I think this is exactly it. We all (well most of us) inherently, in our guts, think some things are really truly “wrong” and other things “right” irrespective of any human opinion or any human culture. It’s just that the existence of absolute morality makes that position rational to hold whereas if there is no moral absolutes, that feeling of ours is irrational and deceptive, and we have no logical right to criticize another’s moral conviction as truly “wrong” or “evil”. (but its not to say that people who don’t believe in moral absolutes can’t still choose to behave according to a set of moral standards that they choose).
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Excellent point. John Lennox makes use of it in one of his talks.
I start a step earlier: I note that something has always existed, or we wouldn’t be here; then that there are two choices concerning this always-existent whatever, either it has mind or doesn’t; then that if it has mind then it is logical to consider it the Creator of the universe – and if the Creator actually exists, wouldn’t He/It/She be the arbiter of morality? and thus there could be no morality that the Creator would have to follow?
It was a step in the right direction. I make the point that anything stricter would have been regarded as a foolish rules – and ask “And how do you react to foolish rules?” So God made as much of a change as the people could stand.
When the American South is mentioned, I note that supporting that form of slavery was very bad Christology – which requires an explanation, obviously, but it’s something the early church recognized, that treating someone bought and paid for with God’s own blood is blasphemous.
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A friend shared with me an article in First Things written in 2020 by Wright “Loving To Know” where he expands on his epistemology of love. I’ll include a snippet of it here in this thread because of our discussion of subjectivity vs. objectivity.
An epistemology of love, seeing the creation as the outflowing of divine creative love, must pay attention to that creation. It isn’t enough to know that it is God’s creation, and so to infer that we already know all that’s important to know about it. Love demands patient curiosity. Love transcends the objective/subjective divide, because as the image-bearing stewards of creation, as liturgists of creation’s praise, as prophets called to speak creation’s reality, we humans are called not to a cool, detached appraisal of the world, nor to a self-indulgent grasping of it, but to a delighted exploration and exposition, in which respect and enjoyment go together.
If this is true with respect to science, it is true also with respect to history. Ever since Lessing’s dictum, following on the historical skepticism of Gibbon and Hume, many have concluded that we can’t know very much about “what actually happened,” since all we can discover is what people said about things that might have happened; and so on. Sometimes this seems like an endless regress. Instead of recovering Jesus, we recover Mark’s Jesus, or perhaps Mark’s source’s Jesus, or whatever. But this hyper-caution, bred from a pseudo-scientific quasi-objectivity, is unwarranted. Yes, we must always allow for the bias of sources, just as the scientist factors in the perspective of the researcher. But just as particles of light really exist even though our observing them changes them, so the fact that fake news exists doesn’t mean that nothing happened.
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- Premise #1: All violence, regardless the perpetrator, is immoral, unjustifiable, and inexcusable.
- Fact: John 19:10. So Pilate said to Him, “You do not speak to me? Do You not know that I have authority to release You, and I have authority to crucify You?” 11 Jesus answered, “You would have no authority over Me, unless it had been given you from above; for this reason he who delivered Me to you has the greater sin.”
- Conclusion: To avoid being violent, be prepared to submit to violence when it comes.
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As I recall, one of the arguments was that the German culture was one where people knew better than to follow certain orders because it was dominantly a Christian culture, and that the Nazi phenomenon was something they should have known better than to embrace.
Not too long ago I talked with a submariner who said that the philosophy had changed and was a lot easier to live with, that the idea is no longer to just wipe out cities but to hit strategic targets such as military installations and transportation hubs. I pointed out a paper from sometime in the 1980s as I recall that argued the best way to defeat an enemy in such a war is to avoid killing civilians but to devastate the enemy’s ability to keep those civilians alive and thus paralyze any response because keeping civilians alive would have to be tried anyway – and I asked, so is it more moral to just kill millions painlessly or to arrange things so they starve instead?
He was not happy with me.
I would argue that this “phase four” he speaks of was always the intent, but in ancient times different actions were necessary to bring about the conditions where that could happen, e.g. wiping out the bastard children of the Watchers, the Nephilim, including the traces left in various tribes in Canaan, then keeping the kingdom in existence long enough to set the scene for the Messiah.
Though maybe he covered that earlier in the talk.
Some of the arguments I head about morality these days would justify some pretty horrific things if used in the past. The one that came to mind when I was listening to the radio the other day was that back in tribal times killing off all the enemy males and keeping the women in order to reproduce more often per male and thus increase the tribe would qualify as moral by a pragmatic foundation some guy was giving.
Not necessarily. The libertarian argument for morality, for example, is based on self-ownership as an observable phenomenon, with rights flowing from self-ownership, and the desire that our rights be respected leading to the Golden Rule. The argument is rational, not needing any objective source.
More and more I see Jesus as making a lot of statements in a context of “If you want to be perfect by following the Law…” With that context a lot of strange things make sense!
My introduction to critical scholarship was via the German school of thought that essentially decreed that the whole JEPD enterprise was pointless, that what we have to work with is the text so our purpose should be to understand that text, so I got somewhat inoculated against the older stuff. We actually had a lecturer visit from Germany who mocked those in the U.S still doing documentary hypothesis stuff as being forty years behind the times; that made a big impression.
I tend to think of this in terms that we all deserve to be under such judgment all the time, and that the amazing thing about history is that God has kept such things in check enough for human society to survive. I think that’s the real lesson of the Flood story, that such a catastrophe was what everyone deserved but He saved some despite that (who plainly didn’t do a good job of passing that lesson along).
That is a good essay. I always liked this bit:
All theology of the liberal type involves at some point and often involves throughout the claim that the real behaviour and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by his followers and has been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars.
Though this reminded me of another way it got muted for me: exercises in applying the principles involved to arrive at ridiculous conclusions, e.g. arguing that the book of Joshua is an ancient tourist guidebook to piles of stones in Israel.
For those who want to read it:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1324&context=byusq
Why?
You should watch all of the Longman lecture heymike referenced above; I’ll give the link again:
Something I noticed was missing (save for one brief second-hand reference) was that the nations that God wanted wiped out had one thing in common: they all descended from or included Nephilim (later called Anakim or Rephaim). These “bastard children” of heavenly beings and human women didn’t belong in God’s Creation and were threats to Israel and were to be eliminated if not from the Earth then at least from the promised land.
That’s a point I wouldn’t make with everyone; purist atheists would scorn it as wallowing in superstition, but some are open to the existence of other beings that are not necessarily friendly to humanity.
I would also add, with respect to the question @T_aquaticus raised, there is no exception to this intent in our period of redemptive history
That is a bit absurd; and to be brutally honest, i have to say that i am honestly a bit hurt by such an absurd accusation from you; and respectfully, i must say such an accusation is a bit beneath you, as I suspect you know quite better than that. I’d like to hope that you know quite well that i wouldn’t justify anything based simply on the fact that any random person wrote in some random book that God commanded some random thing. Is that what you really believe about us Christians, honestly? That is beyond absurd, and i will give the benefit of charity and assume (or hope) that you really do know better than that. If you honestly, genuinely believe that, then lets talk about that on another thread or by private message.
Since i brought up ballistic missile submarines, it lends to another relevant illustraion. I won’t share anything that actually happens onboard these boats, but i am at libertty to discuss what people have seen in the movie Crimson Tide…
In that movie about a U.S. Ballistic Missile Submarine at least… they have a procedure for receiving and reacting to messages related to launch of nuclear weapons, and a procedure for authenticating that these messages actually came from national command authority (i.e., from the president).
Based on what someone watched about that procedure in the movie… it would be ridiculous, demeaning, insulting, disingenuous, and downright asinine to accuse U.S. Submariners of being willing to launch nuclear weapons “just because someone sent a radio message and said that the president demanded it.”
It should be beyond obvious (from watching the movie at least) that this is not what submariners do. In the movie, there is a thorough procedure to authenticate any incoming message and confirm that it really did come from the president. in the movie, this was accomplished by having a secret code secured in a safe in the submarine that had to be confirmed to match the same secret code embedded in the radio message.
Given such a thorough and cautious procedure to carefully and meticulously authenticate that the message actually did come from the president, it would be downright stupid, asinine, insulting and absurd to accuse a submariner of being willing to “launch nuclear weapons just because you received some radio message that claimed that the president said so.” That would be disingenuous in the extreme.
Similarly, it should be beyond obvious that even Christian fundamentalists like me don’t simply believe any and every random book whatsoever that happens to contain a claim that God made some command or another. I suspect you know quite good and well well that I don’t believe the Quran, book of Mormon, or plenty of other books even though they contain claims of God making certain commands.
Whether you agree with our procedures or conclusions or not, we Christians actually do have a process by which we authenticate the claims of any book or writing (or person) claiming to relay the commands of God. Perhaps this may genuinely come as a surprise to you (though i kind of doubt it), but i actually don’t actually believe just any and every book that comes along that contains some random claim of a command from God.
The reason I do believe, embrace, follow, and commit myself to obey the commands in the Bible is because they were authenticated to my satisfaction… in short, because a man claiming to be God incarnate, and who affirmed that said written commands were in fact actually from God, was resurrected and confirmed as such by multiple confirmations after being executed by crucifixion, confirmed dead, and buried… all this confirms and authenticates to my satisfaction that he was in fact God incarnate as he claimed, and thus that I can trust his claims, including that he had the authority and knowledge to authenticate and confirm that said writings actually came from God.
I watched that movie once with a Navy guy who’d spent a cruise on such a sub, and someone asked, “Is that how they really do it?”
His answer was something like, “Well, if someone had proposed that system, and it had been vetted by experts to the satisfaction of the admiralty, and if someone was capable of making it, it could have conceivably been included in a design for future use at some point”. I remember the person who’d asked the question muttering through that with a frown and finally said, “That doesn’t tell me if it’s real!”
To which he responded, “It wasn’t supposed to”.
I had to love the way he phrased it to cause the questioner to think about what he’d said, without really saying anything at all.
Me: “Torturing kittens is wrong.”
You: “My kid brother just wrote a book and in it he said that God commanded it.”
Me: “Huh. Did your kid brother get executed and then come back from the dead?.”
You: “Uh, no.”
Me: “Go away.”
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Well, if what you said were true, that would be very insightful, however if i accepted what you said as true, it would be something that I could neither confirm nor deny…
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Absolutely perfect analysis, thanks for that.
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I agree 100%. There’s not much point having a system of objective morals if there’s no agreement on what it says.
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Nice set of issues. It would be good if you held up a couple items as examples — such as this or that verse or this book of the Old Testament where it says such-and-such.
Yes, of course, there are “puzzling” things in the Bible…but some times the assertions come from people who know less than you or I do (they read the stuff somewhere !)
This is what I am reading from you.
“Rather, I feel great confidence in simply acknowledging that God, as the author and authority over all life and death, has every right to take any human life at any time he so chooses, he has no obligation to give to any single one of us another breath. So from his perspective, I don’t see that categorical a difference between him taking one life through an accident, another through a natural disaster, another through a medical condition, another through a war, another through a capital punishment that he imposed in the Old Testament, or another through a holy war that he similarly commanded in the Old Testament.”
“Neither I nor my culture/society can be trusted to be the final arbiter of all that is or isn’t moral. At some point I must trust God’s commands and character, especially at those times when what he commands seems to conflict with my own understanding of morality.”
What I am seeing is throwing out your own sense of morality and obeying commands. But does this happen in actual Christian culture today? Not for the most part, in my estimation.
Instead, I see Christians filtering the teachings of scripture through their own inner sense of morality, their subjective sense of morality. This is why I have stated that a subjective morality is the reality, it is how morality actually works in human culture. I also think a subjective morality is much preferred over an objective one, but that is beside the point.
I also think this is backed by scripture. In Genesis, Adam and Eve eat of tree that gives knowledge of good and evil. As Genesis says, they came to know of good and evil as God does. I think this is a great allegory for explaining what separates humans from other animals. We recognize that we have this inner sense of morality that we don’t see in other animals.
I also think scripture asks humans to use our subjective sense of morality. We are asked to love one another, and love is a subjective emotion? I don’t think anyone can follow the teachings of Jesus without using a subjective morality.
I will also add that as an atheist I don’t think the Bible is useless as a guide for morality. Even if I don’t believe that the authors were divinely inspired I still think that they showed wisdom in many of the things they wrote. They were human just like us struggling with many of the things we struggle with, so there are things we can still learn from them even if we don’t accept their theological claims.
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I think that you have stumbled upon the crux of the matter. If God is God then we have no right to question his actions or judge Him by our puny human morality.
With great power comes great responsibility. With ultimate power?
So regardless of how accurate Scripture is in assigning actions to God, we still cannot judge or criticise what we cannot fully understand.
There was a TNG episode called “who watches the watchers?” where Picard is inadvertently pronounced a God. One of the side swipes was
“how do you know what God wants if he hasn’t actually told you?”
And as each situation is different, it would be hard to get a specific answer from any writing, even Scripture.
Furthermore, the writers of Scripture assign responsibility to God according to their beliefs, and Judaism has no concept of Luck.
Furthermore Scripture casually claims God said XYZ when in fact people asked a yes or no question and drew what amounted to a coin flip as the answer (Uma & Thuramin). Not always, sometimes God is seen to communicate directly, but, it is strange how this sort of communication died with the advent of Christianity. I am not saying it never happens, only that it is not a common occurrence (and difficult to prove)
This subject we never going to be resolved here.
Richard
PS
This is not a matter for debate or scholarship.
It is simply this. If God definately did what is claimed then people are entitled to an answer, unless you claim
If God is God then we have no right to question his actions or judge Him by our puny human morality.
Then we also can not claim that God is good. God just does. This brings us to Euthyphro’s Dilemma where something becomes moral just because God commands it. At this point, we have given up all hope of constructing any meaningful system of morality and are instead just following orders.
No that is a false conclusion. Goodness is not governed by morality. And morality is not black & white. Sometimes there is either no correct answer, or even no good (or evil) answer.
God is Good as opposed to the Devil who is evil
To decide whether an action is good or evil will not depend on a specific moral call, it will depend more on the circumstances. KiIling is evil but killing one for many? (It would seem that God pronounced that as good) Always?
Richard
Then what is it governed by?
You seem to be asking me these questions as if I am supposed to use my own sense of morality to judge it. However, you have already stated that we can’t use “our puny human morality.” So what can we use to determine if God is good? Do we just have to believe it on faith without ever truly knowing?
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It is the definition of God.
If God is not good then He is not worthy of our worship
Richard