I had a sort of “a-ha” slowly emerge over the last few months, a realization that has prompted me to wrestle and share this long piece.
The very people who are now saying truth is difficult to know, the very people yelling about “fake news”, the very people throwing up their hands and falling back on what they already believe and have always believed—they are the same types of people who 30 years ago warned me about losing my faith in seminary to relativism and postmodernism.
The same types of people who warned me that taking “Truth with a capital T” and trading it for some sort of culturally defined view of truth, are now the ones saying, “Who knows what’s true?” They distrust everything they hear which falls outside of their view of the world.
And so comes the massive irony. These are the ones who have actually fallen prey to relativism. They hold a worldview in which the only facts or perspectives allowed in, are the ones that are relative to their own understanding of truth.
To do this, I think, is what it means to live in an echo chamber.
Those of us who, for decades, have been wrestling with how to evaluate competing truth claims—we might have some experience that is worth sharing.
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