Euthyphro, the Perfections of God, and N.D. Wilson

Yesterday I posted a response to N.D. Wilson’s treatment of Rob Bell in Books & Culture.  In this post I’d like to take this conversation a bit deeper.

Wilson’s essay strikes me as a classic example of the “divine command theory” (“DCT”) of ethics.  According to DCT, something is good or bad simply because God wills and commands it to be so.  It is a popular theory with strong Calvinists because it emphasizes God’s absolute sovereignty.  This is the perspective, I think, from which Wilson writes.

DCT is vulnerable to the Euthyphro Dilemma.  The Euthyphro Dilemma is based on one of Plato’s dialogues.  It asks, “does God will the good because (a) it is good, or is it good (b) because God wills it?”  If (a), this suggests there is something greater than God, to which God is subject.   If (b), this suggests that morality is arbitrary and that statements such as “God is good” are empty tautologies.  Neither (a) nor (b) reflect what Christian theists traditionally mean by “God” or “good.”  DCT asserts (b), and thereby falls prey to claims of arbitrariness and emptiness.

Wilson seems to think the only other option is (a), which would reduce “God” to something less than the final, soverign being of Christian theism.  But (a) is not the only other option.  Indeed, neither (a) nor (b) reflect traditional Christian theism.  As theologian Stephen Holmes notes in his chapter “The Attributes of God” from The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology,“‘goodness is neither merely a name we apply to God’s actions nor a standard beyond God by which he may be judged.  Rather, it is God’s own character to which he may indeed be held accountable. . . .”

Note that Holmes asserts that God may be “held accountable” to act in accordance with God’s own character.  This is the meaning, Holmes notes, of Abraham’s plea in Genesis 18:25:  “Far be it from you to do such a thing–to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” Abraham could not make an appeal to a standard of “right” if “right” meant simply whatever God commands.  Why is Abraham confident that God will not “kill the righteous with the wicked” — confident enough to challenge God Himself?  Because Abraham knows that God will always act in accordance with God’s own character. God is just, and therefore God will not act unjustly.

An epistemological problem, however, remains.  How can we as mere humans know enough about what God is really like to expect that God will act in accordance with some standard we perceive as “good?”  DCT here must posit a radical, complete inability to know anything about what God is like.  All we can do, according to DCT, is hear and obey God’s commands.  But this is untenable.

In order to know that we are in fact hearing God’s commands, we must have some knowledge of the content of God’s communication to us.  In order to have such knowledge, we must believe God in fact has communicated in a reliable, intelligible fashion.  But in order to believe that God’s presumed communication is reliable and intelligible, we must hold such communication (and by extension its putative speaker) to some standard of reliability and intelligibility.  If God could tell a lie and command that such a lie is “good,” how could we know that God’s commands are in fact things He wants us to follow?  Maybe God is a trickster and wants to lead us astray.

We can make such judgments because we do, in fact, have some creaturely knowledge of what is “good” and “reliable” and “intelligible.”  Our creaturely knowledge necessarily is delivered through the cognitive and linguistic structures available to us as human creatures.  But these structures are derived from God as our creator, in whose image we are made.  Therefore, although we do not have direct knowledge of what “good” and “reliable” and “intelligible” are with respect to God in His essence, we do have analogical knowledge of these things.  This analogical argument is found in Thomas Aquinas, and Holmes summarizes it as follows:  “we first know derived goodness, and from that begin to understand what it means to call God good.”

Holmes notes a number of problems with Thomas’ argument and further highlights the problem of divine simplicity that underlies this discussion.  But Holmes is correct, I think, in affirming the basic insight that God’s perfections are one and that we can know something about what God is like by creaturely analogy.  To be sure, such knowledge is only analogical, never direct, and it is always mediated through and accommodated to the limits of human language.  Indeed, we can never really grasp what God communicates to us without the presence of the Holy Spirit, who both authenticates to us God’s speech and enables us to perceive and understand it.  But all of this means that, like Abraham, we are right to interrogate deeply when some passage of scripture, or some doctrinal claim, is stated in a way that makes God appear less than everything that He is, all at once, and all together:  less than perfectly loving and good, less than perfectly merciful and just, less than perfectly sovereign and gracious.