One of the principles that spans both testaments of Scripture is that we reap what we sow. It’s gardening season where I live. Planting a garden has a built-in object lesson for this principle. Whatever kind of seed you put in the ground is the kind of produce you will later enjoy. If green bean seeds, green beans are in your future. If cucumbers, then cucumbers. Whatever we sow, that we reap.
But while gardening represents the clearest physical object lesson of this principle, we see evidence of it all over the place. What’s true with gardening is also true in the realm of ideas. For example, students all across the country starting from a very young age, are being taught that facts are knowable only by empirical testing and everything else is relative. Whatever they happen to believe when it comes to matters of philosophy or religion or ethics or morality is merely a matter of opinion.
These are the seeds of relativism. When you sow the seeds of relativism, what do you reap? How about a culture of moral chaos? How about a culture in which it becomes impossible to logically declare any behavior to be wrong? How about a culture where the only real evil is found in declaring something to be evil?
Here’s another question. What would people think if we wanted to enjoy some nice fresh zucchini but kept planting corn and got more and more frustrated that we weren’t getting the ends we desired? Well, what do you tell a nation that keeps on sowing the seeds of relativism while complaining about the moral state of the culture? Indeed, almost three quarters of the population of the United States believes we are headed in the wrong direction morally. And yet we keep preaching and teaching moral relativism to our young people. I think there’s a joke somewhere in there about the definition of insanity.
Perhaps some examples will help shed some light on the problem. In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, Justin McBrayer, an associate professor of philosophy at Fort Lewis College, wrote about the experience of visiting his son’s second grade classroom. While there he saw a pair of signs hanging over a bulletin board in the room. One read: “Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.” The other read: “Opinion: What someone thinks, feel, or believes.”
This Common Core directed lesson is relativism in elementary form. It encourages students to develop the idea that there are not such things as objective moral facts. It teaches that truth claims are either facts or opinions and not both. When looking over his son’s homework he found some exercises designed to help drive this lesson home. In these the students are encouraged to sort facts and opinions into separate groups. Without exception every value claim was identified as an opinion.
The problems with this approach should be obvious. If there are not such things as moral facts, why bother passing laws? After all, every law legislates morality. The only question is whose morality is being legislated. Raising up students in such an environment will make placing any kind of behavioral expectations on them a futile affair. Indeed, many colleges and universities are shocked to discover that students are cheating their way through school and not just a few either. When I was in seminary several of my professors asked students to sign an honor statement at the end of the final that said something to the effect of “I did not cheat on this exam.” If even seminary students must be given encouragement to not cheat, things in the culture are not good. And heaven help us when we release these onto the world.
And yet consider the parting advice comedian Stephen Colbert gave to the graduates of Wake Forest University this year: “All you young people really need to succeed in the future is a reliable source of fuel and a fanatical cadre of psychopathic motorcycle killers.” Oh wait, that was his punchline. No, the emotional punch of his speech was directed at driving home this idea: “And if there’s one thing you need even more, it’s your own set of standards. … Of course, any standards worth having will be a challenge to meet. And most of the time, you will fall short. But what is nice about having your own set of standards is that from now on, you fill out your own report card.”
That works great — as long as there is no God and no such thing as moral facts (but I repeat myself). Consider for a moment the pure moral insanity of his advice. What kind of society will we have if every citizen develops her own set of standards? Perhaps once where students cheat to get through school and don’t find anything wrong with that. What Colbert was encouraging the students of this historically Baptist university to do is to take up a kind of moral nihilism that will ultimately serve no one well. And yet this is the Siren song of our culture. You are your own moral authority. What is right and wrong are determined by the commitments you have made. If you don’t like the standards you have chosen, that’s OK, just choose different ones. Choose standards that make you happy and give you the kind of life you want to live.
It sounds fun. It sounds exciting. It sounds liberating. It sounds like a recipe for an unmitigated moral disaster.
As followers of the God who defines right and wrong by his character we must stand firm against this particularly pernicious sort of false teaching. Our culture tells us from early on that we find our moral compass by looking in, that moral truths are all subjective and relative. Scripture proclaims something very different. The prophet Jeremiah declared the human heart to be deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Looking in for the path to life will lead us nowhere good. If we are our primary source, we are in trouble. We need something external to ourselves — that’s part of why God gave us the gift of the Scriptures.
We are called not to look in but to look up. It is the transcendent creator God who sets the standards and we the creatures are bound to follow them. These standards are objective and hold whether we like them or not. We can debate what exactly these are, but let us not pretend that we are legitimately our own sources of morality. Sowing that kind of nonsense will only lead to a culture of moral chaos.
We do indeed reap what we sow. Let us pray for our students that they may have the wisdom to recognize moral nonsense when it is presented to them. Let us also teach our students to know the truth and recognize it when in the presence of falsehoods. By this let us sow seeds of truth that we might reap a harvest of righteousness and life.
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