The Case for a Personal God from Morality: Justice
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Two incredibly important questions that every human person should consider involve God’s existence and nature: (1) Does God exist? (2) If so, what is he like? [1]
One of the unique features of the moral argument is its ability to not only provide evidence for God’s existence, but also shed a significant amount of light on God’s character. For example, the moral argument points to a God who exists, but also to God as essentially good and loving, as well as holy and transcendent. The moral argument also indicates that God is deeply personal.
Although there are numerous facets of morality that gesture in the direction of a personal God, the moral value of justice is considered here.
The Personal Nature of Justice
What is justice? Among other things, justice is a personal response to the wrongdoing of morally free human persons.[2] It is said that justice has been served when a guilty party has been punished for his or her wrongdoing. Rather than merely existing as an abstraction of the universe or flowing from a non-personal process of sorts, justice is a property of persons. When a judgment is made upon a particular person or group of persons (or a situation in general), whether it be one of approval or disapproval, a mind and a will are assumed, and generally speaking, one who possesses a mind and a will and the possibility of grasping the role of justice is a person. Is it plausible for justice to simply exist apart from connection to a person or persons? William Lane Craig responds to this question in the following manner:
It is difficult, however, even to comprehend this view. What does it mean to say, for example, that Justice just exists? It’s hard to know what to make of this. It is clear what is meant when it is said that a person is just; but it is bewildering when it is said that in the absence of any people, Justice itself exists. Moral values seem to exist as properties of persons, not as mere abstractions—or at any rate it’s hard to know what it is for a moral value to exist as a mere abstraction.[3]
On a human level, it is clear that justice exists and that its instances are present in persons. What about ultimate justice, if such a thing exists?
The Hope for Ultimate Justice and How It Points to a Personal God
When a human person chooses to carry out a criminal act, he is deserving of punishment, and only when he receives the punishment he deserves, has justice been served. This raises a difficult question: What about the times when justice does not seemingly prevail, at least in this life? There are countless examples of this throughout history, including Joseph Stalin and his participation in the killing of between twenty and sixty million people, Adolf Hitler and his role in the murder of six million Jews, and Pol Pot and his slaying of nearly one-third of the Cambodian population (between one and three million Cambodians). Other examples include the numerous persons who get away with atrocities such as rape, sex trafficking, child abuse, and murder. When human justice is not enacted in this life, should one hope that there is a personal God to enact justice in the next? According to Richard Creel,
As long as it is logically possible that evil be defeated, that innocent suffering is not meaningless and final, it seems to me that we have a moral obligation to hope that that possibility is actual. Therefore we have a moral obligation to hope that there is a God because, if there is a God, then innocent suffering is not meaningless or final. . . . To be sure, the Holocaust was enormously tragic—but without God it is even more tragic. Indeed, a far greater evil than the evils of history would be that the evils of history will not be defeated because there is no God.[4]
If there is no God or the divine is altogether non-personal, legitimate hope for ultimate justice appears unattainable.[5] On the other hand, if there is a holy and personal God who exists, then “innocent suffering is not meaningless or final.”[6] Therefore, by considering the concept of ultimate justice, one is able to postulate not only the existence of a personal deity who is capable of enacting justice, but also an afterlife in which ultimate justice is served.
At this point, a Platonist might suggest that justice merely exists as an abstraction of the universe, and that there is no need to ground justice in a personal God. Suppose that an abstract Platonic realm does exist for a moment. In theory, it is at least possible to understand how ultimate justice could possibly exist, but it is much more difficult to grasp how a non-personal realm (with no ultimate person in view) could enact justice because enacting seemingly requires the existence of a person who does the enacting. Abstract realms cannot enact justice; personal beings enact justice. And in this case, if there is such a thing as ultimate justice (which I believe there is), and if there is to be legitimate hope of it being enacted, it is reasonable to posit the existence of a personal God.
Christian Theism as a Robust Explanation
Although there are several belief systems that set forth the notion of a personal God, with some conceptions coming nearer to adequately accounting for what is required of a personal God than others, Christianity uniquely demonstrates that not only is God personal, but that he has always been personal. If the only sense in which God is personal is in his personal interactions with human persons, then one could say that God’s personality was frustrated before he created human persons or that God became personal only after he created human persons. To say these sorts of things presents all sorts of theological and philosophical problems, namely, that God is dependent on something other than himself and therefore not self-sufficient. However, a Trinitarian conception of God, which is a distinctly Christian concept, solves these sorts of problems, suggesting that God has always been personal in and through the inner personal relations of the three Persons of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the fundamental reason why the Judeo-Christian God, the God of the Bible, provides a robust account of the personal nature of justice (and the personal nature of morality in general): he is intrinsically personal himself.
Stephen S. Jordan is currently the Campus Pastor at Liberty Christian Academy, where he previously served as a high school Bible teacher for nearly a decade. He is also a Bible teacher at Liberty University Online Academy, an Associate Editor at www.moralapologetics.com, as well as a Senior Research Fellow and curriculum developer at The Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Baptist University. Prior to these positions, Stephen served as a youth pastor in North Carolina for several years and taught courses at a local Seminary Extension for a year. He possesses four graduate degrees (MAR, MRE, MDiv, ThM) and a PhD in Theology and Apologetics. His doctoral dissertation was on the moral argument, where he argued for the existence of a personal God from morality. Stephen and his wife, along with their four children, reside in Goode, Virginia. In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his family, being outdoors, fitness, sports, and good coffee/tea.
[1] Portions of this article adapted from my unpublished doctoral dissertation at Liberty University.
[2] According to Kant, “In his moral actions, however, man is a free agent and is, therefore, liable for consequences of actions done…In a word, the key to the imputation of responsibility for consequences is freedom.” Immanuel Kant, Lectures in Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1963), 60.
[3] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 179.
[4] Richard E. Creel, Divine Impassibility: An Essay in Philosophical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 149-150.
[5] There are those who accept the need for justice on a human level but dismiss the need for ultimate justice. However, on this view, it appears that there are many who get away with injustice unscathed. For this reason, among others, it at least seems logical to hope there is such a thing as ultimate justice and that it will be enacted.
[6] Along the same lines, Marilyn McCord Adams states: “If Divine Goodness is infinite, if intimate relation to it is thus incommensurably good for created persons, then we have identified a good big enough to defeat horrors in every case.” Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 82-83.
