Pride and Arrogance in an Age of (Evangelical) Relativism

It is a common byproduct of our cultural syncretism to redefine biblical words in an effort to accord with the ideas that come out of Enlightenment inclusivism. In the Enlightenment, a philosophy of inclusion was sought over what was viewed as rigid dogmatism due to the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rationalists like Kant sought a unifying religion founded on reason, and Romantics, like Schleiermacher, sought a unifying religion founded on intuition, which often developed into something like Kierkegaard's existentialism.  Either way, individual dogmas were out. They are exclusive by nature and exclusivism is the enemy of the Enlightenment.

Soon, any exclusive religious claim that was made was viewed as narrow-minded and anti-intellectual. One might be able to make such claims of things that can be empirically verified, but religious claims could not be substantiated, and so anyone making exclusive religious claims is merely advancing his personal opinion over others. That meant that more concrete or literal, rather than abstract and figurative, religious claims are opinions, subjective experiences that are not to be used to exclude other opinions as though they are facts.

The logical conclusion of this sort of thinking is that anyone making exclusive religious claims in the face of diverse religious opinion does so because he thinks he is smarter, of a better character, or more intuitive than others of differing opinions. In other words, to make an exclusive claim in the face of multiple claims that are viewed as equally valid, since none can be verified as true, is to exalt oneself over others making differing claims. To exalt oneself is arrogant. Hence, anyone doing so by this very process of thinking that is often assumed rather than explicitly manifest is arrogant.

Now, the problem with the Enlightenment is that it has no reliable revelation in its quest to discover religious truth. Devotion to the Bible and subsequent creeds drawn from it were seen as the problem that caused the religious wars. Since exclusivism was upheld by the Bible and these creeds it had to go. Hence, even though there is an ultimate truth to be discovered, it can only be discovered individually and through personal experience (whether through one's own reason or intuition), and it it will manifest itself differently depending upon a person or group's cultural-religious constructs. For instance, a Hindu may find that he has tapped into the divine existence that everyone else has but in his context he names this deity Vishnu as he is expressed through Krishna, etc. A Christian, on the other hand, is also tapping into an experience with the same divine existence, but he names it YHWH as He is manifest through Christ within his Christian tradition. Religions are just ways of expressing the same truth that no one can know very literally or in any factual way.

Evangelicalism, however, has the Bible and some of the creeds, but it retains the problem due to religious syncretism, where Enlightenment ideas have infiltrated Christian thinking. So instead of thinking that all religions are experiencing the same divine existence, Evangelicals will negate that idea with what they view as concretely taught by the Bible and some of their creeds, but then adopt the idea when it comes to theology and ethics found outside of what they view as concretely taught and not a part of their fundamental creeds.

In other words, they make a primary-secondary distinction between theology and ethics in Scripture, so that what ultimately happens is that the ambiguous religious truth of Enlightenment thinking is simply removed from the ethereal space of the heavens and located now in the Bible itself. There is an absolute truth when it comes to these "secondary doctrines" but since there is a diversity of opinion about them, no one should claim that he knows what they are. Instead, each person has his own take on them in the same way that each person in the Enlightenment has his own take on how their experience of divine truth should manifest itself into a dogma.

What this means is that the evangelical has syncretized two belief systems: that of Christianity and that of Enlightenment inclusivism.

He has not given himself to full-blown relativism, but neither did most of the Enlightenment thinkers. There always existed an absolute truth independently of the one who experiences it, but the form it takes is subjective and cannot be verified as true. Hence, the individual is left with what he personally believes as a mere opinion with no way to verify that belief.

Since he cannot verify that belief as being true, and others seem to disagree and hold to a contrary belief, it must mean that those other opinions are equally valid, or at least should be respected as possibly true. Hence, his belief must be held as a personal opinion that cannot speak against other personal opinions without inheriting the charge of arrogance.

Indeed, if there is no way to know whether something one thinks the Bible teaches is actually what the Bible teaches then anyone making the exclusive claim that he does know what the Bible teaches in that area is arrogant, as he has exalted his opinion over others when his opinion is merely based on his own experience, reason, etc., and cannot be known from the Bible itself.

The great irony, of course, is that the Bible itself does not teach this idea of primary and secondary doctrines and practices, and so it is the person who functions off of this paradigm and then dogmatically holds others to it that is arrogant, as his opinion on the matter has come from his cultural experience and philosophy and not a source that can verify the idea.

It also seems to me that the people who are most offended by anyone making exclusive claims on what they consider to be secondary matters have what the Bible labels, not as arrogance as we think of it in the age of Relativism, but pride.

These people are offended that one making claims of exclusivity did not pay their proper respects to their opinions. These people have a high regard for their own opinions that are rooted in their own personal experience and reason that they want acknowledged by others. When someone comes along and makes exclusive claims against their inclusive ideas concerning secondary issues, their pride is wounded and they immediately see the one making exclusive claims as their enemy rather than a brother in Christ. To be sure, one of the true ironies of an inclusive ideology of love and inclusion is that it ends up hating and excluding those who don't sign on to their paradigm of tolerance founded upon religious relativism.

But the biblical version of pride is not found in someone making exclusive claims at all. It is found in anyone making exclusive religious claims not rooted in God's revelation. The humble man trembles at God's Word (Isa 66:1-2) and his speaking the exclusive truth in love is a direct result of his considering others more important than himself. In Ephesians 4:2ff Paul argues that Christians ought to be humble in love and then goes on to relate that there is only one faith, one church, one baptism, etc. and that there is an exclusive truth about all of these things concerning Christian theology and practice that must be used to love one another into a mature relationship with Christ.

It is when people are prideful that they put their own cultural ideologies in the way of fellowship because others do not hold to their man-made religious views, their personal opinions or the opinions of their inclusive culture, that envy and slander take place, as envy and slander are the weapons of wounded pride. And this is all contrary to humility and love.

Philippians 2:3-4 states, "Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others." Yet, Paul introduces this first by saying in v. 2 that all Christians need to be "like-minded," not only being one in the Spirit, but "one in mind." In other words, unity, true unity, is found in the truth, and in so far as we are outside of that truth, our unity is disunity, our unity rests on a false foundation. 

Contrary to the lies of Enlightenment Relativism, therefore, it is not exclusive claims to truth that seek to unify Christians in one mind that are prideful, but rather inclusive claims about God's revealed truth that downplay the clarity of what God has said in order to lift oneself and his opinions up in a false humility that our culture sees as virtuous. Truly, it is the wise sage of relativism who takes the inclusive position that no one knows this or that particular truth and we should all just love one another and get along but this sage of human wisdom is prideful and a destroyer of unity. He is instead a fool to the God who has successfully revealed Himself and His whole counsel in Scripture.

The greatest irony of all of this then is that the one who makes the charge of arrogance/pride toward another claiming to know a truth based on God's Word is often the one who is arrogant/prideful. Confident in himself that he and his religious culture have got it right, he excludes the exclusive claims that would contradict his relativism (secular or religious), and by doing so proves himself a hypocrite.