Are All Christians Moral Relativists? The Place of Faith in Moral Responsibility

There was a lot of talk about responsibility as a theological category in the last century. Much of this had to do with the changing socio-politics of the time including two world wars that left the religious moral center of Western society in ruin. Responsibility for the first time, especially in the writings of Rudolf Bultmann and Reinhold Niebuhr became a way to reconcile faith with moral behavior. Until then, there had always been the strain of “double activity” in Christianity. When one read Paul he was confronted with the prevalence of faith. However, when one read James or even the gospels, it was the moral behavior and obedience that keyed into the duty of man. Paul was often read uniquely, as more sophisticated of the lot, and whose theology made for more creative responses then elsewhere. James, an epistle that Martin Luther threatened to throw into the Rhine River for what he read as its insistence of a works-based salvation, never garnered as much popularity.

Where responsibility became important was in the conversation on absolute and relative morals. It was argued on the one side that moral absolutes created no requirement for self-investment, one only needs to follow and obey. Yet on the other hand, there was an appeal to faith as an individual investment, in which obedience was not seen as a construct of faith but rather its fruit. But it was nonetheless thought to be stale fruit so long as my faith was not provided a clear path through my works. Faith was invalidated outside of works, and was therefore remanded to “wishful thinking.” One could trust in God about the sickness of a loved one, but again, faith required no personal investment. We could fold our hands, pray, walk away, and leave the rest to God. Of course, such formulas exist, but they tell us nothing about the inner life of the ordeal we so desperately wish to understand.

Theologians of this time sensed that faith meant something more than a secondary function that could only be fleshed out by one’s works or obligations. Moral absolutes simply created no element of self-risk. Without risk, the imperative for faith was unclear. Bultmann made a point of this when he noted that Jesus’ rising from the dead was an inauthentic existential act, provided he knew he would rise from the dead. Jesus could be “obedient to the death of a cross,” but his obedience did not necessarily translate into the need to feel the terror of the grave, a feeling of not knowing where his obedience might lead. Faith was thought to be the missing component of obedience. Jesus’ moral response could only be validated by an act of faith that considered the possibility that he might not rise again.  Only when the possibility of failure existed does faith make any sense. This is precisely why obedience without faith is morally suspect as a Christian concept.

To “not obey” or “go the way of the flesh,” only suggests a problem of behavior. Yet responsibility grasped at the very heart of such disobedience as an existential problem that lined up more fully and more rationally with the Christian belief that man inherited his sin nature from Adam.  

Without a clear formula for obedience however, the charge became that such Christians were moral relativists, which was seen as the greater of two evils. In the case of such relativism, one risked the collapse of revelation, the inconsistency of the biblical witness, and finally the loss of the democratizing appeal of scripture that all men are created equal. If men are equal, then surely the situations as they attend them are no different in the interpretative lens of one man than they are for another.

Perhaps one of the more powerful examples of moral relativism came in the theology-meets-life case of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Theologians may have felt that moral responsibility was subject to a context of not very well-defined goals, but Bonhoeffer lived this reality. When Bonhoeffer was faced with the decision of repudiating National Socialism and ultimately conspiring in the assassination attempt of Adolf Hitler, he was faced with a moral dilemma that was based not in interpretation but methodology.  

With the injunction of the commandment not to kill (technically, murder) hanging over his head, Bonhoeffer had to strive for a way past the blockade of moral absolutes and come to an understanding of morality that would ultimately shape his decision in the coming months. His answer was that ethics always occurring when one stands before the “face of God.” This understanding meant that the biblical witness had to be shaped through a different kind of looking glass, one encountered by a cacophony of different instructions and voices to experience how God was speaking to the church today. Much like a Charismatic Evangelical, who believes he is speaking a prophetic word might say that the word that comes to him does not resist the totality of scripture, but is emphasized in a living body of work, Bonhoeffer’s decision to look to Jesus was based upon a similar project. This meant that while one could affirm that absolute harmony of God’s word, since the Word was always ontological, the phenomenology of the words demonstrated that some words regularly manifested over others for the edification of the believer. As a people bound to the book, Christians like Bonhoeffer to Billy Graham, found that in “hearing what the Spirit was saying to the churches,” (Revelation 2:7) did not need to invalidate the body of scripture.

The question of whether one is a relativist depends largely on application ethics and not canonicity. If simply admitted that the canon is, we do not need to be harassed about questions of why it is and what it should have become since these are largely historical concerns. That it did become what it is, and that it has consistently been treated as a multi-colored spectrum of God’s interactions with humanity permits response. And how have the people of Christ responded? With many, many different voices drilling down to differences within the heart of each community, but more importantly down to the divided individual. This is not a lack of consistency. For consistency speaks to systematization and simply a cry to return to absolutism. Consistency, at any rate, lies in the continued engagement with the scriptures.