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Art Lindsley is a senior fellow at the C.S. Lewis Institute who believes we need to defend absolute truth in a relativistic world. Lindsley is most recently the author of True Truth: Defending Absolute Truth in a Relativistic World. He has served at the C.S. Lewis Institute since 1987 and was Director of Educational Ministries at the Ligonier Valley Study Center, and Staff Specialist with the Coalition for Christian Outreach. He co-authored Classical Apologetics with R.C. Sproul and John Gerstner. Lindsley has an M.Div. from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Pittsburgh.

In what sense is truth the decisive issue of our time?

If you give up the idea that there is any truth, as some people are doing, then you don't have any basis for anything in terms of ideas for culture, for morality, for religious belief. In all these arenas if you shift the view of truth, then you have no basis to maintain anything.

If you had to summarize to somebody what you're trying to establish in True Truth as it relates to both modernism and post-modernism, what would it be?

The first half of the book tries to deal with the basic psychological objection of post-modernism, which is that any kind of grand story or meta-narrative will automatically produce oppression. So that whenever you speak about truth or absolutes, many people automatically hear it as intolerance and closed-mindedness and self-righteousness. In other words, they hear a different message than what you may be saying.

Where was modernism flawed?

It placed too much accent on reason, that reason was the definitive and only way you could know things. I don't see how any believer could be a modernist because we need revelation in order to know the answers to some of the deepest things. Anybody who would say we need revelation can't say that reason is omnipotent. And I would say we can place a lot of emphasis on imagination and on mystery.

You say young people are loathe to look at their friend and say, "your position is untrue." What's going on in our need to communicate truth but do it without arrogance, and yet believe that we're talking about the truth?

I work with a group of interns that come out of secular colleges. These are very committed believers. They're the cream of the crop. I find they don't have any difficulty saying that something is true, but only with great difficulty can they say something else is false. It's inbred in them by their educational system that to make any such claim is arrogant and impossible. If you even mention the idea of truth or give reasons against post-modernism, you find a strong emotion arising that even goes against any argument. I remember one young man after class came up to me and said, "I really appreciate what you're telling us, but as soon as you mention giving reasons for faith, I have a strong reaction that rises from my gut." I did a poll the next day and found that about two-thirds of the class of these very committed believers felt the same thing.

People need to understand that relativism has massive negative consequences. What are some of the most severe negative consequences of relativism?

C.S. Lewis made a comment to this effect. It has great dangers because he's never seen any instance in history of anyone that's relativistic, and then given absolute power, who uses it for a benevolent end. The danger is if that were to become a predominant influence in culture, or be at the highest levels of government and society, then there would be no checks and balances for anything.

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May (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48