Ethics and Morality Cont’d Wednesday, April 16, 2008 at 12:47 pm
In response to the unusual number of replies to my last post: I guess whenever I want to generate discussion and comments I should post about serial killers. Thanks for all the responses.
I’m staying at home sick today, skipping out on my one class for the day in hopes that staying home will lead to a better tomorrow (considering that I have a midterm tomorrow, which I am spending much of my time here studying for, I am very much hoping for a better tomorrow). Which also reminds me that it looks as though the courses I need to take and the variety I need to choose from are offered only on a Tuesday/Thursday schedule, with the odd and daunting result that it looks like my fall semester will include six hours of class on Tuesday/Thursday and none at all on Monday/Wednesday/Friday. Though I understand professors’ desires to only teach two days a week, I don’t remember signing up for this when I enrolled at the university.
But on to what I wanted to post about. I want to bring up two quotes from the discussion on morality. There were two comments I want to bring up first, the first from MR, the second from Brandon:
To summarize, simply doing the right actions is insufficient. I should seek to follow God’s commandments AND my heart should be in it. Love is NOT just deciding to do good to another. As my friend from Minnesota says, “Love is taking JOY in the good of another.”
Well, if a person follows the rules but feels nothing toward God, or has no relationship with God, then His following the rules is pretty much meaningless. …(long ellipsis)… What is the intentions for doing good? I think that determines ones morality.
This causes me to ask what God’s goals (or our goals, since we are the ones talking about this and I haven’t had my God phone-line installed yet) are in saying that doing good is insufficient. If doing good is insufficient, that means there is something that morality desires beyond doing good to another; what is this?
Though I wasn’t in the original post talking specifically about Christian Bible-based morality (and though it is obviously related), this brings out another important question: are the commands of God grounded in any principle(s)? That is, one just states that a person ought to follow God’s commands and from the heart, and that this is moral behavior. But why follow God’s commands – because God says so or because of what the commands themselves are? Is it more than a language-game, set up and directed by a divine being? What makes it moral other than divine fiat, or is there anything else? Socrates phrases the question more beautifully than I can and much earlier than I ever thought of it:
Is that which is holy loved by the gods because it is holy, or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?
Socrates lived in a polytheistic culture, but this can be very easily translated into a monotheistic question by dropping the ’s’. (And don’t take this as too much of a plug for Socrates – brilliant though he was, I can’t imagine someone more annoying than someone who always seems to be a step ahead of you and you can never quite tell if he’s being sincere or not.) The above quotes from MR and Brandon seem to tend toward the answer that something ‘is holy because it is loved by God’ rather than ‘God loves it because it is holy’, but I don’t want to put words in people’s mouths, so I want to make sure. Additional questions that may help in answering this one are: could God have commanded other than what he did? and would it still be right to follow the behavior of the commands if we did not have them?
On an aside, why do I have so many gay commentators? Oh right, I suppose that makes sense – that tends to happen when one sets up a blog to deal with issues of one’s sexuality – but thanks to Abigail for commenting and adding another perspective. Not that I am unappreciative toward any of you others’ comments and posts! Now I must return to the lambda calculus from whence I came.
I was thinking about the exact thing (the idea of the Socrates quote) earlier today!
I would offer more commentary, but I will have to ponder.
I think you already know where I stand on Euthyphro’s dilemma: morality comes from God in the sense that it is part of the created order, but it is not established by ad hoc verbal commands. But meh, my experience with such discussions hasn’t been great.
Yes, I think you understand my view.
As you probably know, I highly value the Sovereignty of God in my thinking. Since God created holiness and morality, an action is holy and moral because God determines that it is. It was not moral before God determined it to be.
Because we are far below God’s level, many things remain a mystery to us, but not to God. He must determine what is moral and we should trust Him that He is right even when we don’t fully understand. He has already proven that His character is loving and trustworthy by what Jesus did on the cross and in the resurrection.
Real Christianity is not just blindly following commandments, it is lovingly, gladly following the One who gave us the commandments.
Just to be sure I understand you, MR, this means that you would say that something like adultery, for instance, is wrong only because of God’s command. Were it not for the command, or had God chosen to make different commands, adultery would be morally right. (And so on for other moral imperatives.) Is that correct?
David,
Here’s an example. If I didn’t think God thought gay sex was wrong, I’d have a boyfriend right now and would be having sex with him. If it was okay with God for me to be in a loving and committed homosexual relationship, then why would I not do that? But I have to have faith that when God tells me something is wrong– either through conscience or scripture, etc.– it’s because He knows better than me. If God says gay sex is wrong, then I’m not going to be having gay sex. I’ll not do that because I want to follow a bunch of rules. I’ll abstain from it because I love God and I don’t want to hurt him. I think when we sin, we do hurt God. And so because I love him, I won’t do those things he tells me not to do. I’d hope that would mean I’m being moral about the matter. I’m obeying God.
Now you said, ‘is it holy because it is loved by God’ rather than ‘God loves it because it is holy’
If you’re talking about “someone”, I’d say God loves all whether holy or not. If you’re talking about what is or is not holy, I’d say something is holy because it is loved by God AND God loves it because it is holy. I think it’s both. It works both ways. God is naturally going to love whatever is good and right (and that’s according to him). His love for it makes it holy. And because it is holy, or something good, he loves it. Does that make sense? Now, in my eyes, if I fell in love with another man and began a sexual relationship with him, I might call that something good. But I don’t think God would approve of that. Why? I’m honestly not sure. But if He tells me this, I’ll accept it because I know God knows best. He’s never ever steered me wrong in life. So, if he says something is wrong, I’ll trust that he knows better about it than I do.
I hope I made sense of this. I’ve got a little bit of a cold, so if I came across incoherant, I’ll apologize. Pretty much, I’m agreeing with what MR said.
So, would you say that God’s love for heterosexuality makes it holy? Or rather, God’s love for men and women makes their union holy?
I’ll be honest in saying that i cringe when people say “God says”. For instance, God says women shouldn’t preach. That troubles me. Because God didn’t say women shouldn’t preach. Rather, Paul made several statements about the role of women in the church, most of which have been used, for right or wrong, to justify the exclusion of women from the pulpit and in some churches, from leadership all together.
Answering questions about morality (which often begs us to look more closely at God’s nature) seems to require more than a sunday school, small group approach to scripture. *Btw, i’m not accusing anyone here of having such an understanding of scripture. I’m referring to the fact that many Christians, often of a more evangelical bent, tend to operate as though such level of understanding qualifies them to make statements on what God thinks and feels on a plethora of issues.* Rather, the journey to understanding God, and in turn morality, seems to require a study into the nature and the character of the God who created us to love and serve him. I think that is where we find the answer to what God really says, who God really is, and how to live our lives in ways that truly honor him. That is where we come to truly understand morality, in my opinion.
But, this is a tangent and David will yell at me (or worse, sucker me into watching Dexter…)
- Bryan
I was about to go to bed (I will, perhaps, respond to this later, mulling over thoughts and options), but I cannot forgo the snarky remark to Bryan: I’m not going to yell at you, but if I had wanted to sucker you into watching it, I would’ve said something to the effect of ‘but you can’t handle it’ by this point.
Thanks for chiming in.
Maybe I should clarify a bit. There are a lot of sources for determining the morality of something. We have scripture, we have conscience, we have the Holy Spirit, and of course we have God himself who at any time can boom down his great voice telling us directly what he thinks. I do tend to look at the Bible as Gods written expression of himself to us. We all say that God reveals himself to us in three ways, through God the father, God the son, and God the Holy Spirit. I’d dare say that there’s a fourth way in which he reveals himself and that is through the written word. It’s God’s inspired book to us. Now, I’ll concede we may need to look at more than just scripture in determining what is moral to God. But I don’t think we can just disregard scripture completely on any issue.
On morality, Bryan brought up something I wondered if he might explain a little better. He said, “Rather, the journey to understanding God, and in turn morality, seems to require a study into the nature and the character of the God who created us to love and serve him. I think that is where we find the answer to what God really says, who God really is, and how to live our lives in ways that truly honor him. That is where we come to truly understand morality, in my opinion.” I would just ask, isn’t scripture our best way of knowing what God (presumably) thinks? And if not through scripture then how do we know for sure. See, I’ve tried doing what you suggest by reading scripture. Outside of scripture, I wonder whether something is of God or not sometimes. It’s tough to figure out, and so scripture serves as I guess a base for understanding God. It’s through scripture I find answers about God and what God (presumably) thinks. If I don’t look to scripture and I suppose conscience and the like, then where I do look? How do I ever really know what God thinks?
David,
You said,”you would say that something like adultery, for instance, is wrong only because of God’s command. Were it not for the command, or had God chosen to make different commands, adultery would be morally right.”
What I mean is that adultery is wrong for reasons known to God, but I don’t fully understand all of those reasons. God only declares things evil that actually are, but I can’t see the whole picture. If I say something is right when He says it is wrong, then I am thinking I know better than He does. I don’t.
“I would just ask, isn’t scripture our best way of knowing what God (presumably) thinks?”
Absolutely. What i’m saying is that picking a verse here and a passage there is not the best way of truly understanding God and morality. Yet, many Christians approach scripture in a way that is not all that conducive to truly understanding the nature of God and morality, as many never go deeper than a surface level understanding of scripture and biblical history. Yet, with such an understanding, many still feel comfortable with statements like “God said” and “God commands”. I’m not accusing you of doing this Brandon, but I suppose something in your post brought this to mind. Perhaps it’s our differing opinions on “gay sex”, and the way you expressed your viewpoint on the post by using that as the subject matter. At the same time I understand that this goes much deeper into how one Christian approaches scripture versus another. And that’s a different conversation (or blog post).
But to sum things up, yes, I absolutely agree with you that scripture is how we come to understand God and morality. It’s how you approach scripture that makes the difference.
Okay, I see what you’re saying. I totally agree. We have to apply all of scripture and never just pick and choose. It all works together and in full context.
When I said “God says” I certainly didn’t mean to be trying to speak for God. All I meant was that through reading scripture I’ve felt God reveal to me certain things that I might otherwise have not concluded. I was only trying to make an example of how left on my own, I would probably conclude gay relationships are okay. But through reading scripture I tend to get a very distinct impression they’re not okay. And you could use any other example really. All I was getting at is that God is the one who decides what is and is not moral or right. We as flawed humans may think something is okay or good, but then God may have a different opinion than that. He’s so much wiser than any of us could ever hope to be, so I have to trust that he knows best. I hope all that makes sense.
So perhaps y’all have noticed that discussion so far has actually touched on several different questions about morality. First:
“What actions are moral?”
I’m thinking that this is the primary question that MR and Brandon were addressing when David quoted them. Assuming I understand Brandon correctly, he sees morality primarily in terms of right behavior toward God, so that everything we call “doing good” can be summed up under having the right relationship with God, right?
As an example of an opposing view, I think of morality primarily in terms of right behavior toward other people, so that I think morality could be defined without reference to God at all.
Then there’s another question:
“How do we know what is moral?”
Which is what Bryan and Brandon have been discussing in the comments lately.
And the third:
“What makes things moral in the first place?”
That is the one I see David asking in this post. It’s an important question, since how you answer it tends to affect your answers for all the others as well . . . but I also find it the most difficult to answer.
What makes things moral in the first place? I’d have to say God. God is the one who determines morality. That’s what I’ve been trying to explain. It’s not us that makes that decision, but God. And whatever God chooses to make moral or to call good or evil is up to Him. And we know what God thinks through scripture and through the Holy Spirit.
But just to clear up something, I think of morality in terms of right behavior toward God AND other people. It’s both I think. It can be either or. When we do something good for someone else, and it is pleasing to God, then we have done something moral concerning that other person and God. When we do something particularly pleasing with God in mind, then we have behaved morally toward God. Now, if you do something good for someone and let’s say you’re an athiest and don’t do that good with God in mind, I’d say you’re still acting morally so long as that good is something God would approve of. One can be moral without intending their actions to be for God. Even though you’re not doing something with God in mind, I’d still imagine God would be pleased with you if you did something He considered to be moral or right behavior.
Now, for a person who doesn’t believe in God and doesn’t believe in scripture, I’m not sure how a person like that would determine morality, other than by what they themselves would be determining as treating people good. But that would be by their own flawed human standards. A lot of people have done a lot of really bad things all the while thinking they were doing good. That’s where human standards of morality fail in comparison to God’s standards of morality.
And now that I’ve made that comment, I’ll have to back it up with the following, just so everyone stays clear on what I’m saying. If you’re not a Christian, doing good alone or being moral, even if God is pleased by your actions, will not save you. Having faith in Christ and God and accepting His grace and forgiveness, that’s what will save you. Just being moral alone won’t do that. That’s why I said before that it’s meaningless for a person to do moral things unless they have God or Christ in their lives. Meaningless only in the sense that being moral alone won’t save them. Of course, it’s always good whenever anyone does anything moral though.
Just wanted to be clear on that point.
It has taken me a while to consider how to respond to all this.
First to MR,
“What I mean is that adultery is wrong for reasons known to God, but I don’t fully understand all of those reasons. God only declares things evil that actually are…”
That is quite different from your initial response – that “an action is holy and moral because God determines that it is. It was not moral before God determined it to be.”
Allow me to explain: in the former, you are saying that an action is immoral for reasons particular to that act, but confess that you are incapable of fully understanding it; nevertheless, you seem to say it is immoral apart from God’s decree. On the latter account, you say that an action is immoral only because of God’s decree. I think the former (later) response is more nuanced, and I like it much better than the other (and it is I think the one you are saying you believe in), but I do want to point out there is a substantial difference between the two. In one, morality is determined only by God’s power; in the other, morality is what it is, and God is best equipped to be able to understand it.
Abigail,
You are quite right when you judge which questions varying people are trying to answer. I was not asking, nor am I interested here in, “what actions are moral?” Neither “How do we know an action is moral?” But I asked “what is it that makes an action moral in the first place?” And have not seen it much answered.
Brandon,
You have by now made several contradictory claims about morality. I think this has largely been confused from the beginning by your attempt to immediately apply morality to gay sex. I really do wish you hadn’t brought that up because – particularly for someone who is gay and is trying to defend their beliefs one way or the other – this only muddies the waters. And believe it or not it is not the pinnacle of morality nor the subject of all my thoughts or posts. I am disappointed to see it pointlessly and needlessly incorporated.
You have stated in your first comment both that “something is holy because it is loved by God AND God loves it because it is holy.” You can’t create a causal web like that: A cannot cause B and B cause A simultaneously. Then more recently, “God is the one who determines morality.” This is the more traditional Calvinistic line on morality – that something is moral only because God says that it is. But you have not been consistent about this in your posts and I am still very unclear about your answer to the question that I asked: what makes something moral – the item itself or God’s declaration?
Now to address some of the other tangents you brought up. I am quite disturbed by the following:
“We all say that God reveals himself to us in three ways, through God the father, God the son, and God the Holy Spirit. I’d dare say that there’s a fourth way in which he reveals himself and that is through the written word.”
This makes me very uncomfortable – the Nicene creed does not include “I believe in the Bible, one with the Father, Son, and Spirit”, and to place Scripture at the level of Trinity is very close to idol worship. Even Luther said that Scripture is only of any worth because it speaks about Christ. Here you diverge into waters concerning biblical inspiration (I think I would go somewhere along the lines of Karl Barth – that Scripture is a pointer to revelation, which is the Godhead, and not revelation itself). This is tangential because it is irrelevant to what does or does not make something moral – but this is a prime example of what my emergent friends would call ‘bibliolatry.’
Lastly, I will leave your last comment up, but it is again a tangent that has no place here. I’m not asking how one gets saved. I know that’s the end-all be-all of a lot of evangelical theology, but it is of little to no relevance in the conversation I was wanting to have.
Sorry to be the mean moderator-man, but I’ve seen a lot of comments get added with very few actually answering or dealing with the specific question I was asking.
Ok, I will take a crack at this.
I think morality is something created by God, but not necessarily something that he has to lay out in laws. There does seem to be a universal sense of right and wrong that the majority of humans, regardless of beliefs, understand. I would think one example would be murder, pretty much everyone knows that this is immoral. Still, there are a large number of Christians who don’t seem bothered by the death penalty. Does that mean only certain murder is immoral?
I often have a hard time distinguishing between what is “wrong” and what is “immoral”.
I think the culture you live in determines a lot of what is “wrong” and can make you think it’s immoral. Take eating dogs (I know it’s a random example). Growing up in the United States you are taught that it is disgusting and wrong and if you are a dog owner you may even feel that it is “immoral” to eat man’s best friend. However, is this really “immoral?” I don’t think you can say it is.
Hmmm. I was working to compose my thoughts further, but I am at a loss.
Morality is CONFUSING. When I try to understand whether something is immoral I start by asking “Will this hurt anyone?” Of course, this naive question has limitations. Stealing a pen from work does not appear to hurt anyone, but I consider it immoral.
Ok, I will try to conclude but fear all I have done is throw out random thoughts. I believe morality was invented by God in “the beginning”, but that through the years it has been determined through the lens of culture and we can never fully understand the pure concept. Only God understands what morality is and what makes something moral. Still, I think we can understand the basic right things from wrong things and in the process can achieve some level of morality.
Also, I don’t think you have to be a Christian to be a moral person. There is such a thing as a moral atheist just as their are immoral Christians. Of course, nobody is 100% moral or immoral.
Wow, I don’t know if I achieved anything in this comment. Haha.
David, I think Otrolado did a good job explaining.
Sorry if I offended you any by using gay sex in discussion about morality. I was only using it as an example. I guess I could have just as easily talked about theft or murder or anything else really. The only reason I used it as an example is because I have been questioning the morality of it myself here lately, as you know. So, that’s why I brought it up, and for no other purpose.
When I said “something is holy because it is loved by God AND God loves it because it is holy” I did not think this was being contradictory. What I was thinking is if God loves something, doesn’t that make it holy? And if something is therefore holy, then that would have to mean it is because God loves it. These two are the same to my mind. But I think that nothing can be holy unless it is loved by God. Now, if we say that all things good are holy, and we know that God loves all that is good, then we can say that God loves what is holy. It all works around to say the same thing I think. So, the question would have to be asked, what makes something good? And my answer to that would be that God determines what is good and what is not based on what consequences any action may have.
You asked, “What makes something moral – the item itself or God’s declaration?” Well, like Otrolado was saying, most of us would say murder is not a holy act. There is harm done to someone by that. It has a negative consequence. So we could say that through our own human understanding of things, anything that brings about good is moral and anything that brings about bad is immoral. But as I already said before, sometimes it’s possible for us to think we’re doing good, when in actuality we may be doing bad. Some people would think murdering people who are in pain or suffering may be good, or the right moral thing to do, because it eases their pain. But is it? Let’s say you or I was to do that to someone and think we did the right thing by it, but God knows that had we left that person alive a little while longer, a cure for their suffering may have been produced. In this situation, the morality of our actions is determined by God. Did we do the right thing or not? Probably not if by having let the person lived, the next day they’d have been given the cure and would have went on to live another fifteen years or so with good health. But only God would know that. We can’t always see the consequences of our actions and only God can know what all the consequences would have been had our actions been different. So, morality, what is truly good and right, only God can determine.
Now about the Bible. Yeah, I flubbed up what I was trying to say. I certainly do not think of the Bible as God. Or that the Bible is in the same sense as Christ or the Holy Spirit. What I was trying to express is that the Bible is designed to help bring us in relationship with God. It’s a book that teaches us about God and how we are to relate to Him and to our fellow man. It’s a history book essentially. But it is also an inspired book in which those who had direct contact with God or Christ wrote much of it, and in many cases wrote what they said God had taught them or had told them to write. So, it is an important book, and I think God does reveal Himself to us through it. Not to mean that the Bible is a part of God, but that we are better able to know God because of it, and I think that was what God intended by it. We get a glimpse of who God is by reading it.
Now, in talking about being saved, I’m sorry if I veered off topic a little from the discussion you were after, but you’ve not been the only one in this conversation. Others had made comments to me too and I didn’t want them to misinterpret or get the wrong idea about what I was saying. And in the second place, you’re the one who quoted me to begin with in this post. I was only trying to make sure you and everyone else understood more fully what I was talking about when you quoted me as having said that being moral is meaningless without God in your life.
If you’ll forgive me remarking on one of the tangents, from my experience even emergents and people who like to quote Barth hold to a very high, mysticalish view of the Bible. Surely you’ve noticed how it’s all the rage right now to talk about an “incarnational view” of scripture and compare and model one’s understanding of its human and divine aspects on trinitarian Christology(!). Moderates also criticize inerrantists for having too low a view of inspiration by thinking that the authority of scripture depends on its fidelity to external, theological and historical facts. Even the postfoundationalist arguments that I’ve seen just take it for granted that what matters is the text itself and not the historical realities that produced it (like, you know, the actual historical Jesus and the beliefs of his disciples).
I find it all a bit irritating — and more than irritating when a blogger starts gloating about how the historical-critical method is doomed to be replaced by literary and reception-history approaches to Biblical studies. But I guess that’s just my “modernism” showing.