Introducing a Thomist Moral Argument

Editor’s note:

Here at MoralApologetics.com, we are really excited at younger scholars turning their attention and directing their considerable talents to variations on the moral argument. Moral apologetics can come in lots of stripes and shades, depending on the particular moral phenomena in need of explanation, the methodology involved in argumentation, the alleged tightness of the relationship between evidence and conclusion, and the operative variant of theistic ethic employed. Here Suan Sonna shares some highlights of his ongoing research project in which he proposes a moral argument predicated on natural law. We suspect that Suan’s voice will a prominent one indeed in this discussion for many years to come, and we are delighted to showcase his perspicacious work today.

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My moral argument took form while studying Judith Jarvis Thomson’s defense of abortion. As a Thomist, I wanted to tackle her thought experiments and whatever metaethical foundations prevented her from accepting my view. I read her paper “The Right and the Good” and was positively shocked. Thomson appealed to teleology, except she used the words “design functions”, to ground her approach to ethics. Rather than embracing teleological realism, however, she settled for teleological nominalism. I was curious thereafter and wondered if other philosophers were borrowing ideas from the Aristotelian-Thomist (AT) synthesis for their theories. As I began combing through the literature, I noticed a subtle pattern emerge – when moral philosophers contemplated the metaethical commitments of their theories, they all depended upon some idea of teleology, some notion of “fulfillment” as goodness, and deployed concepts that sounded awfully familiar to me as a Thomist – consider Moore’s understanding of the simplicity and indefinability of the good which rubs right into the classical theist conception of God! Over time, I decided to develop a moral argument for God’s existence from these observations.

Here is the argument:

(1)   Moral realism is true.

(2)   Moral realism requires a foundation that yields (A) objective moral truths, (B) is comprehensive, and (C) is compelling.

(3)   Either theistic or nontheistic moral realism is true.

(4)   Nontheistic moral realism fails to meet at least one of the three requirements.

(5)   Therefore, nontheistic moral realism is necessarily false.

(6)   Therefore, theistic moral realism is true.

(7)   If theistic moral realism is true, then God exists.

(8)   Therefore, God exists.

I divide versions of moral realism into those that imply the existence of God (theistic moral realism) and those that do not (nontheistic moral realism). Nontheistic versions of moral realism simply might have nothing to say about God’s existence or perhaps depend upon foundations incompatible with His existence. And, by “foundation” here I mean the ultimate explanation or grounding of moral facts whether it be our intuitions, some evolutionary norm, reason, or God. Theistic moral realism must say that the foundation of moral facts is God, while nontheistic moral realism need not.  

I then present in (2) three overarching standards for testing which of the two moral realisms is true. I maintain that moral realism requires a source that yields objective moral truths, is itself comprehensive and compelling.

By “objectivity” I mean the nature of the foundation or explanans must itself be consistent with the explanandum. It would be strange to get an objective theory of ethics from a purely subjective, mind-dependent foundation.

“Comprehensiveness” means that the foundation in question must tackle the most relevant metaphysical and epistemological questions for a proper account of moral realism. For instance, the foundation should help us understand the nature of normativity, it should yield an account of moral knowledge, and ensure we have reliable faculties for moral comprehension. Here, I narrow the debate down to five fundamental explananda – normativity, semantics, causation, cognition, and ontology.

In other words, the foundation should explain both the nature and origin of normativity. Regarding semantics, it should avoid making the world unintelligible but render its information content accessible to our intellects. Even the causal order itself requires an explanation such that we demystify the connection between facts about the world and our actions, the behavior of objects and persons in our unfolding moral drama. The foundation should not simply take for granted that we have reliable cognitive faculties for moral reasoning but explain the origin and reliability of those faculties. Finally, this foundation should illumine us on who or what counts as a moral subject, what is the good, the bad, the right and the wrong? This is the most demanding requirement of the three. And, I propose it in order to avoid moral realisms that are simply constructed to suit our ends or attempt to avoid the ultimate question. We are seeking the version of moral realism that actually covers the relevant and required explananda.

Of course, we also need a way of discerning which foundation most compellingly explains the explananda. I propose here several standards:

1)     Intuitive Fit

2)     Empirical Adequacy - “consistency with what we know about the world, including our best scientific knowledge.”1

3)     Epistemic Access - “the theory should include some account of how we could come to know its truth.”2

4)     Metaphysical Fecundity - “the theory should shed light on a variety of metaphysical issues.”3

5)     Unification - “We should not accept a bifurcated, disjunctive account of thought and of knowledge as long as a unified account is possible.”4

6)     Simplicity - “A good metaphysical theory should not be in need of ad hoc rescues or endless epicyclic tinkering.”5

The standard of unification staves off the objection that the comprehensiveness standard is too demanding. If there is a unified explanation that can explain all of the explananda and do it well, then that unified theory is to be strongly preferred. In other words, comprehensiveness is not too demanding since it is a burden that can be carried by other approaches and perhaps not the objector’s.         

Over the course of my research, I found that the AT synthesis simply bests its competitors. It provides an objective, comprehensive, and compelling foundation of moral realism in the very existence of God.

AT moral realism is founded upon six highly plausible metaphysical theses that simultaneously yield a comprehensive moral theory and proofs of the existence of God. The theses are the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), the causal principle (CP), the principle of proportionate causality (PPC), real essentialism (RE), the convertibility principle (TCP), and the principle of finality (PF).

The PSR means that, “Everything that is the case must have a reason why it is the case. Necessarily, every true or at least every contingent true proposition has an explanation. Every event has a cause.”6 Aside from the PSR being highly intuitive, I think Alexander Pruss and Robert C. Koons have provided powerful reasons for suggesting that its denial simply costs too much, including the intelligibility of the universe itself.7

The CP is inspired by Aristotle’s response to Zeno’s denial of change. Zeno argued that true change requires non-being to produce being, since what was not there before must suddenly emerge. Aristotle unraveled the paradox by proposing the CP: change is the actualization of an object’s potential by an already actual actualizer, meaning that being can be divided into being-in-act and being-in-potency. It also appears that denying the CP eviscerates the intelligibility of the universe and the reality of change.

The PPC simply follows from the PSR and CP, since there is an explanation for why events occur and this explanation must preserve the transaction of being. St. Thomas Aquinas defines the PPC as “effects must be proportionate to their causes and principles”8 so that “whatever perfections exist in the effect must be found in the effective cause.”9 To put it more straightforwardly, “a cause cannot give what it does not first have.”10 Consider for instance how materialists argue that consciousness cannot be immaterial, since our origins are purely material and so too is the fundamental nature of the universe. Like things beget like things.

RE is “... the metaphysical position that everything in the world has an essence or nature that fixes its identity.”11 and “The essence of a thing is its nature, that whereby it is what it is. It is what we grasp intellectually when we identify a thing’s genus and specific difference.”12 Things have a real definition of what they are, which makes possible our distinguishing one kind of thing from another kind. It is not that we are inventing the difference between a mushroom and a human but there really is something different about the two, and this difference is ultimately due to the nature of human beings and other plants. To deny this point seems to place a huge hole in evolutionary theory and the project of speciation, or even the trustworthiness of our perception since it seems to really be the case that humans, horses, and fish are not absolutely the same kind of thing and one can identify their differences.

TCP states, “... goodness is the same as being itself, but considered from a particular point of view - that of fulfillment of appetite.”13 In other words, goodness is the actualization of potential, a kind of fullness. For example, we say that one thing is better than another when said thing is more as it should be. A triangle drawn with a radiograph pen is better than one etched into the seat of a shaky bus. The instantiated triangles are obviously aiming towards triangularity and are hence held to that standard. Likewise, human beings are ordered towards “humanity,” and humans are better when they are more in harmony with and fulfillment of their human nature. The fullness of triangularity is the measure of goodness for a triangle. The fullness of humanity is the measure of goodness for a human.

Finally, the PF sates that “... every nature is ordered to an end; that nature does not act in vain; that the end is the first principle of activity; and that the end is the reason for all movement.”14 and “In short, if A is by nature an efficient cause of B, then generating B must be the final cause of A.”15 Another way of framing this is that nature behaves with intentionality or directedness. For instance, the laws of nature do not describe mere accidental regularities but they reveal the natures of the objects in question and how they act under certain conditions. This activity is intrinsic to the objects themselves, meaning they are acting as they should. For instance, an electron is a negatively charged particle that orbits the nucleus. Such a description gives us the nature and activity of the entity in question – even the “negative” charge label is connected to activity. Or, consider even how horses are tetrapods but some are obviously born with more or less legs than they should have. The nature of the horse provides us the norm and allows us to identify deviations and when things are not as they should be.

Two significant consequences follow from these theses. The first is that a comprehensive moral theory known as classical natural law theory follows. Classical natural law theory states that ethics is the science of how to fulfill one’s nature. Just as scientists discover laws of nature through observing the tendencies of objects and what should happen under normal circumstances, the same sort of study is done on human activity in order to unveil the natural law.  

The second consequence is that any properly constructed argument for the existence of God dependent upon any of the theses is given a significant plausibility boost. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, famously developed six ways to demonstrate the existence of God. The first is known as the argument from motion; the second is the argument from efficient causality; the third is a contingency argument of sorts; the fourth is an argument from the gradation of being; the fifth is a teleological argument; and the sixth is his lesser known De Ente argument.

The PSR makes the first, second, third, and sixth ways eminently plausible. For example, the first way begins with the CP and argues that there must be a purely actual actualizer in order to prevent an infinite causal regress. There must be a causal agent who is the source of all change but is not itself subject to change.

De Ente rightly observes that since beings are composites of essence and existence, meaning a real distinction exists between the two and not merely a logical or conceptual one, there must be an explanation for why they exist despite their essences not securing or entailing their existence. This can be viewed as a more precise contingency argument. St. Thomas located this ultimate explanation in a being whose very essence is existence itself lest there be another endless causal regress. In tandem with TCP, RE, and PPC, we arrive at a being who is essentially perfect and the source of all beings - of their essence and existence included! Since human beings are by nature rational animals, meaning our specific difference from the rest of the animal kingdom is our rationality, our cause must also possess something like an intellect in order for it “contain” and “impart” our intellects to us.

Furthermore, we know that this being has an intellect due to the fifth way, the teleological argument, where St. Thomas noted that even beings without minds are drawn or attracted towards their final ends just like an arrow is directed towards its target by an intellect. The PF and PPC get us a creator who must have something like an intellect or mind in order for its creation to have this feature of intentionality or directedness.

If St. Thomas’ arguments hold, then we arrive at one and in principle only one supreme being who is the essentially omnibenevolent or perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent reality.

This is my longwinded way of saying that nontheistic moral realisms have an incredible challenge to face, since theistic moral realism has a foundation that yields objective moral truths (since moral truths are fixed truths about being which emanate from God), a comprehensive explanation, and one that is indeed compelling. Robert C. Koons has demonstrated in his work Realism Regained how the AT synthesis can yield not only a moral theory but also an exact theory of causation, mind, and metaphysics. Significant work has been done in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science to demonstrate the plausibility of the AT synthesis and its relevance to quantum mechanics, biology, physics, and psychology. Theists have the theory of everything!

My moral argument attempts to leave no stone unturned and forces everyone to examine the foundations of morality. I conclude that God is the best and most comprehensive explanation, while nontheistic moral realism fails to provide what is required for a complete and compelling account of moral realism. Of course, further research needs to be done in order to secure this conclusion, but I think the argument has plausible foundations and deserves more attention.

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1. Koons, Robert C. Realism Regained an Exact Theory of Causation, Teleology, and the Mind. Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 3.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Pruss, Alexander R. The Principle of Sufficient Reason: a Reassessment. Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 3.

7. See Pruss’ The Principle of Sufficient Reason and my dialogue with Robert C. Koons here.

8. Aquinas, Thomas. “Of the Causes of Virtue.” Summa Theologica, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Coyote Canyon Press, 2018, pg. 391. I-II. Q. 63. Art. 3.

9. Aquinas, Thomas. “The Perfection of God.” Summa Theologica, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Coyote Canyon Press, 2018, pg. 34. I. Q. 4. Art. 2.

10. Feser, Edward. Five Proofs of the Existence of God. Ignatius Press., pg. 170.

11. See the opening page of Oderberg, S. David Real Essentialism (2007).

12. Feser, Edward. Scholastic Metaphysics: a Contemporary Introduction. Editiones Scholasticae, 2014, p. 211.

13. Oderberg, David S. The Metaphysics of Good and Evil. Routledge, 2020, p. 14.

14. Ibid, p. 28.

15. Feser, Edward. Scholastic Metaphysics: a Contemporary Introduction. Editiones Scholasticae, 2014, p. 92.

Holy Fear

A Twilight Musing

In Christian Bible classes we sometimes hear people discuss the meaning of the biblical admonition, predominantly found in the Old Testament, to “fear God.”  Does not the New Testament present God as our loving Father, whom we are privileged to address familiarly as “Papa”?  But the Old Testament clearly sees fearing God in a different light.  The “Preacher” of Ecclesiastes, for example, sums up his treatise by asserting that we are to “fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.  For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil” (Eccl. 12:13-14 [ESV]).  But in the New Testament, disciples are frequently told not to fear, and in I John 4:18 we have a radical negation of fear: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.”  How do we get from the O.T. fear based on God’s judgment to the N.T. saying that Christians (the new Israel) should have no fear of judgment?  The fear of God still has its place in the N.T., but it is a fear embedded in the fact that Jesus Christ has bridged the gap for us between the austere fear of God and the joyful trembling that comes from being in the Presence of an awesome, loving, and gentle Father who accepts us as brothers and sisters of Christ Jesus.

Those under the Old Covenant were acutely aware that to be in God’s Presence was dangerous because of His perfect holiness and His fearsome judgment on human sin.  Three passages from chapters 6 and 8 of Isaiah and chapter 33 of Exodus illustrate this reaction, even in men who were being called by God.  In Isaiah’s vision of God “high and lifted up” in all His glory and holiness; the prophet’s immediate reaction is fear that he is going to die because he has “seen the King, the Lord of Hosts” (Is. 6:5).  Even though he is a prophet of God, he is terrifyingly aware of his sinfulness, and in order for his life to be preserved and for the conversation with God to continue, Isaiah has to be purified (depicted figuratively by the application of a burning coal from the Temple altar to his lips), so that his “guilt is taken away, and [his] sin atoned for” (v.7).  Moses has a similar experience (Ex. 33:18-23) when he asks God, “Show me your glory” (v. 18); whereupon God allows him only a glimpse of His back, and even that could be granted only with God’s protective hand covering Moses, for “man shall not see me and live.”  Human beings do well to fear the Presence of God, for the fiery holiness of that Presence will consume them unless God Himself offers protection.

The transition between the O.T. fear of God’s judgment and the N.T. casting out of fear by Love is provided by the visitation upon the sinless Lamb of God of all the wrath of the Father deserved by rebellious mankind.  With God’s judgment satisfied, we can be empowered to serve and obey Him without the fear engendered by our sinfulness.   As Paul expresses it, when we accepted the liberating blood of Christ, we “did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but . . . received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, "Abba! Father!"  Thereby we have the liberty to “work out [our] own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in [us], both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12-13).  As Paul points out in Gal. 3, the final deliverance of mankind from sin was not to be accomplished through obedience to the Law, as necessary as that obedience was.  As he concludes in that chapter, “the law was our guardian until Christ came, in order that we might be justified by faith.  But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian, for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith” (Gal. 3:24-26).  God’s love, fully manifested toward humankind by the sacrifice of His Son, is the instrument for transmuting human fear into effective fear of God. 

And so we come back to the statement in I John that “perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love” (I Jn. 4:18).  What a glorious privilege is granted to us who live under the New Covenant, that we may glory in standing before God without fear of punishment for our sins.  Although we no longer tremble in physical terror as Moses and the people did when they encountered the fiery Presence of God at Mt. Sinai, we are nevertheless admonished to approach Him in Mt. Zion, the Heavenly Jerusalem, “with holy fear and awe, for our God is a consuming fire” (Heb.12:28-29, NLT).  We still need the protective covering of the blood of Jesus to keep from being consumed by the Fire of God’s judgment.  Thus we are able under the New Covenant to fear God perfectly and joyfully.

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 Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

New Developments in Moral Apologetics, Part 4

This installment of new developments on the moral argument features two students of mine wrapping up their doctoral work on the subject. They are also dear friends and both have been very active here at MoralApologetics, and will play a big part in the site’s future and the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. They are Jonathan Pruitt, long-time Managing Editor extraordinaire of MoralApologetics.com, and Stephen Jordan, who will be spearheading the development of moral apologetics curriculum as part of a new initiative of the Center in the years to come.

Jonathan Pruitt’s work seeks to extend the abductive moral argument made in Jerry Walls’s and my Good God and God and Cosmos to the Christian religion. Like the argument found in Good God, Pruitt’s argument begins by assuming moral realism. Specifically, it assumes there are a range of moral facts in need of explanation, including facts about moral goodness, moral obligations, moral knowledge, moral transformation, and moral rationality.

With respect to moral goodness, the dissertation brings to bear the rich ontology of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. It suggests that the existence of the Trinity best explains deeply held moral intuitions about “the shape of the good,” as it builds upon Robert Adams’s Platonic theistic view of God as the good. If the good is ultimately triune, this could naturally explain why morality is centered on “the other” and the foundational character of love in ethical thinking.

With respect to moral obligations, the dissertation utilizes the fundamentally social nature of the Trinity to suggest that moral obligations, best understood as a certain kind of social standing, is well explained by a Trinitarian God. The Christian worldview has tremendous resources in the domain of moral knowledge as it claims both a divinely inspired book and the ideal moral exemplar in Jesus Christ. In these, one finds both the moral law and the ever elusive concept of “the good life” reified. Additionally, these resources can help turn back some well-known objections to divine command theory.

The Christian view of sanctification and the role of the Holy Spirit explain how one can be morally transformed, while remaining within the logical boundaries required by such transformation. Though Kant had to postulate God as judge and eternal life to solve what Henry Sidgwick later called “the dualism of practical reason,” the Christian worldview comes with these features included. The public and evidential nature of the Resurrection supplies concrete evidence for moral faith and, in conjunction with Christian eschatology, solves moral problems not explicitly articulated until nearly two millennia later. Thus, Christianity handily accounts for moral rationality. Pruitt’s work, in the end, highlights how some of the most distinctively Christian ideas map closely onto well-known problems in ethical theory. He suggests that precisely where Christianity is most different, it most ably marshals explanatory resources to account for the moral facts.

Stephen Jordan’s developing work is called “Morality and the Personhood of God: A Moral Argument for the Existence of a Personal God.” The concept that God is personal is a necessary and fundamental part of religious belief.[1] If God were not personal, it would be odd to think of him as moral or loving; it would also seem inconsistent to speak of him as One with whom humans can have a personal relationship, One who can be trusted, cares for the people he created, listens to their prayers, acts on their behalf, has their best interests at heart, and so on. In short, to talk of such matters in a sensible manner and to experience them in everyday life seemingly requires that God is personal.

Is there evidence that a personal God actually exists? Enter the moral argument. The moral argument, like other classical arguments for God’s existence, is able to provide evidence for believing in God’s existence, but—unlike other arguments, or perhaps better than the other arguments—is able to shed an incredible amount of light on God’s character (i.e., what God is like). For example, in order to account for morality, God must be good, loving, and holy. Additionally, through surveying moral categories such as moral knowledge, moral values, moral obligations, and moral transformation, it becomes apparent that the source of the moral law, in order to account for the deeply personal nature of morality, must also be personal, and personal to the highest degree possible.

If the moral argument suggests that God must be personal in order to account for the personal nature of morality, the next step in the process involves considering the various explanations for God’s personal nature. 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, however, 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, such as that God would be dependent on something other than himself and therefore not self-sufficient.

A Trinitarian conception of God, which is a distinctly Christian concept, solves the sorts of problems alluded to above, 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, is such a powerful explanation for the deeply personal nature of morality: he is intrinsically personal himself.

While there is certainly more involved, there are two key tasks to this version of the moral argument: (1) demonstrate that morality points in the direction of a personal source; and (2) explain how a Trinitarian conception of God provides the best explanation for the deeply personal nature of morality.[2]

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[1] A definition of “personal God” looks something like this: A Being who thinks, feels, and wills, and who is capable of loving and being loved by other beings.

[2] There are essentially three tasks involved in the moral apologetics enterprise: (1) provide reasons for believing in objective moral facts; (2) address secular theories; and (3) explain why theism, particularly Christian theism, is the best explanation for morality as a whole. While this project largely focuses on the third and final task, there are discussions throughout that give attention to the first two tasks as well. For instance, there is a chapter that provides fifteen reasons for believing in objective moral facts, and there are several chapters that briefly respond to opposing theories.

What Can Christians Say about the Pandemic? A Response to Rosaria Butterfield

The coronavirus pandemic has brought fresh fodder to a question many struggle with: how can a good God allow such pain and suffering? Is he really not as good as we thought? Or maybe he’s too weak to prevent it? In the face of such complexities, some abandon belief in God altogether. Others find this problem of evil a stumbling block to belief in the first place. These are pressing questions, and not only on an intellectual level. For many who have lost loved ones or are battling the virus themselves, those out of work or left lonely from social distancing, the answers to these questions mean the difference between hope and despair.

For this reason, I was discouraged to read Rosaria Butterfield’s recent post over at Desiring God, “Can the Pandemic Be an Answered Prayer?” Butterfield most likely didn’t choose the title, but even still, her article answers the question with a resounding yes. In attempting to square the existence of this physical evil with the existence of a good God, Butterfield has unfortunately flattened the distinction between God’s redemptive use of a tragedy and the nature of the tragedy itself. In so doing, she implies that an unmitigated evil is actually an unqualified good.

Many are familiar with Butterfield’s dramatic conversion story, which testifies to the role of hospitality in evangelism. She herself has been intentional to carry on such hospitality in her own ministry. About eight years ago, Butterfield’s family moved into a progressive area so her husband could pastor a church there. The family prayed for service opportunities in the community but made little headway, as no one came to the barbecues or block parties they arranged. Instead, they were met with suspicion and even found a church sign vandalized.

COVID-19 turned all that around. With the food shortages and shelter in place orders, Rosaria and her daughter began delivering food to many of her neighbors on behalf of a local community supported agriculture program. Additionally, their church made its building available as a distribution center. Folks who once turned away from them on the street now welcomed them into their homes and even asked for help and prayer.

I do not doubt Butterfield’s account. The pandemic has certainly made people experience their limited human resources and vulnerabilities in new ways. And it’s a blessing that the family and church stepped up to love and serve them as Christ commands. What troubles me is Butterfield’s suggestion that, for these reasons (and some others she mentions[1]), COVID-19 is something for which we should be thankful, a good gift to us and a means of God glory:  

“Giving thanks to God for everything, including COVID-19, humbles us — deeply. It reminds us that God’s providence is perfect and our point of view flawed. Because God is good, just, and wise, all the time and in every circumstance, then COVID-19, for the Christian, must be for our good and for God’s glory.”

There is some truth mingled in with Butterfield’s words here, which makes teasing out her missteps tricky. We are called to be thankful in all circumstances (I Thess. 5:18[2]), and we are surely limited creatures, unaware of the fullness of God’s activity in this world. As Butterfield also notes, God is all good, all knowing, and all powerful. But it does not follow that everything that occurs in this fallen world is in itself good. Moreover, it’s a small, capricious god indeed who requires the suffering of millions in order to be gloried.

Empathy with our suffering neighbors demands that Christians reckon with the problem of evil, not to mention that our own theology will be the poorer for lack of an adequate account. This is always important, but perhaps now during this pandemic more than ever. But as we think this question through, our central convictions about who God is must remain intact. He is a God of infinite love, incarnate in Christ Jesus, and wildly imaginative in his redemptive purposes and plans. God desires our flourishing and invites us to a life of shalom, what Cornelius Plantinga describes as “[t]he webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight.”[3]  

Butterfield’s account, on the other hand, offers up a god I don’t recognize in the Christian scriptures, one who inflicts suffering on the global population in answer to a family’s prayer to feel more wanted and useful in their neighborhood by unleashing a pandemic. Again, I rejoice that Butterfield’s family could serve her community and that the pandemic opened the eyes of many to their own insufficiencies and need for grace. But that redemptive twist is the blessing; the love and service in answer to these human needs is God’s good gift, not the pandemic itself.

It’s crucial to make this distinction—otherwise, despite Butterfield’s early protestation, God does get cast as the author or cause of evil. My aim here is not to offer a theodicy, an explanation for why God allows evil. I’ll leave that to others better equipped to do so. Frankly, I have no idea why God permitted the novel coronavirus to unleash such havoc on the world, and any attempt of mine to explain would ring hollow and may even add pain to those already suffering its terrible effects.

What I do know, however, is that none of these sufferings go unnoticed by God. He is el Roi, the God who sees the needy (Gen. 16:13); Jehovah Jireh, our provider (Gen. 22:14). What else is the Bible but an account of God’s attentive and intervening presence in humanity’s sufferings? He neither causes nor desires our fallen condition and its attendant afflictions. To rescue us from it, God enters into that suffering with us, but not for the sake of suffering alone. As Butterfield herself notes, referencing 1 John 5:4, Christ is our promise that all manner of evil let loose in this world—coronavirus included—has been, is being, and will be overcome. The whole of salvation history tells of God’s restorative work, to recreate what he established in Eden.

There are no pat answers in the face of evil. But there is love—a love that won’t let evil have the last word. The cosmos, no less than mankind, is being set right. This redemptive love does involve suffering, but not in the way Butterfield envisions it. It doesn’t cultivate evil to get our attention or enable our ministry. Rather, God’s holy, sacrificial love takes evil with such dreadful seriousness that it requires nothing less than the cross to rectify. Indeed, to equivocate between the evil from which God rescues us and his loving means of rescue, to take one for the other, is ultimately to understand neither.

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Marybeth Davis Baggett lives in Lynchburg, Virginia, and teaches English at Houston Baptist University. Having earned her Ph.D. in English from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Marybeth’s professional interests include literary theory, contemporary American literature, science fiction, and dystopian literature. She also writes and edits for Christ and Pop Culture. Her most recent publication was a chapter called “What Means Utopia to Us? Reconsidering More’s Message,” in Hope and the Longing for Utopia: Futures and Illusions in Theology and the Arts. Marybeth's most recent book is The Morals of the Story: Good News about a Good God, coauthored with her husband, David.

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Notes:

[1] Butterfield, whose conversion story involves transitioning from a lesbian lifestyle, also points to the disruption of the annual gay pride march as another reason to be grateful for the coronavirus. This myopic view selectively ignores the manifold repercussions of the pandemic, which of course has disrupted all manner of events—from the holy to the scandalous and everything in between.

[2] Butterfield also references Ephesians 5:20 here, which admonishes Christians to “Giv[e] thanks always for all things to God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” However, in context, the phrase “for all things,” is best understood as those good gifts God provides, not “in its widest possible extent” to include evil (see the Expositor’s Greek Testament commentary here: https://biblehub.com/commentaries/ephesians/5-20.htm).  

[3] Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s, 1995, 10.

More Undergraduate and Early Marriage Experiences (Part 12)

After the wedding and a brief honeymoon, Laquita and I returned to the A.C.C. campus to continue our undergraduate work, the middle of her junior year and my sophomore year.  Our first residence was the “married barracks,” old military buildings divided into apartments for married people.  Its advantages were that it was cheap and right on campus, so we didn’t need transportation.  It was, as you might imagine, very Spartan accommodations, with male and female bathrooms in each hallway and rough wooden floors.  There were basic kitchen appliances so we could cook, after a fashion, but we continued to take our regular meals in the cafeteria.

Happily, we were able to move at the end of the spring term to a tiny house across the street from the campus.  It had perhaps 600 square feet, divided into a bedroom/sitting area, a kitchenette, and a bathroom.  But it was still reasonable rent, and it was private!  We have fond memories of that little house.   Even though it backed on to an alley, it had grass and flowers in the front, being the back yard of a larger house on the front of the lot.  The flowers were daylilies, and they bloomed profusely.  We had a pleasant neighbor in another little house across from us, a widow lady named Mrs. McClintock.  And down the alley a few blocks lived Laquita’s sister, Grace, and her husband Farrell Hogg.  That supplied us with a place to do our laundry and have a meal from time to time.

Laquita continued to work in the cafeteria, even working extra hours serving at banquets there.  I continued my work on the maintenance crew, graduating to operating the big mowers during the spring and summer.  She continued in the elementary education major, and I definitely settled into the English program, taking the sophomore surveys of English literature under various teachers and having more contact with Dr. James Culp, who took over as head of the English department during that year.  He became my mentor and close friend during the last two years of my baccalaureate program.  I had no more classes from the elderly Mrs. Retta Scott Garrett, but Dr. Culp recommended me to her as someone who could do gardening work for her.  Particularly when she was away during the summer, I would make sure that the house was all right and that her garden was watered, her grass cut, and her hedges trimmed.  The skill I gained in hedge trimming has been very useful in taking care of the yards of houses Laquita and I owned later.  Strangely enough, learning to trim hedges has been helpful in trimming my beard when it gets bushy; start boldly with big swaths and then fine tune the straggly spots.

I took time to engage in a few extra-curricular activities, such as assisting with a night-time talk show on the campus radio station and joining the Pickwickian Club, a group of people who liked to do creative writing.  I also participated in a group of men who sponsored talks on biblical subjects and then discussed them.  Both Laquita and I would very much have liked to sing in the Acapella Chorus, but neither of us had the time for regular rehearsals and frequent performances.

I enjoyed my class work, especially as I got into my junior year and took advanced literature courses, along with electives in philosophy of religion and second-and third-year courses in New Testament Greek.  I took several advanced courses with Dr. Culp, and in my senior year he asked me to be his office assistant.  It was the best job I had on campus, since it allowed me to study when office duties were slow and to strengthen what turned out to be a lifelong relationship with Dr. Culp and his wife.  They often had some of his students over for dinner, and we were several times on that guest list.  Such occasions also provided the opportunity for some of the English majors to get to know each other.

In Laquita’s senior year she had to do her practice teaching, and that meant we needed a car.  My uncle Lester was aware we were looking, and he gave us the best car-buying tip we ever had, resulting in our buying our first car, a black 1950 Plymouth sedan, 10 years old but with low mileage and in perfect shape.  It was the archtypical old lady who had had it in her garage and rarely used it.  That car served us through graduate school and into the first year of my job at UM-Dearborn, a period of six years with trips to Seattle and Pittsburgh.

My senior year was a very successful one.  I graduated (barely) summa cum laude and received the Dean’s Award for the person judged to have taken the best advantage of his opportunities at A. C. C.  I also won a Woodrow Wilson Graduate Fellowship to receive full tuition and living expenses at a graduate school of my choice for a year.  Back then, colleges were growing and there was a market for Ph.D.s in English.  I chose to attend the University of Washington in Seattle (which happened to be where Laquita’s brother and his family lived), and we moved up there in the summer of 1961.  Thus began my four years of graduate study, one at the University of Washington and three at the University of Pittsburgh.

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 Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

The Next Step in College and Courtship: Marriage! Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 11)

          After the short-lived summer harvest job, I made the rash decision, driven by passionate love, to make my way to Laquita’s home in Burnet, TX, where she had returned to take up her job with the town’s downtown drugstore.  She was what was known back then as a “soda jerk,” a term that had nothing to do with the worker’s character, but rather originated from the jerking action required to operate the big handle controlling the output of carbonated water required to produce the fizz for various drinks.  This was a job that required some social grace to interact with customers and the skill to mix the elements of an ice cream soda or a cherry coke in the proper proportions.  None of the premixed drinks one gets now from the fast food places!  I hitch-hiked from Abilene to Burnet (about 180 miles), my longest trip of that sort and the last time I ever did it. 

I surprised Laquita in the drugstore while she was at work, a surprise that had a negative tinge for her because I had grown a mustache during the first part of the summer.  I had no idea what I was going to do after I got there, so I stayed a couple of nights with Laquita’s family before finding a room to rent there in town.  Laquita’s father, whom I called Mr. Alec, liked me because I got up early one morning and went with him on his rounds tending his chickens and his garden.  He was a simple, pleasant man, a hard worker who had a job with the City of Burnet on the maintenance crew.  He invited me to have meals with the family, and would even have been all right with my staying with them, but it would not have been proper (nor even wise, I think), for me to have done that, in view of my romantic interest in Laquita.  Laquita’s mom (whom I called “Mom A” liked me, too, and was gracious to me, but I think she would have been more comfortable with me being back in Abilene.

Mr. Alec was able to get me a job with the city maintenance crew, where the tasks consisted most often of cleaning the street drainage gutters (“curbs and gutters, gutters and curbs” Mr. Alec would say) and unloading sacks of lime at the water purification plant.  This last chore always left me itching at the end of the day, as the lime dust would get under my clothes and irritate the skin.  Mr. Alec liked to tell stories, so I got to know him better as we worked together.  He was not a church-going man at that point (he underwent a conversion later), and in fact (I found out later), he used his Sunday mornings to engage in illegal cock-fighting, using game-cocks that he kept apart from the other chickens at the back of the family property.  I was informed later by his grandsons, who were also living with their grandparents at the time, that he had a fairly profitable business breeding and selling game-cocks.

Our last project before the job ended was working in an open field just out of town which was going to become the town’s airport.  We were assigned the task of clearing away the biggest rocks so that the runway could be built.  It felt a little bit like being on a prison chain-gang, but I’m glad to report that there were no shackles or ball-and-chain. 

Of course, I went to church with the family at the local downtown Church of Christ, where the Alexanders (especially Mom A) were active members of the congregation.  I was welcomed there and enjoyed getting to know the people, who accepted me quickly because of my association with Laquita and her family.  Laquita’s oldest brother, Marion, was the father of the five boys living with the grandparents, and he would visit on weekends, usually going to church on Sunday also.  He was a very lively and charming fellow, but he loved to tease Laquita and me about our relationship.  He was a good salesman and he was able to pay for the boys staying at his parents’ house.  It was rather chaotic at times, since the boys ranged in age from teenagers to the little boy Paul, who was only about five or six at the time. Marion’s wife was mentally ill and was unable to care for the boys.  Marion was a very responsible father, and he spent time and money to engage in activities with the boys, like playing “rounders” with a softball and bat in the vacant lot across the street from the Burnet house and going fishing on one of the local lakes.  Laquita and I sometimes went along on these excursions.

I don’t remember many details of the time Laquita and I spent together that summer.  There certainly wasn’t much chance for private time at her home.  Our companionship was mainly going to church together and hanging around her house at meal times. Both she and I were working all day during the week. There was one occasion, however, that I remember our going for a walk along a dry creek bed that ran right by her house (it had water in it only when it rained).  We got to a sort of secluded spot with some trees around, and I made bold to initiate our first kiss--at least it’s the first one I remember, late as it came in our courtship.  It was rather tentative and shy, but a very meaningful development in our relationship.  I was not a sophisticated courtier!

One of the memorable experiences during this period was my reading for the first time C. S. Lewis’s classic work, Mere Christianity.  I don’t remember how I had gotten a copy, but, as with many other people, it changed my thinking in basic ways.  Never had I read such a cogent but simple argument for the existence of a God who is the source of all moral principles.  I had now a philosophical foundation for the faith I had so far accepted as a given.  My boss on the maintenance crew was a thoroughgoing sceptic and a rather profane man, and he rejected my faith as a mindless illusion.  He was an enthusiast for geological research and had amassed a collection of fossils that he was eager to show me to bolster his argument that the geological record and the theory of evolution explained the origins of life, leaving no room for religious fantasies.  God must have protected me from his influence, for my new perspective from C. S. Lewis overshadowed his arguments.

When I arrived back at A.C.C. in the fall of 1958, I teamed up with three other guys to live in a little bachelor apartment about a five-minute walk away from the campus.  My companions in this enterprise were my two Bible-selling buddies, Fred Selby and Carl Reed, along with a college cafeteria worker named Claude Crawford.  Our landlady was named Mrs. Pettigrew, or as she was affectionately called, “Momma Pet.”  This certainly beat living in the barracks, and it was a good healthy walk back and forth to campus.

Laquita was back in her dormitory, and since both our living places were off limits to the opposite sex, we had to hang out in the library and go to church together three times a week.  We attended, as did many students, the Graham St. Church of Christ, which sent a bus to the campus to transport the students.  The preacher was a dynamic faculty member named Carl Spain.  We learned a lot from him about deeper Christian thinking and behavior.  He paved the way for a shift by the Churches of Christ to a more Spirit-filled understanding of Christian living, and he emphasized the doctrine of grace, which to that point had not been at the forefront of Church of Christ thinking.  I was glad to have had some personal contact with Dr. Spain when I led singing for one of his Gospel Meetings at the Stamford church I attended.

I was not a happy camper that term.  I was greatly desiring to get married, now that we were committed to it.  Laquita (and her mother), however, wanted to wait until she had graduated, or was at least within a year away from it.  But in my immaturity, extended celibacy was pretty low on my list of desired disciplines.  I was selfishly impatient, so I rashly decided to use the “nuclear option”: “Marry me now or that’s it.”  She knew it was a dumb thing to say, but somehow she swallowed her pride and good judgment and gave in, so we scheduled a December wedding.  She has said many times since then, “I knew God had brought us together, even if you were being silly.”  If she have been then the more gently assertive woman she became later, she might have said, “O.K. buddy, I’ll give you a chance to forget you said that, and we’ll talk again tomorrow.”  But she gave in to my stupidity, and the Lord prevented any bad results from my blunder.  Definitely not one of my better moments, though.

Somehow we managed to arrange for the wedding and a little reception at Laquita’s home afterward.  I had to borrow money from my uncle in order to fund my part in the occasion, and I borrowed my friend Fred’s car.  The only honeymoon facility I could afford was a lakeside summer camp with a cabin available at off-season rates.  However, our happy few days there transformed it into a memorable spot, the beginning of our long and greatly blessed life together.  I’m so glad she (and the Lord) didn’t allow me to throw her away.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

Mailbag: Which Books on the Moral Argument Do You Recommend?

Hello, 

I am an aspiring philosopher/theologian with a graduate degree in and passion for apologetics, and I was hoping you could help me out. I'm looking for your personal list of books that someone who wants an advanced understanding moral argument needs to read.

For context, I'm looking to develop a list containing between 20 and 30 books dedicated to the moral argument. Ideally I'd have 15-20 books that provide support for and at least 5-10 books that challenge the argument. Ideally these texts would be mostly at the advanced level, or minimally, intermediate. 

The reason I'd like to do this is so that in the future I could dedicate a year to working through the best resources related to the argument. Ultimately, I'm looking to have advanced understanding of the argument.

I appreciate any recommendations you can give. 

Sincerely, 

Lucas

Hi, Lucas! Love that you want to spend time sinking into the moral argument. I think that too often nowadays arguments like this are treated as just a tool in the arsenal, rather than the rich resource they are for reflection, enjoyment, beauty, insight, spiritual formation, etc. The moral argument has it all going on.

There are five major components to the moral argument as I think about it. One is the history of the argument; another is a critique of secular ethics; another is a defense of theistic ethics; another is a defense of the moral realism on which it is all based; and another is an extension of the argument beyond theism to Christianity.

Regarding its history, Jerry Walls and I wrote The Moral Argument: A History, which directs you to folks like Kant, Newman, Taylor, Sorley, Rashdall, and others. Some of that’s really rich reading—especially Newman’s Grammar of Assent and Taylor’s Faith of a Moralist. Classics. Anyway, lots of recommendations in that book.

In terms of a critique of secular ethics, we wrote God and Cosmos, but just a start and promissory note. Linville’s piece on the moral argument, easily accessible online, is well worth reading. The debate between Craig and Wielenberg is coming out this year; that’s quite good. Edited by Adam Johnson. In terms of defending theistic ethics, that was the main goal of our Good God. But there are lots of possibilities here, including Zagzebski’s Divine Motivation Theory, Evans’ God and Moral Obligations, Hare’s Moral Gap, Adams’ Finite and Infinite Goods, Ritchie’s From Morality to Metaphysics. Most of these cover more than just one aspect of the moral argument—both defending theistic ethics and critiquing alternatives, for example. Wielenberg’s Robust Ethics offers criticisms of theistic ethics and an effort at a more secular account of ethics. Wielenberg and I have a written debate on Lewis’s moral argument in a book edited by Greg Bassham.

In terms of defending moral realism, see Cuneo’s The Normative Web, Shafer-Landau’s Moral Realism, and Enoch’s Taking Morality Seriously; all are important. Jerry and I aim to write our fourth book on the moral argument on this topic, finishing our planned tetralogy.

For extending the moral argument to Christianity, that is cutting-edge stuff. We need to see more books on this—especially using, say, Trinitarian resources. Adam Johnson wrote his dissertation on this recently at Southeastern, and Brian Trapp did about a decade ago at Southern. There may be more resources along such lines but I’m not as familiar with this literature. I have some doctoral students working on such topics in their dissertations. My guess is great work is coming here as the community of moral apologists builds and the momentum of the movement grows.

Incidentally, several of the folks mentioned—Hare, Adams, Evans, etc.—have done more than one book that’s important for the moral argument.

Important folks who are more secular to consider can be found when you look at rival ethical accounts. I mentioned Wielenberg, Enoch, and Shafer-Landau (though he aims for more neutrality on the God question than most), but as you get into error theory, expressivism, constructivism, sensibility, theory, and nontheistic moral realism (either natural or non-natural), you run into a host of thinkers: McDowell, Blackburn, Wiggins, Mackie, R. M. Hare (John’s father), Joyce, Korsgaard, Brink, Harman, Boyd, Foot, Parfit, etc.

There’s a four views book on God and morality edited by Loftin, and a nice anthology on God and ethics edited by Garcia and King called Is Goodness without God Good Enough? that’s eminently worth reading.

Of course avail yourself of this website, MoralApologetics.com, for a host of resources related to the moral argument from a wide array of disciplines. (The site will soon come under the auspices of the Center for Moral Apologetics we get to start at Houston Baptist this fall, as we are joining all the exciting things already happening there.) Recently the site’s begun a new series about recent developments in the moral argument—which reminds me, I have hardly mentioned contemporaries working on the moral argument; we’ve seen a real resurgence of work and interest on the topic over the last several decades.

Mark Murphy is an important thinker who has written some serious books on ethics from a theistic perspective although he is more reticent than many to make it into an apologetic matter. Still, though, quite worth reading, rife with trenchant insight and philosophical rigor. Kevin Kinghorn is a friend and good philosopher who studied with Swinburne and has written some important and germane books: A Framework of the Good, & (with Travis) But What About God’s Wrath? Much recommended.

In taking on alternative moral theories, of which there are a plethora, one might also be interested in taking on not just nonreligious alternatives, but non-Christian religious perspectives. Brian Scalise has done nice work using the Trinity to contrast an Islamic conception of love with that of Christianity’s; Ronnie Campbell has contrasted a Christian perspective on the problem of evil with those of several worldviews (pantheism, panentheism, etc.); TJ Gentry is finishing up a dissertation at North-Western using resources from moral apologetics to critique Mormonism; etc.

Paul Copan has penned a widely anthologized piece on the moral argument, and my wife and I have done a more popular level book that incorporated elements of Good God, God and Cosmos, and the history of the moral argument called Morals of the Story.

Sorry I can’t give you a more exhaustive list for now, but this is at least suggestive. You can find more resources in the notes and bibliographies of these books. I encourage you in your study! I am excited you have the interest; please keep in touch and let me know how it goes.

Blessings,

djb

Mailbag: How do you define the good?

Hi. I had a quick morality question for you. I hope that’s okay. I’ve been working with students at the local college campus, discussing morality. I’m wondering how do you define “the Good”? I’ll usually say something like “the Good is that which conforms to the nature and will of God.” What do you think?

Dave

Hi Dave! Thanks for the note. Your question is of course such a great one, and it is one of the hardest ones. Let me say a bit why I find it so devilishly difficult. Of course folks use “good” in nonmoral evaluative ways all the time—like "my computer is good." Thomists though want to put this sort of teleological consideration into the center of their ethical theory. Something is good to the extent it fulfills its function, or something like that, they will say.

Likewise with human beings, though morality enters the picture more explicitly with us, and if we are made by God and for intimacy with Him and others, then loving God and neighbor is what our purpose is. Thus, to the extent we do such things, we are (morally) good.

I don’t think that’s terrible. It probably has a lot going for it. But there has to be more, it seems to me, because of an example I think Wolterstorff comes up with: a serial killer’s “purpose” is to kill lots of people. So he’s a good serial killer if he does. But there is nothing moral about such goodness. So we have to ask not just whether someone or something performs his or her or its function or purpose, but whether the function or purpose is itself good. At that point a purely teleological account of the good seems to require something more deontological.

So regarding moral goodness in particular, what constitutes the standard or ground of moral value? To me the best account we have is the Christian God, owing to his nature. Of course our naturalist friends who are objectivists on such matters usually point to something like human flourishing. And there is some truth in that, it seems to me. This is what makes disambiguating these partially divergent/overlapping views onerous. As a Christian I’m convinced we were meant for flourishing, eudaimonia, shalom, joy, etc. But the question then becomes, what does that look like for us as humans? And the answer to that query invariably rides on what is ultimately real. If we are mere collocations of atoms and nothing else, our highest fulfillments are likely reducible to naturalistic items. But moral langauge and logic and phenomenology, to my thinking, all point beyond categories that naturalism alone can manage.

So I’m inclined to think the joy and telos for which we were designed requires more than that. So even if I were to agree that what's “good” for us is our flourishing (or something in that vicinity), it still points to something likely transcendent—something, I suspect, like the beatific vision. It seems to me the point is this: we cannot simply speak of what’s good for us and think we’re done; that very question drives us to ask what is good in and of itself.

Now, certain of our experiences are good intrinsically—like our friendships. But what is the ground of such intrinsic goods? Again, I don’t see how we avoid metaphysics if we really want to be thoughtful about it, and to me the best explanation seems likely to be classical theism. The nature of such a God seems to be at the front and center of what “the Good” is. This puts me in the theistic Platonist camp, but of course one can be a Christian without buying that. But it’s where I tend to go. Like you, I’m inclined to say that things are good to the extent they partake in or resemble the ultimate good. That is what makes sense of the value of friendship—it resembles God’s loving nature. At least that’s how I see it.

Christian theology makes even more fine-grained the analysis, since we know God’s nature to be Trinitarian—an eternal dance of other-regarding love. So this makes great sense of love being at the center of things, and of loving God and neighbor capturing all the laws and prophets. We are invited to participate in the love that functions at the foundation of reality and always has.

Ultimately I suspect we can effect a sort of rapprochement between Platonic and Thomistic accounts of the good, since we have been made in God’s image. What is best for us (loving relationships with God and others) and most conduces to our joy depends on what is most ultimately real and good in and of itself (God himself, indeed Trinitarian love).

Note, though, that this isn’t so much a “definition” of goodness as something else. I agree with Moore that we can’t define it. I still suspect, and think there’s good reason to believe, God is in some sense constitutive of it. That is more analysis than definition. And since God’s ineffable, this account has the advantage of rendering ultimate goodness, too, beyond our ken in ineliminable respects, necessitating what Adams calls a “critical stance” toward any other (likely deflationary) rival account of the good.

So, yes, hard question!! But in a nutshell that’s what I’m inclined to say. Thanks for the question.

djb

Recent Work on the Moral Argument, Part 3

In this third installment in the series, we look at the work of two very bright younger scholars who are doing exciting work in moral apologetics. We relish the prospect of seeing the work they will produce for a long time to come. Suan Sonna is building a Thomistic moral argument, and Adam Johnson just successfully defended his dissertation on a Trinitarian metaethical theory; both of their projects are succinctly described and detailed below.

Here at MoralApologetics.com we have been saying for years that there is enough work to be done on the moral argument to require a thriving community working on it together. We hope that this week’s installment can help you see that just such a community is coming together to do exciting and cutting-edge work.

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Suan Sonna is currently working on a Thomistic moral argument. His argument aims to do the following: (1) it proposes 10 standards any adequate moral theory must satisfy in terms of metaphysics, epistemology, and normativity; (2) Sonna argues that the best metaethical theory with respect to those 10 standards is Thomistic or Neo-Aristotelian; (3) And, he unpacks the implications of this Thomistic synthesis for divine command theory, the ethics of a perfect being, and clarifies the relationship between God and morality.

The basic structure of Suan’s argument is like so: If the Thomistic metaphysical synthesis is correct, then the existence of the God of classical theism inevitably follows. And one way in which the superiority of this synthesis can be demonstrated is in the domain of moral theory. In turn, Sonna argues that the best model of moral realism is by nature theistic, and unavoidably so. As Alasdair MacIntyre's did in After Virtue, Sonna more pointedly poses the following dilemma to skeptics who wish to be moral realists - Aristotle (God) or Nietzsche (Nihilism)?

To give you a sense of Adam Johnson’s work, here is a proposal he recently put together that captures much of its essence, entitled “Proposing a Trinitarian Metaethical Theory”:

Many different types of theists can affirm the following moral argument for God:

1. There are objective moral truths.

2. God is the best explanation for objective moral truths.

3. Therefore, God exists.

However, which understanding of God is a better explanation for objective morality? I argue that the trinitarian God of Christianity is the best explanation for objective morality. To develop this argument I propose a Trinitarian Metaethical Theory (TMT) which maintains that the ultimate ground of morality is God’s trinitarian nature. I begin with Robert Adams’s metaethical model and then expand it in significant ways by incorporating God’s trinitarian nature.

The TMT affirms, along with Adams, that God is the ultimate moral good and other beings are good when they resemble Him. But the TMT further proposes that a being is good when it specifically resembles God’s trinitarian nature as found in, and expressed among, the loving relationships between the persons of the Trinity. There are two ways this trinitarian addition to Adams’s model is helpful in understanding how God serves as the foundation of moral goodness.

First, to say morality is based merely on God’s nature ignores the relational aspects of God that are helpful in plumbing the depths of morality. Because morality is inextricably tied to personal relationships, it is easier to conceptualize and understand moral virtues in the context of eternal personal relationships as opposed to a single divine person existing in eternal isolation. God did not need to create other persons in order to be loving, moral, and relational because, being three persons in fellowship, He has always been these things.

Second, without the inner-trinitarian relationships, it is not clear that love, the cornerstone of morality, is a necessary aspect of ultimate reality. However, if the inner-trinitarian relationships are included, then it is more clearly the case that love is part of the bedrock of reality. Because loving relationships are a primordial aspect of God, we can more easily affirm that love is necessarily good. Since God is triune, love is not something new and contingent that came about through creation but is eternally necessary. In this way God’s inner-trinitarian relationships allow us to affirm that loving God and loving others, the bedrock of morality, is necessarily good.

The TMT also affirms, along with Adams, that our moral obligations are generated by God’s commands. An important aspect of this part of Adams’s model is that obligation arises from social relationships. He explained this aspect by affirming a social theory of the nature of obligation and then argued our relationship with God is simply an idealized version of this theory. The TMT expands Adams’s theory of obligation by adding important truths concerning God’s triune nature. There are two ways this addition is helpful in understanding how God serves as the foundation of moral obligation.

First, understanding the social trinitarian context of ultimate reality helps us understand why obligations arise from social relationships. Since God exists as divine persons in loving relationships with each other, there is a profound sense in which ultimate reality itself is social and thus all of reality takes place in a social context. Social relationships were not something new that came about when God created other beings, but are a necessary part of ultimate reality. This tells us that social relationships are part of the fabric of being itself and thus we should not be surprised that personal relationships play such a large role in moral obligation.

Second, God’s commands are instructions for the life-path by which we can best achieve His ultimate purpose for us—to become a co-lover with the members of Trinity. While God has authority over us, His commands flow not from a despotic desire to control us but from a desire that we would enjoy the greatest thing possible—loving relationships with Him and others. This illumines Jesus’ explanation that the greatest commandments are to love God and to love others, and how the rest of the commandments rest upon this foundation (Matt 22:36–40). This is so because these two commands instruct us to be like the members of the Trinity who both love God (the other members of the Trinity) and love others (the other members of the Trinity). Love, the basis of morality, originates from within God’s inner life of three divine persons in perfect loving communion.

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Kudos to Suan and Adam! MoralApologetics.com celebrates the work of these gentlemen, stands with their wonderful efforts, and is excited to see such exciting developments that showcase the power of the moral argument(s) and the splendor of God’s unfailing love.

Recent Work on the Moral Argument, Part II

In this second installment of exciting recent work in moral apologetics, we asked Dr. Mark Linville to offer a quick summary of what he’s been up to. He does really excellent work, and MoralApologetics.com is always happy to direct people to his substantive contributions. In his own words here is that summary:

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Essay in Craig-Wielenberg Book

I titled my essay, “Darwin, Duties, and the Demiurge.”  I begin by comparing the “evolutionary debunking arguments” of C. S. Lewis and Alex Rosenberg.  No two thinkers could be further apart in their views of the nature of the universe, but they agree on two fundamental points: A consistent naturalism entails either moral subjectivism or nihilism, and most naturalists are not consistent, as they seek ways of avoiding the full--and repugnant--implications of their worldview.  Rosenberg embraces both naturalism and its repugnant implications. Lewis rejects both.

In contrast to both Lewis and Rosenberg, I argue not that naturalism entails or requires some variety of moral non-realism, but that moral realism--the idea that some acts really are right or wrong--does not find a good “fit” on that worldview.  And where they argue that the consistent naturalist would embrace some variety of moral non-realism, I instead advance an epistemological argument to the effect that the consistent naturalist is a moral skeptic. Where a naturalist of Rosenberg’s stripe will reject any teleological explanation for what Rosenberg calls “core morality”--basically, the common sense moral beliefs that are widely distributed--the theist thinks that human moral faculties are designed for the purpose of discerning moral truth.  “Theism thus provides underpinnings for the expectation that the human moral sense is capable of discerning moral truth.”

After recounting a general Darwinian “genealogy of morals,” I consider some objections to the sort of argument that I advance.  I assess Louise Antony’s direct replies to my earlier work. Perhaps the heart of her critique is that despite the origins of our moral faculties, we are still in a position to evaluate moral claims and beliefs by appeal to “reason and evidence.”  And she cites an important recent article by Roger White (“You Just Believe That Because….”) in support of her argument. The heart of my reply is that certain of our most basic moral convictions, such as Chesterton’s example that “Babies should not be strangled,” is not had by any inference of reason.  We do not reason to this as a conclusion, but we reason with it as we evaluate other moral claims.  And it is not as though babies have the empirically discernible property of not-to-be-strangledness stamped under their bonnets, giving us empirical evidence for the belief.  Rather, the best evidence for that conviction is it seeming to us to be true, and self-evidently so.  And it is this very seeming that is undercut on Antony’s naturalism.

I then turn to Erik Wielenberg’s interesting and ingenious attempt at avoiding evolutionary debunking arguments by appeal to a “third factor” involved in the explanation of human moral beliefs.  His aim is to challenge the debunker’s claim that even if there were objective values the naturalist would not be in a position to know them.  The core of his argument, I think, is that if there are rights, and if such rights supervene upon the possession of reason, and if believing that there are rights requires the possession of reason, then it would appear that our evolution, aiming only at fitness, has also guided us to truth.  My main reply to Wielenberg invokes George Santayana’s critique of the young Bertrand Russell’s early embrace of both moral realism--a Moral Platonism similar to Wielenberg’s--and naturalism.  The heart of Santayana’s argument--what one commentator on Santayana calls his “most telling criticism”--is what might be dubbed the demiurge argument.  Santayana argued that, unlike Plato’s scheme, Russell’s Platonic Good “is not a power,” and so cannot be thought to influence the course of nature. And so there is a great gulf fixed between those Platonic precepts and whatever shape the world takes, with the result of a Platonism “stultified and eviscerated.”  In a world in which “man is a product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving,” there is no reason to expect that the moral convictions of evolved rational creatures would be informed in any way by the moral declarations in the Platonic Empyrean.  What is missing, then, is someone or something that can fill the role of Plato’s demiurge, and the theist has the perfect candidate.

Other Relevant Recent Work

“God is Necessary for Morality” is my main essay in my printed “debate” with Louise Antony in Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion, 2nd edition, eds., Michael Peterson and Raymond VanArragon (Blackwell, 2019).  Antony and I also exchange brief replies to each other’s main essays.

Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Religion

Wiley-Blackwell

“Moral Argument” in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Religion eds., Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro (Wiley-Blackwell).  I believe this comes out this year.

“Respect for Persons Makes Right Acts Right” is my main essay in my printed “debate” with Alastair Norcross (who defends Act Utilitarianism) in Steven B. Cowan, Problems in Value Theory (Bloomsbury, 2020).  I offer a brief critique of Divine Command Theory here along the same lines as my critiques of several other ethical theories (along the way to defending a Kantian respect for persons principle). Perhaps of at least indirect relevance is my fairly extensive ("Chestertonian") critique of Alex Rosenberg's Scientism in "A Defence of Armchair Philosophy: G. K. Chesterton and the Pretensions of Scientism" in An Unexpected Journal (December, 2019)--online and Amazon hard copy.  (This journal is put together by several graduates of the HBU apologetics program.)

Problems in Value Theory: An Introduction to Contemporary Debates

Bloomsbury Academic

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We appreciate Dr. Linville doing that for us! Be on the lookout for all those exciting essays to come. In our next installment we’ll take a look at two younger scholars doing exciting work on aspects of moral apologetics, namely, Suan Sonna and Adam Johnson.

Matriculation at Abilene Christian College (1957): Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 10)

As a teenager growing up in a premillennial Church of Christ, I had assumed that I would go to the college associated with that group of churches, Kentucky Bible College in Winchester, KY.  But by the time I had been away from that milieu for over two years, there seemed no reason to go so far away, and I enrolled in the fall of 1957 at Abilene Christian College, which was affiliated with the mainline Churches of Christ that rejected premillennialism.  That doctrinal issue no longer seemed central to my faith, and though I couldn’t subscribe to the hardline rejection of it by mainline Churches of Christ, I felt that A.C.C. would meet my educational needs.  Over the four years that I spent there, my vocational plans evolved from thinking I would be a Bible or Religious Education major, to preparing to be a high school English teacher, and finally to plans to attend graduate school and become a college teacher of English.

          As I mentioned in the preceding installment of this autobiography, I went a few weeks early to Abilene to find a job.  Actually, I had two jobs for a while, my truck-driving job with the College maintenance department and work at a drugstore soda fountain across the street from the College.  Although the drugstore job lasted only a few weeks, until I was fully involved in classes, it had one very memorable moment.  My boss on the job was a young man who had worked there a while.  I was mostly a cleanup employee, so it was predictable that in my first week I was called on to do the dirtiest job associated with the fountain: cleaning out the grease trap.  A lot of goop-filled water went through the clean-up sink, where we washed the glasses and other utensils used to operate the fountain.  Every week or two the grease trap had to be cleaned to avoid a blocked drain.  The cleaning involved taking the trap apart, scooping out the accumulated goop, wiping it clean, and putting it back together—a thoroughly nasty job.  I did it the best I could the first time I was asked, and my boss seemed satisfied.  A week or ten days later, he asked me to do it again, but this time he gave me a bit of worldly wisdom before I got started: “You know,” he said confidentially, “If you’re asked to do a dirty job and do it well, you’ll probably get asked to do it again.”  That stuck with me and I have several times been reminded of it when I was confronted with the call to deal with messes much more consequential, if less literally dirty.  There is some ambiguity in the recognition one receives for doing a good job; performing well will often get you into even dirtier jobs.

          Back in 1957, the campus housing at A.C.C. still included some WWII era barracks which were as spartan for the students as they were for the soldiers.  My friend Fred Selby and I had our first-year lodgings there, along with Fred’s brother, David, who was coming back to school in spite of suffering from a form of leukemia that had made his life difficult.  I remember seeing him experiencing a cold sweat one time in his room.  He was unable to finish the term and had to go into a cancer hospital.  Unfortunately, he died before the academic year was over.  Fred and I were best buddies, and I went home with him several times during that year, which enabled me more easily to visit my folks in Rule, which was only ten miles away from Fred’s home.  That was fine with Fred, because he was sweet for a while on my niece, Linda, even though she was still in high school and her mother did not encourage the romance. 

          My campus job with the maintenance department had me often driving their old dump truck to take loads of refuse to the land fill a few miles away.  There I first encountered the smell of perpetually burning garbage, an unforgettable stench both acrid and heavy.  The truck was a challenge to drive, and there was much grinding of gears before I mastered the coordination of stick shift and clutch.  When I was not driving, there was plenty of grounds grooming and weed hoeing to do.  There was an outside maintenance crew of about four or five guys, and an inside crew rather larger who tended the dormitories and other buildings.  When it was raining or there was insufficient outside work to be done, the outside guys would be drafted into painting, or changing mattresses, or sweeping halls.  I preferred the outside work and the chatting time it supplied between the guys as we plied our hoes and rakes.  We were paid 60 cents an hour for our work, and I worked about 20 hours a week, in addition to carrying a full-time academic load.

          I received two pieces of special news during my first weeks of class.  As I was going through orientation and registration, I was called over to the table of the English Department head and told that my placement exam entitled me to be enrolled in the honors composition class taught by a venerable elderly lady called Mrs. Garrett.  Later on, I came to have very close relationships with both Mrs. Garrett and the Department Head, Dr. James Culp.  I received the second news a bit later when I was called out of class to hear that my father had died.  The funeral was held in Rule, but his body was brought to an Abilene cemetery for interment.  After attending these events, I returned to campus and took up classes again.

 Mrs. Garrett’s special class allowed and encouraged creativity in writing and featured a great deal of her reading aloud.  It was there that I first encountered the pleasure of listening to an expressive reader.  Freshman English elicited some memorable writing assignments, including a research paper on the circumpolar constellations, which fostered a lifelong interest in astronomy, even though I never took a class in the subject.  Mrs. Garrett’s class undergirded my decision in my sophomore year to major in English, rather than Bible or religious education.

          Much as I enjoyed my classes in my freshman year, my academic program was not the most significant part of my experience that year.  I had a few short infatuations with female classmates in the fall term, but they all faded away when, toward the end of November or the first part of December, I met the girl who within a year or so had become my wife.  Laquita Alexander was a cutie who smiled at everybody across her cafeteria line, but I thought she had special eyes for me; I certainly had special eyes for her, so it was natural that one day when we met on the stairs as we changed classes, we introduced ourselves to one another.  Shortly after that, one day after I had finished my meal, I strolled back to the line to see if she was free, and she was, and I asked her for our first date, going to the Tuesday Night Devotional on the steps of the Administration Building.  We both liked to sing, and that mutual interest was made evident as we sang the hymns that formed the major part of the devotional time.  After that, we spent most of our free hours together, going to church mostly and studying together in the library.  However, she had (and still has) more common sense than I did and thought that hand-holding interfered with study.  I was so amazed that she wanted to be with me that I was willing to concede to her priorities.

          By Christmas time, we were “going steady,” and I gave her my high school class ring to wear around her neck.  We saw each other as frequently as we could, but her time was more limited than mine, since she worked as much as her boss in the cafeteria would let her, usually 40-50 hours per week in addition to her classes.  She got up at 5:30 a.m. in order to work at breakfast time.  She was not happy that I made 60 cents an hour on the maintenance crew, while she made only 50 cents an hour in the cafeteria.  She had accumulated some savings from her work during her high school years, but she lived in continual fear that she would not make enough to pay her school costs each term.  She managed to pay her bills and not to incur any debt during her bachelor’s work.  In fact, her love for me was abundantly manifest when she agreed to use her hard-earned savings to pay part of my bill one semester.  She has taught me over the years how to be more thrifty, and she says that I have moved her toward being a more generous giver.

          However, I did get some breaks through scholarships.  I was amazed when one day I was called to the ACC vice-president’s office and he told me that I had been selected to receive a $500 award from the Texas Club of  New York.  That was as big to me as receiving a full fellowship during the years of my graduate work.

          Although I had laid aside my plans for a Bible major, I was still interested in biblical studies, so I eagerly engaged in the required general courses such as Survey of the Old and New Testaments.  One of my Bible teachers that year was a man named J. P. Lewis.  His approach to teaching the Bible was to encourage close attention to the text, reinforced by tests that offered multiple choice and fill in the blanks.  This kind of feedback was right up my alley, and I aced most of the tests he gave.  As I remember, he didn’t have much by way of deeper interpretation or application, but I didn’t fault him for that, letting my success in mechanically mastering the text outweigh any shortcomings he had.  I took two terms from him, and one day I encountered him in the barber shop (back in the days when I still had hair to be cut) and mentioned that I would like to sign up with him for still another course in my sophomore year.  He rather dryly responded that it would perhaps be better for me to go on another teacher who would have a different perspective to offer.  Maybe he was tired of having a smug know-it-all in his class, but his put-off was heeded, and I had other Bible teachers my sophomore year. 

          During the second semester of my freshman year, I was preoccupied with hanging out with Laquita, and Fred, my roommate, was sadly absorbed with the final hospitalization and death of his brother David.  So we didn’t see much of each other. that term.  That summer (1958), Fred and I were closely associated once again when he obtained a job for me working with him harvesting wheat and other grains, moving north as the grain ripened.  Our boss was a man named Joe Vosek, with whom Fred had worked before.  That was quite a different experience from anything I had done before.  My job was driving the truck that collected the harvested grain, driving alongside the harvester as it deposited the grain down a chute into the truck.  I then took the load to a grain elevator and came back for more.  It was a hot, dusty job, and everybody was filthy at the end of the day.  Joe rented motel rooms for the crew when we got away from his home territory, and we conked out there after we had eaten. 

I’m afraid that my driving was not always satisfactory to Joe.  One time in particular I turned back into the field from the highway and made a wide swing for the turn.  Unfortunately, someone was behind me who was already passing me because I had signaled the turn, and he almost ran into me.  Evidently he knew Joe and complained to him about my driving.  Later I heard an irate Joe yelling to someone, “He’d better learn to drive that truck, or I’ll take him off of it!”  I don’t remember whether he spoke to me about the incident, but I knew I was on probation.  As it turned out, we were engaged in harvesting for only a few weeks, having to stop because of weather, whether rain or drought I don’t remember.   That precipitated my significant decision to hitchhike down to the town where Laquita lived, Burnet, TX.  More about the results of that move in the next installment.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

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Critiquing Arguments for Moral Nihilism

From Crash Course Apologetics:

The moral error theorist does not believe in such things as moral values and moral obligations. John Mackie offered two arguments for this view that have come to be held with high regard among moral nihilists. The first is the argument from disagreement. The second is the argument from queerness. In this interview, Eric Sampson critiques both arguments. Eric Sampson is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

The two papers linked below are the topic of this interview.

https://philpapers.org/rec/SAMTSA-6

https://philpapers.org/rec/MORPAT-23

Why God's Triune Nature is the Foundation of Morality

From Crash Course Apologetics:

In a previous interview I did with Adam Johnson, he critiqued Dr. Eric Weilenberg's metaethical model. In this interview he defends his own model, which is a new and distinctively Christian.

Link to my previous interview with Adam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs_t0...

Easter and Ecclesiology

By now, you have probably been inundated with articles surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Some articles have told you about the dangers of the virus and why you should heed the advice of the CDC, whereas other articles have claimed that the pandemic is nothing more than a governmental conspiracy aimed at bringing forth socialism into the nation.

But one of the greatest challenges to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic is a theological question that has been posed to the Church. The Church[1] has been unable to meet in person. However, due to the advances in technology, churches across the nation and the world have met virtually through online services and alternative styles, including drive-in services. The question has been asked, “Are these still church services?” An even bigger theological question raised is, “Who is the church?” These questions are part of the theological branch known as ecclesiology or theology of the church.

As we approach the Easter season, many churches will find themselves unable to meet in person. However, does this mean that the Church is no longer in operation? To answer this question, we might consider Jesus’ provocative statement from John 2:19: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up in three days.” Jesus had challenged the disciples and Jewish leaders early in his ministry. It was something that resonated with both. The Jewish leaders exclaimed, “This temple took forty-six years to build, and you will raise it up in three days?” (John 2:20). The disciples only fully understood his message after the resurrection had transpired and the leaders used his message as fodder to fuel Jesus’s condemnation.  Oddly, the message is not included in the Synoptic Gospels. However, it is reflected in the accusation of the Jewish leaders against Jesus during his trial, saying, “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple made with human hands, and in three days I will build another not made with hands’” (Mark 14:58). Even on the cross, Jesus was ridiculed by individuals who said, “You who would destroy this temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross!” (Matt. 27:40). The correlation of these verses across the Gospel accounts amounts to what Dr. Lydia McGrew calls an undesigned coincidence. That is, a correlation that was unplanned, but which shows a common source behind all the Gospel narratives.

The aged apostle John explained the message of Jesus, noting that Jesus “was speaking about the temple of his body. So when he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the statement Jesus had made” (John 2:21–22). But what does Jesus’s teaching tell us about the Church this Easter season, especially during this pandemic? Here are a few applications:

1. The Church is a people and not a place. This is a recurring theme throughout the teachings of Jesus and something that makes him quite the controversialist. Early in Jesus’s ministry, he met with a woman that most modern Christians would turn away. She was a woman who had been divorced five times and was living with a man (John 4:17–18). While Jesus shared the gospel with her, she turned to the debate over place. She, being a Samaritan, said, “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem” (John 4:20). Jesus redirected her attention to the true mode of worship. While admitting that Jerusalem was the chosen place to have the temple, he said something even more revolutionary about worship. He said, “But an hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and in truth. Yes, the Father wants such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and in truth” (John 4:21–24). As the CSB Study Bible says in its commentary, “Jesus’s point was that since God is spirit, proper worship of him is also a matter of spirit rather than physical location.” This is something to which God is directing our attention during this time. Worship is not just something that happens corporately on Sunday mornings even though that is extremely important, but rather worship is something that can and should happen every day of the week.

2. The Church is a body and not a building. I have been concerned for quite some time that we as Christians worship the buildings in which we worship the Lord. This pandemic has unfortunately suggested that is so. By Jesus’s teaching concerning the temple of God being his body rather than the building, he was directing people against the idol worship of the temple building. Jesus warned the disciples that the temple would be destroyed (Matt. 24:2). Yet, the Church would be the bride of Christ (Matt. 25:1–13; Rev. 21:1–2). That is, the Church is a body—a universal body—which cannot be restrained by bricks and mortar. What makes us think that a building could ever hold the totality of God’s presence in the first place (Acts 17:24)?

3. The Church is an organism and not an organization. Jesus taught that the Church would not be built by organizations but rather through the organism of his Church. When Peter proclaimed that Jesus was the Messiah, Jesus noted that Peter had this truth revealed to him by the Father. He calls Peter blessed before saying, “And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it” (Matt. 16:18). The reality is that the Church is a larger assembly of people that one could ever realize. It spans across denominational lines, transcends time, and unites various nationalities and ethnicities.

We have long accepted the idea that the Church is equivalent to a local community club. However, the Church is an unstoppable organism of the like that COVID-19 shutters and flees. No organism can stop the Church. Several viruses much worse than COVID-19 have tried in the past and lost. Smallpox has hit numerous times throughout history from 165 to 748, and the Church lived on. The bubonic plague, otherwise known as the “Black Death,” killed thousands of people from 1348–1352, and the Church continued. Throughout the 1400s and 1500s (the time of the Reformation), the bubonic plague arose from time to time, and the Church remained formidable. The 1600s continued to see the bubonic plague strike and even into the 1700s. The Church has remained steadfast even still. We will survive COVID-19. If we return to the ecclesiology of Jesus, we will have a better picture of the Church and a better theology to accompany what and who the Church is supposed to be.

Remember, it was after the resurrection that the Church began to understand what Jesus meant by the temple being his body. Despite the challenges we face, may we remember the victory found in the resurrection of Jesus and our identity found in him.

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Brian G. Chilton is the founder of BellatorChristi.com, the host of The Bellator Christi Podcast, and the author of the Layman’s Manual on Christian Apologetics. He received his Master of Divinity in Theology from Liberty University (with high distinction); his Bachelor of Science in Religious Studies and Philosophy from Gardner-Webb University (with honors); and received certification in Christian Apologetics from Biola University. Brian is enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Theology and Apologetics at Liberty University and is a member of the Evangelical Theological Society and the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Brian has been in the ministry for nearly 20 years and serves as the Senior Pastor of Westfield Baptist Church in northwestern North Carolina.

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© 2020. BellatorChristi.com.

[1] I use the capitalized Church to indicate the universal Church.

Lewis and Tolkien on True Fairy-Stories

“On Fairy Stories”

J. R. R. Tolkien

Full Essay

“It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would feel, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be “primarily” true, its narrative to be history, without thereby necessarily losing the mythical or allegorical significance that it had possessed. It is not difficult, for one is not called upon to try and conceive anything of a quality unknown. The joy would have exactly the same quality, if not the same degree, as the joy which the “turn” in a fairy-story gives: such joy has the very taste of primary truth. (Otherwise its name would not be joy.) It looks forward (or backward: the direction in this regard is unimportant) to the Great Eucatastrophe. The Christian joy, the Gloria, is of the same kind; but it is preeminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous. But this story is supreme; and it is true. Art has been verified. God is the Lord, of angels, and of men—and of elves. Legend and History have met and fused. ”

— J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories"

A clip from EWTN's Tolkien's 'The Lord of the Rings:' A Catholic Worldview portraying a debate between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien on whether or not myths are lies. This debate was ultimately instrumental in C.S. Lewis's conversion to Christianity.

Critiquing Dr. Eric Wielenberg's Metaethical Model (Interview with Adam Johnson)

Photo by James Sullivan on Unsplash

From Crash Course Apologetics:

Adam Lloyd Johnson is a PhD candidate at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary specializing in metaethics. He teaches philosophy at Theologisches Seminar Rhineland in Wölmerson, Germany. He is also a campus missionary with Ratio Christi.

In 2015 he published a paper in the journal Philosophia Christi titled, “Debunking Nontheistic Moral Realism: A Critique of Eric Wielenberg's Attempt to Deflect the Lucky Coincidence Objection.” The paper is linked below. Adam summarizes the paper in this interview.

https://www.pdcnet.org/pc/content/pc_...

My Summer of (Attempted) Bible-selling: Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 9)

My Summer of (Attempted) Bible-selling: Twilight Musings Autobiography (Part 9)

Elton Higgs

In June, 1957, I said my good-byes to the family, packed up my suitcase, and, with my soon-to-be roommate, Fred Selby, piled into the car of our Bible-selling recruiter, Carl Reed, to make the trip to sales school in Nashville, TN, home of the Southwestern Bible Company.  My summer’s experience was not as financially productive as I had hoped, and there were challenging difficulties along the way.  Consequently, I came to see and accept some of my weaknesses and vulnerabilities, learned how to cope with unexpected difficult circumstances, and made discoveries that turned out to be helpful in years to come—and in the process produced some good personal anecdotes. 

In that era, the Southwestern Company had hundreds, maybe thousands of young men of college age selling for them in a kind of pyramid system.  That is, a portion of the profits for each salesman accrued to those who recruited them, and so on up the line.  In this way, young men who had several crews reporting to them could do quite well.  I recruited nobody and was not myself recruited to return the next summer.

After sales school (conducted by a slick super-salesman who later was indicted for some questionable business dealings), Fred and I were assigned to the town of Mt. Vernon, OH.  We found room and board in a residential house that had three rooms for rent, the other two occupied by elderly gentlemen with whom Fred and I had conversation from time to time.  We set out immediately to get town and county maps with which to plan our sales activities and checked in with the local authorities, which was protocol for all Southwest salesmen.  We were very disappointed to find that there was a restriction on door-to-door selling in the city limits of Mt. Vernon, so we were forced to sell in the outskirts of town or to hitch-hike to nearby towns without sales restrictions to pursue our enterprise.  We both did a lot of walking that summer.

We established ourselves with a local Church of Christ and were well received there as we attended each Sunday morning and sometimes went to week-night activities.  I remember being allowed to lead singing a few times and participating in Bible classes.  It was in one of the week-night activities that I first engaged in bowling, and I had beginner’s luck by throwing a couple of successive strikes, a feat I have repeated only rarely and don’t remember ever exceeding. 

Meanwhile, on the sales front, I tried some of the techniques we were taught at sales school.  Get the name of the first person who will talk to you on a street and use that name when you approach the next-door neighbor.  “Mrs. Jones, I’ve just been talking to your neighbor Mrs. Brown, about reading the Bible, and I’d like to share with you also how some books I have will make your Bible study richer.”  Or walk up to a door, and if somebody answers, say, “What beautiful flowers you have, how do you make them so healthy?”  If you manage to get inside and actually show some books, say, “This comes two colors; which one do you prefer?  Good, now let’s look at leather covers and hardbacks.  Which of those do you prefer?”  If they look the least bit interested, get out your order book and begin writing.  “Do you prefer paying cash today, or writing a check?  What delivery date is best for you?”  I rarely closed a sale this way, but I thought I had to try.

A few weeks into my stay in Mt. Vernon, I came down with mumps and had to stay in for almost two weeks, so that put a big kink in my income for the summer.  During this confinement, I was regaled by the two older guys in the rooming house with stories of grotesque swellings in adults who had mumps, and in more intimate places than the jaws.  My case, I am happy to say, was unremarkable.  I don’t really remember how I spent that time, but  since we didn’t have a TV, I assume I did a lot of reading.  It was probably on this occasion that I read some Jehovah’s Witnesses material that I came across, in which I first encountered their argument that Jesus was created by God (“the firstborn of all creation”) and was not the eternal, co-existent  Son of God.  Some of the resistance of people to talk to anyone who came to their door arose from their having been visited frequently and rather insistently by Jehovah’s Witnesses. 

I truly enjoyed meeting people, when they would let me in the house, and later, when the books I sold had to be delivered by others because I had been called home to be with my dying father, the recipients seemed truly concerned at not seeing me again.  Sometimes I would talk to people in stores and on the street just to get a feel for what a town was like.  I usually took a sack lunch along with me, but I needed to go to a store for something to drink and a little dessert treat; as I sat outside and ate, I would observe people going past.  I remember specifically sitting outside a store across from Gambier College in Gambier, OH, and eating my Twinkies while I watched the students going in and out.  I never went through the gates myself.

Other than the mumps, the summer was very healthy for me, because I walked miles on country roads, where the houses were up to a mile apart.  That was actually pleasant, since it was quiet and punctuated only by birdsong and the occasional passing car.  The residents were a bit more laid back and less suspicious than town folk.  I don’t think I was a very threatening sight with my little brown sample case, walking in from the dusty road.

My summer of selling Bibles and aids to Bible studies (I still have and use my Nave’s Topical Bible) came to an early end when I received a call from my sister-in-law in Rule, TX, that my father was dying and that I had better come back home to see him.  I had to ride the bus, since I didn’t have enough money to take the train, and it took me a couple of days to make the trip, sleeping on the bus.  Though my father was very frail, he actually lived until I had to go to the campus of the school I had decided to attend for my college education, Abilene Christian College (now Abilene Christian University), about 60 miles from Rule.  I was able to find two part-time jobs during the last few weeks before classes began, one with the College maintenance department ground crew driving a dump truck, for which I was qualified by still having the commercial license attained when I drove the school bus back in Rule.  My other job was working the soda fountain in a drug store across the street from the campus.

I remember very well receiving a piece of mail that put the official end to my summer of Bible-selling: I got a check from the Southwest Company for $220, my net profit from my summer’s work in Ohio.  Not a very remarkable reward for all my efforts, but it was better than being in debt to the Company.  In spite of my small earnings in this job, I have often harked back to the good experience I gained, and my knowledge of sales techniques has enabled me to ward off more than one salesman who knocked at my own door; but if they were young and nervous, I was gentle in my rejection.

I got news that my father had died during the week of Freshman Orientation at A.C.C.  I went back to Rule for the funeral and a period of mourning with the family, and my leaving home after that marked the beginning of my academic career.  Fred Selby and I continued rooming together in an old army barrack that served as the poor boys’ dormitory at A.C.C.  I will be describing my college experiences in my next installment of Autobiographical Musings.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife and adult daughter in Jackson, MI.. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. His self-published Collected Poems is online at Lulu.com. He also published a couple dozen short articles in religious journals. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable; it's thrilling to welcome this dear friend onboard.)

In Love with the Word: A Charge to Christian Literary Critics

In Love with the Word: A Charge to Christian Literary Critics

Marybeth Baggett

Back when I decided to become an English major during an American Literature class at the local community college, I was overwhelmed by many of the wonderfully creative pieces that we studied. Chief among the works that captivated my attention was Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. I don’t mean to overstate the situation, but I teach English today in no small part thanks to that book. It’s a tragic story, so its positive effect on me may be a bit surprising. But anyone who has read it can testify to Crane’s ability to use mere words to bring to vivid life the fully realistic character of Maggie and to garner sympathy and concern for her and those like her.

Somehow these marks on the book’s pages filled my mind with empathy for the less fortunate, challenged my preconceptions about poverty, and—among other things—helped me better understand American history and culture. Reading this novel impressed upon me what an astounding thing is language. Used well it fills us with joy and enobles our existence. Language can entertain us through stories and verbal games. It can delight us through brilliant literary expression. We can use it to convey our internal experiences and to get a peek into the experiences of others. In short, we can do wonders with words.

I felt as much when I wrote my end-of-term paper on Crane’s novel. I found such satisfaction in engaging Crane’s story, having responses to it formed in my mind, and turning those inchoate thoughts into something structured, something readable and understandable by another person. That was my first experience, I think, in writing an essay of which I was truly proud. What was true at that time remains true now: for me, there is little better than bringing ideas to heel in a well-crafted sentence. If I may engage in hyperbole, it sometimes feels like a miracle.

But as valuable and worthwhile as language and literature is, there is a danger of overvaluing the written word for those like us who spend our time dwelling on it. We risk overestimating literature’s worth and putting on it a burden it simply cannot bear. As we think about our love for literature, we can understand sentiments of writers like Samuel Coleridge who elevate literary expression to the apex of human activity. In Biographia Literaria, he says that “poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.”[1] Emerson, in his quintessential grandiosity, takes this notion a step further, making poetry foundational to reality itself and placing it beyond humanity’s comprehension or control:

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.[2]

On Emerson’s terms, we are unworthy mortals who can only glimpse poetry’s greatness.

Still others have put much hope in poetry as the means of personal or communal salvation, as does Matthew Arnold who, Culture and Anarchy, stakes his social agenda on advancing transformative cultural education:

Again and again I have insisted how those are the happy moments of humanity, how those are the marking epochs of a people’s life, how those are the flowering times for literature and art and all the creative power of genius, when there is a national glow of life and thought, when the whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive.[3]

It’s an enchanting vision to be sure, of society in full cooperation and prosperity. But literary genius as the source of such conditions strikes the ear as a bit of wishful thinking.

Yes, Coleridge, Emerson, and Arnold affirmed the existence of God and saw poetry or cultural activity as in some way or other directly tied to a divine source, but in their writings that so highly elevate poetry, we can see the makings of a disconnection between the two, a displacement and eventually an elevation of one for the other—and the wrong one. In Screwtape Letters through the mouth of his titular demonic character, C. S. Lewis warns of such a temptation regarding social justice. Rather than the so-called “patient” prioritizing Christian doctrine with social justice concerns flowing from that, Screwtape wants him to reverse the order: “The thing to do is to get a man at first to value social justice as a thing which the Enemy demands, and then work him on to the stage at which he values Christianity because it may produce social justice.”[4] The temptation process he describes to Wormwood could work just as easily for literature. What this amounts to, of course, is idolatry, a status for poetry that Wallace Stevens makes explicit in Adagia: “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”[5]

Christians would, of course, assiduously avoid embracing Stevens’ conclusions, not least of all because we retain a belief in God. But Christian or no, we’d do well to pause for a moment and consider the absurdity of Stevens’ claim. Poetry is wonderful, but life’s redemption? What a bunch of nonsense. In the face of death, disease, war, atrocities, we’ll respond with figurative language and some prosody. Grievous loss? Here’s a sonnet to remedy the situation. To offer lyricism alone as rectification for horrific abuse is frankly grotesque. Justice may at times be poetic, but poetry is far from justice’s source. At best it is a salve for sorrow, an intimation of a world set right.

But before we start patting ourselves on the back for recognizing the error of Stevens’ ways, I wonder if we don’t sometimes verge the same idolatrous thinking about our vocation. It’s often the subtle errors that are the most perilous and insidious. Do we ever ourselves prioritize literature and language at the expense of something more vital? Do we ever use it to overindulge our own longings or boost our own ego? Does our love of literature ever interfere with or displace our deeper callings, especially our highest calling as Christians to love God and love our neighbor? Do we mine literature’s truths as means for self-advancement instead of with kingdom-building aims? Have we ever allowed our God-given gifts for appreciating and analyzing literature to look down on others who don’t share those gifts? Are we guilty of imperialistic thinking, believing our discipline the most important, implicitly saying to another part of the body of Christ that we have no need of them?

In a poignant passage, William James well articulates the danger of mishandling literature:

All Goods are disguised by the vulgarity of their concomitants, in this work-a-day world; but woe to him who can only recognize them when he thinks them in their pure and abstract form! The habit of excessive novel-reading and theatre-going will produce true monsters in this line. The weeping of the Russian lady over the fictitious personages in the play, while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside, is the sort of thing that everywhere happens on a less glaring scale.[6]

Again, literature is a beautiful thing; prizing it over actual human beings is abhorrent.

In the literary field, we also sometimes see self-indulgence of a different kind, that which is practiced from a critical stance where a scholar or reviewer uses the work of another as merely a soapbox for self-promotion. W. H. Auden captures the temptations to pride involved in literary criticism:

If good literary critics are rarer than good poets or novelists, one reason is the nature of human egoism. A poet or a novelist has to learn to be humble in the face of his subject matter which is life in general. But the subject matter of a critic, before which he has to learn to be humble, is made up of authors, that is to say, of human individuals, and this kind of humility is much more difficult to acquire. It is far easier to say — “Life is more important than anything I can say about it” — than to say — “Mr. A’s work is more important than anything I can say about it.”[7]

A piece of literature is no human being, of course, but treatment of a book or literary work surely has implications for treatment of the one who wrote it and who poured so much of themselves and their time into it. It also has implications for our own character formation.

Christian literary critics must center our Christian identity as primary, with our study of literature flowing from that. John 13:35 says that love is the distinguishing mark of disciples of Christ. In Matthew 22, Jesus identifies love of God and love of neighbor as the two greatest commandments, ending with the profound but mysterious truth that “[a]ll the Law and the Prophets hang on [them].” Alan Jacobs uses this claim as a springboard for his worthwhile book, A Theology of Reading, which is intriguingly subtitled A Hermeneutics of Love. An adaptation of a well-worn scripture passage might frame our thinking here:

If I read through the lens of Marx or of Greenblatt, but do not have love, I am only a noxious judge or a nagging critic. If I have the gift of soliloquy and can fathom all poetry and all fiction, and if I have a style that can stir passions, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I pen all I perceive to the crowds and give over my essays to journals that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient reading, love is kind interpretation. It does not envy another writer’s gifts or troll another’s work, it is not vain about its own intellectual blessings. It does not dishonor others in the guise of criticism, it is not self-promotional, it is not easily angered when edited or evaluated, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are novels, they will cease; where there are odes, they will be stilled; where there is critique, it will pass away. For we read in part and we analyze in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

The challenge I want to pose—as Christians studying literature and language—is for us to contemplate what loving participation in the literary discipline looks like. What kinds of words do we use; when and how do we use them? What kinds of stories do we tell; why do we tell them? How do we handle the words and stories of others?

Literary studies today can give us critical frameworks for reading, terminology for literary criticism, insights into the creative process and lives of poets. It can provide us with untold lists of books to read, ways to understand them, and thematic angles for interpretation. But it cannot instill in us love for God or others. Even politically charged theories, concerned as they are with questions of justice, have no mechanism for personal transformation—they can tell us to be good but cannot make us good, as Jacobs points out in regards to cultural studies.[8]

What makes a difference for literary studies as for life—what makes possible our love for one another—is that God first loved us. He entered into our world to redeem his creation, thus enabling our free responses to his overtures of love. A belief in the incarnation, as Roger Lundin argues, should make all the difference in how we conceive of “the nature, scope, and power of words.”[9] Our words have value, they have meaning, they have purpose because of the Living Word, the Word made flesh who chose to dwell among us. This truth should ground our engagement with human words, our own and those of others. Done well and right, even our study of literature, if subsumed under the lordship of Christ, can become a way for us to fulfill the great commission and the great commandment, to discharge our God-given vocations, to do the good works for which we were intended.

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Marybeth Davis Baggett lives in Lynchburg, Virginia, and teaches English at Liberty University. Having earned her Ph.D. in English from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Marybeth’s professional interests include literary theory, contemporary American literature, science fiction, and dystopian literature. She also writes and edits for Christ and Pop Culture. Her most recent publication was a chapter called “What Means Utopia to Us? Reconsidering More’s Message,” in Hope and the Longing for Utopia: Futures and Illusions in Theology and the Arts. Marybeth's most recent book is The Morals of the Story: Good News about a Good God, coauthored with her husband, David.

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notes:

[1] Coleridge, Samuel. Biographia Literaria. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6081/6081-h/6081-h.htm.

[2] Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The Poet.” https://user.xmission.com/~seldom74/emerson/the_poet.html.

[3] Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. http://public-library.uk/ebooks/25/79.pdf.

[4] Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. London: Centenary, 1944, Chapter XXIII.

[5] Stevens, Wallace. Adagia, section 1. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997.

[6] James, William. Psychology. London: Macmillan, 1892, p. 124.

[7] Auden, W. H. Dyer’s Hand. New York: Random House, 1962, p. 8.

[8] Jacobs, Alan. A Theology of Reading. New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 124.

[9] Lundin, Roger. Beginning with the Word. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2014, p. 8.