Posted on 03/16/2018 6:10:22 AM PDT by Gamecock
Openness to truth where truth may be found is a long-standing virtue that worked on the assumption that there is such a thing as objective truth, to which we should be open. Students of higher education now taught one overarching virtue: to be open. The purpose of their education is not to make them scholars but to provide them with a moral virtuean openness, a relativism that eschews any form of fixed objective values or truth. Its simplistic creed is that there are no absolutes.
Without objective standards of truth, we are left with feelings, impressions, and intuitions that can never be judged as either false or bad. The bottom line of such an approach is not merely ignorance and skepticism, but the ultimate dehumanization of persons. If everybody is right, then nobody is right. If every viewpoint is equally valuable, no viewpoint is valuable.
As members of the body of Christ, we face twin enemies, both of which are deadly. First, we are tempted to embrace the thought patterns of the secular world in order to be modern and relevant in our thinking. We are terrified of being perceived as being out of it.
Second, we may be tempted to a new form of monastic isolationism, in which we surrender science, logic, and education to the secular world while we try to live an empty, discontent faith on an island of religious feeling.
Either option ends at the cemetery with a morbid funeral service for truth. A burial is a decent thing to do for a body that has been left where it was slain.
Coram Deo Examine your own life: Are you tempted to embrace the thought patterns of the secular world in order to be modern and relevant in your thinking? Are you living an empty, discontent faith in monastic isolation?
Passages for Further Study
John 16:3 And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me.
John 17:17 Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.
1 John 4:6 We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.
1. The love of Christ is rich and free;
Fixed on His own eternally;
Nor earth, nor hell, can it remove;
Long as He lives, His own He'll love.
2. His loving heart engaged to be
Their everlasting Surety;
Twas love that took their cause in hand,
And love maintains it to the end.
Chorus: Love cannot from its post withdraw;
Nor death, nor hell, nor sin, nor law,
Can turn the Surety's heart away;
He'll love His own to endless day.
3. Love has redeemed His sheep with blood;
And love will bring them safe to God;
Love calls them all from death to life;
And love will finish all their strife.
4. He loves through every changing scene,
Nor aught from Him can Zion wean;
Not all the wanderings of her heart
Can make His love for her depart.(Repeat chorus)
5. At death, beyond the grave, He'll love;
In endless bliss, His own shall prove
The blazing glory of that love
Which never could from them remove.
Friday Ping!
Thank you. I needed this today.
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