Astronomy and Politics Through the Lens of Epistemology
How do We Know What We Know?
What is Our Method of Evaluating Truth?

Superseding Biblical Resistance to Moral Relativism

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There are even a good number of believers in Christ who do not know what moral relativism is.  Here is a quote from a site that defines moral relativities in a brief, yet thorough way.

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We have heard for years this demand for tolerance and relativism in political thought on the left.  Yet this supposed ethic has continued to evolve.  The latest manifestation is a popular campus organization who call themselves ANTIFA.  Many of them condemn their own liberal-humanistic teachers and professors because they are supposedly not anti-fascist enough.  And heaven forbid if a Christian or political conservative visits the campus because they either scream at the guest so he or she cannot be heard, or threaten carry out violence which then triggers campus administrators to ban the guest speaker with these dangerous religious or political ideas.

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This is what happens when moral relativism is allowed to go unchecked.  They become the real fascists themselves, which are far more certain to impose their beliefs on others than the Puritans of old could have ever dreamed of in their wildest imaginations!

The best description of this in the Bible is a famous quote from the book of Judges.  Despite, The Ten Commandments and God's other laws defining right and wrong, the nation of ancient Israel abandoned those values and derived what was right and wrong in the following manner.

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In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Judges 17:6 (NKJV)

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Ultimately, this is what happens at the end of an unguided and evolving secular process of morally relativistic values.  God and His unchanging nature and view of right and wrong are completely left out of the moral equation, where there is no reference point from which one started.  This moral situation is analogous to a pilot who takes off from an airport and then loses his reference point from where he took off.  Unless he can establish new points of reference in his navigation, he is hopelessly lost and will eventually run out of fuel and have to make a potentially fatal crash landing. This is a frequent evet in the white-out conditions of Alaska or over any open ocean.

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So how do we know God and his views on right and wrong do not change.  Many passages point this out.

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Mal 3:6 For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed. (NKJV)  Heb 13:8 Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. (NKJV) Num. 23:19 God is not human, that he should lie,  not a human being, that he should change his mind. (NIV)  James 1:17 Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. (NIV)

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Yet some believers object here because they believe something did change with respect to the law via the New Testament.  But the law did not change any more that God did.  What changed is how we are justified before God.

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Rom 10:4 For Christ [is] the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes. (NKJV)

Ga 6:2 Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.

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Now although many believers question whether or not Donald Trump is a genuine Christian, he in no way endorses moral relativism. Instead, he makes strong distinctions between right and wrong, good and evil.  This among many Christians makes him qualified to serve as the governmental leader of our nation irrespective of whatever the nature of his religious faith is.

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Poverty & Social Justice

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In the effort to understand why so many Christians are conservative supporters of Trump, I cannot close without including two interrelated world-views critical to their political philosophies.  The first issue is of our current government assistance to the poor which in the mind of many Christians, inspires them to vote democrat.  The second and related left wing political cry is for “social justice”.

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Again, an underlying belief at the center of much Christian thought is that the nature of man is inherently flawed and falls short of God’s character, which leaves one with evil, self-destructive tendencies. Romans 3:23 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”.   Among the many, many such tendencies is the inclination toward dependency when one is financially assisted on a long-term basis.  To make matters even worse, many of those programs actually entrap people in those financial assistance efforts.  Helping the poor is indeed very much on God’s mind in the Bible.  Yet an expression to answer these government efforts is “God’s work, done in God’s way, will never lack his support.  But God’s work done not in God’s way will never have his support.

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The main argument leftists make in support of the poor is the rallying cry for ‘Social Justice”.  Without knowledge, many Christians support social justice with the naïve assumption that it is the same as biblical justice.  This is a tragic error.  Since this is a quick review to explain the reason for Trump’s support among Christians, I will simply recommend an excellent book which clearly describes the difference between social justice and biblical justice, Social Justice and the Christian Church by Ronald Nash, published in 1984 and 2002.  It is $5-6 on Amazon and is even more relevant today than when it was published.

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Now, does all of this suggest that the average Christian conservative would suspend government assistance to the poor?  ABSOLUTELY NOT!  But they would certainly want to modify the government assistance programs to make them consistent with biblical values, , so that they would at least have a chance of working in a real and practical world setting!  We have had Johnson’s “great society” for over 50 years and yet the poverty rate has remained almost the same.  What good is that, given the trillions spent?  Therefore, biblically consistent reform is essential if those programs are going to work!

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Superseding Biblical value of Private Property

 

However, I cannot neglect a certain add-on argument sometimes advanced by the evangelical left in the last 2 decades.  They use the fact that believers in Acts (4 & 5) chose to live together sharing all belongings in common to imply that we take a serious look at socialism or communism as a biblical model for government under the pretense of “Liberation Theology”.  The fundamental mistake here is that they mix up the Biblical role of the Church with the Biblical role of Government.  

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Yet since the beginning of the Gospel, churches or groups of churches have elected to live in a communal arrangement like those in the Catholic monastic movement, not to mention a rash of evangelical/charismatic communities during the Jesus Movement.  The problem is if this elective principle were to be implemented  as a rule for government,  it would have run afoul of the eighth commandment: “Thou Shalt Not Steal”.  It is easy to see that the commandment not to steal is a recognition of the right of private property.   If someone cannot steal something, it is inescapable that the original owner has the right to keep it and possesses the right of private property.  Obviously, the right of private property is never explicitly spelled out in scripture, but its elements are implicitly inescapable in Biblical logic.   Yet, the denial of the right of private property is the foundational element of modern Marxist thought and a repudiation of a Biblical World View.  More importantly, Marxist/Leninist thought is not compatible with political freedom which is our last example of biblical analysis. Fortunately, Donald Trump is a well-known supporter of private property.