Subjectivist nazis:

There is a certain kind of conviction in the Reformed Christian world that, when it encounters claims of hard, concrete objective truth (the confident assertive kinds) responds in the following fashion: "You don't have a monopoly on the truth!" "You just think you are right and everyone else is wrong." "That's just your interpretation." "That's just your application (of the Bible)." "You think everyone who disagrees with you is wrong."

I find all these statements incredibly naive for a few reasons.

1. They mean nothing, and have nothing to do with the nature of whatever claim is being made. You don't have to be the source of truth (only God is) to be right about the truth. Your interpretation of the facts isn't wrong by nature of it being an interpretation. Your application of the Bible doesn't lack moral authority that binds others by nature of it being an application. I think I am right about Jesus being the Messiah, and everyone else who doesn't think that is wrong, but that says nothing about whether or not the claim that I am making is OBJECTIVELY true.

2. The hypothetical retorts above are just Christian expressions of the postmodern spirit of the age, which equates certainty with arrogance and undermines claims to objective truth almost entirely on the basis of the fallibility of the one making the claim. Such people treat some truths as unknowable to an extent. Or they are so debatable that if we ever do speak about our convictions about such things, we must do so in terms of probability. "It seems to me..." "You should really consider..." "I believe..."

But the reality of the situation is that God made the world in such a way where fallible human beings can know the infallible God, and they can correctly know what the infallible God thinks about thinks about things. In other words, God has created us with the capacity to be right.

All this being said, I'm not negating the fact that we can be very confident concerning things that we are just dead wrong about. On the other hand, we can also be confident about convictions that God also happens to hold. Again, in other words, we can be right.

So, yes we should be humble when we don't have all the facts necessary or when we haven't studied a hard topic in depth. We shouldn't make confident assertions about things that we don't understand. The apostle Paul condemns that. But this does not equate to a "I'll believe what I believe about ethics and you believe what you believe." That's what the postmoderns do. My truth is my truth. Your truth is yours. Bearing with the weaker brother amounts to acknowledging that said brother is OBJECTIVELY wrong about his conviction not to eat vegetables, and that he is "failing" in the words of the apostle Paul (Romans 15:1), but deciding to bear with him and that faulty conviction nonetheless out of love. Romans 14 doesn't require that the strong brother speak in terms of probability when it comes to his correct convictions on the relationship between Christians and food, but it does require not despising the brother who is wrong about the matter.

Resist the urge to reject a claim just because it is spoken confidently. Doing the work of discussing the objective facts around a claim is at times hard, but we still should. God's word speaks to everything authoritatively. Sometimes it speaks to it explicitly, and sometimes it speaks to it in principle.

Let me give a sample of the sort of assertions I am talking about. Using the F words casually is a sin, even though the Bible never addresses that word specifically. Sending your children to the government schools to be discipled by the secularists is a sin. Sending your unequipped child to the public schools to be a "light" and a "missionary" is a sin and incredibly moronic. The fiat money system is a corrupt vehicle of theft.

These assertions do not stand or fall on the basis that I am saying them confidently or on my fallibility as a fallen man, but they stand or fall by whether or not I am applying the word of God and understanding His world in an objectively correct manner.

So don't brush people's claims off just because they are confident. Deal with the facts. Don't be a subjectivist nazi that demands that unless someone incessantly speaks in probabilities they are guilty of being "arrogant".

And sometimes we are wrong, and we should admit that when we are. But if you have studied the evidence of a thing and have come down on a concrete conclusion, don't back down unless someone shows that objectively your conclusion is wrong.

Grace and peace. May God eliminate epistemic postmodern goo thought.