Reflections on Cardinal Ratzinger's Identification of 'Dictatorship of Relativism'

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, preaching today at the mass for his fellow cardinals as they prepared to enter the conclave at which they will elect the next Roman Catholic pope, said some things that may raise eyebrows. In particular, he spoke of the "dictatorship of relativism."

His words met with thunderous approval from his fellow clerics, but were likely greeted with chagrin by those, especially in America and Europe, hoping that the Church will turn from many of its traditional teachings.

As a Lutheran Christian, I admit that I am not in agreement with some official teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

I believe in the ordination of women, for example.

I don't believe that the use of contraceptives by married couples is sinful.

I can see no reason for insisting that clergy be celibate.

I don't buy traditional Roman understandings of sainthood or of Mary.

While I resonate more closely with the Catholic Church's teachings on Holy Communion than with those of say, the Methodist Church in which I grew up, I still have my differences with Rome on this important subject.

My belief that the Bible, as God's Word, is the ultimate authority for the life, faith, and practice of the Church and of individual Christians, finds me casting a wary eye on the Roman Church's seeming overreliance on extra-biblical writings and traditions.

But as I hope readers of this blog can attest, I also gladly and unreservedly affirm that Roman Catholic Christians are my sisters and brothers in Christ. A Roman Catholic priest preached at my service of ordination and participated in the laying on of hands there. (I suppose that, for those who believe in such things, this puts me in apostolic succession. Lutheran and Nazarene pastors also placed their hands on me then.) I enjoy warm personal friendships with deeply committed Roman Catholics and have since adolescence. I have had the honor of preaching in several Roman Catholic parishes.

I mention all this by way of saying that I care about the Roman Church without agreeing with it on every particular of doctrine. There are many Catholic notions which Ratzinger, the Church's chief enforcer of doctrine, holds to be core elements of Christian belief that I see as mere cultural accretions or traditions with scant Biblical support. (Luther would call these adiaphora, non-salvific beliefs without eternal consequence. I would agree with him.)

But I also think that Ratzinger was dead-on at some points in his homily. A CBC account tells us:

"Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labelled today as a fundamentalism, whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along by every wind of teaching, looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards," the 78-year-old Ratzinger said during the homily.

"We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires."

An account from The Australian quotes Ratzinger as contrasting immature faith, susceptible to the shifting winds of personal preference and of cultural fads, with mature faith, which follows Jesus Christ as its True North by Whom one is called to live, no matter what opposition or derision is faced:

"'Grown-up' is not a faith that follows every wave of fashion and the latest news," he told the pre-election mass celebrated just hours before cardinals were sequestered in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel.

"'Adult and mature' is a faith profoundly rooted in the friendship of Christ.

"How many winds of doctrine have we known in these past decades; how many ideological currents; how many ways of thinking?

"The little boat of thought for many Christians has quite often been thrown from one extreme to the other, from Marxism to liberalism, right through to libertinism, from collectivism to radical individualism, from atheism to a vague religious mysticism, from agnosticism to syncretism."

[Syncretism, by way of explanation, is the combination of faith in Christ with other religions, traditions, and isms in a faithless effort to make oneself more palatable and unexceptionable to those who might reject a clear, faithful allegiance to Christ as Lord and God. This is alluring for a coward like me. But Jesus tells us that if we are unwilling to acknowledge Him and His Lordship here on earth, He cannot acknowledge as His own in eternity.]

This evening on Hugh Hewitt's radio show, Hugh asked listeners if we thought that Ratzinger were onto something. Is there a "dictatorship of relativism" which does not recognize anything as certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires?

Is it possible in today's culture for anyone to assert that, "This is timelessly true and anything that is opposed to this truth is false" without being dismissed as intolerant by the PC-police?

Sadly, my observation and recent experiences lead me to believe that there is a dictatorship such as that described by Ratzinger. More than a few of my pastoral colleagues and I have seen this close-up in our own Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).

For about a decade now, there has been a movement within our church body that has two goals: to allow for the ordination of practicing homosexuals and to allow for the church sanctioning of homosexual unions.

Those advocating both or one of these two positions have grabbed the reins of influence within our Church and have framed the entire discussion of these two issues as being about tolerance. From their perspective, those who agree with their positions are tolerant and those who disagree are intolerant.

(Of course, this framing of theological discussion ignores the fact that the Bible doesn't see tolerance as an ultimate value. Indeed, Christians are called to be tolerant of all people and completely intolerant of sin, especially in ourselves. The worst thing that Christians can do is take a tolerant attitude toward overt rebellion against God. In John 20:23, Jesus gives His followers the responsibility of proclaiming forgiveness to those who turn from sin and turn toward Christ and of announcing to those unwilling to make such a turn--what the Bible calls repentance--that their sins are unforgiven and that they are therefore separated from God.)

Questions about what is right and wrong have been swept aside by these advocates of the law of relativism that tolerates anything, even if it's wrong. Several years ago, a colleague served on a national board of our denomination which was considering a paper embodying the movement goal of sanctioning homosexual unions. A lay member of the board spoke up and asked, "Doesn't the Bible indicate that marriage is between men and women?" Hearing this, another member became agitated. "Why?" this second person wondered, "Do people always bring up the Bible in these discussions?"

This sentiment is apparently shared by more than those uninformed of the traditional Lutheran view that the Bible is the ultimate arbiter of Christians' beliefs and practices. Readers of this blog will know that in January, a "study" of sexuality sponsored by the ELCA and conducted by a church-appointed commission was released. In the run-up to that, documentation was given to our congregations designed to frame their consideration of the commission's work. In the documentation, the commission suggested that there were three authoritative voices to which the Church should heed in the discussion: (1) The Bible; (2) Science; (3) Societal views.

Lutherans have always been at home with the life of the mind. The movement was, after all, born in a university. The tradition includes people like Schweitzer, Kierkegaard, and Bach. So, unlike some Christian traditions perhaps, Lutheranism has never reacted with reflexive negativity to intellectual inquisitiveness, creative adventurism, or scientific inquiry.

Lutherans have always tried to be sensitive to what's going on in the world, sometimes being overly accommodating to prevailing world views. (That was our sin in Nazi Germany. That was also the wrong committed by many leading Lutheran theologians in the US who defended slavery before our Civil War. But Lutherans have also been quick to acknowledge the Biblical call to be transformed people who strive to do things God's way rather than following the selfish customs of the human race.) (Romans 12:1-2; Philippians 2:4-11)

The commission's elevation of three seemingly co-equal authorities for the Church's discussion represented a stunning departure from Lutheran insistence that the Bible contains God's truth. The reason we refer to the Bible as canon, a word for a form of measurement, is that we deem the Scriptures to be the expression of God's truth against which we measure all other truth claims.

There is room in this view for varying perspectives of the meaning of specific Biblical teachings, of course. But there certainly can be no wiggle room for those wishing to designate as right what the Bible clearly calls wrong.

Yet, the PC police in our body have been able to manipulate this discussion so as to make opponents of Biblical revisionism afraid to speak up. They accuse those who disagree with them, either overtly or by implication, of being intolerant.

Being intolerant, in this view, is to hold that there are absolutes.

But this puts the dictaors of relativism at odds with the Scriptures. Jesus, for example, calls Himself "the way, the truth, and the life" and says that no one can know God apart from Him. (John 14:6)

The Bible warns us from putting too much stock in our own judgments of right and wrong, relying on God's judgment as being our ultimate guide: "There is a way that seems right to a person, but its end is the way of death." (Proverbs 14:12)

The Bible also claims to authoritatively speak for God: "All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness..." (Second Timothy 3:16)

The dictatorship of relativism wants to deny the existence of absolute truth founded in an absolutely good God Who speaks to us authoritatively through the Bible because such denial allows human beings to evade responsibility for our sin, giving us license to do what we want to do.

When Adam was confronted for his sin, he blamed his wife. She in turn, blamed the serpent who beguiled her. When God confronted their son, Cain, for murdering his brother, Abel, Cain tried to shrug the whole thing off by asking God, "Am I my brother's keeper?" We've been trying to shrug off the existence of right and wrong ever since. But we can't do it.

As Paul notes in his opening salvo in the extraordinary New Testament book of Romans:

"...the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them, Ever since the creation of the world His eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things He has made. So they are without excuse; for they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools..." (Romans 1:18-23)

Paul is saying here that we all know that there is ultimate truth and it resides in God. This knowledge is knit into our very DNA. But to acknowledge these things forces us to subordinate ourselves to God and to turn to Him for merciful forgiveness for our violations of His will for us.

This is why the Bible is so unrelenting in its call for us to be truthful with ourselves and with God. It's only by an honest accounting of our wrongs that we become open to receiving the forgiveness and new life God offers through Jesus Christ:

"If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He Who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar..." (First John 1:8-10)

"The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise." (Psalm 51:17)

The ultimate reason that Jesus, God in the flesh, was crucifed by the human race and the reason that we would prefer not following Christ today is that we are what the Bible calls, idolaters. We choose to worship things rather than God, lying to ourselves about Who is really in charge and really our Boss, because things can be manipulated and God can't be. We choose to worship ourselves because, like Eve in the garden, lured to rebel against God's commands, we want an easy life in which nobody finds us objectionable for suggesting that we individual human beings ought to be the ultimate authorities over our lives.

A friend of ours went through a divorce. Her husband had an affair, which she had been willing to forgive provided they got counseling and he exhibited a genuine effort to rebuild their marriage. But the man left.

As he walked out the door of the house, leaving our friend and their child, the woman said, "How can you be so selfish? Don't you know how wrong this is?"

In patronizing tones, the husband replied, "There's no such thing as right and wrong."

Some months later, the two were locked in a custody dispute. The husband who'd left the relationship almost exactly, though unconsciously, aped his estranged wife's words when he asked her, "Don't you know how wrong this is?"

Our friend, actually trying to do right by both their child and her one-time husband, replied, "I thought you said that there was no such thing as right and wrong."

The fact is, that no matter how hard we try to bury it, there is such a thing as ultimate truth. The dictators of relativism cannot change that.

These days, I'm praying that neither the Roman Catholic Church or my own Evangelical Lutheran Church in America cave in to the fads of the times, but always strive to make their decisions in prayerful consideration of the witness of Scripture, God's authoritative truth source. We, in our respective church bodies, won't always get it right. We will sin. But if we keep the God we meet on the Bible's sacred pages as our True North, we'll never veer far off course or for very long.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt has produced a transcript of Ratzinger's entire homily on his blog. In it, I note, Ratzinger speaks of "cheap grace." So far as I know, this term was coined by the martyred German Lutheran theologian and pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It appears in Bonhoeffer's classic book, The Cost of Discipleship. In it, Bonhoeffer contrasts "cheap grace" with "costly grace."

Grace, is literally God's charitable decision to forgive sin and offer new life through Jesus Christ as a gift to all with faith in Him. (John 3:16) It is utterly free and cannot be earned, only appropriated by those who dare to entrust their lives and eternal destinies to Christ.

Bonhoeffer says that while God's grace is free, it isn't cheap. This is so, first of all, because it cost Christ His suffering and death on the cross. It's also not cheap because new life through Christ and Christ Himself are such valuable and precious commodities. "Lord, you are more precious than silver...more costly than gold," the Bible says.

Finally, God's grace is costly because in order for us to receive it, it will cost us our lives. You can't hold onto the dying trophies of this life and still grasp Christ's outstretched hand. Jesus had this abandonment of self-seeking ways in mind when He said:

"If any want to become My followers. let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow Me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for My sake will save it." (Luke 9:23-24)

I believe that Ratzinger is saying that the Church must not fall prey to the temptation of making itself temporarily acceptable to the dictatorship of relativism and thereby divest itself of its connection to Christ.

Cheap grace is the sort of grace we winkingly give to one another, allowing ourselves license for sin, deliberately rebelling against God and daring to call it holy.

Costly grace is the sort that comes to those who are absolutely honest about the pervasiveness of our sin and our need of God, who surrender and open themselves to the invasion of Christ into every department of their lives, who admit their unholiness, and hungrily feed on Christ's forgiveness and goodness.

ANOTHER UPDATE: John Schroeder has linked to this post on his site, Blogotional. Thanks, John! By the way, I haven't expressed any opinion on the filibuster issue to which John connects this post and have no plans for doing so.

THANKS to Joe Gandelman of The Moderate Voice for linking to this post in his extensive round-up of reactions to Cardinal Ratzinger's elevation to the papacy.