Sneering and "Relativism"

It was with great bemusement that I read the exchange between Zeus and Darius. While I was intrigued by Darius’s erroneous belief that Zeus’s name was a merely a moniker (as a fellow descendent of the Mediterranean, I empathize Zeus—but doesn’t Darius believe in the divinity of one Yeshua Ben-David?), it was his charge of “moral relativism� that got my attention.

Refuting the obfuscating charge of moral relativism exposes the charade of attacking progressive faith as having no core belief. However, a simple historical review of orthodox traditions, the evolution of morality is a constant, not an exception.

In the days of Moses, adultery was defined as an act committed by a married woman having sexual relations with a man to whom she was not married. Yet a man who had sexual relations with one of his numerous wives would have committed no such sin. Part of this equation, which no longer is accepted as valid, was that a wife the equivalent of property. In the West, bigamy, once so commonly practiced, is now considered immoral. Similarly, for the first 1,000 years of the church, Catholic clergy was able to marry for well over a thousand years after Jesus walked the earth. That changed when Pope Gregory VII mandated celibacy for the clergy in until the Eleventh Century primarily as a means to prevent Vatican land gifted to clergy from being alienated to heirs. Yet, even this doctrine was not fully enforced for yet another hundred years. In essence, morality does not so much evolve as it actually matures.

Even our more fundamentalist friends have engaged in their own extensive practice of “relativism.� Does not Leviticus--the book of Torah that is raised up for its prohibitions of homosexuality--also calls for prohibitions of men shaving their beards, the wearing of clothe with two different types of threads and the stoning of disobedient children? If the fundamentalist believer (which Darius often appears to be) is to be consistent, then why is their no call to be unshaven, wear clothes of on thread and the execution of wayward children? And speaking of homosexuality, where is lesbianism prohibited?

Both Hillel and Jesus made an evolving morality an important part of their respective messages. Both wanted humanity to look at revealed law in a new, more compassionate light. Perhaps this is what Pope John XXIII meant when he described Christians as “a people on a pilgrimage� who with each passing day better understood the meaning of the Gospels.

Perhaps Pope John XXIII, much like Reinhold Niebuhr, understood that to simply assume a full knowledge of what morality God expects of us by relying upon a non-esoteric reading of Scripture and without deeper study or continuous introspection is not true faith but unbridled arrogance. Only God knows what He is accepts as morality; we can only hope to find it by ceaselessly questioning our own preconceived notions.