The “Creature of His/Her Time” Defense: Why Christian Moral Absolutism Cannot Accept It

Summary

This essay refutes the common defense that historical figures who participated in slavery and genocide—specifically America’s founding fathers—should not be judged by contemporary moral standards because they were “creatures of their time.” After defining key terms, it argues that Christian moral absolutism, grounded in an unchanging God, innate moral awareness (Romans 2:14–15), the imago Dei, and the prophetic tradition, leaves no room for this defense. The persistence of moral witness within slaveholding societies (from the enslaved, abolitionists, and even slaveholders’ own anxieties) proves that moral truth was available, not absent. The “creature of their time” argument is not moral nuance; it is moral evasion. And for those who claim the Bible while excusing historical evil, the proper response is not explanation but repentance—producing fruit in keeping with repentance, as John the Baptist demanded.

I. Definitions

Before proceeding, several terms require definition. Moral relativism is the view that moral principles are valid only relative to a particular culture, era, or individual preference, with no universal or absolute standard. Cultural relativism in its descriptive sense is simply the anthropological observation that different societies have different moral codes; this observation does not logically entail moral relativism as a normative claim. Moral absolutism holds that certain moral truths are universally binding, unchanging, and not dependent on human consensus, culture, or historical context. The “creature of their time” defense is the argument that historical agents cannot be held morally culpable for actions that were socially normative in their era because they lacked the moral knowledge or social vantage point available to later generations. An epistemic excuse claims that an agent acted wrongly but lacked the ability to know better due to limited information or social formation. Finally, teleological prophetic calling is the understanding that biblical prophets were not morally perfect individuals but were called by God to deliver specific messages pointing toward God’s purposes; their authority rests in their divine sender, not in their personal moral completeness.

II. The Defense’s Core Problem: It Asks Us to Ignore Available Moral Witness

The “creature of their time” defense appears sympathetic on its surface. It says, in effect: How could Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or any other slaveholding founder have known better when virtually everyone around them accepted slavery and the exploitation of enslaved women as a normal feature of social and economic life? We cannot fairly read today’s sensibilities back into the past. The argument seems to embody a kind of historical humility, a refusal to judge the dead by the standards of the living.

But this argument fails the moment we ask two decisive questions: first, was the moral truth available within their system? And second, did anyone during that time exercise restraint on moral grounds? The historical answer is unequivocally yes. To see why, we need only consider the multiple forms of moral witness that existed within every slaveholding society.

Consider first the witness of the enslaved themselves. Enslaved Africans resisted their condition at every turn. They ran away, organized revolts, sabotaged equipment, preserved dignity through the secret maintenance of cultural and religious practices, and sang spirituals that plotted deliverance. Their suffering was a visible, embodied moral testimony. The very fact that their traffickers had to enact elaborate legal codes to suppress literacy, restrict movement, and punish resistance demonstrates that the enslaved were not passive objects but moral agents whose condition and resistance testified to the wrongness of the institution. An enslaver could not look at a person who risked whipping or death to escape and honestly conclude that the system was just. The suffering body of the enslaved was itself a witness that had to be actively ignored, rationalized, or rendered invisible. Ultimately, the collective cognitive dissonance drove the colonizers to reduce the Africans to a subhuman status.

Consider second the witness of abolitionists. From the colonial era forward, there were people who shared the same Scriptures, the same general socialization, and the same historical moment as the slaveholders but arrived at the opposite moral conclusion. Quakers, evangelicals, and free Black activists like Olaudah Equiano and Lemuel Haynes did not possess some secret moral knowledge unavailable to their neighbors. They read the same Bible. They heard the same sermons. They lived under the same laws. Yet they concluded that slavery was a grave sin. The existence of such people refutes the claim that “everyone thought it was acceptable” or that “nobody knew any better.” Enough people within the same social framework most certainly knew better.

Consider third the witness of the enslavers’ own anxieties. The historical record is filled with evidence that they knew, at some level, that what they were doing was wrong. The elaborate theological gymnastics required to justify slavery—the tortured arguments about the Curse of Ham, the appeals to Old Testament servitude, the extracting of passages about liberation from the Bible, the desperate efforts to prove that enslaved persons were not fully human—testify to a moral awareness that had to be continuously suppressed. Jefferson’s private writings are only the most famous example: he called slavery a “moral and political depravity” and trembled for his country when he reflected that God is just, yet he couldn’t keep his hands off Sally Hemings, and he never freed most of his own enslaved laborers. The prohibitions against teaching enslaved people to read, the fears of rebellion that haunted every slaveholder’s sleep, the legal codes that regulated the treatment of enslaved people with ever greater specificity—none of these make sense in a society that genuinely believed slavery was a positive good. The very energy required to maintain the system was not only a confession but a continual reminder of moral culpability and eventual accountability.

The “creature of their time” defense requires a moral vacuum. It asks us to imagine a society in which the wrongness of slavery was simply unthinkable, unavailable, beyond the horizon of moral imagination, but that vacuum never existed. Moral truth was spoken, embodied, suffered for, and resisted. To claim that enslavers “could not have known better” is not a historical judgment; it is a choice to torture the truth and to look away from the witness. It is a silent confession.

III. Christian Moral Absolutism Dismantles Every Premise of the Defense

For those who claim the Bible as their moral foundation—and it must be remembered that the founding generation was predominantly Christian in its self-understanding, whatever the nuances of individual belief—the “creature of their time” defense is not merely weak; it is theologically incoherent. Christianity’s own internal commitments systematically refute every premise the defense requires.

The first and most obvious problem is that the Judaeo-Christian tradition is explicitly moral absolutist. This is not a tradition that must be argued into moral absolutism; it begins there. The moral law is grounded in the character of God, and that character is immutable. “I the Lord do not change,” declares Malachi. “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever,” writes the author of Hebrews. The Ten Commandments are not presented as culturally contingent suggestions but as divine imperatives binding across all time. If the moral law does not change, then what was wrong in 1776 is wrong in 2026 and will be wrong in 2276. The defense’s first move—calibrating moral knowledge to the norms of an era—is already a relativist move, and Christianity rejects it.

The second problem is even more devastating, and it comes straight from the Apostle Paul. In Romans chapter two, Paul writes that when Gentiles “who do not have the law do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law.” He explains that the requirements of the law are “written on their hearts,” with their consciences bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or defending them. This passage is a theological guillotine to the epistemic excuse. Paul claims that even those without access to Scripture possess innate moral knowledge. The moral law is not discovered through historical progress or cultural evolution; it is inscribed by God on every human heart from the beginning. If Gentiles without the Torah have this innate awareness, then Christian enslavers who possessed both Scripture and conscience have no epistemic excuse whatsoever. They had natural law. They had revealed law. They had the prophetic tradition. They had the explicit words of Christ. To claim that all of these were insufficient to communicate that owning and exploiting another image-bearer of God was wrong is an incredible theological claim.

The third problem is the doctrine of the imago Dei. “Let us make mankind in our image,” says Genesis, “in our likeness.” Every human being bears the image of God. This is the bedrock of Christian anthropology, and its implications for slavery are immediate and inescapable. If every person bears God’s image equally, then no person can be reduced to property without first dehumanizing them. If human dignity is intrinsic and inalienable because it is God-given, then no law or social convention can strip it away without denying God. If persons are ends and not merely means, then treating a person as an instrument for another’s profit is a direct violation of that person’s status as an image-bearer unless it is done by divine sanction. A Christian enslaver had to suppress the most foundational claim of his own theology to participate in slavery, an act of willfully suppressing known truth.

The fourth problem is the prophetic tradition. One of the most striking features of the Judaeo-Christian tradition is that it already contains its own answer to the “creature of their time” argument, and that answer is the biblical prophet. One key function of the biblical prophet is to confront a society that has normalized sin and call it back to moral truth. The prophets are, by definition, people who refuse to be creatures of their time. Moses confronted the normalized slavery of Egypt. Amos condemned the economic exploitation that Israelite society had accepted as routine. Isaiah denounced the idolatrous religiosity of a culture that practiced injustice while performing the correct rituals. Jesus overturned the tables of a religious economy that exploited the poor. In every case, the prophetic message is the same: the fact that your society has normalized this sin does not make it less sinful. God does not grade on a cultural curve. When Amos says, “Let justice roll down like waters,” he is not speaking to people who lacked moral knowledge. He is speaking to people who suppressed it. The prophets never accept “but everyone does it” as a defense; they treat it as an indictment.

A careful reader might object that the prophets themselves had moral blind spots—that they accepted slavery, polygamy, patriarchy, and ethnic exclusivism in ways we would now reject. This objection is important but ultimately misdirected. The prophetic calling is teleological; it is oriented toward God’s purposes, not indexed to the prophet’s personal moral development. The authority of a prophet does not rest on that prophet’s moral perfection. Balaam prophesied truthfully while being morally corrupt. Jonah resisted his call, resented God’s mercy, and sat in petulant anger. David was called a man after God’s own heart while committing adultery and orchestrating murder. Moses himself murdered an Egyptian and was eventually barred from the Promised Land. The prophetic tradition can contain more truth than any individual prophet grasped. The trajectory of the tradition—its cumulative moral direction—exceeds the understanding of any single participant. So, the fact that some prophets accepted slavery does not rescue the “creature of their time” defense. The question is not whether individual prophets transcended their time completely. The question is whether the moral truth toward which the tradition points was accessible to those who later claimed its authority; and on that question, the answer is clear.

The fifth and final problem is the explicit teaching of Jesus Christ. The Great Commandments—love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself—were given without caveat or historical qualification. When a lawyer asked Jesus to define “neighbor,” Jesus responded with the Parable of the Good Samaritan, deliberately choosing a despised ethnic outsider as the moral exemplar. The command to love is universal and boundary-crossing by design. The Golden Rule—“do to others as you would have them do to you”—is so simple that a child can understand it, and so devastating to slavery that no enslaver could honestly face it. Not one of them would have wished to be enslaved. History records the passionate words of Patrick Henry that epitomize the convicting cry for humanity, “Give me liberty or give me death!” The Golden Rule, taken seriously, eviscerates the moral legitimacy of slavery. Paul’s letter to Philemon, urging him to receive the enslaved runaway Onesimus “no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother,” demonstrates that the early church already possessed the theological resources to critique slavery from within. And Galatians 3:28—that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for all are one in Christ Jesus—stands as a permanent theological witness against any hierarchy of human superiority.

Taken together, these five lines of argument leave no coherent space for the “creature of their time” defense within Christian theology. The moral law is unchanging. Innate moral awareness is universal. The imago Dei prohibits the reduction of any person to property. The prophetic tradition exists to confront normalized sin. And Jesus Christ explicitly commanded love of neighbor and the Golden Rule. A Christian who deploys the “creature of their time” defense must simultaneously hold that God’s moral revelation is authoritative and that it was insufficient to overcome cultural norms—that Scripture, conscience, the Holy Spirit, and the example of Christ were all impotent in the face of the economic incentives of an enslaving society.

IV. What the Defense Actually Reveals

When Christians use the “creature of their time” defense for historical figures—or, more critically, for the tradition’s own complicity in slavery and racial oppression—they are not making a sophisticated moral-philosophical argument. They are doing something much more specific. They are using the language of moral nuance to avoid the demands of repentance and accountability.

The Judaeo-Christian tradition has a robust framework for dealing with moral failure. It is called confession and repentance. But the “creature of their time” defense short-circuits every step of that framework. It replaces confession with explanation (“They couldn’t have known better”). It replaces repentance with contextualization (“It was a different time”), and it replaces moral accountability with historical sympathy (“We should not judge them by our standards”). The defense is, in structural terms, a rejection of grace—because grace requires the acknowledgment of sin, and the defense is designed precisely to deny that acknowledgment.

This brings us to a figure strangely overlooked in most discussions of moral accountability: John the Baptist. When the religious leaders of his day came to observe his ministry, John did not offer them historical context or cultural relativism. He did not assure them that they were creatures of their time and should not be judged too harshly. Instead, he looked at them and said, “Bear fruit in keeping with repentance” (Mat 3:8). He told them that the ax was already laid to the root of the tree, and that every tree not bearing good fruit would be cut down and thrown into the fire. John’s message was not to “Feel sorry” or “Offer an academic qualification.” It was: Produce fruit. Genuine repentance is not an internal feeling, intellectual assent, or historical explanation; it is a visible, tangible turning (metanoia) that yields tangible evidence of change.

To claim the Bible while refusing to examine the moral failures of those who also claimed the Bible—to wave away slavery and genocide as “products of their time”—is to produce no fruit. It is to stand in the prophetic line and do the opposite of what the prophets did. The appropriate Christian response to the tradition’s complicity in slavery is not “They were creatures of their time.” It is confession: White people who self-identified as Christians participated in and sanctioned a grave evil. It is repentance: this participation was sin, not ignorance or cultural limitation. It is the conviction: the consequences of this sin thrive in structures of racial injustice that continue to this day. And it is fruit: a concrete, costly turning toward justice, without obfuscation and hiding behind the past.

V. Conclusion: The Defense Is Moral Evasion, Not Moral Nuance

Can Christians logically, rationally, reasonably, or morally use the “creature of their time” defense? They cannot. Not when moral awareness was overwhelmingly present as a witness within their system. And in the case of American slavery, it was.

Christian theology affirms moral absolutes grounded in God’s unchanging character. It affirms innate moral awareness written on every human heart. It affirms revealed moral truth in Scripture and prophetic witness. It affirms a prophetic tradition whose entire purpose is to confront normalized sin. And it affirms the explicit teachings of Christ—the Great Commandments, the Golden Rule, the dismantling of hierarchies. The “creature of their time” defense is not merely in tension with these affirmations; it is functionally antithetical to them.

The defense asks us to treat the depth of a society’s moral corruption as evidence of its members’ innocence. It asks us to look at a system in which the truth was spoken by the enslaved, articulated by abolitionists, betrayed by the enslavers’ own anxieties, contained in the Scriptures they read, and pointed toward by the tradition they claimed—and to conclude that the truth was somehow unavailable. That is not moral nuance; it is moral evasion.

And for those who claim the Bible while practicing that evasion, the word remains the same as it was for a previous generation that confused religious familiarity with repentance. Bear fruit. Bear fruit as an authentic demonstration of repentance.