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Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted In Mid-Air, Francis J. Beckwith and Gregory Kokul, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2005, 8th Ed, 188pp
You Can Obtain The Book From Baker Books∞
You Can Obtain The Book From Baker Books∞
Conservative and Evangelical Christians have been going through an intellectual sea-saw for the last two centuries [though the term 'evangelical' is only half a century old]. During times of intense attack, they gather all the implements in the arsenal, service them, and use them with great power. Much territory is regained, there is great confidence, and then they lay down the arms without realizing that an army never takes, or should never take, rest. Only those territories have remained safe for any period of time where the warriors were ever ready for defense as well as offense. Unfortunately, this has not been the way defenders among the professing Christians have been doing it.
Unfortunately, the world knows more about the Christians than the insiders in the house of God. Thus they use this sea-saw motion to move closer to their target each time the defenders rest. And in two hundred years they have gained so much territory that now Christians think they are part of the enemy camp. They now think like the enemy, speak like them, and even act like them. It is Christian speech that looks alien to them. With this kind of a situation, the enemy does not need to fire the final bullet. We have already killed ourselves, and all they need is to allow this status quo to continue. This is a qualitative chronology of Moral Relativism and its takeover of the Christian community.
Moral Relativism is the philosophical stand that all moral values are relative. None is absolutely binding upon the entire population, and that each person is free to choose what is right and what is wrong for him. As a corollary, nobody is supposed to "impose" his value on others, for either of them is equally valid for the individuals who profess them, but neither of them is absolutely valid for anyone. Let us tolerate all viewpoints, and who are we to condemn others are slogans of this movement. These slogans 'sound' right because our generation loathes the idea of being a minority made up of the so-called religious fanatics.
All of it looks pleasing and rosy till someone begins asking leading questions. A simple question like 'if all viewpoints are valid, and if we are not supposed to oppose the viewpoint of others, then why do you oppose my conservative viewpoint' . In fact leading questions is a powerful method for dismantling Moral Relativism, but it is strange that very few evangelical writers have published articles or books on this topic. In this desert, Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted In Mid Air comes as a great resource.
The book is easy to read, and in sixteen chapters handles a good deal of topics related to Moral Relativity. The first section about Understanding Relativism gives a brief, but satisfactory non-technical introduction. This is important because Moral Relativism is a phenomenon is a fuzzy in every way. Like the amoeba, you can recognize it if you know the major assertions of MR, but you cannot draw a definite shape.
In the second section the authors offer a relatively good critique of Relativism, and it is enough to equip the average person to take a stand in a crowd full of relativists. If the reader has any idea of what 'leading questions' are, he will be able to use this information to dismantle most MR arguments. Though Relativism affects all areas of life and society, the authors have opted to choose only two: Education and Public Policy. They handle these two topics in detail in the next two sections, which contain some surprising information for even the well-informed.
The fifth and last section explains how one can respond to Moral Relativism. Of these, The Tactics To Refute Relativism is very good, though the title could have been rephrased to sound more objective.
Here is a most accessible book for the layman as well as for those who wish to study at a deeper level. My only disappointment is the way the authors give undue prominence to men in the MR camp. A good number of pages are devoted to refuting what this person or that person says, without realizing that the battle is with issues and not individuals. These individuals will vanish from history tomorrow, and their names will make no sense to readers tomorrow. They are already meaningless for people outside the USA. Worse, these names unnecessarily date a book that would surely be here for a long time. All the "so and so says" and the related expressions could have been recast into "another argument goes this way", etc. That would have made the book timeless and also a more easy read.
I strongly recommend that every Christian, even laypeople, should read this book.
Reviewed By: Dr. Johnson C. Philip
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