| Between relativity and absolutes
Humans can never establish themselves in anything absolutely; they are always relative to God. Humans are relative in their self-evaluations before God. Yet humans make God relative to their projections of divinity cast as ideals or perfect expressions of imperfect human attributes. God is not an abstraction of human projection but intentional and sovereign in meeting human existence, otherwise than our conjectures. God too, can play a “game of relativity,” yet otherwise than by human expectations. God of biblical witness gives relative priority to a nation in its election from obscurity to be dedicated servants of testimony among the nations. As personal, God becomes relative to humanity in incarnation, engaging human existence in the intimacy of relationships within the scandalous relativity of a specific time and place. Intimate disclosure in Israel anticipates the completeness of intimacy that is relative to human life in Jesus Christ. In the gospel of God, relativity is a paradox inasmuch as humans are shown to make relative valuations of life absolute, while God in grace becomes relative to our existence, overturning our relative valuations of righteousness that are made absolute. Human values are made relative in the light of grace as pride of righteous achievement and self-standing is turned on its head to become a liability in alienation from the righteousness of God. God’s righteousness is experienced and expressed as trust in the righteous word of God. This word is dependable amid the relative perspectives of our existence. The gospel declares that humans, in their state of relativity, are not relatively good or bad but sinful. Sinfulness is an issue of trust in God, not degrees of relative goodness. True goodness or righteousness is experienced through unreserved trust in the word or righteousness of God that is never relative to anything else. The gospel exposes human relativity that is made absolute. It shows human righteousness relative to God’s righteousness. The gospel discloses in grace, righteousness that is essential to integral human life within the relativity of our lives before God. These intersections are all relative to Jesus Christ as the definitive focus of the gospel of God. v As “the measure of all things” (Protagoras), humans formulate relative values and assert the freedom to choose or to reject any particular value. Yet if humans are the measure of all things, there can only be relative values. If there is no extrinsic source to suggest otherwise, human values can only be established by convention, negotiation and contracts. This has two significant tendencies—either making a particular perspective and its values absolute or making relativity itself an absolute value. Values and activities relative to perspective, whether religious or political, are often regarded as absolute in partisan contests of rival perspectives in the desire to establish a place under the sun. Competing relative positions are advanced in order to gain social leverage and resources; within the anxiety and insecurity of each living before the same horizon of death, a society harbours an implicit “war of all against all” (Hobbes). To make the relativity of all perspectives and values absolute is asserted in self-justifying opinions with corresponding but selected activities. Yet what is deemed permissible by one person will always be under contest if it conflicts with another opinion. Human conventions are contested as relative, even if some conventions are obviously inadequate for human dignity. If each does or asserts what is right in one’s own eyes, each will defend an assumed righteousness that is ultimately relative. Ironically, such relativity cannot offer a durable point of reference for self-justification. The human capacity for self-righteousness is demonstrated in making absolute what is in some way, invariably relative. Social correctness is an insistence on the absolute value of a perspective that is relative among other values. Such insistence is a variation of self-righteousness contested by the gospel. To cast as a badge of righteousness what is inherently a self-justifying assertion, negates the reception of any other source of righteousness. What we think is righteous, will be unrighteous if it is made an absolute. Apart from God’s righteousness, our existence is relative within the various layers of human perspective—whether explicit or implicit—that encompass our lives. This is our perennial crisis. The flux of life is interpreted through tribal allegiances and partisan prejudices that are social and religious, yet partial within their assertions of autonomy, anxiety and insecurity. The gospel of God calls into question all human sources of valuation. It exposes as sinful our trust in the rightness of our own perspective. The trauma of recognising limits in our purview of life, the fallibility of our interpretations and the paucity of our efforts in making an enduring difference to abyssal human difficulties, invokes a different response in the gospel. Recognition of relativity in our righteousness among others within the relativity of our lives before God is the beginning of another possibility disclosed in the gospel of God: the righteousness of God revealed entirely to faith—from faith to faith—for the righteous will live by faith (Rom. 1). v Faith is accepting and trusting God by a word that speaks of human life and the promises of God in grace. The word of God speaks of human sinfulness or compromise; it exposes human relativity in its assertions of righteousness, which is ultimately unrighteous in its attempts to justify life defined by relative perspective. The word of God exposes the fallacy of making humans in their relativity, the measure of human existence. The gospel declares righteous what we overlook—pervasive biblical testimony to self-righteousness and alternatively, trust in God’s righteous word. Repentance within faith recognises this as exposure to the word of promise that calls forth response to God in trust, even as it gives everything we need for integral human life and expressions of righteousness in that trust. This is relational as a call to responsibility within the context of communion. The gospel calls us to intimacy with God through trust in the word of God instead of plausible conjectures that are couched as absolutes while having been wrought merely from creaturely relativity. Trust in the gift of righteousness, not self-righteousness expressed by our relative self-evaluations, is intrinsic to the gospel. Christian faith is accepting and living toward the word of God, which the gospel articulates as life in grace through Jesus Christ as the definitive truth of human existence resourced by his risen life, which exceeds death and therefore the anxieties relative to death. By faith, we recognise that dying with Christ to our seemingly plausible assertions of righteousness is to be elevated within the gift of God’s righteousness. This is also the beginning of truly righteous expressions of life within the Holy Spirit as the source and impetus of our attitudes and actions, animating everything in a new way. How we perceive God is not an issue of relativity but trust in God’s lavish gifts of grace for integrity and intimacy beyond anything we might conjecture relative to ourselves and our tendency to make our relativities absolute. To convey such grace, the gospel tells us that God became relative to our existence in Jesus Christ. |
