As we have been studying “Essentials of the Christian Faith,” we have operated out of a certain assumption—that Truth is real, and that we can know it. Unfortunately, that is not an assumption many today are willing to acknowledge.
For all the insights and benefits the postmodern mind has given into our present life situation, its popular expression quickly devolves into a vulgar relativism, and shuns any attempt to be logically consistent. We live in a world where “that’s your truth, not mine”; “there are no absolutes”; “all truth is relative.”
We all know what it is like to deal with those who are arrogant—it’s an easily recognizable trait that quickly churns the stomach. Knowing how much the cocky sway of the arrogant disgusts us when we see it in others, we are often surprised to have it revealed in ourselves; and the prudent will take steps in their heart and in their prayers to counter this particularly annoying expression of sin.
However, our popular culture has usurped the term, “arrogant,” and played against our natural fears. To many today, any expression of “conviction” or “certainty” is arrogance. If one demonstrates confidence in an absolute Truth, or asserts the validity of a truth claim, he/she is attacked or dismissed as an arrogant person. To claim to know the truth, a truth that has relevance beyond oneself, is an invitation to be marginalized in our present culture, as conceited and egotistical.
Instead, our modern pseudo-intellectuals celebrate doubt as humility. To bask in the morass of uncertainty, to joyfully acknowledge ambiguity, and to reject even the possibility of being accurate, is perceived as a most admirable quality. So, our culture pushes us toward a place where, as individuals, we are all confident in our own doubt of any truth claim. To have an unshakeable conviction and prejudice against Truth is to lay hold of contemporary “humility.”
But, surely, this is totally backwards.
· To assert truths that lay outside/beyond oneself is an honorable thing; that is conviction, not arrogance.
· Arrogance is to be confident in oneself—especially, nowadays, in the absolute rejection of an absolute, universal truth.
· To reject the reality of such a truth is not humility, but a bold assertion of one’s own self-importance; “If I can’t or don’t know it, it is not ‘real’.”
· Humility is not gained in questioning the reality of an external truth, but by challenging one’s own inner being.
· Doubt is supposed to be directed at ourselves, not at Truth that is beyond us.
A man of his times, but surely a man for ours as well, G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1908: “What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place…A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.”
(Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 31). Wow. Take that.
I need more true humility, and more true conviction. Humility when looking inward; yet conviction when asserting the truths God has revealed. May He bless us all with such a character in our present culture. To the Praise of His glory!
-Henry Knapp