From Free Thinking Ministries:
Dr. David Baggett is often considered the world's foremost expert on the Moral Argument for God's Existence. Dr. Baggett sits down with Tim to discuss the philosophy, history, and theology of the Moral Argument.
What is the foundation for morality? Two philosophers, atheist Peter Singer and Christian John Hare, discuss where we must look to find a coherent ethical system.
Peter Singer, world-famous Princeton philosopher, ethicist, and atheist, discusses with John Hare, Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale. Watch the full recording at veritas.org: http://www.veritas.org/Media.aspx#/v/10
Over the past two decades, The Veritas Forum has been hosting vibrant discussions on life's hardest questions and engaging the world's leading colleges and universities with Christian perspectives and the relevance of Jesus. Learn more at http://www.veritas.org, with upcoming events and over 600 pieces of media on topics including science, philosophy, music, business, medicine, and more!
“Greg explains why Darwinism can’t account for objective morality, then he answers a question about whether our sins are covered or washed away and takes a follow-up call from a caller about the origin and development of the cosmos.”
Robert from Canada wrote to Reasonable Faith:
Dear Dr. Craig,
There have been a lot questions recently asked about grounding the existence of morality in God, and I have one as well. The Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne rejects the Moral Argument for God because, he thinks, moral truths are necessarily true, and so the existence of God cannot have an effect on their truth.
He comes to the conclusion that moral truths are necessary because certain events are thought to be morally good or bad; more than that, the moral goodness or badness of an event is inseparable from the state of affairs itself. So, Swinburne claims, there is no possible world in which the exact same things occur as occurred during the holocaust, and in which the holocaust is not morally abominable. It is the same with other events that are considered morally good or bad. There is no possible world in which the event is the same as in the actual world and in which the moral judgement of the event is different than in the actual world. Thus Swinburne concludes that the moral judgement of an event is necessary to the event itself. And this leads naturally to his conclusion that the existence or non-existence of God is irrelevant to the existence of the moral judgement since the moral judgement is necessary given the event.
Swinburne's argument would thus undercut one of the premises to your moral argument. I am a Christian philosophy student at a secular university where many of my professors take a view similar to Swinburne, holding that the objectivity of moral values does not depend on God's existence. I have read and heard your arguments about the absurdity of life without God, and I am currently undecided. What would be your response to Swinburne's argument?
Robert
On October 17, 2022, William Lane Craig discussed an article of mine in which I explained my Divine Love Theory. My article was published in the Worldview Bulletin Newsletter here: Divine Love Theory: How the Trinity Is the Source and Foundation of Morality.
You can listen to Craig’s podcast about my Divine Love Theory here: Divine Love Theory and the Trinity | Podcast | Reasonable Faith.
First, I’ll provide key quotes from Craig’s podcast. Craig said he has reservations about my Divine Love Theory because “it proposes that the love between the members of the Trinity is the source and foundation of morality, and I think that is a distorted and lopsided view because, as important as divine love is, it also equally belongs to God’s moral perfection to be just and to be holy.”
Caius Obeada hosted an interview with David Horner earlier this year. Dr. Horner is a terrific moral philosopher and, in this interview, he discusses apologetics and the role in evangelism. This is a topic Horner also explores in this essay: Too Good Not to be True: A Call to Moral Apologetics as a Mode of Civil Discourse.
“This is an interview with Dr. David Horner, professor of Theology and Philosophy at Biola University in California. We discussed apologetics and the task of evangelization, the role that they play, the tools, and the relation with the body of Christ. Dr. Caius Obeada, director of Reasonable Faith Romanian Chapter and Founder of Vox Dei Institute of Apologetics, discussed many aspects of apologetics in defending the Christian Faith.”
One summer day in the ocean off Panama City Beach, two boys out for a swim got caught in a rip current. When their mother heard their cries, she and several other family members dove into the ocean, only to be trapped in the current, too. Then, in a powerful display of character, complete strangers on the beach took action. Forming a human chain of 70 to 80 bodies, they stretched out into the ocean and rescued everyone.
Stories like this inspire me with hope about what human beings are capable of doing. Though we may face a daily barrage of depressing reports about sexual harassment, corruption, and child abuse, stories of human goodness help to give us another perspective on our human character.
But, as we know too well, there is also a darker side to our character. Take, for example, the story of Walter Vance, 61, who was shopping in his local Target for Christmas decorations. It was Black Friday and the store was mobbed when Vance fell to the floor in cardiac arrest and lay motionless. The other shoppers did nothing. In fact, some people even stepped over his body to continue their bargain hunting. Eventually, a few nurses used cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but by then he was too far gone.
In 2018, William Lane Craig debated Erik Wielenberg. Both Craig and Wielenberg are influential in the current literature on the moral argument. Craig is well known for his defense of the deductive moral argument and the need for God in order to have an objectively meaningful life. Wielenberg is an atheist and a Platonic moral realist, who also specializes in the thought of C. S. Lewis.
You may have seen the debate (if not, you can find it below). But you may not know that Adam Johnson edited a volume on the debate with excellent essays from David Baggett, J.P. Moreland and others. If you liked the debate and want to explore the ideas further, be sure to check out this resource.
Editor’s note: This article was orignally posted here. It is shared with the author’s permission.
This year the New Zealand apologetics organization Thinking Matters, ran a “Confident Christianity Conference” in Auckland. I was asked to speak at this conference on the topic. Does Morality Need God? Below is a slightly streamlined version of the talk I gave.
“If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.” These words from Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers of Karamazov express a widely held intuition that moral requirements depend upon God’s existence. Most contemporary ethicists today would dismiss this intuition. In this talk, I will argue their dismissal is premature. I will defend what philosophers call a divine command theory of ethics. The thesis that moral wrongness is (identical to) the property of being contrary to God’s commands.[1] Where God is understood, in orthodox fashion, as a necessarily existent, all-powerful, all-knowing, essentially loving and just, immaterial person who created and providentially ordered the universe.
Note three things about this thesis:
First, it is a thesis about the nature of moral requirements. It is not a thesis about the nature of goodness. The concept of “good, is ambiguous, as is seen by the following statements “I had a really good dip in the spa pool last night,” Or “going on a low carb diet is good for you.” Or “Carlos the Jakal was a good hitman.” The concept of the morally obligatory, or morally required, is not identical to the concept of what it is good to do. It might be good, even saintly, for me to give a kidney to benefit a stranger, but it is not an act I am obliged to do.[2]
Second, my thesis is that the property of being morally required is “identical” to the property of being commanded by God. I am not saying that people cannot know what is right and wrong unless they believe in God. Nor am I claiming that the word “wrong” means “contrary to God’s command.” These are distinct claims. Consider light; Light is identical to a certain visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum. But obviously, that isn’t the meaning of the word “light.” People knew how to use the word “light” long before discovering its physical nature. And they knew the difference between light and darkness long before they understood the physics of light. Analogously, we can know the meaning of moral terms like “right” and “wrong” and know the difference between right and wrong without being aware that the moral requirements are God’s commands.[3]
Third, this is a thesis about the relationship between God and morality. It is not a claim about the relationship between the bible and morality. The thesis I laid out does not mention any sacred text such as the Bible, Quran, Hadith, Torah, or Talmud. While many divine command theorists accept that God has revealed his commands in an infallible sacred text, some do not. The claim that God’s commands are contained in some sacred text is not part of or entailed by a divine command theory itself. It is the result of other theological commitments they have. One could consistently be a divine command theorist without holding this. Divine command theories are ecumenical; they have had advocates within the Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and even deist traditions.
Having clarified my thesis, I will defend three contentions.
Secular accounts of morality cannot coherently account for our fundamental intuitions about moral requirements.
If God exists, then a divine command theory can coherently account for our fundamental intuitions about moral requirements.
Standard objections to divine command theories fail.
I. Four Assumptions about Moral Requirements
But first, what do I mean by fundamental assumptions? Moral theories are tested, in part, by how well they account for various assumptions about morality implicit in our moral thought and practice. [4] I will begin by listing four plausible assumptions about the type of requirements morality imposes upon us.
One is that moral requirements are inescapable: they apply to us irrespective of whether following them contributes to any ends or aims we currently desire. Consider a criminal who stands in the dock convicted of a crime; he openly admits the crime, is unrepentant and informs us that he wanted to kill and torture. Doing so did not frustrate any of his desires. Does our moral condemnation of him depend on us assuming he does not have statistically abnormal desires so that we withdraw this judgment when we discover he really does desire to kill and maim? Moral requirements can’t be escaped or begged off by noting they don’t fulfill one’s goals or ends. [5]
Second moral requirements are requirements that are justified from an impartial point of view. Peter Singer explains:
The ‘Golden Rule’ attributed to Moses, to be found in the book of Leviticus and subsequently repeated by Jesus, tells us to go beyond our own personal interests and ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ – in other words, give the same weight to the interests of others as one gives to one’s own interests. The same idea of putting oneself in the position of another is involved in the other Christian formulation of the commandment, that we do to others as we would have them do to us. The Stoics held that ethics derives from a universal natural law. Kant developed this idea into his famous formula: ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’ Kant’s theory has itself been modified and developed by R. M. Hare, who sees universalisability as a logical feature of moral judgments. The eighteenth -century British philosophers Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith appealed to an imaginary ‘impartial spectator’ as the test of a moral judgment, and this theory has its modem version in the Ideal Observer theory. Utilitarians, from Jeremy Bentham to J. J. C. Smart, take it as axiomatic that in deciding moral issues ‘each counts for one and none for more than one’; while John Rawls, a leading contemporary critic of utilitarianism, incorporates essentially the same axiom into his own theory by deriving basic ethical principles from an imaginary choice in which those choosing do not know whether they will be the ones who gain or lose by the principles they select…. One could argue endlessly about the merits of each of these characterisations of the ethical; but what they have in common is more important than their differences. They agree that an ethical principle cannot be justified in relation to any partial or sectional group. Ethics takes a universal point of view[6]
Third moral requirements have practical authority: agents always have conclusive reasons to do what is morally required and never have sufficiently good reasons for doing what is morally wrong. Someone has conclusive reasons to act in a certain way when the reasons in favor of acting, taken together, are stronger than any set of reasons we may have to act in some other way. If we don’t always have conclusive reasons to do what is right, having total allegiance to morality will be arbitrary and, at worst irrational. We will have no more reason to do what is right than wrong. Or doing the right thing will be doing what we have a most reason not to do.[7]
Moral requirements are supposed to answer questions about what we are to do. They are considerations that guide our actions. When we learn something is wrong, that tells us what we are not to do. They cannot do this if we lack conclusive reasons to do what they say. Suppose you and I are discussing whether it is my duty to donate to the red cross. You convinced me it is my duty to do so. The red cross knocks on my door. I refuse to donate. I suspect this would puzzle you; didn’t I concede that I had a duty to do it? If I responded with “yes, I am persuaded it is my duty to do it, but that doesn’t mean I have reasons to do it,” I suspect you would think I was missing something. I would deny moral requirements have any authority or claim on my behavior and don’t address the question, “what ought I do?”.[8]
Or suppose you heard that I had resigned from my high-paying job. You think I am nuts. How am I going to provide for my family? Why would I give up the career I always dreamt of? I tell you, I discovered the firm was engaging in unethical business practices, and I had to resign to avoid being complicit. On hearing this, wouldn’t it now make sense that I did this? I was justified in doing so. If you do, you are assuming that the fact an action is wrong justifies my refraining from doing it.[9]
Fourth, a final assumption is that if something is morally required, we are accountable for doing it in an important sense. John Stuart Mill famously stated,
“We do not call anything wrong unless we mean to imply that a person ought to be punished in some way or other for doing it—if not by law, by the opinion of his fellow creatures, if not by opinion, by the reproaches of his own conscience. This seems the real turning point of the distinction between morality and simple expediency.”[10]
There is a conceptual link between something being morally obligatory and something being blameworthy. If we do what is morally wrong without excuse, others can legitimately blame us, and guilt is warranted. Moral requirements conceptually are demands people make upon one each, which we can hold each other accountable through demanding an excuse, practices of blaming, criticizing, and guilt.
Robert Adams asks us to imagine a situation in which there are compelling reasons to support you not walking on the lawn. However, these reasons give you no grounds for feeling guilty if you do, and they provide no reasons for other people to make you feel like you must stay off the lawn or to blame and reproach you for doing so. Adams concludes that while there would be a sense in which you ought not to walk on the lawn, you have no obligation not to do so.[11]
So, whatever property moral wrongness is, it is the property of being prohibited by certain standards: standards that are inescapable and justified from an impartial point of view. The fact these standards prohibit an action means agents have conclusive reasons not to do the action in question. Agents are also accountable for actions doing actions prohibited by these standards. Others can blame and sanction me if I act contrary to them without an adequate excuse. A plausible thesis about the nature of moral wrongness should account for these facts.
In my next post, I will defend my first contention: that secular accounts of morality struggle to coherently account for these four assumptions.
[1] Robert M. Adams, “Divine Command Meta-Ethics Modified Again,” Journal of Religious Ethics 7:1 (1979): 76.
[2] Example from C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 16.
[3] This illustration comes from William Lane Craig see “Is Is the Foundation of Morality Natural or Supernatural? The Craig-Harris Debate” available at https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/debates/is-the-foundation-of-morality-natural-or-supernatural-the-craig-harris-deba/) accessed 19 August 2022.
[4] The implicit method here is described in Richard Joyce’s “Theistic Ethics and the Euthyphro Dilemma,” Journal of Religious Ethics 30 (2002): 68-69;”
[5] Richard Joyce, “Mackie’s Arguments for an Error Theory,” Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-anti-realism/moral-error-theory.html, accessed 20/4/17).
[6] Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 11
[7] This argument is adapted from C. Stephen Layman’s “God and the Moral Order” Faith and Philosophy, 23 (2006): 306- 307
[8] This example comes from Michael Smith’s The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 1994) 6
[9] This example comes from C Stephen Layman’s “A Moral Argument for The Existence of God” Is Goodness without God Good Enough: A Debate on Faith, Secularism and Ethics eds Robert K Garcia and Nathan L King (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008) 53-54
[10] John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, chapter 5 available at https://www.utilitarianism.com/mill5.htm accessed 23 August 2022
[11] Robert M. Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 238.
In this lecture by Dr. David Baggett at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln on March 30, 2022, he discusses C. S. Lewis' novel "Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold." Dr. Baggett explores the theme of shame in this story through the character of Oural and relates how shame affects our relationship with the world and those around us.
James writes:
In Good God, and God & Cosmos, Baggett and Walls argue that William Lane Craig’s deductive argument for morality isn't as persuasive to intellectual atheists, and that abductive arguments are preferred because they are more persuasive to unbelievers as they avoid the problems with the atheological premise of the Deductive Argument. However, what if the atheist were to ask, "Do you mean that's the best argument FOR NOW, or is it possible that there could be a better explanation than your best explanation down the road?" Granted, this objection would be an argumentum ignorantium, but for the Abductivist himself has conceded that his own argument wasn't designed to provide certainty, so how can the Abductivist answer this objection without begging the question that his current explanation is the best explanation, and will ALWAYS be the best explanation?
For the record, I like both arguments. I, however, use the deductive argument more frequently because I haven't been able to have a quality conversation with an unbeliever for any longer than 5 minutes since the 2016 election LOL
In Christ,
James A., PhD
Hi James,
Thanks for your e-mail to MoralApologetics. This is Dave Baggett, co-author of God and Cosmos & Good God. You note that in those books we issue a critical verdict on WLC's deductive moral argument. This is true. And that we talk about how abduction can avoid the atheological premise of the deductive variant. Yes. Then you write, what if the atheist were to ask, "Do you mean that's the best argument FOR NOW, or is it that there could be a better explanation than your best explanation down the road?"
Yeah, I think this is a good question. The nature of abduction seems to leave open the possibility of a better explanation. If we're talking about the BEST explanation, a certain tentativeness seems built in. Otherwise we’d talk of the “best possible explanation,” which some students seem to think abduction means, before I point out that it’s not. If a better explanation comes along, it could unseat the current winner. That seems right.
Of course I can't imagine what that would be in the case of accounting for moral facts. Naturalistic accounts just seem inherently limited, axiarchic approaches seem deficient, pantheistic and panentheistic accounts seem wrongheaded, etc. So though it's theoretically possible there could be a better explanation, it's awfully hard to imagine what it would or could be. It's also the case that our analysis is predicated on Anselmianism, which literally involves a being than whom none greater can be conceived—which makes it all the harder to top when it comes to explanatory potential! 🙂
All that said, I've laid off criticizing Craig's approach in recent years. He and I co-taught a class on the moral argument at Houston Baptist, and I found that our approaches deeply dovetailed at so many points that the number of disagreements in approach seemed small by comparison. And we now have a contract with Baker Academic to write a book together on the subject, one in which we'll be mainly talking about the resonances of our perspectives, not any remaining differences, at least for the most part. (By the way, it was hearing Craig give an argument for the historicity of the resurrection in abductive terms years ago that most inspired me to go that route.)
I've also realized in recent years that talk of "best explanation" is awfully ambitious. I usually rest content with speaking of a robust account, or powerful account, or even adequate account.
Of course, all of this pertains to the matter of how best to couch the moral argument. As long as folks are intelligently pushing the moral argument, which can come in deductive, inductive, abductive, or even other forms (like Evans' Reformed-sounding "natural signs" approach)—or even embodying it by the life they live like Fred Rogers did—I'm happy to hear it and rejoice these important truths are being accentuated one way or another. (The fun aspect of inductive variants is distinguishing between what Swinburne calls P- and C-inductive arguments here: does the moral evidence increase the evidence for theism just a bit, or enough to make it more likely than not?)
Bottom line: What's really great is God himself, not any particular discursive analysis. Proponents of various stripes of the moral argument agree on a whole lot more than they might disagree on, and it’s vital we not lose the proverbial forest for the trees.
I've also seen, at the same time, that a helpful feature of abduction is that, when dealing with an individual, we don't have to take on every potential theory out there. We can just focus on contrasting a theist picture with the picture of morality that our interlocutor provides. This helps delimit the conversation and not have to do more than is practicable in a conversation or two. The ultimate aspirations of abduction when it comes to so heady a topic as ours is a human quest spanning generations to which any of us at most contributes but one voice.
By the way, I’ve started reading a great book—McCain and Poston’s Best Explanations: New Essays on Inference to the Best Explanation. Highly recommended.
Every best wish in your work; thanks for the note.
Blessings,
Dave
The Bible says God can’t deny himself. He can’t act contrary to his nature. So telling us to torture children for fun isn’t possible for him—not because anything outside of God constrains him, but because of his own essentially loving nature.
In this interview, Caregiver Chronicles interviews doctors and authors Elton and Laquita Higgs, who raised two adoptive daughters with Huntington's Disease. They speak about how their caregiver journey and how their faith has guided them as parents.
Dr. Higgs is a longtime contributor to MoralApologetics.com and a good friend and mentor of Dr. David Baggett. This interview highlights the role that moral faith can have in dealing with suffering.
Below is audio and PowerPoint for a presentation TJ Gentry did in April at the National Conference on Christian Apologetics in Charlotte.
Author’s Note: This paper was written for and initially presented at the first annual symposium of the Society for Women of Letters (June 2022, Asheville, NC).
The Lord’s Prayer is the model that Christ offered his disciples when they asked for his instruction on how to pray. Wesley Hill’s primer on the prayer offers a helpful rundown of how the church has historically understood its import, and most of my discussion that follows is informed by that book.[1] The prayer consists of six petitions (or seven, depending on how the final section is handled). The opening three petitions center on God’s character and reign, and the others turn to the human condition, invoking God’s aid for what ails us. It’s a rich prayer, with quite a bit to unpack. But I want to focus primarily on how the full context can help us better appreciate and practice the difficult art of forgiveness.
We’ll start with the second half, the petitions aimed at the human condition. There we find Jesus acknowledging our agonizing need: our need for sustenance, both physical and spiritual; our need for grace, protection, and rescue. Regular recitation of this prayer, Hill explains, trains us to rightly envision our plight, as utterly dependent on God’s provision. Not just in the past as though God winds us up and leaves us to our own devices, but moment by moment, “this day,” we are sustained by God’s provision. What an antidote to the self-reliance enshrined in our contemporary American culture.
This reminder of who we are as God’s creatures is also a comfort as we consider the prayer’s appeal for forgiveness and deliverance from evil. Human beings are all in the same boat, we find—all, victims and victimizers alike, buoyed up only by God’s allowance. All of us are in dire need of saving from the sin that surrounds and infects us, the sin that’s “more pervasive and intractable than individual peccadilloes or improvable behaviors,” to use Hill’s language.[2] These petitions of The Lord’s Prayer strike at the very root of human corruption, the lie that tells us we are our own, that we can do as we please, and are unaccountable to anyone else. And most importantly for our purposes, the lie that the evil perpetuated against us cannot find refuge in our own hearts.
This is not to suggest a moral equivalence between large infractions and small. That bit of received wisdom often hampers our attempts at forgiveness, either asking us to minimize harm done to us or overestimating the harm we ourselves have done to others. As Cornelius Plantinga explains, “All sin is equally wrong, but not all sin is equally bad.”[3] He continues, “The badness or seriousness of sin depends to some degree on the amount and kind of damage it inflicts, including damage to the sinner, and to some degree on the personal investment and motive of the sinner.”[4]
If anything, The Lord’s Prayer is realistic about the nature and extent of sin in this world and the damage it does to God’s creation. Petition VII puts a face on the evil one who seeks to devour us, infiltrating and enlisting those who give themselves over to his service. “What we need to be rescued from,” Hill says, “isn’t just the devices and desires of our wayward hearts, as real and dangerous as those are, but also the malevolence of a personal being bent on our suffering.”[5] The temptation to revenge, as gratifying as it may feel, is to turn ourselves over to that destruction. Marilyn Adams explains, “To return horror for horror does not erase but doubles the individual’s participation in horrors—first as victim, then as the one whose injury occasions another’s prima facie ruin.”[6]
In Stump’s essay that I referenced earlier, she provides some language to help us think through these gradations of guilt. There she catalogues, on a sliding scale, the damaging effects sin has on the perpetrator him or herself, to include defects to the person’s psyche, memory, and empathic capacities, and sin’s harmful and unjust consequences in the world, whether resulting from the wrongdoer’s action or inaction.
These details matter to the one wrestling with forgiveness. A naïve understanding that jumps quickly to reconciliation can easily leave open the door for yet more harm, to both parties. It is not good either to sin or to be sinned against. The Lord’s Prayer dispels such naivety by virtue of its portrait of God, a loving Father who invites us into holy and flourishing fellowship with him. A world infected by sin and human corruption is incompatible with the promise we have in this prayer of God’s kingdom to come and his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Whatever forgiveness is, we can be sure that it is part and parcel of the resounding victory of the prayer’s final lines: God’s kingdom, power, and glory ultimately transcend and defeat whatever now is currently arrayed against them. This is the truth that The Lord’s Prayer opens our eyes up to, and the vision that enables us to enter into the spirit and process of forgiveness, trusting no less than God himself to bring it to completion. What Weisenthal could not be, as stand-in for the Jews that the Nazi soldier harmed, Christ himself can fulfill—both as the one to bear the harm done and the one to offer the ultimate absolution.
Prayer joins us in this process. It is a rebellion, as David Wells describes it, “against the world in its fallenness, the absolute and undying refusal to accept as normal what is pervasively abnormal.”[7] The Lord’s Prayer, then, is a clear-eyed, realistic assessment of our current status against the backdrop of what should—and ultimately what will—be, given God’s nature. Hill explains, “When we pray, ‘Your will be done, on earth as in heaven,’ we are aware of how God’s will is not being done in our world. We are asking God to overcome this contradiction, to act in such a way that life on earth increasingly resembles the peaceable and joyous life of God, of heaven.”[8]
Like the Persistent Widow in Jesus’ parable, when we fully embrace The Lord’s Prayer, we refuse “every agenda, every scheme, every interpretation that is at odds with the norm as originally established by God.”[9] We confess, along with Volf, that we cannot forgive on our own steam but that on Christ’s we can and should. We affirm that God’s kingdom is victorious over any and all attacks upon it, including the ones where we have found ourselves in the line of a perpetrator’s fire. Although this affirmation takes the form of a petition in The Lord’s Prayer, it’s functioning more as an alignment, of our purposes and spirit with God’s. Through recitation of the prayer, Hill says, we are “stretching our hearts so that we may learn to desire truer, greater realities.”[10]
This greater reality is our ultimate promise: deliverance from oppression, healing, and restoration from the disfiguration caused by sin and death.[11] Healing both for harm we have done and harm done to us. It is out of God’s character that his plan for salvation, his deliverance from guilt and the death and damage of sin in all of its instantiations, comes. And this is God’s plan, The Lord’s Prayer tells us, that is already underway and available for us right here and now, even if it is not yet fully realized. Only a God who has entered in to our suffering, who has taken on human flesh and dwelt among us can provide that remedy.
In Jesus Christ, God’s own son, we find all the resources that potential forgivers need. Christ is everywhere present in The Lord’s Prayer, both as the one inviting us into fellowship and as the very bridge we walk across to approach God’s throne. Christ is also the means by which God’s will is enacted in this world, the way the curse that we labor under is reversed, how our crisis of forgiveness is resolved. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ cries out to his Abba, Father, asking that the cup of suffering and death he is about to drink be passed from him. Even still, in an agonizing act of obedience and an illuminating echo of The Lord’s Prayer, Jesus declares, “Thy will be done.”
This divine action is the paradoxical linchpin of our faith and what ultimately makes sense of forgiveness’ counterintuitive demands. Hill explains it this way:
It’s clear to us that the will of God in heaven is the perfect, eternal love of Father, Son, and Spirit, unmarred by any suffering or dying. What is less intuitive—but what Gethsemane and, later, Calvary force us to notice—is that the will of God is also the way of the incarnate Lord into the far country of our suffering and dying, where he is mocked, spit upon, strung up, and left to suffocate. That is what it looks like for the will of God to be done on earth as it is in heaven because that is the only way our earth can be saved.[12]
Our forgiveness—whether enacted or received by us—our ability to heal and be healed, rests alone on the work of Christ on the cross. And that is the promise we must cling to as we undertake our own hard work of forgiveness. There’s a suffering involved in that process, to be sure, but we can know that that suffering is not in vain. Hill again: “God must also be at work in suffering, in darkness, in torment, because only if God confronts the horror we’ve made of the world, bears it, and bears it away can the triumph of God’s love be assured.”[13]
But let me not leave you with a promise of suffering. I recognize that’s not much of a comfort. My intention instead is to leave you with a word of hope, to help us fix in our minds the beautiful reality that lies on the other side of our earthly travails. Recently, I had the opportunity to hear N. T. Wright speak at Lanier Library in Houston, with a message that draws together the various threads of my argument and underscores the hope we have in our struggles to forgive. Turning to Romans 8, Wright highlighted how our own times of trial, our own Gethsemane moments—when we, like Christ, call out to our Abba, Father (Romans 8:15)—these are the precise places in which we can perceive, and even participate in, the divine life of God himself.
Those who have faced a crisis of forgiveness will certainly resonate with Paul’s acknowledgment that we often do not know how we are to pray. In trying to forgive painful hurts, we struggle to understand how justice can be achieved or why mercy must be extended. In that moment, Paul affirms, we can be sure that “the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans too deep for words” (Romans 8:26). This co-laboring with God in our prayers of deep sorrow is the backdrop for the glorious assurance of Romans 8:28, a verse that Wright translates in this clarifying way: "God works all things towards ultimate good with and through those who love him.”[14] That’s true for our crises of forgiveness. Lament in the face of our overwhelming challenges, the times when we most keenly feel our frailty and most desperately need deliverance, is the very seedbed of the hope we cry out for.[15]
The Lord’s Prayer is really a lifeline to that hope, which will not disappoint. It’s a promise bigger than we can even imagine, although Jesus invites us to try. The petitions of The Lord’s Prayer, when we enter fully into its mindset, we recognize as pointers, pointers to the life we are made for and that God longs to welcome us into. As Hill explains, “This is what the final praise in the Lord’s Prayer means to direct us toward: there is coming a time when we will have no more need to ask God for bread, for absolution, or for rescue. All of our tears will have been wiped away, death will have been finally defeated, and the earth and its people will be at peace and thriving.”[16] And that is a promise we can cling to, a story big enough to house justice and mercy, and a power strong enough to fuel our will to forgive.
[1] Wesley Hill, The Lord’s Prayer: A Guide to Praying to Our Father (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019).
[2] Ibid., 61.
[3] Cornelius Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), 21.
[4] Ibid., 22.
[5] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 82.
[6] Marilyn Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2000),
[7] David Wells, “Prayer: Rebelling Against the Status Quo,” Summit Christian Fellowship, June 17, 2020, accessed May 29, 2022, https://summit-christian.org/blog/2020/06/17/prayer-rebelling-against-the-status-quo.
[8] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 42.
[9] Wells.
[10] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 45.
[11] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 34-35.
[12] Wesley Hill, “Praying the Lord’s Prayer in Gethsemane,” First Things, April 2, 2015, accessed May 29, 2022, https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2015/04/praying-the-lords-prayer-in-gethsemane.
[13] Ibid.
[14] You can find this translation in Wright’s God and the Pandemic (Zondervan, 2020). Glenn Packiam’s review of the book (found here: https://www.glennpackiam.com/post/n-t-wright-on-god-and-the-pandemic) also includes it.
[15] I’d love to claim credit for this phrasing, but it was all N. T. Wright. “Lament is the seedbed of hope” is a line from his talk that will stick with me for some time to come.
[16] Hill, The Lord’s Prayer, 94.
Marybeth Baggett is professor of English and Cultural Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. She earned her PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and — along with her husband— recently has published Telling Tales: Intimations of the Sacred in Popular Culture (Moral Apologetics Press, 2021).
Author’s Note: This paper was written for and initially presented at the first annual symposium of the Society for Women of Letters (June 2022, Asheville, NC).
Simon Wiesenthal is a Holocaust survivor renowned for his role in tracking down and bringing to justice fugitive Nazis who fled at the close of World War II. While still a prisoner, Wiesenthal was one day brought to the room of a dying SS member at the Nazi’s request. The soldier wanted to unburden himself of his guilty conscience and find absolution before his imminent demise. To that end, he hoped that Wiesenthal would serve as a stand-in for the specific Jews that he had directly harmed. Forgiveness from him, the logic went, would release the Nazi from his guilt and bring him much-needed peace.
Wiesenthal chronicles this encounter in his 1969 book The Sunflower, and his account is worth reading in its entirety, including the symposium that makes up the second half of the book. It’s difficult for me to convey either the brutality of the atrocities that the Nazi describes or the pathos of his confession. Wiesenthal does so masterfully and, importantly, the author contextualizes that deathbed scene within his own day-to-day horrors of life in the concentration camp. As we well know and as the book vividly reminds us, the Nazi’s confession is a mere drop in the bucket of the hell that Hitler’s forces unleashed on those the German fascists deemed undesirable.
The book’s title refers to the sunflowers planted on the graves of Nazi soldiers to honor them, a ghastly tableau that Wiesenthal could see across the way from the camp. That tribute was a painful contrast to the indignities heaped on the many deaths that daily surrounded Wiesenthal and his fellow prisoners, and this uncanny sense of shared humanity across a gulf of inhumane difference pervades the exchange between Wiesenthal and the dying Nazi.
That meeting also upended the given power dynamic of the Third Reich: the Nazi sought something from the Jew that could not be coerced. Forgiveness would be either freely given or withheld. While the SS man disclosed his secrets, Wiesenthal grappled with how to respond: “He sought my pity, but had he any right to pity? Did a man of this kind deserve anybody’s pity?”[1] It’s clear from the exchange that the Nazi has in fact repented and fully realized his need for the peace that comes only through forgiveness. But was that enough for Wiesenthal to bestow it upon him? And what difference would forgiveness make since, as Wiesenthal notes, “[h]e was confessing his crime to a man who perhaps tomorrow must die at the hands of these same murderers.”[2]
Ultimately, Wiesenthal could not bring himself to share words of forgiveness, leaving instead without opening his mouth. The decision was almost instinctual, involuntary, and it haunted Wiesenthal for many years. He sought counsel from others when he returned to the camp, hoping they might be able to explain and perhaps even justify his visceral rejection of the dying man’s pleas. As the years wore on, he wondered if his response was, in fact, cruel. Out of this mystery and Wiesenthal’s inability to solve it, even a quarter of a century later, came this question, which he posed to notable public figures to solicit their responses: “You,” he asks, “who have just read this sad and tragic episode in my life, can mentally change places with me and ask yourself the crucial question, ‘What would I have done?’”[3]
The fifty-three responses that came in were all over the map, though most (thirty four in the expanded edition) argued that Wiesenthal was right not to forgive. Only ten posited that forgiveness was necessary. The other nine were uncertain. Harshest among the denials was Jewish-American writer Cynthia Ozick who condemned the Nazi, seeing even his confession as manipulation and abuse of power. “Let the SS man die unshriven,” she exclaimed. “Let him go to hell.”[4] On the other side, South African bishop Desmond Tutu put a pragmatic spin on his Christian response: “It is clear that if we look only to retributive justice, then we could just as well close up shop. Forgiveness is not some nebulous thing. It is practical politics. Without forgiveness, there is no future.”[5]
Most of us will never be in the position of either the SS officer or the Holocaust survivor, neither needing to be forgiven for such unthinkably heinous wrongs nor needing to forgive such large-scale, unimaginable atrocities inflicted upon us or upon those we love. Nonetheless, reflecting on the extreme case of guilt and injustice that Wiesenthal’s story presents and the crisis of forgiveness it evokes is still worthwhile, doubly so for those of us who claim Christianity since forgiveness is deep down at the very root of our faith.
To begin, let’s think a bit about the impulses behind the different responses to Wiesenthal’s question. Reading them, one realizes the richness of this topic and the complexity of the question that he poses. His respondents dig into the nooks and crannies of what forgiveness is, they search out what it requires, consider the implications of forgiveness or its denial, and weigh the psychological struggle involved. Even if you already have a strong sense about which response is right, I’d encourage you to withhold judgment, just for now, and sit a while with the tension. In Exclusion and Embrace, theologian Miroslav Volf brings to bear the terms of the gospel to the weighty questions of alienation and injustice. Volf’s own history as a Croatian living through the Balkan warfare of the late twentieth century informs his reflections and prevents him from regurgitating simple answers.
Volf’s preface well captures the tension that I’m asking you to consider. The book, he says there, was prompted by a question that Jürgen Moltmann asked him after a talk he gave arguing that we have a moral obligation to embrace our enemies. Could Volf embrace a četnik, one of the Serbian fighters who had so thoroughly ravaged his country and its people? To put the question on Wiesenthal’s terms, could Volf muster fellow human feelings sufficient to forgive one who had done him and those close to him such harm?
“No, I cannot,” Volf finally answered, “but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to.”[6]
While writing Exclusion and Embrace in an attempt to work out this struggle, Volf confesses, “My thought was pulled in two different directions by the blood of the innocent crying out to God and by the blood of God’s Lamb offered for the guilty.”[7] Herein lies the tension: “How does one remain loyal both to the demand of the oppressed for justice and to the gift of forgiveness that the Crucified offered to the perpetrators?”[8] To opt for one felt a betrayal of the other, either to further disenfranchise the already oppressed or to disavow his faith. Even worse, the longer Volf sat with the tension, the more it seemed that God was at odds with himself, at once delivering the needy and restoring the wrongdoer. Just what kind of toxic, dysfunctional family is God trying to make?
Can these two apparently irreconcilable divine actions somehow align? Surely the God who loves the wronged party also loves the one who hurt him, but mustn’t love of one require punishment of the other? Many of our doubts about the demands of forgiveness stem from our own psychological and imaginative limitations, which makes one wonder whether a rational case for our obligation to forgive matters if it’s simply impracticable for us to carry out.
And yet scripture calls us time and again to forgiveness, even going as far as to bind our own forgiveness to the forgiveness we offer others. We see this link explicitly articulated in the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant in Matthew 18 and in The Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13, Luke 11:2-4). “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us,” so the fifth petition of the prayer goes. As C. S. Lewis explains in his classic Mere Christianity, “There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven.”[9]
A world without forgiveness, as Bishop Tutu noted, is unimaginable. This side of Eden, sin—and the death it entails—sadly is a persistent presence, at least that’s the case while we wait for God’s kingdom to reach its crescendo and bring to consummation the victory Christ inaugurated on the cross. Ever since Cain, human beings harm each other daily—in big and small ways. Lamech’s attitude to such mistreatment that we find in Genesis 4 makes a certain kind of sense: “I have killed a man for wounding me,” Lamech boasts to his wives. “[A] young man for striking me. If Cain’s revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech’s is seventy-sevenfold.”[10] On human terms, payback for wrongs is logical, necessary even. But who wants to live in a vortex of infinite vengeance, bound forever to lex talionis?
By contrast Jesus’ vision of unlimited forgiveness laid out in Matthew 18—seventy times seven—sure seems more appealing. But might it also feel, at least for some, like a burden, even for far more commonplace hurts than Wiesenthal experienced? Wouldn’t boundless forgiveness simply invite yet more harm? Wouldn’t unending grace exacerbate power imbalances and force the already exploited into deeper levels of oppression?
I confess that this is the burden I personally carried when I came up against my own crisis of forgiveness some years back. Someone I counted as a close friend had thoroughly betrayed me. To use Lewis Smedes’ rubric of the difficult cases of forgiveness, the hurt this person caused me was three-fold: personal, unfair, and deep.[11] No easy Band-aid could fix the problem. Compounding the suffering I endured in the wake of that betrayal was the support my friend garnered from mutual acquaintances who saw my grief and withdrawal from the relationship as the fruit of bitterness and a failure to forgive. The next few years proved a crucible for my faith as, much like Volf, I had to grapple existentially with the dilemma of forgiveness noted above. I didn’t have many resources to help and certainly could have used Smedes’ book, Forgive and Forget, as well as others I’ve more recently found. Instead, voices that flattened out forgiveness—seeing it as either anathema or a piece of cake—only made that process more difficult. Smedes frames the challenge this way: “Forgiving is love’s toughest work, and love’s biggest risk. If you twist it into something it was never meant to be, it can make you a doormat or an insufferable manipulator.”[12]
Sometimes a word can obscure the complexity of the reality behind it, and my personal experience tells me that’s often the case with forgiveness. I’m drawing my definition of forgiveness from an essay by philosopher Eleonore Stump, where she says forgiveness is an entailment of love, a human obligation.[13] Love, according to Aquinas, is two-fold: (1) a desire for the good of the other and (2) a desire for union with the other. Because these desires are located only within the person harmed, they can be accomplished without any action on the wrongdoer’s part. But Stump is quick to note that desire alone is not sufficient for the realization of the other’s good or for actual union with him or her. Another human agent is involved, and that person’s will and external circumstances may prevent those desires from coming to fruition. It is not good, for example, for either party to remain in a position that gives license for bad behavior to anyone involved. For that reason, forgiveness and reconciliation can, indeed, come apart. Ignoring this distinction is one of many ways that the concept of forgiveness can be watered down.
Before we turn to some more theological considerations, consider first some useful insights Smedes offers in his practical guide to forgiveness. First of all, Smedes emphasizes that forgiveness is a process, at least that’s the case for forgiveness of people who caused us personal, unfair, and deep hurt. Entering into that process requires uncompromising honesty. We cannot forgive harm that we do not acknowledge. As Smedes explains, “There is no real forgiving unless there is first relentless exposure and honest judgment. When we forgive evil we do not excuse it, we do not tolerate it, we do not smother it. We look evil full in the face, call it what it is, let its horror shock and stun and enrage us, and only then do we forgive it.”[14]
Smedes also acknowledges that forgiveness sometimes involves specialized cases—forgiving people who have died, for example. Life’s vagaries and vicissitudes preclude any one-size-fits-all approach that we might try to impose. The road to forgiveness, we find when we embark upon it, is unique to the harm done and to our current conditions. That is not to say we are thus on our own. We can certainly find solace and guidance in the testimony of others who have traveled their own paths of forgiveness, and his use of such stories is one of the best features of Smedes’ book.
When we undergo a crisis of forgiveness, it’s important then whose voices we listen to because of the many pitfalls that lie on that road. Even Christian voices, as previously noted, can sometimes unwittingly make the task of forgiveness much harder by thinning the concept out. I suggest that we see shades of this diminishment whenever the fifth petition of The Lord’s Prayer is isolated from its broader context and—intentionally or not—when it is launched as an accusation toward those who have been harmed. For all the reasons noted above, we need a bigger story of justice and mercy, one that reveals their inextricable link. We find that story in the full context of The Lord’s Prayer, through its bracing description of the human condition, its astonishing portrayal of the God who longs to liberate us, and its audacious plan for our salvation.
[1] Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, Revised and Expanded ed. (New York: Schocken, 1997), 52.
[2] Ibid., 53.
[3] Ibid., 98.
[4] Ibid., 220.
[5] Ibid., 268.
[6] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996), 9.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Revised and amplified ed. (New York: Harper, 2001), 116.
[10] Unless otherwise noted, all biblical passages referenced are in the English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001) biblegateway.com, accessed May 29, 2022.
[11] Lewis Smedes, Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve (New York: HarperOne, 1996).
[12] Ibid., xvi.
[13] Eleonore Stump, “The Sunflower: Guilt, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation,” in Forgiveness and Its Moral Dimensions, ed. Brandon Warmke, Dana Kay Nelkin, and Michael McKenna (New York: Oxford UP, 2021), 172-196.
[14] Smedes, 79.
Marybeth Baggett (associate editor) is professor of English and Cultural Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. She earned her PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and — along with her husband— recently has published Telling Tales: Intimations of the Sacred in Popular Culture (Moral Apologetics Press, 2021).
Question:
I am writing to you because I am currently working on an article that is critical of certain versions of the moral argument and I am researching the work that you have done on the topic. I have read both Good God and God and Cosmos. Recently, as I was reviewing your arguments concerning moral obligation, I was re-reading a passage from chapter 9 of God and Cosmos, specifically the section titled, "Moral Obligations." What caught my attention is something that you say on p. 289: "[God's] commands would furnish powerful new reasons or performing various acts."
I hope that you might have time to consider and respond to a couple of questions about what you say here. The focus of my article is precisely on the question of whether God's commands can provide us with additional reasons. My view, roughly, is that divine commands provide additional reasons only when there is an antecedent obligation to obey God. In the absence of such an antecedent obligation, divine commands are normatively impotent (i.e., they add nothing to our reasons to engage in any action). My question is this: Do you agree that God's commands provide additional reasons only given the existence of such a prior obligation or do you think that God's commands can provide such reasons without such a prior obligation? If the latter, do you have an argument for the conclusion that God's commands can provide additional reasons in the absence of any prior obligation to obey God (and have you provided such an argument in any of your published works?).
Please forgive me if you have addressed these questions in your books or other writings. I have tried to track down answers, but I have not found anything that directly addresses these questions. If I have missed something, I sincerely apologize.
Thank you very much for you time,Jason
Answer:
Hi Jason! Thanks for the note. Hope you are well. I'll offer what I have, which isn't much!
What a fun project you're working on. Appreciate the question, and it's an important one, I think. I suspect the answer to your question is "yes," that DCT provides new reasons iff we're antecedently obligated to obey God. The question then boils down to why whether we're obligated to obey God and, if so, why. This is the "prior obligations objection," and it's a thorny challenge, I think. We first discussed it a bit on pp. 122-123 of Good God, though not by name. There we took up the question of God's authority--does he have the authority to give us binding commands? And we try tying our answer to his great-making properties. That was at least our first go trying to address what we considered the crux of the issue.
In a later book that my wife and I wrote together called The Morals of the Story, we discuss it at a bit more length, though still altogether too briefly. Here we discuss it explicitly by name, on pages 147-149. The objection is tied to Cudworth historically, so sometimes gets dubbed the "Cudworth objection." At any rate, we mention what Jer and I said about it in Good God, but also discuss a half dozen possible solutions to the puzzle that Evans provides in God and Moral Obligation. We don't really discuss them at length as much as point readers to take a look at what he says on pages 98-101 of his book. We also mention Hare's solution echoing Scotus and Pufendorf that you can find on p. 58 of God's Command.
'm sure there's quite a bit more to say about this important objection, but so far those are the only places I've addressed it. I'm inclined to think that if we can answer the question of God's authority well, it will address the matter. Although Evans made mention of the possibility of bootstrapping, most worry that there's something circular to punting to God's command to account for the authority of God's command--even though God does tell us to obey him. I'm left wanting more, and understand others who do as well. So far I've rested somewhat content with the sketch of an answer provided by the considerations Evans, Hare, and Jer and I have offered, but as I say I'm sure quite a bit more can and should be said.
The reason I retain such openness to DCT is not because I think it's the only possible way to ground ethics in God, but just because, honestly, it strikes me as intuitive that God would be the one able to issue authoritative commands owing to who he is and who we are as creatures, and because the objections to it I've heard usually strike me as admitting to a solution. So it's never seemed an obviously bad theory to me, although I'm more strongly committed to a dependence relation of morality on God in one way or another than specifically this way. Regarding this objection, if bootstrapping isn't enough, as I suspect it isn't, it would show that a key foundational principle on which DCT is predicated is an obligation not attributable to DCT. But since I don't think that all moral realities are grounded in DCT, this doesn't bother me too much. Maybe it should bother me more than it does, but at least I console myself by the reminder that other moral theories, at their root, encounter a similar challenge. For example, the utilitarian is confronted with the question, Why maximize utility? Appealing to the maximization of utility doesn't help much. It makes some amount of sense, to me anyway, that so foundational a grounding principle might have a slightly different moral rationale than the rest of the theory. And if, for the DCT'ist, it comes down to something as foundational as good moral reasons, and even an obligation, to obey our Creator who loves us, is perfect, who desires our well-being, etc., then I feel like we're on the right track.
As I say, I have tended to divide the two questions you're tying together, though I can see why you think them intimately connected: does God have authority to issue us binding commands, and does DCT offer us distinctive ("powerful new") reasons to perform various acts. I find that explicit connection intriguing, and wondering if there's something new you're pointing out there or if there are just two conceptually distinct questions here.
Blessings in your work! I look forward to what you come up with.
Best,
Dave
James the Just, 16th-century Russian icon.
What happened to our Lord’s brother, James? James was known for his unbelief. Then, years later, he is known for being on his knees praying. Before I get to James, let me ask you these questions: what happened to the sociopath David Wood? What happened to Saul, the Pharisee hunter of Christians? What do these questions have to do with Jesus’ resurrection?
David Wood’s dog is hit by a bus and dies. His mother is terribly upset. David is not. It is just a dog. A few years later his friend dies. He feels no sorrow. He sees how others are feeling and senses maybe he should feel sorrow. David is separated from his feelings. He cannot empathize with others. He is diagnosed a sociopath. On top of this, David is an atheist. Right and wrong do not matter to him. One day David’s life comes into focus. He brutally attacks his father and beats him with a hammer until he thinks him dead (he wasn’t). He is imprisoned for ten years. David is now a missionary, reconciled with his father, and has an earned Ph. D. from Fordham University. What happened to him?
Before I answer this question and the one about James, consider the question about Saul. What happens to Saul, the Pharisee hunter of Christians? Saul is a contemporary of Jesus’ apostles. He is a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin. From the age five Saul is educated in the Old Testament law. At age of thirteen, he studies Scripture under the Jewish scholar Gamaliel. Gamaliel is the Alan Dershowitz Harvard law professor of the day. He prepares Saul to teach the law. Saul becomes so zealous for the law he surpasses his Pharisee peers. He kills for the Law.
In fact, Saul takes a leading role in bullying the church. He goes to Christians’ houses. He hauls them – even women – to prison. Saul says, ‘I was violently persecuting the church of God’…I ‘was trying to destroy it’ (Gal 1: 13). He takes cool satisfaction in the stoning of preacher Stephen. He holds the coats of others to throw their stones. (Acts 8:1)
Then, something happens suddenly. People say, “He who formerly was persecuting us is now proclaiming the faith he once tried to destroy?” (Gal 1:23)”Is not this the man who made havoc in Jerusalem…?” believers ask (Act 9:21). He now goes by the name of Paul. He testifies in the synagogues Jesus “is the Son of God”. He argues Jesus is the Messiah. (Acts 9:22) What gives? How could one so passionately against Jesus turn so for him? This brings me to James.
What happened to James? In 2002 an archaeological discovery was made. A first century ossuary box was uncovered. An ossuary box contains the bones of a deceased person. This box has this inscription on it, ‘James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.’ Whether it is authentic is still being studied. No matter, Jesus of Nazareth had four brothers, one whose name was James. Not much is known about James. James is the biological son of Joseph and Mary. He, his brothers, and mother Mary travel with Jesus early in Jesus’ ministry. But Jesus does not win him over. Conflict arises between Jesus and James and his brothers. They do not believe him. They think anybody can claim to be a Messiah and get away with it in the rural countryside. “If you do Messiah works, show the world”. Prove yourself before the watching world. Do your miracles in D.C., not in Tight Squeeze! Do out- in- the-open miracles. Jesus goes to his grave with his brother James a skeptic.
But then what happened to James? The next thing you hear James is on his knees praying. Ancient testimony says James is frequently found on his knees begging forgiveness for people; his knees are as hard as a camel’s. After his brother’s crucifixion, he is with his mother Mary and Jesus’ disciples in the upper room. James is now called “James the Righteous”, the leader of the Jerusalem church. Because of this, James is stoned in 62 AD. What happened to James? Once a skeptic …now a martyr.
Here’s the answer: Take Paul first: Paul sees the bodily risen Jesus Christ. At midday when traveling to Damascus a light shines on him. The light is brighter than the sun and encircles him. He hears the Voice speak to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 26: 14) Paul asks, “Who are you Lord?” “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” (Acts 9: 5) Paul testifies, Jesus “appeared also to me.” “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” Paul asks (1 Cor 9:1). Seeing the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ instantaneously turns Saul around. The resurrected Jesus turns Saul into Paul.
What happened to David Wood? In prison he runs into Randy, a Christian. Randy articulates his reasons for believing in Jesus. It makes David’s unbelief seem silly. David wants to refute Randy’s faith. So, David begins reading the Bible. Jesus’ bodily resurrection bothers him. Why would the disciples risk death to testify to the resurrection if they didn’t believe it? He also reads in the Bible Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life”; the Son of God can set you free. David knows he has many psychological, spiritual, and moral disorders. He cannot help himself. Who could? Only Jesus, the One God raised from the dead, can.
What happened to James, our Lord’s skeptical brother? The apostle Paul tells us: Christ “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures…and then he …appeared to James…” (1 Cor 15: 7) Our risen Lord Jesus appears to James! To his own brother the risen Lord reveals himself! Jesus Christ shows himself visibly, bodily to James and to Paul; this is the game-changing event that overturns them both. Not hallucinations; delusions; mental dreams; a myth; a lie, a conversion disorder, or any combination thereof. Jesus appears bodily, visibly! Our risen Lord turns James the skeptic into James the Just!! He transforms Saul into Paul. The meditation on Jesus’ bodily resurrection in concert with the risen Jesus Christ radically changes David Wood the sociopath into David Wood the missionary. For what else would they have endured and kept true through insults, ridicule, rejection, mockery, beatings, suffering, and martyrdom: Paul beheaded, and James stoned.
Do you too know the risen Lord Jesus? He says to you, “Look at me. I stand at the door. I knock. If you hear me call and open the door, I’ll come right in and sit down to supper with you.” *
*Gary R. Habermas and Michael R. Licona’s book, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus and David Baggett’s Moral Apologetics testimony of David Wood have been instrumental resources for the above.
Tom is currently a retired Elder in the Virginia Annual Conference. He has pastored churches in Virginia, California and England. Studying John Wesley’s theology, he received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from the University of Bristol, Bristol, England and his Master of Divinity degree from Asbury Theological Seminary. While a student, he and his wife Pam lived in John Wesley’s Chapel “The New Room”, Bristol, England, the first established Methodist preaching house. Tom was a faculty member of Asbury Theological Seminary. He has contributed articles to Methodist History and the Wesleyan Theological Journal. He and his wife have two children, daughter Karissa, who is an attorney in Richmond, Virginia, and, John, who is a recent graduate of Regent University. Being a part of the development of their grandson Beau is a rich reward. Tom enjoys a good book by a crackling fire with an English cup of tea. His life text is, ‘Jesus, confirm my heart’s desire, to work and speak and think for thee’.
A Twilight Musing
Do you wear a cross around your neck or have one on display elsewhere on your person? If so, is it simple or elaborate, and what is your purpose in wearing it? How many crosses might you see during the course of a day? Most churches we pass have a cross somewhere on the building, most likely at the top of a spire, perhaps on the sign out front, and very probably at one or more spots inside the building. If there are paintings inside, Jesus on the cross will be given prominence as a subject. The very shape of many older churches is what is called “cruciform.” All this should cause us to ask, “What kind of religious purpose prompts its adherents to give such ubiquitous attention to an instrument of torture and utter humiliation? Do we realize the strangeness of honoring such an image and wearing it as jewelry and giving it prominence in our art and architecture?
As we participate in the Lord’s Supper, we do well to consider whether we have appropriately assessed the cross of Christ. Jesus regarded it as something to be taken up and borne, a token of self-denial, not only for Himself but for His disciples (see Matt. 15:24-25). He set the example of embracing his cross, humbling Himself and “becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:8). It is no light matter to be associated with the cross on which the Son of God died. Paul considers the cross of Christ to be the instrument by which he “has been crucified . . . to the world” and the world to him. In other words, the cross represents his sharing in the death of Christ, and thus it is to be to us. It is a symbol of our willingness to radically forsake the supposed wisdom of the fallen world around us and to identify with “Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (I Cor. 1:23).
In making these remarks, I am reminded of a poem by T. S. Eliot, “The Journey of the Magi.” It depicts the Wise Men making their arduous pilgrimage to see and pay homage to the newborn Messiah. As they encounter bad weather, disloyal servants, and villages that gouge them with high prices, they wondered if “this was all folly.” They finally come to the end of their journey and see the Christ child, but that epiphany is tempered by a concomitant vision of “three trees on the low sky” (i.e., the crosses on Calvary), leading the speaker of the poem to wonder,
Were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
This is an appropriate presentation, I think, of the ambiguity of the Cross of Christ; it reminds us of the Divine Man whose very birth had death as its purpose, and it ought to remind us that we, like the Magi, can no longer be “at ease here, in the old dispensation.” Also like them, we “should be glad of another death,” by which we are dead to the world but alive in the Christ who alone brought glory to the cross.
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 in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.
“Bioethics provides a revelatory snapshot of deep worldview divides in our society today, as well as a nearly unparalleled opportunity for outreach and faithful witness. As a result, it is a topic of great importance and bound to become only more so in a culture increasingly bereft of resources to take principled stances against abortion on demand, problematic transgender policies, and embryonic stem cell research. More positively, a distinctively Christian bioethic can, in contrast, effectively posit grounds for understanding human persons as infinitely valuable and ends in themselves, whose worth is neither a function of their abilities nor diminished by handicaps.
My dear friend and former colleague Mark Foreman, with invaluable assistance by Lindsay Leonard, have written Christianity and Modern Medicine: Foundations for Bioethics, and in the process have contributed an important, powerful, and persuasive voice—and eminently readable book—into this vitally important arena. It is with enthusiasm that I endorse their project and recommend their excellent and laudable work.”
A Twilight Musing
Paul’s comments on the Lord’s Supper in I Cor. 11:17-34 are meaningfully followed by a chapter on the importance of communal and harmonious life together in the Body of Christ. The abuses of the Lord’s Supper in chapter 11 are related to the absence of any sense of commonality in the church at Corinth, so that some poor members were being contemptuously ignored by those who were wealthy. Chapter 12 of I Corinthians emphasizes the need of all members of the Body to appreciate and value each other, obscuring the superficial differences between them and embracing the lowly and the exalted with equal fervor. Chapter 13 then goes on to assert “a still more excellent way,” the bonding of all members of the Body into a symphony of love. The appropriate frame of mind in our partaking of the Lord’s Supper is that God cherishes and reaffirms both our individual gifts in the Body and our identity as one organism, with common purpose and mutual affection for one another.
As we commune together, we need to recognize that Jesus died for His Church, but also for each of us who constitute the Church. “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (I Cor. 12:27). Our Western culture cries out for individualism of a sort that gives us license to define who we are; but that identification is God’s prerogative. Saul of Tarsus was seeking to establish his own identity as one who, by persecuting Christians and casting them in prison, would be regarded as “extremely zealous . . . for the traditions of [his] fathers” (Gal. 1:14). But God stopped him in his tracks and called him to a radically new identity, in which he was to preach to both Jews and Gentiles “the faith he once tried to destroy” (see Gal. 1:13-24). Consequently, he could say after he had accepted God’s definition for him that he had been “crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me (Gal. 2:20).
How are we to know who we are in the eyes of God? First of all, we must be still enough to let Him assign us our place: “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you” (I Pet. 5:6). This exaltation includes being called “children of God” (I Jn. 3:1), a privilege that can be attributed only to the undeserved love of God. However, our individual identities as children of God feed into our relationships with each other in the Body of Christ; as children of God, we are “joint-heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:16-17). If we are siblings in the Body of Christ, we find our full identity in serving one another, as Jesus did. He could have claimed special status as the only “natural” Son of God, but He “did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant” (Phil. 2:6-7). Only as we serve one another do we fulfill our identity in Christ. The only place for “competition” is in “[outdoing] one another in showing honor” (Rom. 12:10). But this sort of holy abnegation is leading us to an eternal relationship to God that is the ultimate individualized identity: “To the one who conquers I [Christ] will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, with a new name written on the stone that no one knows except the one who receives it.” In the heavenly state, we will see God face to face and will rejoice in knowing Him as He knows us (see I Cor. 13:12).
In the meantime, “until He comes” to take us to Himself, we rejoice in being defined by where He has placed us in the Body that He inhabits and directs. As we commune together in the Lord’s Supper, we affirm the worth that He imparts to us as units of His own Body.
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 in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.
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MoralApologetics.com is a function of the Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Christian University
