Relativism

Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

— Judges 21:25

Relativism is the position that truth, especially moral truth, is not fixed but relative to the individual or culture holding it: what is true or right for one person or society need not be true or right for another. One common form, moral relativism, treats morality as subjective and humanly constructed, established to maintain civil order and protect individual rights rather than grounded in anything beyond human agreement.¹ Epistemological relativism extends the same claim to truth itself, denying that any perspective can reach a reality beyond its own vantage point.²

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession predates the term relativism by more than two centuries and names no such position, but it commits Reformed Baptist theology to the claim relativism denies: “the Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience,” not the individual conscience or the surrounding culture.³ The same formulation is carried forward verbatim in the Philadelphia Confession of 1742.⁴ On the prior question of whether unaided human reason can reach that knowledge on its own, without Scripture, the confession’s opening paragraph allows that “the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence” show enough of God’s “goodness, wisdom, and power” to leave everyone “inexcusable,” while denying they are “sufficient to give that knowledge of God, and of his will, which is necessary unto salvation.”³

Biblical Basis

Scripture presents truth as something fixed in God rather than constructed by the individual who holds it. Christ tells Pilate that he came into the world “to bear witness to the truth,” prompting Pilate’s own relativizing reply, “What is truth?” (John 18:37-38); elsewhere he identifies himself directly with it: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).⁵ Paul describes humanity’s fundamental error as exchanging “the truth about God for a lie” (Rom. 1:25), and warns Timothy of a coming time when people, “having itching ears,” will reject sound teaching for teachers who “suit their own passions” (2 Tim. 4:3-4), the same individually-tailored standard of truth relativism formalizes into a principle. Judges’ own refrain for Israel’s moral chaos without a king, “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judg. 17:6; 21:25), states in narrative form what moral relativism states as a philosophy. Against all of this, the psalmist grounds truth in God’s own speech rather than in the individual: “the sum of your word is truth” (Ps. 119:160).

Historical Development

Enlightenment roots

Craig Carter traces relativism’s modern career to a chain of Enlightenment- era developments rather than to any single thinker. Late-medieval nominalism, in the thought of William of Occam, was followed by the mechanism of Descartes and Bacon and then by the Enlightenment’s own materialism; skepticism reached a high point in David Hume, and Immanuel Kant’s constructivist turn to the human subject then produced what Carter calls “a rapid descent into epistemological relativism in Nietzsche and the postmodernists and ethical relativism in the sexual revolution of the twentieth century.”² On this account relativism is not a postmodern invention but modernity’s own premises, “materialism, nominalism, mechanism, relativism, and skepticism,” worked out to their conclusion, which is why Carter calls postmodernism “hypermodernism” rather than a genuine departure from it.²

MacIntyre’s diagnosis of emotivism

Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (1981), which Louis Markos says “took the English-speaking world of moral and political philosophy by storm,” gave a philosophical diagnosis of moral relativism’s twentieth-century form.⁶ MacIntyre identified the doctrine that “all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference” as emotivism, and linked its rise to a new, historically novel conception of the self as “radically autonomous,” freed from the roles, a member of a family, a citizen, a servant of God, that had previously given human life its function and purpose.⁶ Where earlier ethical traditions held that “to be a man is to fill a set of roles each of which has its own point and purpose,” MacIntyre argued, the modern self exists “prior to and apart from all roles,” with no fixed telos left for it to be measured against, which is what makes purely preference-based moral judgment possible in the first place.⁶

Metamodernism and the return of authority

By the early twenty-first century, postmodernism’s own consistent relativism had itself given way to a further stage theorists call metamodernism, which lives “as if” objective truth is real while denying it is.⁷ Postmodernism’s own article traces this later development in full; Robert Golding’s diagnosis of it bears on relativism specifically because it marks the point at which Western culture, without abandoning relativism’s premise that there is no objective truth, stopped living as consistent relativists in practice.⁸

Opposing Views

Moral relativism holds that no moral judgment binds beyond the individual or community that makes it; Ken Magnuson describes it as the view that morality is “subjective and ‘created’ by human beings,” serving practical ends such as civil order and individual rights rather than answering to a moral order beyond human agreement.¹

Cultural relativism, a variant of the same claim applied at the level of whole societies, holds that a society’s own moral norms cannot be judged by an outside standard. Gene Veith observes that the tolerance this view demands functions as “the only absolute moral value insisted upon by postmodernism,” and argues that sorting people into “mutually exclusive cultures” on that basis “trends to produce intolerance” rather than the harmony it promises.⁹

Epistemological relativism applies the same denial to truth itself rather than only to morality: no vantage point, religious or scientific, reaches a reality beyond its own historical or cultural position. Carter traces its philosophical root to Kant’s turn to the constructing subject and its cultural spread through Nietzsche and the postmodernists who followed him.²

Objections and Responses

Relativism refutes itself: the claim that no truth is absolute is itself stated as an absolute truth. The observation is correct, but its force is limited in practice. Citing Carl Trueman, Golding notes that pointing out this contradiction is “polemically useless” against people who have already moved past holding it consistently, since a culture can affirm that no objective truth exists while still treating its own constructed truths as binding on everyone else.⁸ The logical inconsistency remains real; it simply no longer describes an opponent who lives as a consistent relativist.

Relativism cannot account for why the world keeps resisting the relative truths its adherents construct. Even on relativism’s own terms, Magnuson observes, morality “exerts itself as objective”: “a relativist may wish the world were different, and try to live as though it were, only to find that it goes against the grain of the universe.”¹ A relativist who asserts moral authority, whether located in the individual or the community, typically ends up presenting that authority as though it were objectively binding after all.¹

A relativist culture’s professed tolerance produces the very intolerance it claims to avoid. Gene Veith traces this directly to cultural relativism’s own premise: sorting people into “mutually exclusive cultures,” each with its own standard immune from outside judgment, “trends to produce intolerance” between them rather than the harmony the sorting was meant to secure.⁹

Related Doctrines

References

Ken Magnuson, “3. The Bible and Christian Ethics,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2020): “One common view is moral relativism, which understands morality to be subjective and ‘created’ by human beings. In this view, ethics is established in order to create a civil society and avoid anarchy, to establish and protect individual rights, and so on. … Even though morality is considered to be subjective, it involves reflection on the world, which exerts itself as objective: a relativist may wish the world were different, and try to live as though it were, only to find that it goes against the grain of the universe. Further, when a relativist asserts moral authority, which may lie in the will of the community or the individual, it is often made to seem objective.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Craig A. Carter, “Do We Worship the God of the Bible?” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 9. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩ ↩²
The Philadelphia Confession of Faith (1742), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩
Robert Golding, “Swimming in a Sanctimonious Sea of Subjectivity: A Proposal for Christian Authenticity in a Made-Up World,” Themelios 49, no. 1 (2024): 169. ↩
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, quoted in Louis Markos, From Aristotle to Christ: How Aristotelian Thought Clarified the Christian Faith (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2024), “Part 4: How to Get Along with Our Neighbors.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
Golding, 162. ↩
Golding, 161. ↩ ↩²
Gene Edward Veith, Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), 154, quoted in Golding, 159. ↩ ↩²