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W. Davd Phillips

Integrating Missional Thinking, Living, and Culture

Truth: absolute, relative, or relational?

July 10th, 2006 by David Phillips

In this month’s Relevant Magazine, Peter Walker writes an article entitled “Missing the Point? The Absolute Truth Behind Postmodernism, Emergent and the Emerging Church.”  Towards the end of the article, the author includes statements from Tony Jones, Brian McClaren and Len Sweet about truth.

For Jones, “putting the qualifier absolute inform of truth is a modernistic fallacy.  Truth is not qualified by adjectives like absolute.” For both Jones and McClaren, the problem is not with truth but absolute.

Sweet rides the fence, however.  He states that he is both an absolutist and a relativist.  “You can’t escape absolutism.  To say there are no absolutes is in itself absolute.  The Pharisees were the absolutists.  Pilate was the relativist, asking, ‘What is truth?’  I find both of them within me.  But both the Pharisees and Pilate stared truth in the face and didn’t see it.”

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