October 30, 2013

Cliff's Edge

When editing Liberty magazine in the 1990s, I published an article about police who bugged a confessional booth in a Roman Catholic church. Everyone found it appalling, including the court, which threw out the evidence garnered by the eavesdropping device. Please!Even we at Liberty were offended.

But why? We’re Seventh-day Adventists; we don’t believe in confessional booths. We see them as part of the ecclesiastical usurpation perpetrated by the little-horn power of Daniel 8, in which it “set itself up to be as great as the commander of the army of the Lord” (verse 11).The confessional is another manifestation of what Paul warned about as “the secret power of lawlessness” (2 Thess. 2:7). From our perspective, the confessional booth is no more “sacred”—in that it was hallowed by God—than a fruit stand.

We often hear about the “sacred,” but what does that mean? In India the faithful come to the Karni Mata Temple in hopes of being blessed by the 20,000 kabbas that live there. Kabbas are rats, which worshippers regard as such sacred creatures that it’s considered a supreme blessing to eat from the same bowls the kabbas do.

All through history communities, cultures, and faiths have deemed objects, places, or people as “sacred.” So what? Are the Mormons’ “sacred” undergarments sacred because Latter-day Saints think so? Is tobacco sacred because Ojibwe communities in America believe it is? Herodotus wrote about a tribe, the Callatians, whose sacred duty demanded that children eat the corpse of a deceased father. In ancient Egypt cats were sacred, even worshipped as gods (in China about 4 million “Egyptian gods” get eaten every year).

Who, though, can condemn these people or their practices as wrong, or prove that what a person or a culture believes is “sacred” isn’t?

You can’t, unless you believe in absolute truth in a transcendent metaphysical standard by which everything is judged . . . such as what the Bible teaches. “For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil” (Eccl. 12:14). “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse” (Gal. 1:8). “You are not to do as we do here today, everyone doing as they see fit” (Deut. 12:8). “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

These verses, and others, shred any nonfoundationalist worldview that denies the existence of a single foundation or edifice for truth, because nonfoundationalism argues instead that contingent, cultural, and social contexts alone determine what is true, sacred, and moral. If people believe that kabbas are sacred, what justification do we have to tell them that they’re wrong? And if one culture teaches you to love your neighbors, another to eat them, who determines which one is superior (we know which one a nonfoundationalist would prefer to raise a family in, though)?

Nonfoundationalism refutes itself anyway. To deny the existence of a metanarrative, a grand overarching story that explains reality (such as the great controversy), is to affirm a metanarrative that explains reality—in this case that reality is contingent, cultural, relative. If one accepts the premise of no overarching story, shouldn’t that same one regard nonfoundationalism as just one more overarching story? A nonfoundationalist would have to deem their nonfoundationalism as another chauvinist, imperialistic, oppressive, and judgmental “regime of truth” (Michel Foucault) to be discarded. Nonfoundationalism promotes its own totality and overarching reality, but because it rejects any overarching reality and wages war “against totality” (Jean-François Lyotard), it is self-refuting and, hence, incoherent.

Scripture presents about as firm a foundationalist worldview as imaginable: one God, one Savior, and one name under heaven to be saved. This doesn’t mean that police should be bugging confessional booths; it means only that the stalls are no more sacred than kabbasor the ancient “Egyptian gods” who torture and then eat them. 

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