Moral Logic: Morality and Biblical Worldview

Moral Logic: Morality and Biblical Worldview

By Jay Wegter

To deny that there is a transcendent moral order is to deny that the Almighty Holy God of the universe is Creator and Ruler. That denial is evidence that a person has been taken captive by the world’s philosophies (Col 2:8). Holy Scripture affirms that the transcendent moral order (God’s law) is just as real as the non-transcendent physical order we see in our universe (see Psalms 93-97). It is impossible that we should have a Holy Almighty Creator and NOT be living in a moral universe (Job 34:10-15; Dan 4:34-35; 5:21-23; Rom 2:5-9; 12, 16; 13:1; Eph 1:21; Rev 2:26-27; ). By ‘moral universe’ we mean that moral law is built into the very fabric of creation. God’s laws are not arbitrary or the result of social conditioning—in fact God’s laws are just as much in force on earth as anywhere else in the universe. If we traveled to a planet in some other galaxy, God’s laws forbidding murder and adultery would be just as universal. God’s moral authority will be put on display to the rational universe on judgment day (Rev 20:11-15; 21:8).

Unbelieving men deny that this is a moral universe due to their antipathy toward the holy character of God and due to their resentment that they are accountable to Him. They resent the fact that they owe God moral perfection—they bear a grudge against God’s moral majesty (Rom 8:5-8). Man’s transgressions cause him to live with his back to God—in defiance of his Maker’s rightful claims upon him (Jn 3:19-21). The reality that this is a moral universe is sometimes called natural law— meaning that God’s laws are the very furniture of the universe—and therefore are self-evident. By self-evident we mean it is inescapably obvious that ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ is ethically superior to hate your neighbor and lie in wait for his blood. Virtue and nobility is the polar opposite of living by animal passions. We know instinctively that theft, murder, rape, adultery, and slander are wrong and worthy of condemnation. The Word of God tells us WHY we know instinctively that those actions are wrong—we know they are wrong because our Creator’s moral mark is upon us—written upon our consciences (Rom 2:14-16).

Why is a 14 year old runaway teen enslaved in prostitution in New York City a terrible tragedy? The answer is: because of self-evident morality. We know instinctively that she was created for something infinitely better than to sell her young body to lusting older men. When one opens the Holy Scriptures, a work of correspondence takes place (correspondence between what is written by God on man’s conscience and what is written by God in His Word). What is written on the heart and conscience of man (God’s transcendent moral order) is written on the pages of Holy Scripture. The reality that this is a moral universe is inescapable. This is the reason why that sin and judgment is such a pervasive theme in literature from antiquity to the present. We are regularly confronted by the plot of crime and punishment—virtue and evil. Crime and punishment bear an undeniable relationship to one another which we refer to as justice—and the reason why— because this is a moral universe and its Ruler is just (Is 30:18; Rev 20:11-15; Matt 7:21-23; Mark 7:20-23; 9:42-48).

Because this is a moral universe; ideas have consequences. God made the universe out of nothing. Truth has no independent existence of its own. Truth is therefore an ethical issue because all truth is God’s truth—and is therefore backed up by His authority. Truth is from God; truth is not a property of a chemical on the elemental table. Christ is divine truth incarnate (Jn 14:6).

The concept of truth includes morality. The term ‘moral value’ is actually a misnomer. The reason why is that morality is not a matter of personal preference (what a person chooses to value or devalue). Morality is anchored in divine immutable truth. Thus, the more accurate term (instead of moral value) is moral truth. Moral truth is a superior term because God has spoken authoritatively concerning what is true; real; right; and wrong.

Moral truth does not change because God does not change. Thus, what is true about God, man, man’s moral boundaries, and man’s place in the universe issues from the immutability of God Almighty. Morality finds its objective source in the answers to the following questions: Who is God? What is man? What is man’s purpose? Is this an open or closed universe?

Application: consider how the reality of ‘moral truth’ overturns the prevailing idea today that morality is subjective; or relative to the individual, and that if a person thinks something is right or wrong; then it is right or wrong ‘for them’.

By the term ‘closed universe’ we mean that those who hold to this view believe the universe made itself and that the universe is self-sustaining and self-interpreting. An analogy is helpful at this point: to believe in a closed universe means that all existence is in a ‘box’ we call the universe. And, those who hold to a closed universe explain what’s in the box by what’s in the box (including the explanation of man). This view is known as naturalism or materialism. By contrast, the open universe view proclaims the non-negotiable truths of biblical theism—that our transcendent Creator has spoken to us infallibly in His Word and in His Son (Heb 1:1-3) and He acts upon the created universe from outside of it—He is not a part of it. It is dependent upon Him; not the other way around.

God’s self-revelation, the Bible, is God’s authoritative word from outside the ‘box’—from outside time/space/mass. God is not a part of the time/space/mass continuum we call the universe. In the Scriptures God is telling things we could not have known apart from His revelation. The Bible defines reality as God Himself and His relationship to what He has created (Rom 11:36). God has direct control of what He has made. He owns it; upholds it; directs it; sustains it. He invaded history in the Person of Jesus Christ. But when Christ returns in glory; it will not be as suffering servant next time. He will return as Conqueror to subdue every enemy of God (1 Cor 15:23-28; 2 Thess 2:6-9; Heb 9:27-28).

Only the Word of God can answer with absolute objectivity and authority what we call ultimate questions. Science cannot answer even one ultimate question anymore than the bug in a jar can explain the boy holding the jar. An extremely important ultimate question is: What is sin? How big of a disaster is sin? What are the consequences of sin? What has God done about sin? God declares through Christ (the sinless one) that man is not fit to diagnose his own case (Jn 3:19-21). But why does Jesus make this statement? It is because sin kills moral objectivity. For man to accurately diagnose sin he would have to step outside of it entirely. That would be like a scientist saying: “In order to study the element oxygen accurately we will abstain from using it personally for the entire duration of the experiment.” Part of man’s dilemma is that he cannot transcend his moral condition. His ethical existential situation is that he is a member of a horribly fallen human race. The goldfish in his bowl does not know he is wet. Wetness is all he has ever known. Sin is all we have ever known—we do not know experientially what perfect holiness is—therefore we do not know God apart from Christ.

If man has no Maker, no Divine Designer, and no goal; then where does the ‘ought’ and ‘should’ come from in morality? In MacIntyre's interpretation, Aristotelianism sees the moral virtues as connected to the social role of the individual as part of a broader community, a community which collectively strives towards the highest good for man. Man is seen as a creature with a telos, a purpose, and striving to fulfill this purpose is the very definition of being a "good man." This further means that one can derive an "ought" from an "is" through a rational analysis of man's telos. Thus, man is not an ostensibly free individual disconnected from his social roles and functions. There is no real identity for man apart from such roles and functions (from an Amazon book review of, Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue).

God alone knows the true nature of sin in all its ugliness. The Word of God is comprehensive treatment of the subject of sin—it is our Creator’s testimony of man’s moral condition; and it is God’s testimony concerning His Son (1 Jn 5:9-10). Jesus made this perfectly clear. No one can be objective about his sin (and the human moral condition) until he acknowledges that sin kills moral objectivity (Jn 8:31-38); and that God’s testimony concerning human sin is true.

Repentance is intellectual as well as addressing outward ethical behavior. To repent is to abandon our cherished erroneous ideas about man and God and sin—and then to abandon the false notion of autonomy and autonomous reason. The repenting man brings his mind under the mind of God as revealed in the Bible; the Word of God. This is absolutely essential if a man is to be ruled by God (and thus moving from a fugitive under God’s moral government to a willing subject under God’s moral government). God and His Word are one. Just as you cannot know another human well apart from his words—we know God solely by His Word. God’s Word is where his moral truth is authoritatively revealed. God’s moral truth is backed up by divine authority (1 Jn 1:5).

Now in our supposedly progressive world, moral relativism and moral confusion reign—and are moving us to the brink of destruction because we have lost our moral minds through the deceits of secular humanism. Manmade philosophy has justified living by animal passions—morality has been reduced to personal preference. The created purpose of man has been intentionally lost (Rom 1:18-23). The reality of the human soul has been ‘amputated’ from our anthropology by false philosophy in the name of freedom and progress. This is a death wish; a death spiral; a staircase to hell. Ideas have eternal consequences because this is a moral universe ruled by God. Man, by his false philosophy, is smashing himself against God’s immovable laws.

How much of a disaster is sin? Only on judgment day will the gravity of the disaster sink in fully. Then on that day, history will prove to be the record of the honoring and dishonoring of God and the eternal consequences of each. Error will someday be forever hung on the gallows and displayed in all its wretchedness. God tells us that history will prove to be a mighty object lesson to the rational universe (Rom 9:22-24).

How much of a disaster is sin? It is a disaster of such proportions that to remain impenitent is to openly deny the purpose for the creation of the human race—that purpose being to love; obey; know; serve; and enjoy our God forever. The very purpose of our existence as those made in the image of God is to exalt the beauty of God’s moral majesty. The universe exists for this reason. Of course the realization of man’s created purpose is absolutely out of reach apart from the grace of God. To love the God of holiness is impossible for mankind apart from forgiveness through Christ Jesus (Jn 17:3).

What men are by nature due to sin expresses itself in hostility toward God and His law (Rom 8:5-8). By man’s stubborn commitment to retain enmity toward God, he winds up opposing himself and his own highest good (Rom 2:4-11). Sin is spiritual suicide. When men choose to remain in unbelief; it is an act of self-destruction; there is no greater folly. God’s gracious offer (the command to receive eternal life)—to be right with Him by Christ is the greatest of all conceivable gifts (Jn 3:16, 36; Rom 8:32; Is 55:1-6).

No man knows God until that man has been forgiven of his sins. And no man can be forgiven of his sins until he says the same thing about his sin as God does. And this is what God says about your sin: it is rebellion; lawlessness; pollution; alienating; ruinous; and deserving of hell. And, no man will say this about his sin until he has been cross-examined by God’s law (Rom 3:9-23). Only then can he be ‘cross liberated’ (Rom 3:24-26).

God’s law is the polar opposite of arbitrary. For God’s law is His eternal holy character in code. This is the source of our ethics in this moral universe. Thus, to rail against universal moral absolutes is to attempt to mock God—it is to defy God’s immutable holy character (Gal 6:6; Rom 6:23). Man was created to be the image of God—the reflection of God in the creature (Gen 1:26-27). Conscience tells me that this is so. It tells me that God will examine my life someday. For the conscience generates ‘subpoenas’ on a regular basis. The conscience is a little annex of God’s ultimate courtroom (Rom 2:12-16). The conscience of man is a place of verdicts. The reality of a busy defiled conscience which constantly evaluates all of our ethical decisions is very real for one great reason: man was created to be the moral image of God—that is to reflect God’s moral beauty and perfections in our relationships.

IMAGE OF GOD AND OUR CHRISTIAN WORLDVIEW

Even atheists agree that if every single person lived by The Ten Commandments, we would have heaven on earth. But man’s pride and self-love will not allow him to admit the depth of his fallen-ness. How far did Adam fall? He fell much further than we can possibly imagine. But no man will accept God’s remedy for this disaster until he accepts God’s diagnosis of the man’s horrific dilemma. The majority of the human race is traveling upon the broad road which leads to destruction (Matt 7:13-14). If a person is on the broad road to destruction; he will regard God’s diagnosis of his moral condition to be a conflict of interest. In other words, he will reject God’s plain testimony concerning the human condition. He chooses to live his life in denial of his true moral state in God’s sight (Ps 14:1).

Why do unbelievers do this? Why do they reject God’s testimony concerning their moral state in His sight? Why do they assert that absolute moral truth is unknowable and therefore non-existent?

They remain in this state of denial because of their deadness by sin. They cling to the rebellious illusion that they are autonomous and that there is a reality greater than God Himself. Therefore they have zero sentiment to live for God’s honor and glory. Only the power of God in the gospel can reverse this. Only the gospel has the divine power to restore the glory of God to us and allow us to recover our love and passion for God’s glory. The gospel has the power to drive out the ancient lie which has darkened every man’s heart (Col 1:19-21). When a sinner sees the glory of God in the face of Christ; only then does that sinner understand the beauty and desirability of God’s glory (2 Cor 4:4-6). For God’s glory is joined to the wonder that Christ has borne the reproach of all who would believe.

How spiritually dead is mankind? John Piper answers this question brilliantly, “One of the unsettling things about the new birth, which Jesus says we must all experience in order to see the kingdom of God (John 3:3), is that we don’t control it. We don’t decide to make it happen any more than a baby decides to make his birth happen. Or even more accurately: We don’t decide to make it happen any more than dead men decide to give themselves life. The reason we need to be born again is that we are dead in our trespasses and sins. That’s why we need the new birth, and that’s why we can’t make it happen. This is one reason why we speak of the sovereign grace of God. Or better; this is one reason why we love the sovereign grace of God” (John Piper, Finally Alive, pg. 77).

ADDENDUM: Reviews of the Book by Alasdair MacIntyre titled, After Virtue

The book, “After Virtue” was a tour de force when it hit the shelves roughly 20 years ago. It laid bare the utter incoherence of the use of moral language in societies of "advanced modernity", i.e., modern Europe, the former USSR, and the US. His critique of the various descendents of the Enlightenment, from utilitarians and Nietzscheans, blasted moral philosophy out of its slumber into a field that continues to grow to this day. Even today, most moral philosophers have spent most of their time attacking Macintyre's positive theses rather than critiquing his critique (a definite sign of the respect at his assessment of the use of modern moral language). I will summarize the major motivations on why this book was written and why someone would read it:

1. Why are there so many types of moral disagreements in modern societies?
2. Why do these disagreements never seem to end but go on indefinitely?
3. Can any moral theory be related to actual facts or is all moral language sui generis?

Not surprisingly, MacIntyre traces most of these problems to those thinkers of the Enlightenment yet it would be a MISTAKE in thinking that MacIntyre is somehow laying the blame solely on the Enlightenment for the current situation. Rather, his whole thesis is that they did the best they could in defending in what they thought was the CONTENT of morality (the culture of post-Enlightenment Europe being as it were a mix of Christian values with an intense admiration of newly re-discovered Greco-Roman pagan texts on a range of subjects) with their own philosophical methods (See Hume's reasoning on why women should remain chaste until marriage). MacIntyre's insight is that they HAD to fail. No philosophical brilliance they could muster could save the CONTENT they wished to save (for example, "always tell your mother the truth") with their prescribed METHODS of doing philosophy (for example a la Kant, "all moral laws have the character of being assented to by all rational persons at all times in all cultures"). The Enlightenment thinkers chose an impossible task and thus failed (and moreover had to fail in such a way that their failure was relatively hidden from the thinkers themselves and their respective cultures at large). It is only with Nietzche do we have a thinker brave enough to raze the CONTENT they wished to save with the METHODS and start totally anew.

Thus, half-way through the book, MacIntyre offers the reader a stark choice: either we must choose that all moral talk (talk of right & wrong) is really an attempt to impose one's will on another person a la Nietzsche or that there is form of moral language that is not undercut by Nietzsche's own rather devastating attack on (post-)Enlightenment moral theories.

Hence begins MacIntyre's foray from critique to laying out a positive philosophical programme that leads to several books (See Whose Justice? Which Rationality? & Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Paul Carus Lectures) especially) and a refining of his ideas.

MacIntyre says that there is an interminability of moral debate today. No consensus solution to the variety of moral issues such as abortion and war will present itself because proponents of both sides of the arguments in these two issues argue from a different set of premises from a different tradition of moral philosophy. You have Thomistic ideals of the value of life and justice against Rousseauist ideals of individuality, for example, in life issues. Can any of the Enlightenment moral philosophies really help us make rational, clear decisions about the morality of a particular decision? MacIntyre investigates the moral philosophies of Kant, Hume, & Kierkegard, showing how each of them miserably fails as a possible moral system. Utilitarianism, pragmatism, and emotivism are also wonderfully skewered. With what are we left? It seems as if after the failure of these systems we are left with the Nietzschean amorality of total chaotic relativism. MacIntyre understands the enigma of Nietzsche's ideas and shows how his attacks toppled the pompous, arrogant ideals of the Enlightenment. But Nietzsche's system seems impossible from a human standpoint, since, for example, we are left with the unsettling discovery that events such as the Holocaust are not really "wrong" in any objective sense.

Our moral language assumes a universality we do not believe, he argues at the beginning. How have our moral beliefs become so ruptured from (and so much smaller than) the language we use to describe them? That rupture is the history he traces. The setting is the Western world; the characters are philosophers; the plot is the murder of Aristotle. Who killed him? Was it Hume in the Enlightenment with the candlestick? Was it Machiavelli in the Renaissance? Was it Kierkegaard the Dane with a book: Enten-Eller? Was it the Bloomsbury group with their emotivist approach to ethics? Was it, after all has been said and done, Nietzsche? And, can Aristotle (and his teleological view of morality) be brought back to life?

Writing polemics in support of virtue became something of a cottage industry in the '90's. This is one of the texts that drove that trend. For MacIntyre, upon investigation there are only two consistent moral viewpoints: one associated with Aristotle that views morality as objectively valid and rational because it's based on a natural teleology and sees that morality exercised through the development of virtues and intricately entwined with them, another, based upon Nietsche, which sees morality only as a mask for irrational power. (NOTE: the term teleology is used to mean end, ultimate goal, purpose by design.)

This book is really two books in one. The first half in large part lays out MacIntyre's wholesale critique of contemporary moral/ethical/deontological discussion. This in my opinion is the book's greatest accomplishment; the first two chapters are a must read for all inquiring philosophical minds inasmuch as they unflatteringly lay bare the emptiness of any and all moral discussion in the post-Enlightenment West.

In MacIntyre's interpretation, Aristotelianism sees the moral virtues as connected to the social role of the individual as part of a broader community, a community which collectively strives towards the highest good for man. Man is seen as a creature with a telos, a purpose, and striving to fulfill this purpose is the very definition of being a "good man". This further means that one can derive an "ought" from an "is" through a rational analysis of man's telos. Thus, man is not an ostensibly free individual disconnected from his social roles and functions. There is no real identity for man apart from such roles and functions (the author attacks existentialism on this point, which claims the opposite). Nor is man a creature that can freely choose any goal whatever - or rather, he can so choose, but the consequences are the confusion, anomie and meaninglessness characteristic of our times. MacIntyre's communitarian or collectivist angle rules out liberal capitalism, and the idea that one can indeed derive an "ought" from an "is" collides head-long with most modern moral philosophers from Hume onwards.

During the Enlightenment, according to MacIntyre, the Aristotelian notion of a telos was dispensed with, creating a contradictory moral philosophy where the private strivings of each individual were dualistically opposed to a non-teleological morality no longer based in human nature, but coming from outside in the form of abstract, general rules. Even later, philosophers like G.E. Moore claimed that "the good" cannot be defined at all and is graspable only by a nebulous intuition, and this eventually opened the door to dispensing with any moral language or knowledge whatsoever. Modern philosophers who hark back to Hume or Kant can't solve the problem either, since their systems still lack the teleological link between the individual as he is and the moral rules as they ought to be. The only alternatives to our present sorry state are Nietzsche or Aristotle. Either boldly embrace the void and the Übermensch, or restore the classical and medieval understanding of the virtues and teleology.

His attempt is to show a historical nature to moral arguments, sited within social contexts, and to show that this in fact offers a strength to moral debate, rather than a weakening through relativism. If you wonder why everyone seems to be talking past each other, and why moral discussion is nigh unto impossible to sustain, this book offers answers. It is a worthy beginning, or maybe a last diagnosis before the curtain falls. Read it to understand why we are what C.S. Lewis calls "men without chests". I recommend this well-thought-out and well-written book highly. I see on the back cover that John Gardner calls it "the best book of philosophy in years." I assume this is the John Gardner--novelist, literary historian, and teacher of writing--who wrote ON MORAL FICTION. If you read chapter 2 of that fine little book by Gardner, you will get a discussion of morality that may help you, as a studious reader of AFTER VIRTUE, understand a little better what MacIntyre is saying. The moral outlook discussed by MacIntyre has been indeed the basic outlook of Christianity in its various catholic forms certainly (Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, etc.) as well as the outlook of Romanticism and Marxism. I intend to study MacIntyre's book a second time to clarify and refine my understanding of it. It does seem to me that his insistence on the need to beware of the morally devastating effects of "emotivism" in its various forms is an intelligent therapeutic move. An ethics founded on man's telos or on the imperative to live according to the will of God, as we are able to divine it, is an ethics, a set of criteria for conduct, that facilitates our stuggle to become authentic, creative, and healing persons, individually and collectively. In this, his most famous work, Professor MacIntyre seeks to review the history of the destruction of modern ethics. He sees ethics as having been destabilised by the Enlightenment project, when scientism got its first foot-hold in the modern mind, and the thinkers of the era tried to ground everything in hard, observed fact or even harder, structural logic. He correctly diagnoses that attempts at the former, when in a positivistic framework, end in emotivism (e.g. Hume), while attempts at the latter (e.g. Kant), end in failure.

However, modern ethical theory does not necessarily end in emotivism for the simple reason that positivism is not the only approach. Indeed a semi-Kantian approach can be taken to ethics, in which it is seen not so-much as justified by logic, as a prerequisite of our language (transcendental, e.g. early Wittgenstein). This puts its ground outside the range of criticism. MacIntyre is at his most interesting in his attacks on the lack of 'telos' (goal) in modern ethics. It is as though we were taught all the rules of chess (the laws of movement) without being taught how to win. However, he falsely damns one of the orginal men who diagnosed this, Nietzsche, and his self-created man, so like Aritotle's 'megalopsychic man', the 'Ubermensch' as belonging in a "philosophical bestiary". Like all communitarians, however, he can not bring himself to answer why you should create morality (how can there be an ethical ground for any ethics) and also how you can actually do it (mass post-hypnotic suggestion perhaps).