Category Archives: morality

Interlude: Why Bother?

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Today I want to step back from the current series (The Road to Moral “Progress”: From Obedience to Self-governance to Autonomy and Beyond) and address a question some of you may be asking:  Why bother with so much history? Why approach the contemporary moral climate in such a roundabout way?

Why History?

As many of you know, I am very interested—bordering on obsession—in how certain very powerful segments of contemporary culture came to think as they do about morality. But some readers may be wondering why we need to understand the historical origins of the crazy ideas that emanate from university social science, education, and literature departments. What does it matter from where Hollywood and Silicon Valley got their twisted values? Whatever their origin—you may be saying to yourself—these ideas contradict the reason and common sense of every right-thinking person: everyone knows that we are born male or female, men can’t have babies, and people are not born equal in every respect.

Indeed (you may concede), it is helpful to realize that progressive philosophy presupposes that the goal of human progress is liberation from all limits. But we don’t need to study the entire history of modern moral philosophy to see that striving toward this goal is futile. We already know that achieving it is impossible! And if the goal that drives a historical process is impossible, we can be sure that this striving has been misdirected from the beginning. So, why trace out how it went wrong?

Good Observations…

I admit that you don’t need to know the historical origin of a bad idea to see that it is illogical or immoral or empirically false or impractical. It may be only curiosity that leads some of us to ask how otherwise intelligent people could believe that a person can be born in the “wrong” body or that it is morally permissible (or even imperative) to give female hormones to an underage school boy (with or without parental consent) or to attempt by way of surgery to transform a female body into a male body. Perhaps so. But there may be more at stake than merely satisfying a curiosity.

I see your point, but consider that these ideas appear absurd to you only because you hold to a different way of looking at the world. And your worldview also has a history. You believe in the God revealed in the Bible: the all-knowing, omnipotent, all-wise, Creator of heaven and earth, the author of the moral law, and the hope of the world. You were taught to accept the limits imposed by the Creator, to trust God even when you do not understand God’s ways, and to worship God alone. Judged by this worldview, the modern progressive view—that we ought to aspire to divine status—appears not only rebellious, disobedient, and immoral but absurd, insane, and suicidal! Viewed through this lens, we see that the divisions in contemporary culture result not merely from the clash of a few contradictory moral ideas but from the collision of two diametrically opposed worldviews.

You may suggest, then, that the most reasonable response to the errors of progressive culture is to preach the Christian gospel and explain the worldview implicit therein and call for conversion. For only then can people see what is wrong with progressive moral philosophy. I agree with this strategy up to a point. Each misguided moral perspective makes sense only when placed within the complete progressive worldview. Likewise, Christian morals make sense only within the Christian worldview. Challenging each progressive absurdity individually will probably be ineffective. Complete conversion is needed.

To share Christianity effectively with some people, however, it may be necessary to explain the historical origins of the progressive worldview. Most progressive-leaning people are not postmodern philosophers or social science professors who incessantly quote postmodern philosophers—usually, I might add, without understanding them. They are not Hollywood actors or tech industry workers who say whatever they need to say to fit into their corporate cultures. Nor are they politicians who do whatever it takes to hold together a progressive coalition. For the most part they are college educated professionals whose main impulse is to conform to the trends dominant among other college educated professionals. Their moral beliefs are an unstable mixture of progressive and traditional ideas.

Reasons for Studying History

How might learning about the historical origins of contemporary progressive philosophy help people to rethink their progressive ideas? Three ways come to mind:

1. It dispels the illusion that progressive ideas are self-evident.

When everyone around us voices progressive ideas, the rewards for conformity are great and the punishment for nonconformity is severe. We have little motivation to question them. But the study of history demonstrates the contingency of progressive morality. Chance and circumstance—not merely reason and goodwill—contributed to the construction of progressive culture. When a way of thinking loses the aura of self-evidence, we are forced to ask the question of its truth.

2. Understanding the genesis of the progressive worldview frees us to ask where it might lead in the future.

I admit the difference between historical development of an idea and the logical unfolding of an idea. Logic is timeless; history is temporal. History does not necessarily follow the path of logical implication. Chance and human freedom and caprice also influence the flow of history. Nevertheless, there is a certain resemblance between logical and historical movement. Each generation tends to modify or contradict or extend the ideas of preceding generations. One generation argues that belief in human dignity demands freedom from kings and priests. The next generation demands freedom from all traditional moral rules, and the next asserts freedom from God and nature. What’s next? Where will it all lead?

3. Historical study places before us a decision between two starkly different worldviews and ways of living.

As I said above, most people hold to a mixture of progressive and traditional beliefs. Studying the origin and historical development of progressivism demonstrates that these two types of beliefs are incompatible. Progressive moral values presuppose a progressive worldview and traditional beliefs presuppose a traditional worldview. The history that led to the creation of contemporary progressive culture gradually replaced God, Christ, and creation with humanity, science, and technology. Perhaps the study of history will help some people see that these two worldviews are incompatible. You can’t have it both ways. You have to choose between them and reform your life accordingly.

At the Edge of Ruin

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I have been engaged in a decades-long quest to understand the philosophical assumptions that have driven Western culture, especially in the United States of America, to the brink of moral anarchy and metaphysical nihilism. I have read shelves of books in service of this quest. For the past six months I have been reading J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1998) . There are very few books I think worth careful reading even once, and I could count the number of books worth reading twice on my fingers and toes. Schneewind’s book is among the latter. I read it very carefully in the spring and I am over halfway through my second reading at present.

In 554 dense pages, Schneewind analyses the thought of hundreds of thinkers. It would be foolish of me to attempt to map the bewildering variety of theories. Nevertheless, I’d like to share a few things I’ve learned from reading this history about those contemporary assumptions driving us to ruin.

The Quest of Modern Moral Philosophy

Schneewind marks the beginning of the distinctly modern approach to morality with the career of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and ends the story with Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Before modernity, moral theology and philosophy were not distinguished to the point of becoming separate spheres of knowledge and distinct academic disciplines. Until around 1600 the dominant approach to morality was obedience to authority. In the century and a half between Grotius and Kant the disciplines split apart and the dominant approach shifted progressively from obedience to authority (that is, to God, state, and church) to self-governance, and finally to autonomy (self-legislation).

What prompted the development of a distinctively modern moral philosophy? To oversimplify but not falsify matters, the Protestant Reformation (1517 and following) provoked a crisis of faith, gave birth to philosophical skepticism, and disrupted the moral and political order in Europe. Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) articulated this new skepticism in a sophisticated and fashionable way. In a collection of essays, he advised his generation on how to live well in a culture where everything is doubtful. In response to the religious conflict and the skepticism this struggle provoked, Grotius and those who followed in his wake worked to articulate a moral philosophy that could be agreed upon by people who differed greatly in religion. This objective energized a line of thinkers that lead from Grotius to Hobbes to Locke to Kant.

The Great Debate

According to Schneewind, the moral philosophers working on this project fall into many conflicting and overlapping schools of thought. But almost all of them fall on one side or another of the great debate between voluntarism and intellectualism, which has roots in late medieval philosophy. Voluntarism argues that the distinctly moral nature of an action is grounded in (and only in) the command of a superior. Obligations and duties, the distinctions between right and wrong and justice and injustice are created by (and only by) the commands of a superior. The motives for obeying the laws thus promulgated are fear of punishment and desire for reward. Voluntarism can take shape in theological or secular forms. Theological voluntarists (William of Ockham) argue that God and human beings do not share a common moral world. Right actions are right because God commands them, not because they conform to God’s moral nature. Secular voluntarists (Hobbes) argue that what is obligatory is determined by the legislation of the state. There is no law before or above the state.

 Intellectualism argues that the distinctly moral nature of an action is rooted in the eternal nature of a moral universe shared by God and other rational creatures. The distinctions between right and wrong and justice and injustice are unchangeably present in the eternal nature of things. Obligations and duties arise from the inner necessity of reason to conform to truth. We are rightly motivated to moral action by the impetus of reason to conform to the rational order. For some intellectualists God plays an essential role in their philosophy. Leibniz (1646-1716), for example, understands God as the most perfect being and views moral action (divine and human) as seeking under the guidance of reason to increase perfection in the world. Loving God is the most rational act possible for a human being. Secular leaning intellectualists set aside the question of God and ground moral action in the autonomous moral order.

Mutually Assured Destruction

Voluntarists criticize intellectualists for subordinating God to a moral order that exists independent of the divine will and choice. God’s power and freedom, voluntarists charge, are limited if God and all rational beings share an eternal moral universe. Additionally, if human beings share a moral universe with God, they can know the divine mind simply by reflecting on their own minds. And this theoretical overlap between the divine mind and the human mind opens the possibility of deification of the human mind, making God irrelevant to morality, and grounding the right in the human essence.

On the other hand, the intellectualists criticize voluntarists because they apparently make the divine nature and will inscrutable and arbitrary. As far as we can know, the voluntarist God is beyond good and evil as we understand them. God is pure power and must be obeyed for that reason alone. Additionally, a state based on the voluntarist philosophy would be by definition tyrannical.

There were many thinkers in this 150-year history that attempted to avoid the extremes of both voluntarism and intellectualism by weaving into their systems elements of both. Immanuel Kant’s concept of autonomy can be considered an attempt of this kind. Autonomy is the idea that rational beings legislate laws for themselves not by an act of will but by an act of reason, which they are obligated to obey.

What Failure Teaches

Early modern moral philosophers were searching for a rational theory of morality that could overcome doubt about the reality of a moral order in an age when traditional authorities no longer commanded universal respect. They wished to reestablish the consensus of culture that had been destroyed by the Reformation and the religious wars that followed. Their failure to find compelling grounding for morality and the exposure of the limits and problems of both voluntarism and intellectualism raised the real possibility that morality has no grounding at all.

I find it significant that no philosopher discussed in Schneewind’s history attempted to create a new morality or rejected all moral rules. All accepted the necessity of the rules that make for social peace and cooperation as well as many other traditional moral rules. Philosophers in this era, instead of taking traditional moral rules for granted or accepting them on authority, felt compelled to establish the grounds of their truth, discover how we know them, and pinpoint what motives should compel us to live according to them. They understood themselves as apologists for a moral order they thought necessary for the continuance of civilization.

However, by acknowledging that traditional rules cannot (rationally) and should not (morally) be accepted on authority or taken for granted as traditional and by failing in their quest to establish morality by reason alone, they unwittingly opened theoretical space for the idea that there are no moral structures that transcend and define the limits of individual actions.

At the Edge of Ruin

In the 225 years since Immanuel Kant, hundreds of other moral philosophers worked on the Grotius-to-Kant project. The also failed. Twentieth-century existentialism (Jean Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir) and a variety of post-modern theories are premised on the failure of the project. If morality cannot be grounded and justified by traditional authority or universal reason, and if intellectualism and voluntarism destroy each other, the only ground left for justifying anything like morality is within the inner world of the unique individual. In analogy to intellectualism, the individual’s inner world replaces the universal moral order and in analogy to voluntarism, the individual’s desires replace the will of God or the laws legislated by the state. The particular desires, feelings, sense of self, wishes, and aspirations of the individual guide that individual in their external behavior. Authenticity—that is the fit between external behavior and internal desire—replaces conformity to authority- or reason-based rules.

In view of the general skepticism in Western society toward a traditional or rational moral order, we are taught in schools and in the media, not respect for moral law and rational order, but respect for the inscrutable and arbitrary inner world of the individual. What is not acknowledged is that apart from integration into the external moral and rational order, the inner world of the individual is chaotic, irrational, and self-contradictory. Hence to affirm the inner world of the individual as the basis of the moral order is to embrace the ruinous nightmare so feared by the early modern moral philosophers. Not only are the rules necessary for social peace and cooperation left ungrounded, it becomes thinkable that an individual may justifiably refuse to live by them if they do not fit harmoniously with their inner world.

At the edge of ruin…that is where we live today.

Surviving a Cultural Apocalypse : Advice to Churches

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This essay concludes my five-part review of Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. In the interest of space I will skip a summary of the arguments presented in the four previous essays and ask the reader to consult those essays in preparation for this conclusion.

Optimism and Pessimism

In general, I am an optimist. My optimism is grounded in my faith and hope in God. God’s good will most certainly will be done in the end despite appearances to the contrary. But I am not optimistic that the cultural trends described in Trueman’s book can be reversed. Nor is Trueman optimistic; for as the title of the book foreshadows the modern self has “triumphed.” The dominant culture assumes that the psychologized, sexualized, and politicized self is the only morally acceptable view of the self, and it considers those who disagree as ignorant, bigoted, and oppressive. Efforts to marginalize traditional Christians and churches are growing in frequency and intensity. Recent court decisions, anti-traditional policies of big corporations, media caricatures of conservative Christians, indoctrination by educators, and censorship by social media giants do not bode well for the social position of confessing Christians in the USA. Legislatures and courts have recently expanded anti-discrimination laws to cover those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer. These new laws threaten to restrict the “freedom of religion” to the silent spaces of the inner self.

It is against this “rather bleak analysis” (Trueman, p. 402) that Trueman offers three bits of advice to the church:

The Moral Blindness of False Compassion

(1) “The church should reflect long and hard on the connection between aesthetics and her core beliefs and practices” (p. 402). The modern self was created in part by replacing moral categories grounded in moral law with aesthetic ones grounded in inner feelings. The LGBTQ movement has been propelled forward not by ever deepening moral insight but by rehearsing narratives of oppression, victimhood, and personal unhappiness that evoke “sympathy and empathy” (p. 403) from a culture that has already accepted the psychologized, sexualized, and politicized self. It is disturbing but not surprising that huge numbers of self-identified Christians have without knowing it assimilated to that culture. Many churches talk and act and worship in aesthetic categories and are silent about sin…unless the sins are also “sins” for the secular progressive culture. For the most part, churches long ago assimilated to what Phillip Rieff (The Triumph of the Therapeutic) called the “therapeutic culture,” marketing themselves to society as supporting the common good and promoting individual wellbeing. In response to this assimilation, Trueman calls on churches “to forgo indulging in, and thereby legitimating, the kind of aesthetic strategy of the wider culture” (p. 403). We must not allow false compassion and threats from progressive culture, to replace reason, moral law, the scriptures, and tradition as the determining factors in our moral teaching. Indeed, the church needs to rediscover Christianity’s “dogmatic, doctrinal, [and] assertive” core (p. 403).

The Church as a Moral and Theological Community

(2) The church “must also be a community” (p. 404). The church must form strong and intimate communities based on a common faith and moral vision in self-conscious opposition to the dominant therapeutic culture. These communities must meet together often to encourage, teach, and support members to live thoroughly Christian lives. Apart from such communities, individual Christians are vulnerable to the ever-present pressure to assimilate.

Recover Reason and Moral Law

(3) “Protestants need to recover both natural law and a high view of the physical body” (p. 405). Protestant neglect of natural moral law is one reason churches have been so easily assimilated to the aesthetic view of morality. Traditionally, Protestants grounded their moral teaching in specific biblical commands or principles derived from commands. A thing is wrong because the Bible says it’s wrong. Does this mean that the absence of a biblical command against something gives us permission to do it? Or, what happens when clever theological “experts” create all sorts of confusion about the meaning of a command? In future essays I plan to pursue these failings at great length.

For Trueman, recovering “a high view of the physical body” involves rediscovering God as the creator of the body, Jesus Christ as the savior of the body, and the Holy Spirit as the purifier and life force of the body. The church must resist the culture’s view of the body as a mere means of sensual pleasure or as nothing but raw material for us to drug, cut away, and shape as we please. I wish that every church could hear and take heed to the following words from Trueman:

And closely allied with this is the fact that the church must maintain its commitment to biblical sexual morality, whatever the social cost might be. If, as Rieff claims, sexual codes are definitive of cultures, then an abandonment of Christian sexual morality by the church can be done only on the basis of a rejection of the sacred framework of Christianity and at the cost of the loss of Christianity as a meaningful phenomenon (p. 406).

I placed the words “whatever the social cost might be” in the above quote in bold because I believe the cost doing this will be very high. Many will find it too high. But the cost of assimilation is even higher:

“What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?” (Matt 16:26).

Sex, Identity, and Politics: Two Incompatible Moral Visions

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Where Are We?

In previous essays I’ve tried to get to the roots of the moral crisis that engulfs contemporary culture. At the origin of this crisis stands the abandonment of the long-accepted notion that human beings acquire experiential knowledge of the good as communities and transmit it through tradition. Simultaneously, modern culture adopted a romantic notion of the good as a feeling of well-being and an individualist view of how we come to know the good.

Given its subjective view of the good, modern culture can no longer make sense of the right as a moral rule that conforms to the moral law. Hence the “right” becomes a private assertion of “what is right for me” or it is identified with legislated human law made through the political process. The simmering crisis becomes open conflict when society’s subjective views of the good and right become concrete disagreement about specific moral behaviors. These disagreements can be settled only by coercion in one of its modern forms: protest, cancellation, intimidation, or legislated human law.

Christians who submit themselves to the authority of Jesus Christ and the scriptures and retain the traditional view of the good and the right find themselves under fire. When confessing Christians oppose the dominant culture’s subjective view of the good and the right they are made to appear backward, oppressive, insensitive, cruel, and downright hateful. Indeed, they are portrayed as enemies of humanity worthy of marginalization, legal proscription, and even persecution.

Clash of Moral Visions

We are now at the point in our discussion of the moral crisis where I need to speak about specific behaviors. And I want to begin with the body and sex. In the contemporary controversy over the use of our bodies we see most vividly the clash between two irreconcilable moral visions. During the course of the last one hundred years Western society has been increasingly sexualized and sex has been politicized. The reasons for this development are complex, and I will explain them in greater detail later in this series. However I will say this in advance: progressive culture from its beginnings in the Enlightenment to today sees Christianity as the greatest enemy standing in the way of its advance. With the rise of the Romantics in the early nineteenth century, nascent progressive culture came to see that Christianity’s limiting of sexual relations to lifetime marriage between man and woman grounded in a sacred moral order served as the foundation of conservative and traditional culture. The family is the perennial bearer of tradition. If society is to be made into a progressive utopia, Christianity must be marginalized if not destroyed. If Christianity is to be destroyed, marriage and the traditional family must be destroyed. And marriage and the traditional family can be destroyed only by removing the limits on sexual activity and transforming the meaning of sex. Sex must be removed from the sacred moral order and reconceived as a means of self-expression and self-fulfillment. Without tradition, isolated, and with their identity being reduced to race and gender, individuals may then be willing to become wards of the progressive state and its educational institutions.

We’ve Been Here Before

But the clash between moral visions is not new. The New Testament is replete with warnings about this collision of worlds: two opposing kingdoms (Col 1:3), life and death (Col 2:3), visible and invisible (2 Cor 4:18), the way of the Spirit and the way of the flesh (Gal 5:13-26), and many others. One of the clearest contrasts is found in Colossians 3:1-14. Paul contrasts two ways of living as opposition between two orientations, to things above or to earthly things:

Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. 3 For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. 4 When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

5 Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. 6 Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. 7 You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. 8 But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. 9 Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. 11 Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.

12 Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. 13 Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. 14 And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.

The New Testament clearly views the moral life as an essential aspect of a comprehensive and internally consistent way of life, at once religious, spiritual, and moral. Its specific moral rules are not isolated and arbitrary. The moral prohibitions in Colossians 3:5-11, quoted above, are interrelated. All of them deal with “earthly things.” The list in verse 5 centers on misuse of the natural urges of physical body: “sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed.” The list in verse 8 has to do with misuse of our need for acceptance and fellowship from others: “anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language.” The physical dimension cannot be separated from the social and neither from our relationship to God. We use our bodies to communicate with others and our physical urges almost always involve interaction with others. They can be used to honor God or disrespect him.

Body, Soul, and God

The New Testament affirms the created goodness of the body. But the body is not absolutely good. Its goodness lies in the possibility of its proper use as determined by the intention of creator. It can be misused and misdirected. Those whose minds, hearts, and wills are set “on things above” want to use their bodies for the Lord, but those whose minds, hearts, and wills are set “on things on the earth” view their bodies as instruments for their own pleasure and power. Those who direct their minds toward Christ desire to learn the purpose for which God created their bodies and the rules for their proper use. To those whose minds are set on earthly things, the Bible’s moral rules for the proper use of the body seem strange, unnatural, and oppressive.

The Bible speaks of human beings as body and soul. We are physical and mental. We possess freedom at some levels of our being, but at other levels the automatic processes of nature operate apart from our choice or awareness. The Bible is not concerned with the philosophical problem of the composition of human beings, with debates about the nature of the soul and the relationship between soul and body. It is concerned with the orientation of the whole human being toward or away from God. But the Bible acknowledges what we all know from experience, that there is a hierarchical order in the relationship between body and soul. The mind is the ruling aspect and the body needs to be ruled and guided by the mind, which in turn needs to be informed by the moral law and common sense. Our minds enable us to gain the wisdom we need to discern between good and bad and right and wrong. The body apart from the mind possesses no conscious knowledge of the good and right. It works more or less automatically and instinctively. (Contemporary culture reverses the order by looking to the irrational passions–in contemporary terms “the inner self”–for guidance about what is real and good.)

Now consider the two directions mentioned Colossians 3:1-14 again in light of our created nature as body and soul. Paul speaks of the two ways of living, two possible orientations to God of our whole persons. As whole persons we are body and soul, but the body must be guided by the soul. But the mind must be illuminated by moral and spiritual truth from above in order to guide the body to its proper end, which is to serve God. Paul urges us to set our minds and hearts on “things above.” Unless the mind is set on “things above” it cannot lead the body to do good and right. When the mind forsakes “things above,” the body begins to dominate the mind, which then becomes a mere instrument we use to seek out ways to please the body. It thinks only about “earthly things.” Instead of rising higher to become more and more like God, human beings fall to earth to become mere smart animals. Dangerous ones too!

The Good, the Right, and the Bible

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In the previous essays we learned that human beings discover what is good for them through reason and experience. Each new generation must be taught the knowledge of the good acquired and tested by billions of individuals over thousands of years. The knowledge of what is good for us is communal and traditional. It should be obvious to any thoughtful person that no individual can acquire this knowledge from private experience alone.

The contemporary moral crisis was in part precipitated by modern culture’s abandonment of the notion that human beings acquire experiential knowledge of the good as a community and transmit it through tradition. In place of the notion of universal human nature and the goods necessary for its health, modern culture adopted a romantic notion of the good as a feeling of well-being and an individualist view of how we come to know the good. Not only do many people today reject the ideas of human nature, moral law, and the good and right as discovered and defined in tradition, to their ears these ideas sound completely foreign and incomprehensible.

Morality and the Bible

Not surprisingly, then, when Christians appeal to the Bible to determine what is good and right they are met with incredulity and hostility from the dominant culture. Appealing to the Bible strikes modern people as strange for two reasons. First, the Bible preserves a view of the good learned by the Jewish and Christian communities over many thousands of years and passed on in a tradition. Since our contemporaries do not acknowledge that communal experience and tradition are the only ways individual human beings can learn about the good, they reject appeals to the Bible as a moral authority. They would reject the authority of any other community and tradition for the same reason.

Second, Christians do not just appeal to the long-term experience of a community. They also equate the view of the good presented in the Bible with divinely revealed moral law. The rules and laws of the Bible present themselves not only as human discoveries of what is good for human beings but also as divine commands. The natural consequence of not adhering to the good is enduring something bad. But the consequence of disobeying a divine command is divine punishment.

Perhaps this second aspect of the Christian message is the primary reason for the hostility of the ascendant culture. It is one thing to warn people of the negative consequences of their actions. It is another to invoke divine disapproval and threat of punishment in addition to the natural consequences of the bad act. The first warning may cause people to smile at our naiveté, but the second will be taken as an insult and will evoke anger.

But it is not just outsiders who experience difficulty reconciling the good with the right and comprehending the relationship between learning about the good in communal experience and learning about it from a divine command. Believers, too, are often disturbed by the thought that God punishes bad behavior with pain in addition to the act’s natural consequences. Perhaps they are troubled even more by the thought that God might command something unrelated to any obvious good and punish transgressors even when negative consequences from the act itself are wholly absent. The moral crisis touches the church more than we would like to admit.

God and Morality

Why might a divinely commanded moral law may be needed above and beyond humanly discovered good? I am assuming for the moment that we at least understand the reasonableness of looking to the moral tradition contained in the Bible for instruction about the good. I admit that those totally sold out to the romantic view that the good is whatever gives us a pleasant feeling will not grant this assumption. I will address their rejection in due time. For now, I want to address those who are at least open to the idea that it is wise for an individual to accept the moral authority of a long-continuous community and tradition above private experience or abstract theories. But why divine commands?

In view of the human tendency to degenerate into sensuality and violence, we can see the value of divine guidance and inspirations to help lawgivers, prophets, and religious and moral reformers formulate rules that guide a community toward what is truly good. This is certainly how the Bible sees it. After the fall in Genesis, chapter 3, humanity keeps on its downward moral trajectory until there is only one good human being, Noah. From the biblical point of view, the customs of the peoples surrounding Israel are evil and inhumane. The laws given by God through Moses, however, are good and wise (See Psalm 119).

Admittedly, most of the moral laws in the Bible could have been learned from communal experience and they are similar to the highest moral aspirations of nations other than ancient Israel. However human beings are inclined to follow their immediate desires rather than reason and experienced-based wisdom. And this inclination can even poison the moral traditions of whole cultures, for example, Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18 and 19). Hence, from the biblical perspective, God’s decision to educate his people about the truly good by giving laws is a gracious act.

A Christian Morality?

What does viewing biblical morality as divinely commanded add to the moral authority of the Bible considered as a deposit of wisdom from a long-continuous community? The previous section began to address these questions. As I suggested there human beings tend toward sensuality and violence as individuals and as civilizations. And, although it is possible to learn much about what is good for human beings from experience, most people are more interested in immediate pleasure than the truly good. Hence the moral traditions of whole cultures can become polluted and self-destructive or so marginalized that they have little impact on the mass of individuals. The Bible assumes that human civilization has become so corrupt that divine intervention is necessary. The story of the Old Testament includes divinely commissioned lawgivers and prophets sent to a degenerate culture to reveal what is good.

There is also another reason Christian teachers invoke divine commands. Human experience is limited to life in this world. Experience can teach much about what promotes human happiness and flourishing in this life. But belief that God is creator of this world sets human life into a larger context, beyond the range of what can be learned by ordinary experience. If our sole end is living long and well in this life, then good is whatever helps us achieve this goal. But if God created human beings for a greater end, then good is whatever helps us achieve that end.

If we have a God-intended end beyond living long and well in this body, only God can tell us what it is and how to achieve it. We cannot learn this good from individual or collective experience. It should not be surprising, then, that Christians view the moral rules Christians live by as divine commands. This view makes perfect sense, because in Christianity the humanly chosen goal of living long and well is subordinated to the divinely chosen end of eternal life with God. This shift changes everything. Life in the body as a whole is now directed beyond itself. Living long and well in this life alone is no longer the end that determines what is good. We need God’s help both to know and to do the truly good. Those who believe that Jesus is the risen Lord will gladly receive his and his apostles’ instructions about how to live in view of the true end of human life revealed in him.

There are two big reasons the moral life to which the New Testament calls us seems strange and oppressive to our age: (1) even experienced-based moral rules, which focus only on living well and long in this body, sound strange and oppressive to many people. Never in any society has the majority been virtuous, even by Aristotle’s standards! (2) Unless one wholeheartedly embraces the Christian vision of the God-intended end of human life, living here and now in faith for that unseen end appears extremely foolish.

Is There a Moral Law and How Do We Learn What it Teaches?

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The Right

In previous essay in this series we examined the concept of “the good” for its relevance to morality. We discovered that the good is not by itself a moral category. Strictly speaking, the mere fact that something is good for us does not obligate us to seek it. It leaves undecided whether or not we are at fault for refusing it. In my view, a sense of obligation is essential to moral experience. And this requirement leads us to the concept of “the right.”

Hence the concept of “the right” is indispensable for moral reasoning. Just as something is good because it is “good for” something else, an action is right because it corresponds to a norm, standard, or authority. The answer to a math problem will be right when the student understands the symbols and follows the rules for the operations. A history of a Civil War battle is not right unless it corresponds to the facts. In the same way, a human action is morally right only if it measures up to a moral law. And an act is morally wrong if it breaks a moral law.

Human Law

We are familiar with the concept of human law, that is, law legislated by the state. The state claims authority to make and enforce laws for the common good of its citizens. A law is a statement that forbids or requires a certain act and prescribes the penalties for infractions. It is legislated by a legislative authority, enforced by an executive, and adjudicated by judges. But we know that the state is not the ultimate moral authority and that the demands of the state are not right simply because it commands them. Human laws can be right or wrong, just or unjust, good or bad. There is hardly any need to marshal examples of unjust laws. They are all too common in human history. But we can judge a human law to be wrong only when we see that it is out of line with a higher law by which human laws must be judged. They are not wrong simply because you don’t like them.

Natural Law

What is this higher law? How is it legislated and made known? On what authority, and who enforces and adjudicates it? For many thinkers, nature is a prime candidate for this higher law. After all, nature exists independently of human culture and law. So, let’s consider the possibility that there is a natural law that stands above legislated law.

Upon consideration, natural law can mean only two things. Natural law describes either (1) the basic physical laws according to which nature invariably works or it describes (2) the conditions and actions required for human flourishing. In neither of these senses of natural law do we come under an obligation to act or refrain from acting. We have no obligation to act consistently with basic physical laws, since we have no freedom of choice in this area. Obligation and moral law concern only free actions. Even if natural law can tell us what is “good for” us, it cannot obligate us to perform it. The concept of the good does not include the concept of the right. Hence natural law can have the force of moral law only if the order of nature derives from the will of a moral authority above nature. The natural order is to the divine will what human law is to human legislators. If there were no God or anything like God, the order of nature would be a brute fact with no moral authority. Our actions would be limited only by nature’s physical laws. There would be no class of possible actions that ought to be done or ought not to be done. The idea of an unjust human law would make no sense.

Creation

For Christian theology, the order within nature derives from the will and act of the Creator. The world is the creation of an infinitely good, just, and wise God. Hence the true order of nature, including those actions that enable human beings to flourish and achieve their natural ends, possesses moral authority. We are, therefore, obligated to seek to know and follow the law of nature, that is, those conditions and actions that enable human beings to function properly, flourish, and achieve their end. In this way, what is good for human beings (“the good”) and our obligation to obey the moral law (“the right’) converge in the will of God. Or, to say it another way, if we consistently do the good, we will also be acting rightly. And if we consistently do the right, we will also achieve the good.

Where Are We?

Where are we in the series? We’ve arrived at a way to conceive of the union of the good and the right. The will of God is reflected in the created order. So far, so good! But there is much more ground to cover. Do human beings have ends beyond nature? Is there a divine law not given in nature? How do we learn what is good and right? If good and right ultimately coincide, why do we need both concepts, and which is primary?

How Do We Learn Good and Right?

To understand and deal with the contemporary moral crisis, it is first necessary to get clear ideas of the good and the right. I think we’ve accomplished this: The good is what is truly good for us in the most comprehensive sense and the right is a rule for human behavior that corresponds to moral law. But these concepts are still rather abstract. Perhaps it’s time to talk about how we know what specific things and actions are good for us.

The Good and Experience

We don’t come into the world knowing what is good for us. As infants and small children we need adults to protect us from bad things and provide us with good things. Almost immediately, adults begin to teach us the difference between good and bad. Somewhere along the way to adulthood we learn from trusted others and from our personal experience enough to survive. We learn about what is good for our physical bodies. Fire, electricity, and busy streets are dangerous. We need to eat our vegetables and drink our milk. We also learn social goods and evils. We don’t bite our playmates, and we share our toys.

But all the adults in our lives were also at one time children and had to learn what is good and bad from the previous generation of adults…and that generation from the one before it. We can’t just keep resorting to the previous generation. From where did the knowledge of what is good and bad for human beings originate? Remember what we said in earlier chapters. To say that something is good for us means that it enables us to flourish and achieve our natural end. The goodness of a thing or act is revealed when it actually causes human beings to flourish and achieve their ends. It can’t be known theoretically. To say it another way, human beings learn what is good for them by experience evaluated by reason.

Community and Tradition

But we cannot learn all we need to know about what is good and bad for us through our own experience! Indeed, by the time we can survive without constant supervision, we’ve already learned from others a way of thinking about the world and we’ve internalized hundreds of rules about good and bad. We are born into a human community that is already heir to thousands of years of traditional wisdom. We inherit billions of years of accumulated human experience. Hence, knowledge of good and bad comes to individuals in the form of traditional wisdom formulated in rules, maxims, advice, observations, and sometimes in laws. The best and most enduring parts of this wisdom are often preserved in fables, parables, and proverbs. In every age there are wise men and women who pay special attention to this tradition. They collect it, organize it, and write it down. We are all beneficiaries of their work.

Notice that although rational reflection on experience is the original teacher of good and bad, the lessons of experience are mediated to individuals by language, the language of rules. Though the rules derived from the collective experience of the human family are not infallible, it seems foolish indeed for individuals to flout the lessons learned from billions of years of human experience in favor of their limited and as yet incomplete experience in living. Nor would a theoretical notion, such as autonomy or equality, suffice to overturn the authority of such a huge reservoir of experience. Traditional wisdom is derived from millions of completed lives, observed and assessed from within and without. If we really desire the truly good, we should acknowledge the limits of our individual wisdom and pay reverent attention to the wisdom of the moral tradition.

Summary

We’ve learned some important lessons. Human beings learn what is truly good for them through experience, and this good can be confirmed again and again by experience. But we’ve seen that we cannot discover what is truly good for us from our own private experience. We depend on the experience of generations of those who came before us. These lessons help us understand some things about the biblical vision of good and right that are often obscured in contemporary discussions. Given what we’ve learned about how human beings actually come to know the good, it should not be surprising that Christians look to the laws, parables, proverbs, and direct moral teaching of the Old and New Testaments to learn what is truly good for them. Everyone looks to moral tradition in one form or another. We have no choice. But Christians understand the moral tradition contained in the scriptures to be based on more than mere human experience, and it is concerned with a wider horizon and a greater end than life in this world. Christians believe that this human experience was elevated and deepened by divine revelation and providence and by the working of the divine Spirit.

Reclaiming the Vocabulary of Morality

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In the previous post it became clear that contemporary progressive culture does not use moral words to convey clear ideas about an objective moral order. It uses them instead to convey feelings of approval or disapproval. One of my first goals, then, is to free moral words from their servitude to emotion and restore them to their proper rational function.

The Good

I’d like to begin by reflecting on the concepts of the good and the right, two of the most basic categories necessary for conducting reasonable discussions on moral questions.

I find it interesting that even though the word “good” is very general, it is indispensable for discussions of morality. The meaning of the word can range from weak expressions of pleasure to assertions of superlative excellence. It can be used to express personal preference or to pronounce moral judgment. It can be misused as synonym for the “right” or it can mean the “pleasant.” Given the wide range of meanings for the word good, it would seem important to be clear and specific in our use of the term in discussions about morality.

Examination of the ways the word good is used shows that in every case, except in reference to God or its misuse to mean the right, it is used in a relative sense in which something is declared to be “good for” something else. Apart from God, who is absolutely good, any finite good can be “good for” one thing but bad for something else. Salt is good for preserving meat but bad for snails.

A thing can be “good for” someone in two senses. It can give pleasure or promote well-being. Likewise, it can be bad for someone in two senses. It can cause unpleasant feelings or reduce well-being. To say that something is good in the first sense (pleasure) is to express the connection between it and a feeling of pleasure. Examples are abundant: that was a good meal, a good show, or a good experience.

An experience can give momentary pleasure but not be “good for” one in the sense of promoting well-being. We all know, for example, that overeating is not good for you. And an experience can be “good for” your well-being but not be especially pleasant. We can readily offer examples: “Eat your vegetables because they are ‘good for’ you.” “Moderate exercise is ‘good for’ you.” and “Honesty is the best policy.” Such assertions declare that possessing these goods, regardless of whether or not they give immediate pleasure, advances your well-being. We can distinguish these two meanings of the word good by naming one “the pleasant” and the other “the useful.”

Let’s draw a preliminary conclusion. To engage in fruitful moral discussions it is important not to confuse the two meanings of “good,” pleasant and useful. If one party uses the word good to mean the immediately pleasant and the other party uses it to mean that which is productive of long-term or ultimate well-being, the discussion will be futile. We can hardly dispute a claim that someone finds something pleasant or unpleasant. The claim is the proof! Hence, this type of assertion about goodness is not subject to rational debate. But a claim that something is productive of long-term or ultimate well-being is subject to discussion and dispute.

What is the difference? The assertion that X is a means to long-term or ultimate well-being is a claim about what our physical, psychological, moral, or spiritual natures require for proper and optimum functioning. This can be true only if within these dimensions of human existence there are objective structures and inherent ends, subject to rational analysis. Additionally, these structures and ends must remain constant regardless of our subjective feelings.

Analysis of the concept of the good has led us to the concept of human nature, its proper functioning, and its ultimate end. Is there such a thing as human nature, and, if so, how can we discover what is “good for” it? Do human beings have a natural (and perhaps a supernatural) end, and do we know what it is? These questions lead us to our most basic beliefs about God and creation.

Natures and Ends

In the previous section we concluded that we call a thing “good” when we want to express the relation of being “good for” between it and something else. To say a particular hammer is good is to say that it is good for doing what hammers are meant to do, drive nails and demolish things. In analogy, to say a particular human being is “good” is to say that this human being is capable of doing and actually does what human beings are meant to do. In the same way, a particular human action is good if it does for human beings what human actions are meant to do for human beings.

Notice that hammers, human beings, and human acts can be called “good” only if we know what they are meant to be and do. The idea that human beings are meant to be and do certain things and not others implies that they possess natures and ends. Put as simply as I can, a nature is the design plan or structure of a thing that makes it the kind of thing it is. Inherent in the idea of a design plan is proper function and purpose. Just as a hammer’s design plan makes it suitable for driving nails but not for threading needles, human nature directs human beings to certain ends, not to others. And certain acts enable human nature to function properly to achieve its intended end and others do not.

The idea of the good is relevant to moral issues only if human beings possess natures that determine the conditions under which they can function properly to achieve the end at which their nature aims. Apart from the idea of human nature and its end, the “good” will always be reduced to the “pleasant.” And the pleasant is not a moral category. Whether you find a certain activity pleasant or not cannot demonstrate whether it is good for you. As we will see in the course of this series, at the center of our contemporary moral crisis is loss of faith that human beings possess natures and ends. Human nature and its ends have been replaced by the arbitrary human will.

Philosophers from Aristotle onward attempted to describe the essential features of human nature and the ends toward which it is naturally directed. Aristotle’s work on this subject in Nicomachean Ethics (350 B.C.) exercised profound influence on Western ethical thought, and it still commands respect today. Although such philosophical ethics as Aristotle developed can play a role, Christian ethics adds three faith presuppositions to Aristotle’s naturalistic perspective: (1) God is the Creator of human nature; (2) Jesus Christ is the perfect example of a good human being; and (3) union with God is the end of human nature.

For Christian moral thought, the idea that human beings possess natures and an ends is securely grounded in the confession that God is the maker of heaven and earth. God created human beings in his “image” and “likeness” (Genesis 1:26, 27). Throughout the Bible, God deals with human beings as if they were designed to function properly by doing certain things and not others. Certain individuals are set forth as examples of “good” human beings. Jesus Christ serves as the supreme example of a perfect human life. Certain commands direct us to engage in activities that show us the best of which human beings are capable, chiefly the commands to love God above all else and our neighbors as ourselves. The resurrection of Jesus Christ and our union with him in baptism ground our hope of eternal life and union with God in the general resurrection.

In sum, the Christian understanding of the good is determined by the following convictions: (1) the most important characteristic of human nature is that it is the image and likeness of God; (2) human nature’s proper function is to image the perfect character of God in the world as informed by the example of Jesus Christ; and (3) human nature is directed by its Creator toward the end of eternal life and union with God. Nothing can be considered good for us that contradicts or inhibits these three principles.

These three foundational principles provide us with lenses with which to read the Bible along with the church to fill out in greater detail the character of a good human being, that is, a picture of what the Creator intended human beings to do and become.

A Century of “Churching” the Half Converted: A Well-Deserved Obituary

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In the previous essay, I argued that modern American (and Western) society has been for quite some time unraveling the intimate bond between religious practice and personal morality forged by the prophets of ancient Israel, taught by Jesus, and maintained by the church. Whereas I am very concerned about the effects of this dissolution on American society—nothing short of its re-paganization with all the consequences thereunto appertaining—my concern in these essays is how readily the church is assimilating to this separation. The fact that this assimilation is happening to one degree or another is not in doubt. For me, understanding why it is happening and what we can do in response are the most pressing questions.

Why Now?

To answer this question I need to revisit a central argument I made in the summer 2020 series on Rethinking Church. After the persecutions of the early period ended (A.D. 313), the church in the Western world got used to peace, privilege, and power. The church in the United States of America, though not officially established as a state church, remained privileged and respected within the general society throughout the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. The church accepted and relished its implied responsibility to function as priest, conscience, and counsellor to society. It felt no great tension with the social consensus about what constituted the common good of the nation. After all, the church had been the tutor of Western society for nearly two millennia.

As society gradually disengaged morality from religion, it became harder and harder for the church to pursue its essential mission of witnessing to Christ while also serving as priest to society. The religious task of “converting the unconverted”—dominant in nineteenth-century revivalism—was gradually replaced in the second half of the Twentieth Century by the quasi-secular task of “churching the unchurched.” The church urged people to become actively involved in a church and attempted to influence general society to rise at least to the standard of moral decency. It could comfort itself with the thought that most people believe in God even if not everyone attends church regularly.

To achieve the goal of “churching” as many people as possible, churches sometimes “lowered the price of admission,” emphasized the worldly advantages of being church members, and in practice if not in theory treated members’ personal moral lives as private. As long as general society and the church shared certain basic moral standards that could pass—unless closely inspected—for biblical morality, it was not so obvious that “the churched” were more numerous in churches than “the converted.” However as American society gradually came to reject one Christian doctrine and moral teaching after another, it became harder for churches to ignore the distinction between the churched and the converted.

A Forced Choice

The church now faces a choice it cannot evade: will it continue to assimilate to the evolving secular culture in order to continue the project of churching the half converted at a discounted price or will it wholly renounce its supporting role to a rapidly re-paganizing culture and again take up the divinely-given task of witnessing to Christ? As the rhetorical form of the question implies, you know which alternative I recommend. For it is no longer possible to pretend that a truly Christian church can function as chaplain to a thoroughly pagan culture. We should have known this all along, because Jesus did not say, “Go into all the world and make people slightly better” but “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matt 28:19).

The Idol in the Cathedral

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The church faces challenges in every age and in every place. They arise from outside and inside, from rulers and from the people. Some strike a sudden blow and others develop slowly. In the moment, it is hard to tell which threats are superficial and ephemeral and which are profound and enduring. What we think is our greatest challenge may turn out to have been a passing fad and an issue we hardly noticed may prove to have been an existential threat. Only with historical hindsight can we discern with any clarity the difference between the two. But we live now, and have no choice but to use the wisdom we have to deal with the challenges we face.

What are the challenges confronting us today and which one is the greatest? Perhaps there is more than one answer to this question. The church exists throughout the world, and circumstances differ greatly from place to place. The greatest challenge for the church in Nigeria may not be the most pressing problem for the church in Russia or Iran or Canada. I cannot answer for my brothers and sisters living in Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America. I live in the United States of America, and since I live in the State of California it is even somewhat venturesome to speak as an American Christian. For the church in the United States is quite diverse. Even the city of Los Angeles is dizzyingly multicultural. Nevertheless, I would like to share my perspective.

Separating Religion and Personal Morality

Contemporary American culture separates religion (or spirituality) from personal morality, and contemporary Christians seem to be assimilating to that separation at a rapid pace. In my view, this move is one of the most serious doctrinal errors, even heresies, of our time. It is not unusual to hear people express warm personal piety, talk about the love of God and the grace of the Holy Spirit, celebrate Advent and Easter, and speak about the resurrection and eternal life but find it impossible to utter words condemning personal sins having to do with sexual promiscuity, jealously, greed, cursing, selfish ambition, filthy language, litigiousness, adultery, abortion, divorce, factionalism, envy, malice, lying, drunkenness, and many more (See 1 Cor 6:7-20; Rom 1:18-32; Gal 5:19-21; Col 3:5-11). The list of texts of Scripture that churches are embarrassed to read in the public assembly grows yearly. Why am I so concerned about this? Why is this my number one heresy? To answer these questions I need to remind you of something the church used to know but has forgotten.

Ethical Monotheism and Idolatry

The religion of the Old Testament is often called “ethical monotheism.” In stark contrast to the Canaanite and other religions contemporary with ancient Israel, the prophets of Israel taught that there is only one God and that God is perfectly righteous, having no evil impulses. Israel’s God demanded that his people practice personal holiness, justice, and mercy as a religious duty. But Israel always lived on the edge of reversion to idolatry and pagan indulgence. The classic example of this defection is found in Exodus 32:2-6 (See also 1 Cor 10:1-6):

“He [Aaron] took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.” So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.”

The union of personal morality and religious practice became central to the faith of Israel and the Judaism contemporary with Jesus and so passed into Christianity. The New Testament’s critique of idolatry is nearly always at the same time a critique of the idolatrous separation between personal morality and religion. The first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans is an excellent example of the connection between pagan idolatry and immorality: The pagans, says Paul, “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another” (Rom 1:23-24).

Invisible Idols

The pagan impulse to separate religion from personal morality is strong and ever present for the simple reason that, like water poured out, human beings always look for the easiest path and the broadest way. Self-indulgence is the natural ethics and idolatry is the natural religion of every human being. The advantage of idolatry is that we get to “have our cake and eat it too.” We can entice the supernatural powers to work for us at the bargain price of a few sacrifices and prayers while we pursue our bodily lusts and worldly ambitions. Idols do not care how we live our personal lives. They are lenient and indulgent and want us to be happy in our own way. After all, idols are imaginary gods we create in our own image.

Contemporary culture worships the idol of the autonomous Self, which must be given maximum freedom to pursue happiness in its own unique way and create its own authentic identity. Any attempt to impose on this self a moral code such as the one found in the New Testament is an outrageous sacrilege. Modern culture does not object to the idea of god as long as it is not the God of the Old or New Testament, the God for whom personal morality is a religious duty, the God who cares with whom you have sex, how you spend your money, what you think, and how you talk.

The Idol in the Cathedral

In my view, then, the church faces a stark choice with profound consequences. Will it remain faithful to the biblical view of God in which religion and personal morality are inextricably bound together or will it replace God with a pagan idol whose sole function is to sanctify our self-indulgent pursuit of pleasure?

To be continued…

On the Difference between Morality and Legality

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In the previous essay I posed a question on which contemporary society is greatly confused: “What is the difference between ethics and politics, between what is right and what is legal, and between morality and legality?” I am perplexed about why people get the two spheres confused. The distinction is very clear, and I propose to make that clarity obvious in this post.

Some Definitions in the Political Sphere

1. In the sense I wish to use it, politics is the process by which people acquire the power to legislate and enforce policy within an established state whose legitimacy is generally accepted.

2. Political philosophy is rational reflection that aims to establish the rational grounds and just order of a legitimate state.

3. Legality is the quality attributable to an act because of its lack of conflict with the laws of the state having jurisdiction where the act takes place.

4. In law, an act is presumed to be legal if it is not forbidden by law.

Some Definitions in the Moral Sphere

1. Morality is the sphere of human behavior covered by the rules, laws, and maxims that determine what free agents ought to do independently of any calculation of consequences.

2. Ethics is a rational discipline that works to clarify the nature of morality by seeking the most basic grounds that justify its claims, defining its basic vocabulary—right, wrong, obligation, duty, good, and law—and deriving rules, maxims, and principles for morally relevant behavior.

3. Right is a quality attributable to an action because it ought to be done.

4. Wrong is a quality attributable to an action because it ought not to be done.

Two Areas of Overlap and Potential Conflict

Political Philosophy and Moral Philosophy

The best candidate for overlap between morality and politics is the space covered by political philosophy. Political philosophy, unlike the normal political process, cannot take the legitimacy of the state for granted. It must ground it in some reality capable of giving legitimacy to the state. Since the late Seventeenth Century, Western states have grounded the legitimacy of the state not in God or nature but in the social contract. States have the right to promulgate laws and enforce them on unwilling residents because of an implicit contract that binds each citizen to the others under law for the good of all.

Hence the legitimacy of the state is based on the consent of the people, and those who break the law violate their contract. The state is legitimate because it was created to enforce the social contract for the common good. Notice the moral rule embedded in the state’s foundation: the moral efficacy of the social contract is grounded in the principle that one ought not to break one’s promise to work for common good. In other words, the moral validity of the social contract is grounded in something like the “golden rule” in its negative form: you ought not do to others what you do not want them to do to you. A state’s legitimacy, then, derives ultimately from the moral obligation to keep one’s promises. If there is no moral obligation here, then the social contract is meaningless.

Sometimes the Same Acts are Forbidden

The second sphere of overlap arises because the laws of a state sometimes command or forbid behaviors that are also commanded or forbidden in the moral sphere. It is illegal to kill another human being without legal justification, and it is also immoral. It is immoral to rob, steal, and swindle, and these things also violate our moral obligations.

Here is the difference between legality and morality:

To say that killing another human being is illegal says only that a state has legislated a law that forbids this act. To say that killing another human being is immoral says nothing about its legality but only that it ought not to be done.

An act can be illegal within a state but morally obligatory under a higher law. Likewise, an act can be declared permitted by a state but be known to be immoral by a conscience in tune with the moral law. Something can be declared a “right” by the state when it is “wrong” measured by the moral law. Clearly, when we say a law is unjust we do not mean that it is illegal. We mean that it is immoral.

Next Time: the conflict over the boundary between morality and legality.