All matters of truth and reality, today in our modern society, is said to be subjective rather than objective. Relativism is the name of the game. This epistemology is extended to all facets of life. “They can’t do it, but you sure can, ‘coz you are you. You matter.” This sort of thinking, as it is applauded by the modern age, has, over the movement of years and decades, subtly eaten away, slowly but surely, the very fabric of truth and morals that all existence holds on to.
Though this thinking is upheld lovingly and openly by the Emergent movement, this is not genuine Christian Religion. To subject one’s conscience and system of morality to relative truth rather than objective truth, and here I say, transcendent Truth, Biblical Truth, is to layout a blueprint for utter societal corruption and widespread depravity. Because it is a detachment from every God ordained truth and is in the very sense of the word, open rebellion against God.
Dear, J. Gresham Machen shares these same thoughts on his short treatise on theology:
IF my idea of God were really mine, if it were one which I had evolved out of my own inner consciousness, I should attribute very little importance to it myself, and should certainly expect even less importance to be attributed to it by others. If God is merely a fact of human experience, if theology is merely a branch of psychology, then I for my part shall cease to be interested in the subject at all. The only God about whom I can feel concerned is one who has objective existence, an existence independent of man.
But if there be such a really and independently existent Being, it seems extremely unlikely that there can be any knowledge of Him unless He chooses to reveal Himself: a divine Being that could be discovered apart from revelation would be either a mere name for an aspect of man’s nature – the feeling of reverence or loyalty or the like – or else, if possessing objective existence, a mere passive thing that would submit to human investigation like the substances that are analyzed in the laboratory. And in either case it would seem absurd to apply to such a Being the name of “God.”
A really existent God, then, if He be more than merely passive, if He be a living God, can be known only through His revelation of Himself. And it is extremely unlikely that such revelation should have come to me alone. I reject, therefore, the whole subjectivizing tendency in religion that is so popular at the present time – the whole notion that faith is merely an “adventure” of the individual man. On the contrary, I am on the search for some revelation of God that has come to other men as well as to me, and that has come into human life, not through a mere analysis of human states of consciousness but distinctly from the outside. Such revelation I find in the Christian religion.
—J. Gresham Machen, D.D, My Idea of God
Read the rest of this most edifying work, here.
