Continuing the e-mail conversation with my sister, I move from considering objective truth to address the question of my being a relativist:

I am not a student of the arguments for or against relativism. I don’t think I would consider myself a relativist, though the double entendre existing between the meaning associated with kinship and the one associated with comparison and proportion is intriguing, especially in light of our kin and conversation. I think I am a relevantist. Perhaps this is my new word, since my spell-check doesn’t recognize it. I believe that God’s revelation of objective truth is always relevant to the circumstances of our lives. Sometimes God’s truth leaves us with more questions than answers. In the search for answers to relevant questions, we sometimes find ourselves reexamining long-held answers to other questions.

One of the questions asked of men and women who are ordained (both as elders and ministers of Word and Sacrament) in the Presbyterian Church is:

(Book of Order) G-14.0207

c. Do you sincerely receive and adopt the essential tenets of the Reformed faith as expressed in the confessions of our church as authentic and reliable expositions of what Scripture leads us to believe and do, and will you be instructed and led by these confessions as you lead the people of God?

Through the years, some in the church have tried to nail down a limited list of specific “essential tenets.” Thus far, the church has refused to adopt any such list, arguing that doing so would reduce the entire Book of Confessions to a select list, and that the things deemed essential for today’s church may well be less relevant at some point in the future. Some of the Confessions (later than the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed) were written as early as the 16th century. They contain vitriolic backlash against Rome. Today we recognize their context and circumstance: fledgling Protestants throwing out some babies with the bath water, in much the same way that the early Christians first identified themselves as “not-Jews” before they clearly formed their Christian identity. We would never hold those parts of the confessions to be “essential.”

I suspect that I, along with many other Presbyterians, may hold a different and/or smaller set of objective truths than some other religious groups. This difference seems to me to be part of the nature of our church organization. Presbyterians experience themselves as “people of the middle way”, somewhere between the hierarchy of papal authority and the disconnection of congregational freewheeling. We trust the Spirit to work through and both ways between congregations, presbyteries, synods and General Assembly (higher governing bodies in the church). God’s truth is always relevant to our lives. The task of the church in any particular time and place is to discern the message that this relevance speaks to our current situation, and to courageously live that message.

© 2006 Todd Jenkins