” are placed in their proper context and compared with the teaching of the Bible as a whole, it becomes clear that judging is quite permissible. What is prohibited is judging the wrong way. We are not to judge according to our own preferences, for it is God who ultimately judges us all. We are to uphold his standards. We are not to judge while hypocritically overlooking our own sins but to assess others and ourselves with honesty. We are to see things as they really are. We are not to become dull in our moral discernment, for not everyone values the truth. We are to protect the dignity of the message we preach. When we understand these things, we will realize that proper judging is not only allowed; it is our obligation.

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Bibliography for Moral Relativism Beckwith, Francis J., and Gregory Koukl. Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998. A popular-level book offering a critique of relativism and examining its impact in the realms of education and public policy. Beilby, James, and David K. Clark. Why Bother with Truth: Arriving at Knowledge in a Skeptical Society. Norcross, Ga.: Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, 2000. A popular-level booklet critiquing and answering postmodern skepticism. Copan, Paul. Is Everything Really Relative: Examining the Assumptions of Relativism and the Culture of Truth Decay. Norcross, Ga.: Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, 1999. A popular-level booklet demonstrating the self-contradictory nature of relativism, the objectivity of truth, and ramifications for morality, tolerance, and ethical judgment. ____. That’s Just Your Interpretation: Responding to Skeptics Who Challenge Your Faith. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001. A popular-level book addressing challenges related to truth, worldviews, and the unique claims of Christianity. _____. True for You, But Not for Me: Deflating the Slogans That Leave Christians Speechless. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1998. A popular-level book answering the claims of relativism, showing it to be hypocritically absolutist and exclusivistic.

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Carson, D. A. “The Taming of Truth.” In The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism, 57–92. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996. A good discussion on the history of postmodern developments and their implications for hermeneutics. _____. “The Hermeneutical Morass.” In The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism, 93–137. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996. Advocates a moderate response to postmodernism, rejecting its more radical tenets and embracing a few of its strengths. Erickson, Millard. Postmodernizing the Faith. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1998. A readable introduction to postmodernism, containing essays by evangelical leaders on both sides of the debate. Some authors argue for a total rejection of postmodernism, while others argue for an assimilation of it. Ganssle, Greg and John Hinkson. “Epistemology at the Core of Postmodernism: Rorty, Foucault, and the Gospel.” In Telling the Truth, ed. D. A. Carson, 68–89. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000. Originally a paper given at the Postmodern Evangelism conference at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. A good summary of Rorty and Foucault, though the critique of Rorty is weak. Groothuis, Douglas. “Postmodernism and Truth.” In Philosophia Christi, 271–81. Vol. 2, no. 2. La Mirada, Calif.: Evangelical Philosophical Society in cooperation with Biola University, 1999. This is largely a summary of Groothuis’s book, Truth Decay (see below).

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_____. “The Truth about Truth.” In Truth Decay, 83–110. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2000. An outstanding, readable work defending a correspondence theory of truth. _____. “Ethic without Reality, Postmodernist Style.” In Truth Decay, 187–210. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 2000. An excellent discussion of postmodern epistemology’s implications for morality. Primary attention is given to the writings of Rorty and Foucault. Harris, James F. Against Relativism. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Press, 1992. An outstanding philosophical work on epistemological relativism, covering Quine, Hume, Kuhn, and feminist ideology. The two chapters critiquing Quine are particularly recommended. McCallum, Dennis, ed. The Death of Truth. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1996. An excellent popular work critiquing postmodernism and examining its effect on academic disciplines and the culture at large. Moser, Paul K., Dwayne H. Mulder, and J. D. Trout. The Theory of Knowledge. New York: Oxford, 1998. An introduction to epistemology. Chapter 4, “Truth,” is a great introduction to relativism and related issues. Nagel, Thomas. The Last Word. New York: Oxford, 1997. An excellent philosophical work defending the objectivity of truth, a traditional view of logic, and the knowability of science. Chapter 3, “Language,” is particularly recommended.

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Norris, Christopher. Against Relativism: Philosophy of Science, Deconstruction, and Critical Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. An excellent work by a preeminent philosopher. Chapter 2, “Deconstruction and Epistemology,” is particularly salient. _____. What’s Wrong with Postmodernism? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1990. A technical work discussing textual criticism and attacking deconstructionism. Phillips, Timothy R., and Dennis L. Okholm, Christian Apologetics in the Postmodern World. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1995. A series of essays advocating a variety of apologetic approaches to postmodernism. Some authors advocate an assimilation of relativism. Hence, “There’s No Such Thing as Objective Truth, and It’s a Good Thing Too” by Kenneson, and others attack it. William Lane Craig’s article, “Politically Incorrect Salvation,” is outstanding. Rescher, Nicholas. Objectivity: The Obligations of Impersonal Reason. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1997. An outstanding work refuting deconstructionism, epistemological relativism, and moral relativism. Willard, Dallas. “How Concepts Relate the Mind to Its Objects: The ‘God’s Eye View’ Vindicated?” In Philosophia Christi, 5–20. Vol. 1, no. 2. La Mirada, Calif.: Evangelical Philosophical Society in cooperation with Biola University, 1999. An outstanding technical article on the epistemological and linguistic foundations of postmodernism.

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About the Author Josh McDowell never intended to be a defender of the Christian faith. In fact, his goal was just the opposite. As a skeptic at Kellogg College in Michigan, he was challenged by a group of Christian students to intellectually examine the claims of Christianity. He accepted the challenge and set out to prove that Christ’s claims to be God and the historical reliability of Scripture could be neither trusted nor accurately verified. The evidence he discovered changed the course of his life. He discovered that the Bible was the most historically reliable document of all antiquity and that Christ’s claim that he was God could be objectively verified. When Josh was brought face-to-face with the objective and relevant truth of Christ and his Word, he trusted in Christ as the Son of God and his personal Savior. Josh transferred to Wheaton College and completed a bachelor’s degree in language. He went on to receive a master’s degree in theology from Talbot Theological Seminary in California. In 1964 he joined the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC) and eventually became an international traveling representative for CCC, focusing primarily on issues facing today’s young people. Josh McDowell has spoken to more than seven million young people in 84 countries and on more than 700 university and college campuses. He has authored or coauthored more than sixty books and workbooks with more than 30 million in print worldwide. Josh’s most popular works are The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict, More Than a Carpenter, Why True Love Waits, the Right from Wrong book, and the Right from Wrong workbook series.

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Josh’s new Beyond Belief campaign offers the tools to correct our young people’s distorted beliefs and lead them to deepened convictions about God and his Word. In classic McDowell fashion, he provides families and the church with a “relational apologetic”—rock-solid reasons to believe and a biblical blueprint for living out those beliefs in relationship with others. Josh has been married to Dottie for more than thirty years and has four children. Josh and Dottie live in Dallas, Texas.

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