If this life is all you have, then absolutism makes perfect sense.
Just over two years ago I wrote Contextual Justice and it’s been getting a lot of hits lately. I’d like to restate the message in different terms: You can’t have peace if you keep seeing things in terms of absolutes.
You can reach for God’s peace — shalom as a Hebrew term implies all the things God promised He would do for people who embrace His revelation. It certainly applies to this world, for the simple reason that all Creation is wired with God’s character. If your orientation in life is focused on Him, you will have a tendency to understand the demands of reality. But instead of the Western mechanistic view of an inanimate universe, you’ll see the universe as a living thing populated with life on multiple levels. All Creation hums with the personal attention of the Creator.
That viewpoint is necessary for divine justice.
God’s revelation comes mostly via parables, or parabolic language, symbolism. Revelation is couched in a world of assumptions totally foreign to Western thinking. God’s Word assumes you realize that all of the most important stuff can only be characterized. If you characterize reality as dead and largely inert, then you find yourself in a world where absolutes are an obvious necessity. If you characterize reality as a vivid expression of God as a living being, with His hand constantly involved in every particle, then absolutes become little more than a conscious abstraction. You can talk about absolutes without taking absolutism seriously because some part of you knows there will always be contextual limits, even if you never experience those limits.
And while I may get you to learn all of that intellectually, chances are you’ll spend many years afterward struggling to retrain all those unconscious mental reflexes to keep expecting hard absolutes in a literal sense. A Western mind has no room for Eternity; the entire matrix of mental operations is wired to exclude it. Western consciousness ends at the boundaries of what we can observe and analyze physically. That sort of thing reduces God to a mere abstraction.
Thus, it’s no surprise that very few Western Christian believers experience God as a Person. Even the one human manifestation of God — Jesus Christ — becomes an abstract figure, a body of facts and analytical product. Spiritual birth seems to change that very little. A genuine encounter with God finds very little space to plant roots in their consciousness. It can be so confusing and this causes me to bear a sense of pity for Western Christians. The bondage of absolutism is very hard to bear, and very painful to watch. Once you get free of that, you can vividly see the battle in their eyes.
For those of us who have escaped the chains of absolutism, let us pray fervently that others can be set free to grasp the multiple layers of reality. You and I are able to sense all the layers of divine justice in most contexts. Something in us calls out to what is appropriate for the context. Westerners tend to dismiss this as relativism because they don’t understand it. They don’t understand the active tension of life itself, and so cannot see that tension in the moral necessities of human existence.
My joking comments in yesterday’s post has a serious point: My eventual practical choice in each situation rests on the divine calling of God and the unpredictable results of interaction with other humans. If someone were to ask my advice on something, my response depends on what I perceive to be my duty to that person at the moment. My duty to God contains multiple layers of divine justice, but what I eventually tell that person cannot be codified in mere proposition, as if God can be confined to one concrete answer in all contexts. The question depends on my grasp of how God wants to use me for His glory at that moment. Demanding rational principle flushes you out of the moral realm altogether, and blinds you to reality as God revealed it.
There is no room for simplistic absolutism in the Kingdom of Heaven.
