Colson: Sometimes what you have to do is illustrate them in a very simple way. I get a lot of students who come to work in our ministry in the summer as interns, most of them from Christian colleges. I’ll do the same thing with every group every summer when I get them together. I’ll say, "How many of you believe there is such a thing as absolute truth?" And you’ll see them kind of shift uncomfortably in the chair and look at their neighbor; nobody really wants to be first to raise his hand.
I’ll say, "Well, I realize that’s a politically incorrect question, but let me ask you a practical question. If you were standing on a street corner and saw an old lady standing there with shopping bags, the traffic is whizzing by in all directions. You’ve got three choices. You can help her across the street. You could ignore her. Or you could push her into the traffic. Which is wrong?" And of course, the kids all chuckle. And after I do that then I say, "Now how many of you believe in absolute moral truth?" and the hands all shoot up.
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Of course! The truth is written on the human heart. Paul in
Romans 2 makes it so clear. Paul makes it so clear in
Romans 1 that people are without excuse because that which has been made has been made known to them. So we see it in what earlier generations of evangelicals called "The Book of Nature." We see it in nature. We know it’s written on the heart. And you can teach someone to answer the great questions of life: "Where do we come from? Why is there sin and suffering? What is the answer? Is there hope? What’s our purpose?"
You can answer those—creation, fall, redemption, restoration—you can take that four-part grid. You can apply it to every other religion, every other worldview and see which ones rationally answer those questions. The only one that does is the Christian worldview. My contention is if you empirically study how various religious and secular belief systems work out in practice—this is something Cornelius Van Til, a great preacher, once wrote—you’ll see that the only one that is rational is the Christian worldview, and all others fail.
So what’s a truth claim? People make truth claims every day even if they say truth is simply subjective. We make them all the time. The problem is we have so exalted tolerance as almost our supreme virtue that we’re afraid to even say the obvious. I’ve found with kids, when you start working this through with them, all of a sudden their eyes brighten. I’ve been teaching the knowability of truth for years and have found a great response.
Evangelicals need to be shaken out of their comfortable, lethargic accommodation of the culture and realize that we have something to say, which is a truth claim and has been since the beginning. And it’s not wrong to make truth claims. But it’s dead wrong to disrespect someone’s truth claim.
