Ravi Zacharias on Culural Relativism and the Emasculation of Truth

Recently on Ravi Zacharias's "Just Thinking" podcasts, one of Ravi's sermons was divided into a powerful four part series entitled " CULTURAL RELATIVISM AND THE EMASCULATION OF TRUTH." I thought it was especially relevant considering my last post on Rob Bell and the "celebration of ambiguity," (to use the words of Dr. Brown).
Ravi points out three ways in which truth has been emasculated:

1) Revelation has been replaced by reason.

Do not misunderstand. No person familiar with Ravi Zacharias would ever accuse him of being anti-intellectual. He is not against reason in the least. He is simply warning us not to look to reason apart from revelation in our search for wisdom and truth. God gave us intellectual capacity as a gift, but we need to acknowledge the source.

Isaiah 55:9 ESV
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

2) Truth has been perverted by agnosticism.

This is exactly what Dr. Brown was referring as the "celebration of ambiguity." Of course, this did not seem to stop Rob Bell from unambiguously taking a stand against the biblical teachings on marriage! This is the theological garbage that issues from Christian pulpits when revelation is replaced by reason.

3) The propositional has been replaced by the visual.

We have transitioned from a culture that that seeks for truth in the written word, to a culture that gets information from television, YouTube, and other pictorial/video means. Pictures can be quickly apprehended without much thought, but at what cost? The result of this is intellectual sloth. We don't want to read the book; we'd rather watch the movie. We have come to the point where rather than read widely and think deeply about important issues, we would rather watch a TV program or video which provides soundbite explanations of trivial issues, and that requires little or no thought on our part. Understanding  propositional truth has become a chore and fallen by the wayside.

Neil Postman made this observation in Amusing Ourselves to Death:

In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything. "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth." I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture.

With that I will end my comments and direct you to Ravi Zacharias's four part podcast series, "CULTURAL RELATIVISM AND THE EMASCULATION OF TRUTH."

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4