How do we answer the claim that truth is relative?

Question 60089.

Objective truth has become the one claim you are not allowed to make in polite company. That may be true for you but not for me sounds tolerant and generous, and it is now the standard response to any statement about God, morality or the resurrection of Jesus. It has moved out of philosophy departments and into ordinary conversation, including a good deal of church conversation.

So how do we answer it? Not, I would suggest, by shouting louder. The claim has a weakness at its centre, and once you have seen it you can raise it gently and let the other person do the thinking.

What the Claim Actually Says

Relativism about truth holds that no statement is true in itself, only true relative to a person, a culture or a framework. There is no view from nowhere, no neutral standpoint, and therefore no such thing as objective truth binding on everybody.

It is worth separating that from two neighbours that often travel with it. Perspectivism says we all see from somewhere, which is obviously right. Fallibilism says we might be wrong about anything, which is also right and rather healthy. Neither of those entails relativism, because being unable to see the whole of something is not the same as there being nothing there to see.

Most people who say truth is relative have not adopted a philosophical position at all. They are expressing a social instinct: they do not want anyone bullied over belief. That instinct is decent, and it deserves respect before it gets examined.

The Claim Cannot Survive Itself

Here is the difficulty at the centre. Is the statement all truth is relative itself relative or objective? If it is objective, then objective truth exists and the claim has just contradicted itself. If it is only relative, then it is just this speaker’s preference and there is no reason on earth why I should adopt it.

There is no third option, and this is not a debating trick. It is the same problem that sank logical positivism in the last century, when the verification principle turned out to be unverifiable by its own standard. A theory that cannot pass its own test is finished, however fashionable it is.

I would raise this as a question rather than a gotcha. Ask whether they mean their statement to be true for everyone, and then wait. Most people have never had cause to notice, and the moment of noticing does more work than an argument would.

Nobody Actually Lives This Way

Watch how relativism operates in practice. It is applied with great enthusiasm to religion and ethics, and almost never to anything else. Nobody says the train timetable is true for you but not for me. Nobody tells the surgeon that her diagnosis is a valid perspective within her framework.

It also collapses instantly when injustice arrives. Tell a relativist that torturing children is wrong only within your cultural framework and watch the objection appear. The moral outrage of our own age, on almost any subject you choose, presupposes objective truth about right and wrong even while denying it in theory.

That inconsistency is not a reason to sneer. It is a reason for hope, because it means the person in front of you already knows more than their stated position allows. You are not introducing something alien. You are pointing at something they already have.

Where the Instinct Comes From

Relativism gained ground for reasons worth understanding. It followed a century in which grand ideological certainties killed people on an industrial scale, and it followed the discovery that a great deal of supposedly neutral scholarship was carrying somebody’s cultural baggage. Suspicion of confident truth claims was earned.

It is also, in our setting, a way of keeping the peace in a plural society. If nobody’s beliefs are true, nobody’s beliefs can threaten anyone else’s. That is a genuine kindness, and it is why gentleness matters when you press the point.

But the peace is bought at a ruinous price. If there is no objective truth then there is no basis for saying that any atrocity was actually wrong, only that we happen to dislike it. Relativism cannot condemn the very horrors that made it attractive, and I have found that this is often the point at which a thoughtful person stops and reconsiders.

What Scripture Claims About Objective Truth

The Bible is unembarrassed about objective truth. Jesus says He is the way, the truth and the life, and that nobody comes to the Father except through Him. He tells Pilate that He came to bear witness to the truth, and Pilate’s weary reply, what is truth, is the oldest recorded version of the conversation we are still having.

The Greek word is aletheia, and in John it carries the sense of reality itself, what is actually the case, unhidden. Truth in Scripture is not primarily a property of sentences. It is a property of God, and it becomes personal in Jesus.

That is why the resurrection matters so much to this discussion. Paul does not commend the Christian message as a meaningful narrative. He says in 1 Corinthians 15:17 that if Christ has not been raised your faith is futile. He offers a claim that can be false, which is exactly what relativism says is impossible.

Pressing It Where It Matters

The conversation only becomes useful when it comes down out of theory. I would ask something like this: if Jesus really did rise from the dead, would that be true for everybody, or only for those who find it meaningful? Almost nobody wants to say it would only be true for some.

That question moves the discussion from whether objective truth exists to whether this particular claim is true, which is where it belongs. Christianity does not ask to be accepted as one valid perspective among many. It asks to be investigated as a historical claim about a Galilean carpenter and an empty tomb.

There is more on the wider argument at how relativism leads to intolerance and on the evidence itself at the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection.

Tone Is Part of the Argument

Peter tells us to be prepared to give a defence, and then adds the manner: with gentleness and respect. The way we hold objective truth is itself an argument for or against it, and Christians who are right and unbearable have done enormous harm to a case they were trying to help.

Remember that many people hear a truth claim as an act of aggression. Showing that you are willing to be questioned, that you have doubts of your own, and that you would change your mind if the evidence went the other way, does more to make objective truth plausible than any syllogism.

Humility is not the opposite of conviction here. I hold that Jesus rose from the dead as objective truth precisely because I did not invent it and cannot alter it. That should make me humble rather than arrogant. It is not my truth. It is simply true.

When Relativism Gets Inside the Church

The version of this that concerns me most is not the one on university campuses. It is the softer form that has settled comfortably inside evangelical churches, where doctrine becomes a matter of personal resonance and the question what does this passage mean to you quietly replaces what does this passage mean.

That question is not harmless. Once a text can mean different things to different readers with equal legitimacy, Scripture has stopped functioning as authority and started functioning as a mirror. Bible study becomes an exchange of impressions, and the one thing nobody may say is that a particular reading is wrong.

Recovering objective truth here does not require harshness. It requires the ordinary discipline of asking what the author intended, what the words meant in their setting, and what the passage therefore says to all of us before it says anything to any of us. See what is literal interpretation and 2 Peter 1:20-21.

So, now what?

Next time you hear that truth is relative, do not argue. Ask. Ask whether they intend that for everybody. Ask whether the atrocity in this morning’s news was actually wrong or only unfashionable. Ask what it would mean if Jesus really did walk out of that tomb. Questions travel where assertions bounce off, and a person who arrives at objective truth by their own reasoning holds it far more firmly than one who was told.

And do the harder work on yourself first. Objective truth is not a weapon for winning conversations; it is a claim about reality that has to be lived with, and Jesus said that anyone who does the will of God will know whether the teaching is from Him. Are you willing to test it that way round?

Jesus said to him, I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

John 14:6 (ESV)