Published: April 16, 2026 | thefinalconvergence.com
There is a moment in every serious conversation about truth when someone says it — delivered with the quiet confidence of someone who believes they have just ended the discussion:
“That may be true for you, but it’s not true for me.”
It is the defining sentence of the relativist worldview. Simple. Inclusive. Tolerant. And on the surface, almost reasonable.
But examine it carefully — because it contains a fatal self-contradiction that collapses on itself the moment it is applied consistently.
If truth is relative — if what is true depends on the individual, the culture, or the moment — then the claim that truth is relative is itself relative. It is only true for the person who believes it. Which means the relativist has no basis for telling you that your belief in absolute truth is wrong. Because on their own terms, your belief in absolute truth is true for you.
Relativism cannot even state its own position without refuting it.
But this is not merely a philosophical parlor game. The stakes are eternal. And the Bible addresses the consequences of relativism — the inversion of truth that results when a culture decides that right and wrong, good and evil, light and darkness are matters of personal interpretation — with language as severe as anything in Scripture.
“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20).
Woe. Not a mild caution. Not a gentle warning. A pronouncement of divine judgment on a specific behavior: the inversion of moral reality. Calling what is evil good. Calling what is good evil. This is not simply wrong — it is catastrophically, judgment-invitingly wrong.
And it is exactly what happens when a culture abandons absolute truth.
What Absolute Truth Actually Claims
The concept of absolute truth is frequently misunderstood — even by those who defend it.
Absolute truth does not claim that human beings have perfect, complete, or infallible knowledge of all truth. We do not. Our knowledge is partial, limited, and subject to the distortions of a fallen nature. The history of human understanding is full of confidently held errors that later generations corrected.
What absolute truth claims is far more modest — and far more important. It claims that truth exists independently of whether any human being believes it, knows it, or agrees with it. That reality is what it is regardless of the cultural context it is viewed from. That a statement is either true or false — not true-for-some and false-for-others.
If a man falls from a building, he falls at the same rate regardless of whether he believes in gravity. If Jesus rose from the dead, He rose regardless of whether the first-century Roman establishment acknowledged it. If God’s Word declares something to be sin, it is sin regardless of whether the twenty-first century church finds that declaration uncomfortable.
Truth does not require your agreement to remain true.
This is what Scripture assumes on every page. When God commands “Thou shalt not” — He is not offering a suggestion that might be true for some people in some cultural contexts. He is declaring the nature of moral reality — reality that exists because He is its author, and that no human consensus can alter.
“For I am the LORD, I change not” (Malachi 3:6).
The unchanging God is the ground of absolute truth. Because He does not change, His character does not change. Because His character does not change, His moral law does not change. Because His moral law does not change, truth does not change.
The Self-Defeating Logic of Relativism
Relativism does not merely fail philosophically — it fails practically, consistently, and inevitably.
Every relativist has things they are not actually relativistic about. Ask a committed moral relativist whether the Holocaust was wrong — not wrong-for-you but genuinely, objectively wrong — and watch the relativism evaporate. They know it was wrong. They feel the weight of that wrongness as something that transcends cultural preference and personal opinion. But they have no philosophical ground on which to stand when they say so — because their worldview has already told them that moral judgments are relative.
This is the incoherence at the heart of relativism: it cannot be lived. You can hold it as a theoretical position in a philosophy seminar. You cannot hold it at a funeral, or in a courtroom, or when someone does something genuinely evil to someone you love. In those moments, everyone becomes an absolutist — because reality has a way of insisting on itself.
The Bible does not argue for absolute truth as a philosophical position. It assumes it as the foundation of everything. The entire structure of Scripture — creation, fall, redemption, judgment — only makes sense if truth is absolute. If morality is relative, there is no fall — only a difference of perspective. If truth is personal, there is no judgment — only an imposition of one set of preferences over another. If good and evil are cultural constructs, the cross is not atonement — it is merely a miscarriage of Roman justice.
You cannot have the gospel without absolute truth. They stand or fall together.
What Relativism Produces
Isaiah 5:20 does not simply describe the inversion — it traces its trajectory. Calling evil good and good evil is not a stable resting place. It is a direction. And the direction leads somewhere specific.
When a culture decides that truth is relative, the first casualty is moral clarity. The categories of right and wrong become negotiable — first at the edges, then at the center. What was once universally condemned becomes first tolerated, then celebrated, then legally protected, then imposed. What was once universally celebrated becomes first questioned, then marginalized, then condemned.
That is not a theoretical description. It is a description of the last fifty years of Western cultural history.
But the second casualty — less discussed but equally devastating — is the gospel itself. Because a gospel that addresses absolute sin requires absolute truth. The moment you grant that morality is relative, you have no basis on which to call anyone to repentance. Repentance requires the acknowledgment that something was genuinely wrong — not wrong-for-you, but wrong. Full stop. And if truth is relative, that acknowledgment is impossible.
This is why the erosion of absolute truth in the culture is always followed by the erosion of the gospel in the church. They are inseparable. The church that accommodates relativism in order to appear tolerant and relevant will find — always, without exception — that it has nothing left to say to a dying world.
“There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Proverbs 14:12).
The way of relativism seems right. It seems kind, open, humble, and inclusive. But the end is death — of moral clarity, of the gospel, of everything that makes Christianity worth dying for.
The Berean Response to Relativism
The Bereans did not test Paul’s preaching by asking whether it resonated with their personal truth. They searched the scriptures daily “whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11). The implied assumption is that there is a so — a fact of the matter, an objective reality, a truth that exists independently of whether any listener finds it personally compelling.
That is the Berean model for engaging a relativist culture. Not capitulation — bringing our beliefs to the bar of cultural acceptability to see which ones pass. Not retreat — abandoning the public square to those who would fill it with alternatives. But confident, rigorous, Scripture-grounded engagement with the questions the culture is asking, from the standpoint of a truth that does not depend on the culture’s approval to remain true.
“Sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15).
Ready always. With a reason. With meekness — not arrogance, not condescension — but also with confidence, because the truth we are defending does not need our cleverness to stand. It needs our faithfulness.
The Unchanging Standard
The post-truth world will tell you that claiming absolute truth is the height of intellectual arrogance. That humility requires holding your convictions loosely. That the loving position is always the inclusive one.
But there is nothing humble about telling a drowning person that whether water is dangerous is a matter of personal perspective. There is nothing loving about affirming a direction that leads, as Proverbs says, to death.
The most loving thing a believer can do in a relativist age is to hold the line — not with harshness, not with contempt, but with the settled, unshakeable confidence of someone who knows where the ground is when everything else is shifting.
“For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven” (Psalm 119:89).
Settled. Not relative. Not subject to cultural revision.
In heaven. Beyond the reach of any philosopher, any council, any cultural consensus that has ever assembled to vote truth out of existence.
Forever. Long after the age of relativism has passed into the judgment it has been building toward since Isaiah pronounced his woe.
The Word stands. Absolute. Unmoving. True.
📖 What Is Truth? Unshakable Truth in a Post-Truth World — the biblical case for the absolute truth a relativist age is trying to erase. Available now on Amazon in paperback and Kindle. Written by Menno Zweers | The Final Convergence Discernment Series Get your copy on Amazon →
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