"What is truth?", Pilate asked Jesus during the last hours of the passion week.

I can almost hear the sarcasm in Pilate's voice when he responded to Jesus' claim to "bear witness to the truth". Who could claim to have such knowledge? Surely, only a neuropath or simpleton; neither was a threat to the Roman empire. With a condescending shake of his head, he turned and threw his hands up to the crowd saying, "I can find nothing wrong with this man".

  The reality of truth, and how one could know it, had long been an object of controversy among the ancient philosophers. Heraclitus and Parmenides in the sixth century B.C. held opposing views that helped shape two major worldviews: naturalism and transcendentalism.

  Heraclitus insisted that what is real is what changes, things which come into being, decay and ultimately disappear. We can only know what comes to us by physical sense perception. In other words, truth and knowledge are found solely in nature, because nature is all there is.

  In contrast, Parmenides claimed that only those things that are eternal are real, like Plato's 'forms' or 'ideas'. It is in the intangible, unseen realms that reality exists and truth is to be found. Plato elaborated on this theme in his allegory of the cave, where the material world is depicted as an illusionary shadow pointing to the 'real' world of ideas. And only in this numinous world can truth and ultimate reality be found.

Plato's skepticism about the tangible world came to dominate not only philosophy, but Christian theology as well. However, with the advent of the Renaissance, came a growing optimism about human knowledge. This optimism began with the invention of the telescope, which helped replace the Ptolemaic Earth-centered view with a more accurate model of the universe. When Isaac Newton published his elegant mathematical descriptions of planetary motion, he added the element of predictability to nature, and it was, "Good-bye, mystery and superstition; hello, determinacy and empiricism"! These advances prompted some philosophers and scientists to think that all the mysteries of the universe would eventually be unveiled and harnessed, leading to unlimited progress.

  But by the 19th century a growing disillusionment set in. Soren Kierkegaard declared, "I must find a truth that is true for me". Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, "The assumption of an orderly universe is illusion". These sentiments were undergirded by the metaphysics of Immanuel Kant, who said that mind is the creator of reality, and later, by the physics of Werner Heisenberg, who said that reality is created in the act of observing. These ideas led to the notion of the autonomous self and moral relativity. These, in turn, became the distinctive features of postmodern thought.

  Shaped by these concepts, people began to reject the constraints of objective moral authority and individual moral responsibility and accountability. They began to regard antisocial behavior as an issue of ignorance, poverty, environment and bad genes. And the perpetrators of antisocial acts became society's new 'victims', who needed understanding and not punishment.

  This relativistic ethos also set the stage for a more sinister ethic pragmatism, where the truth is 'whatever works'. The highest values are defined by those in power; communist tyranny and ethnic cleansing, and closer to home, negative political campaigning, corporate America's 'fight for market share', and insider trading scandals.

  The collapse of a social moral sensibility has created a vacuum that is being decried by some unlikely voices. Tammy Bruce is an openly gay, gun-owning, pro-death-penalty, voted-for-Reagan feminist and former regional NOW officer. In her 2003 book, The Death of Right and Wrong, Bruce lists the following examples of what many people view as the 'new' morality:

Murdering your child isn't murder if you're a woman: it's postpartum depression.

Sex addiction, compulsion, and promiscuity aren't problems if you're gay; they're part of an 'alternative lifestyle'.

Vandalizing, degrading, or mocking the symbols of a religion is a hate crime only if the object is Islam or Judaism. If the target is Christianity, it's 'art'.

Murdering a police officer isn't murder if you're black; it's self-defense or a heroic act.

Murdering 3,000 people isn't terrorism if the murderers are Muslim; it's the Freedom Fighters last heroic act against an oppressor.

Cheating on or lying to your wife isn't a sin, it's a sport; after all, it happened in the Oval Office.

Bruce rightly attributes this multicultural morality to the 'left's' self-obsession and rejection of rules, noting that, 'without rules, there was no perspective, no right and wrong'; only relativism where everyone loses, especially the generation that must inherit their folly. "Although a non-Christian, Bruce echoes C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity in declaring that there are immutable virtues that 'apply to everyone and already play a natural role in our lives'. Christian ethicist J. Budziszewski would say that these are part of the things "we can't not know".

Still, most Americans reject the idea of any absolutes that are universally applicable and knowable. This is true even in the Christian church. Consider the controversial ordination of the Episcopal bishop, Gene Robinson. When asked why he left his wife and family for a homosexual lover, he responded that God had convicted him of living a lie. He was 'created' homosexual, and living as a heterosexual was not being 'true to his authentic self'. When a reporter asked another bishop how he could vote in support of Robinson's ordination, given the explicit statements of the church's sacred scriptures, the bishop replied, "We do not consider Scripture as authoritative. Our authority is the Spirit as it moves through community". In other words, the litmus for truth is not found in the historical text, but in the collective experience and feelings of a group or community.

How widespread is this attitude today? The data from a February 2002 study by George Barna (see chart 1) paints a disquieting portrait. The most surprising data is for the 'born-agains'. Only 32 percent believed in absolute moral truth, with 54 percent believing that truth is situationally dependent. This is incredible, given their putative status as 'followers of the way'. It flies in the face of the biblical statements: "All your righteous laws are eternal". "You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free".

  Even more alarming is the data for teens (see chart 2). For teens, only 9 percent of 'born-agains' believe in absolute moral truth, with 76 percent believing that truth is situationally dependent. Barna believes that these troubling results are due to relativism that was firmly entrenched in their parents' generation.

These beliefs have consequences. Christians in America do not embody a nobler, more honest, generous, disciplined way life than society at large. In his 2001 book, Growing True Disciples, Barna writes, "After studying 131 different indicators, we concluded that, to the naked eye, the thoughts and deeds (and even many of the religious beliefs) of Christians are virtually indistinguishable from those of nonbelievers".

  This observation should serve as a wake-up call to any church, because it strongly suggests that we have been assimilated into the morality of a culture we are commissioned to change. Could it be that the fragrant aroma of the Christian life, designed to attract the world to the Bread of Life, has acquired too much of the scent of its tainted surroundings to be perceived as the remedy to the human condition? Could it be that we have capitulated to the philosophy of 'tolerance', privatizing our faith so that we will never be accused of making others feel uncomfortable? If so, could this be the reason growth has been stifled in some churches?

  These questions are as uncomfortable as they are challenging, because they remind us that if we wish to bring about changes in our culture we must begin with ourselves. There are no shortcuts or 'end-arounds', for it is through us that God has chosen to reveal himself to the world. In bearing witness to the truth, the church must first allow itself to be ordered and shaped by the truth. The experiential nature of postmodernism has produced a culture that seeks authenticity. People will insist on seeing the truth in life before they will believe it in words. The challenge for the church is to offer a genuine display of truth so that when the world asks "What is truth", they will be compelled by our lives to hear our answer.

  Regis Nicoll is with the Wilberforce Forum, teaching Christian worldview thinking. E-mail: Jznicoll@aol.co.