During the recent Cambridge Mission, Ravi Zacharias spoke on 'What happened after God's funeral?' We print here a brief extract which touches on the problem of moral relativism, which follows atheism.
I think it was Paul Tillich who said that religion is the essence of any culture and culture is the dress of religion. I believe he was right in this statement. The West has yet to answer the question: 'What is the essential belief in its culture'. With pluralism growing dramatically, it is a question that Western culture needs to answer.
What is the essence of what we now believe? Is there any religiosity, any spirituality to it? Because that is going to determine the kind of dress we ultimately wear: that is, the terms of engagement in which we will live with each other. What has happened to us after the death of God in Nietzchian terms?
A number of things have followed, both logically and existentially. Let me try to portray them. Two things obviously stand out and one of them is this: It is very difficult to disconnect existentially when the logic you stand in and believe in tells you that there are no absolutes. There is going to be a connection existentially when you make a categoric statement that there is no point of reference for moral absolutes any more. Just think of the contradiction that emerges.
Two weeks ago I was speaking to a group of lawyers and judges in South Carolina. They were a hard, intimidating group. They make their living with words and most of them were sceptics and hostile to what I was going to say. Just before I stood up, the woman who was the Head of the Bar Association looked at me and said: 'Are you nervous?', implying that I needed to be, because I didn't understand this group well enough. And they were there, the Chief Justice and all of them, and you could tell by the body language that there was uncertainty about whether they were really going to enjoy the afternoon or not.
White House scandal
And then I gave them a little illustration. I said: 'You know folks, just before I came here I turned on CNN and I was fascinated by the first three items of the news. The first item on the news was journalists who were discussing with each other: 'Have we been had when we asked our President (Clinton) certain questions; was there a double-speak in his language? Were there implications that he was giving to his words that we were not inferring from the words that he chose to use? Were his denials dying such deaths by subtle qualifications?'
One journalist said: 'To be honest with you, we do not know any more what the term 'sexual relationship' means because I understand he has a different definition for sexual relationship or adulterous relationship.' So they were talking about language and its connection to reality. Talk about being post-modern - there it was.
And then the second item of the news was to interview everybody on the street on what morality meant. This is our 'salvation by survey' culture. If you don't know what anything means, take a survey. So they go on the street and ask everybody: 'What does morality mean to you?' Everybody on the street, everyone, answered the same way: 'It's a private matter', sustaining what Alan Bloom said, the Professor of Philosophy from the University of Chicago, in 1980 when he wrote his book The Closing of the American Mind. His opening line was that every university student believes morality and truth are relative. That was his opening line. And so to everybody on the street morality is a private affair.
Immoral Saddam
So, the number one item: do words mean anything any more? Number two item: morality is purely private. Number three item: I said: 'Get this, we are now talking about bombing Iraq because we are tired of Saddam's word games.'
Suddenly, morality was not that private any more, but it was going to cover miles in the air and on the seas to deal with an immoral individual. The body language visibly relaxed and the lawyers and judges began to think that maybe there was something worth discussing here.
You see what I mean? When absolutes are denied, the first inescapability is that you cannot sever an existential connection to that, but the second thing is that no matter how persuasive the worldview turns towards an atheistic or anti-theistic or a secularistic worldview, we are still not able to utterly assuage the spiritual hungers that are there.
I see this across the globe. As far as I know, I am the only Western-based Christian apologist who has even had meetings in Damascus, Syria, before packed audiences. I have been in the Middle East many times and a lot of my work has been done in the land of my birth: in India. In every place in the audience, when you are dealing with spiritual issues, there is undeniable hunger. So the first thing is that it is very hard to sever the existential rub when absolutes are denied. And secondly, it is very hard to suppress the spiritual yearnings even if there is a reigning anti-theistic worldview.
A tape of the whole talk by Ravi Zacharias is available from CICCU Tapes, c/o Eden Baptist Church, Fitzroy Street, Cambridge CB1 1ER.
