Reading a book on Christian Curriculum yesterday, I ran across this sentence:
Grammar and language are indeed relative to a culture, but the fact of a degree of relativity does not make it necessary (nor sensible) to affirm a radical relativism.
I then ran across this meditation on covenantal ethics.
The covenant teaches that man is a conditioned creature. Only God is unconditioned, meaning unbounded by time or place. Man’s response to God must always be conditional. Man is bounded by God’s law, but he is also bounded by history. He must faithfully apply the law to historical circumstances. The covenant (the law as a whole, as well as the historical books of the Bible) provides us with the details of these historical circumstances. These details must be respected.
So here is the false dichotomy that I find both statements attempting to answer:
- Human knowledge is absolute and unchanging.
- Human knowledge is radically relative.
Continue reading “What Does Theology Have to Say About Grammar?”