"'. . . that He may teach us about His ways
And that we may walk in His paths.'
For from Zion will go forth the Law
Even the Word of God from Jerusalem."
Micah 4:2
| The material in this column is a shameless wholesale
rip-off of chapter 14 of Greg Bahnsen's book, Theonomy in Christian Ethics. |
The links and definitions in this column
are designed to help the reader understand Bahnsen's material, as well as promote Vine & Fig Tree's radical agenda, which we call The Christmas Conspiracy. |
| THE foregoing sections have explained the principle of theonomy in its covenantal context
based on the special revelation of God. God’s law has
been shown to be indispensable to Christian biblical ethics. Based on the absolute authority of God, and in response
to His gracious salvation, the
Christian is taught what God requires and desires of him by the
written law of God. Motivated by faith and enabled by the Holy Spirit,
the Christian seeks to glorify and serve God
in all his moral behavior by following the directives of God’s law. Such is the
Christian ethic: covenantal use of the law of God. Because the Christian
has a personal relation with God established by His sovereign grace, wherein the Spirit of
knowledge, power, and holiness enables him to understand and obey
the moral stipulations of God, the Christian can live a life pleasing to his Lord. The
biblical ethic is constituted by this covenantal theonomy. The normative center of Christian morality, then,
is nothing other than the whole law of God as
recorded in Scripture. |
theos = God
autos = self
nomos = law |
Theonomy = God's Law
Autonomy = self-law |
And the serpent said unto the woman, "ye shall be as gods, determining good and
evil for yourselves." Genesis 3:5
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| The direct antithesis of Christian ethics is sin or
lawlessness. Covenantal theonomy is incongruous with autonomy,
for self-law does not seek to conform the person’s thoughts, words, and deeds to
God’s righteousness as learned in God’s revealed word. The skills of godly living can only be acquired by Spiritual reception and obedience to the
commandments of God’s word. Thus only the Christian theonomic ethic is true and
effective. Adam learned this hard lesson in the garden; we do well to learn from it also. [279] |
|
Adam
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| Even when man’s life was untainted by sin, his
moral consciousness was not ultimate, but derivative; Adam was receptively reconstructive
of God’s word, that is, he thought God’s thoughts after Him on a creaturely
level. Adam did not look to himself for moral steering; rather, he lived by supernatural,
positive revelation. Adam was not without external moral dictate; he knew what was good
and evil because His Lord told him. However, Adam fell from his state of blessing and
moral uprightness when he succumbed to the Satanic temptation improperly to "be like
God." Satan lured our original parents into thinking that they should know good and
evil for themselves; they would be moral arbitrators determining good and evil. They
decided that they could be self-sufficient in their moral consciousness and reasoning.
They substituted autonomy for theonomy. |
|
| The dreadful results are all too well known to us. Man
is not morally self-sufficient; when he tries to be he sins and rebels against God,
and such is the antithesis of true ethics. Autonomy is inherently destructive of
genuine morality; self-law makes ethics impossible. Although Adam’s temptation and
fall took place in calendar history, his pattern of autonomy has been recapitulated
throughout the history of ethical philosophy. Biblical theonomy as the principle of
Christian ethics is a resplendent sight in contrast to the wasteland of humanistic ethical
philosophy. |
|
| 1. The following treatment in this chapter is not
intended to be the in-depth analysis which only a book (or series of books) could be.
Philosophic detail-work and highly qualified argumentation have been relinquished in order
to achieve a popular sketch of the high points of autonomous ethical systems. The
discussion is thus non-expository as well as incomplete in its selection (e.g., the period
spanning the third century B.C. to the eighteenth century A.D. is completely untouched).
My aim has simply been to set out an outline of approaches to ethics and present key
critical questions for them, in order that some general comparative remarks and a
fundamental conclusion can be reached in the end. Those wishing background to the history
of philosophy can profitably pursue it in: Henry Sidgwick, Outline of the
History of Ethics, (with an additional chapter by H. G. Widgery) (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1886, reprinted 1960); Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (New
York: Macmillan, 1966); Mary Warnock, Ethics Since 1900, 2nd Ed. (London: Oxford
University Press, 1966). |
|
| In what follows we shall selectively explore, albeit
briefly, the history of humanistic ethics that we might see the collapse of morality and
ethic in its ungodly course.1 |
|
| Note [281] should be
made of the failure of autonomous ethics (i.e., anything outside of biblical theonomy) to
answer the decisive questions of interpretation, direction, authority, motive, power, and
goal for an ethical system. What is the meaning of "good"? What norms are to be
used for choosing value? What is the right thing to do in a particular situation? Why
should a person be obligated to act morally? In what is obligation grounded? What
motivates moral behavior? Where does one get the ability to act rightly? What is the aim
of moral conduct? Autonomous ethics, because it looks to sinful man rather than to the
covenantal Lord and His law, is bankrupt before the demands of these questions. Only
theonomy can render a genuine and effective moral system, for there is only one Law-giver:
the living and true God. Autonomy refuses to acknowledge this. The autonomous philosopher
is misled in his metaphysical and, hence, epistemological presuppositions. Presuming
autonomy he does not see the facts of God’s self-sufficient authority over man
and His self-attesting communication to man; it is only inevitable, then, that he
will be misled in his ethics. In fact, the very presumption of self-sufficiency is
evidence of immorality, sinful rebellion against the clearly revealed, living and true
God. When man turns away from covenantal theonomy to supposed autonomy, ethics become a
vain delusion. |
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Plato
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|
| Plato reacted to the moral relativism of the Sophists of
his day; although denying their maxim "man is the measure of all things," Plato
ended up reintroducing it in a different way. The Sophists were moral subjectivists who
viewed value [282] as relative to human tradition; of
course their relativism made moral prescriptions (universal statements of obligation)
impossible. Against this Plato developed a school of axiological realism (i.e., moral
absolutism or objectivism); he held that moral values were independent of human
relativities and acknowledgment. However, correlative to his axiological realism was the
autonomy of ethics from religion (cf. Euthyphro). Plato maintained that there is
right and wrong even if the gods do not exist, and he held that a person could get answers
to his ethical questions without religious revelation. Plato posed this question: Is a
certain behavior approved by the gods because it is good, or is it good because it is
approved by the gods? All non-Christian ethicists have assented to the former alternative
along with Plato. When it comes to deciding or knowing what is good, man is
(eventually) the judge, not God. Plato and all subsequent ethical philosophy are
indifferent to what God has to say about holiness; moral good will be discovered and
analyzed by looking within, by looking to man’s thought. |
|
| Of course Plato’s question was a false antithesis;
by setting it up in the way he did, Plato could make God look totally arbitrary or
capricious in determining what is good and evil. The truth of the matter is that good is
not independent of God. Certain behavior is good because God approves it, and God approves
it because it is the creaturely expression of His holiness-in other words, it is good. To
be good is to be like God, and we can only know what behavior is good if God reveals and
approves it to us. The important point is that good is what God approves and cannot
be ascertained independent of Him, but Plato and the history of ethics turned away from
this and down the alley of autonomy. |
|
| By a very unconvincing line of reasoning (cf. Republic)
Plato ends up asserting that man’s particular virtue is justice, that is, to live
the life of reason. (Does man qua man have one particular function? Must that
function be tied up with reason and the intellect? Could not someone hold that the [283] appetites should govern the reason just as capriciously
as Plato asserts the opposite? Given that man’s observed function is that of
living reasonably, ought it to be? etc.) Plato arbitrarily posits
"Good" above nonbeing and evil (and he would accuse the gods of this same
caprice!). Contrary to moral experience Plato’s ethical system requires him to
hold that no man knowingly does evil (universal psychological egoism). And at base
Plato’s ethic turns out to be ignoble and self-centered hedonism, for the
reason he offers that man ought to be "good" (have reason govern the appetites
and spirit in order to gain a harmonious soul) is that it leads to a life which is
happier, more satisfying, and richer. Plato’s ethic is adrift from credibility, the
facts of moral experience, genuine direction, and authority. Even if there are moral
absolutes on Plato’s basis, one has no assurance of knowing what they are: the
testimony of the philosophical "priests" is hopelessly conflicting. After all,
it is Plato’s word against that of Protagoras. |
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Aristotle
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|
| In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics man’s
highest good is considered to be "well-being" or happiness; yet there can only
be linguistic agreement on this point, for "happiness" is different from person
to person. Aristotle made the same mistakes with respect to man qua man’s
"rational function" as did Plato. He also shared Plato’s oblivion to the
"forbidden fruit syndrome" (i.e., men often do what is immoral simply because it
is enticingly against the law) and thereby held that no man knowingly does evil. Such
moves were necessitated by his rationalistic system and false anthropology. |
|
| Even if we grant Aristotle that it is meaningful and
true that "all men desire happiness as an end," he still commits a naturalistic
fallacy by directly going on to say that "all men, therefore, ought to desire
happiness as an end." (All descriptions do not in themselves yield prescriptions.) By
the doctrine of the golden mean Aristotle held that the right thing to [284] do was to choose a mediating course between excess and
deficiency; due to varying situations the golden mean will not be the same for all men or
for all time. However, a descriptive variety of situations does not imply that
moral (prescriptive) absolutes cannot apply irrespective of circumstance. |
|
| Finally, Aristotle’s attack on hedonism turns back
on his own system. He rightly observed that some things which bring pleasure (hedonism
holds that pleasure is the sole good) are still disgraceful and immoral; further, pleasure
is not the supreme or "intrinsic" good because pleasure combined with something
else (e.g., wisdom) is better than pleasure alone. These same comments could be made about
"happiness," but Aristotle inconsistently failed to make them. We can only agree
with Aristotle’s own evaluation of ethics as based on his system: it is an inexact
science-of little help or plausibility. |
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Utilitarianism
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|
| Utilitarianism, represented by a man like J. S. Mill, is
a form of hedonism; to be exact, it is universal ethical hedonism. The concern of morality
in utilitarianism is the man-centered goal of the production of the greatest happiness for
the greatest number; good is identified with that which maximizes happiness. Of course, to
make sense of this position "happiness" must be computable; yet no one has been
able to do this. Morality with its universal prescriptions is again lost in this system,
for nobody can condemn anyone else’s pleasures; to do so the critic would have to
appeal to a value [286] separate from pleasure, but in
utilitarianism this is illegitimate. Moreover, no behavior is intrinsically right or wrong
in utilitarianism; relativism and the loss of ethics results. |
|
| The attempt to bolster utilitarianism with rule
utilitarianism (i.e., the test of utility is applied to general rules instead of
specific acts) is futile since rule utilitarianism simply collapses into act
utilitarianism in the long run (by extensive specification of one’s rule). The
principle of utility can be cleverly manipulated to sanction almost any act, even those
which are universally abhorred; hence utilitarianism is inherently immoral. As with other
ethical systems, utilitarianism also commits the naturalistic fallacy; it moves from the
observation that all men seek happiness or pleasure to the dictate that men ought to do
so. This expression of autonomous ethics is obviously self-serving and duty-dissolving.
Although utilitarians have held that man ought to work toward the happiness of others, one
can critically inquire as to why he should be thus obligated (especially if he gets
more pleasure out of exploiting than the victim gets out of being helped).
Mill is especially vulnerable here since the obligation to maximize the happiness of
others is rooted by him in the assumption that it is pleasurable for the individual
to seek the happiness of the group or others. At base, then, utilitarianism is simply
egoistic hedonism. To calculate one’s conduct always for his own welfare is merely
prudent self-interest, an abandonment of morality and principle. Inclination, not
obligation, prevails. |
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Kant
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|
| Immanuel Kant represents the very opposite of
utilitarianism, for he viewed ethics as deontological rather than teleological;
intrinsic good, rather than instrumental good, was for Kant the only proper subject of
morality. Hence certain acts have intrinsic rightness which is not determined by their
consequences. Kant wanted to get completely away from an ethic of inclination; this he did
by drawing a radical bifurca [287] tion between facts
and values (between scientific assertions which convey information that is true or
false about the phenomenal world and moral judgments relating to the noumenal
dimension). Facts have no bearing on morality; only duty is to be heeded-duty determined
by man’s moral consciousness apart from God. God is a noumenal object for Kant; hence
God cannot enter the phenomenal world to deliver propositional, informative, true moral
commandments. Yet the only area in which man has any right to be absolutistic, according
to Kant, is in the area of practical morality, for god is found in our experience of
ethics. God is not revealed, but is the projection of the morally autonomous man; God is postulated
as the ultimate moral enforcer. It is not "true" that God will judge the
lawless in a final day of judgment, but nevertheless the moral obligations given in
conscience can be "considered as" commands from a God who will redress moral
imbalance beyond phenomenal history. We might say that for Kant, although it is not
"true" that God is genuine Law-Giver and Judge, it is helpful to think of
Him as such. The absoluteness of God is found within the moral experience of man; the
moral dictates of man’s self-sufficient ethical consciousness are dignified by
referring them to a (superfluous) "god." Having drawn a hard and fast
distinction between facts and values, Kant maintains that the only thing which is
"good" without qualification is a good will; acts are morally right when joined
with this good will, and agents are morally good only if they act from duty. It is
not enough that the moralist acts in accord with his duty; he must act solely because it
is his duty. Kant continues (with his faulty faculty psychology) to say that a good will
acts in accord with reason, for man’s sole obligation is to reason. Reason
shall excogitate objective maxims with which the moral agent is to align his subjective
maxims. The requirements of reason must be met in the objective maxim, and Kant revealed
(based on what authority?) that a maxim is in accord with reason if universalizable with
consistency and reversability: [288] that is, if
attuned with Kant’s categorical imperative. The categorical imperative is the
necessary and sufficient criterion of right behavior. If the moralist can take his
proposed behavior and imagine that everyone followed the same course of behavior, and if
that universalized activity were not inconsistent, and if the moralist could allow anyone
else to do as he plans to do irrespective of his position, then that behavior is right. It
should be done from duty, with a good will. Even overlooking the fact that this is simply
Kant’s word (and view of reason, etc.) against someone else’s, that moral
judgments have been deprived of the qualities of truth and falsity, that Kant’s view
is built up on an erroneous faculty psychology, that Kant cannot supply the power to
effect what reason prescribes as a moral obligation, that Kant’s view of
duty-motivation is somewhat artificial, still Kant’s ethic faces insurmountable
problems. |
|
| The rationalistic formalism of Kant sought to
objectivize morality; yet it turned out making all value relative to the rational will.
Kant’s view that man’s one and only value is loyalty to his obligation to be
rational is contrived and arbitrary (Why should man have only one value? Why should
that value be found in rationalism rather than its opposite?). How does Kant derive
obligation from rationalization? Most everyone can see that morality is far more than
logical consistency; on Kant’s basis a sternly self-sufficient person would never
need to help others as long as he could consistently cling to his cherished
self-sufficiency in time of need. In the categorical imperative there is a measure of
ambiguity as to what will count as a contradiction when a maxim is universalized; hence
ethics is deprived of clear direction. Kant made the categorical imperative the sufficient
test for rightness; yet acts which everyone considers to be amoral can pass the test and
come out being obligatory (e.g., wearing blue socks can be consistently universalized
irrespective of a person’s position in life, hence it becomes man’s duty to wear
blue socks!). Maxims which are generally agreed to as morally binding are [289] abrogated by Kant’s principle; for instance, "honesty
is the best policy" does not universalize with reversibility, that is, it does not
necessarily apply irrespective to circumstance. "Honesty is the best policy" is
a conditional, not a categorical, imperative; under the condition that a business is
running short of capital and man-power, cheating could be viewed as the best policy,
especially if feeding the family is held in more esteem than a good reputation. On the
other hand, if someone did not need profits at all, honesty might be indifferent to him
altogether. The duty to honesty is categorical only if Kant can specify some universal,
value-oriented end for man; rational consistency fails to guarantee categorical
obligations. A clever person could use Kant’s categorical imperative principle to
legitimize his immorality (e.g., everyone who has a certain set of fingerprints can steal;
since the "moralist" is the only one who has those fingerprints, he can continue
with his nefarious deeds). Qualifications can be built right into the rule which the
categorical imperative legitimizes; self-interest and inclination can be reintroduced
therefore. The categorical imperative permits of contrary maxims being
universalized, which is ironical since Kant exulted in rational consistency as a supreme
value! |
|
| Kant never explained why it was better to be moral than
economic; and although he would have repudiated it, it is hard to see how relativism could
be prevented from entering Kant’s ethic given the incommensurability of different
scales of values. Kant’s notion of a good will acting from duty was muddled; he held
that the virtue of certain acts lies in acting in such a way because it is dutiful. Hence,
being-honest is not virtuous in itself or on some other grounds; what is virtuous is
being-honest-because-honesty-is-virtuous. When this concept is analyzed it is seen to be
virtuous because of the duty attaching to it also; hence, what is virtuous is
being-honest-because-honesty-is-virtuous because-being-thus-honest-is-virtuous. The
infinite regress entailed is obvious -- and deadly. In later development of his ethic Kant
came to emphasize the [290] value of free and
autonomous personality. But what justifies personality as a value? A scientist might just
as arbitrarily posit impersonalism as valuable. In appealing to the "noumenal
self" (or transcendent personality) of man Kant inevitably ran into insuperable
difficulties with explicating this notion. Furthermore, the determinism inherent in
Kant’s discussion of the phenomenal realm contradicts his view of human freedom in
the ethical sphere; in his useless attempt to reconcile the contradiction he ended up
bifurcating man and using an ambiguous notion of "freedom." In working from a
false metaphysics (view of God and man) and a false epistemology Kant could not avoid
destroying the credibility of ethics. |
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Subjectivistic Schools
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|
| Others who hold that "good" is used in an
informative way in ethical judgments are subjectivists. The private subjectivist maintains
that the predication of "good" to anything [293]
simply asserts the speaker’s personal approbation for it (e.g., Hume) or that it
contributes to fullest satisfaction (e.g., Santayana). If this is the case, however, then
moral judgments are never false unless the speaker is mistaken about his own psychology;
at least all moral utterances are incorrigible. This is certainly a strange state of
affairs; moral discourse is informative according to the private subjectivist and thereby
capable of being true or false-yet it is never false! Also, two people could never mean
the same thing even though there might be a linguistic agreement on a moral appraisal, for
in "agreeing" that X is "good" the two speakers are not attributing to
it the same property. All predications of "good" are statements about the speaker,
not about the object under consideration. Furthermore, the private subjectivist could
not reasonably answer to a question asking why he approves of X as "good," for
he would either make an illegitimate reference to the goodness or value of the object
independent of his feelings toward it or he would end up reasoning in a vicious circle. It
is also meaningful for us to ask whether what the private subjectivist approves is
actually good or not; yet on his basis such a question would be ridiculous. Although
the private subjectivist holds that ethical discourse is informative and definable, oddly
enough ethics is still not open to discussion. "Good" is simply relative to each
moralist; therefore, ethics is destroyed because the notion of obligation cannot be
derived from this conception of "good." |
|
| A modification of the above proposal is found in the
interest theory" of R. B. Perry, who defines "good" as an object of
interest to someone. In this way Perry seems to deny that there is anything which is
intrinsically good; for anything to be good it must sustain a certain relationship with a
mind outside of it. Yet it certainly seems that when most people attribute goodness to
something they are viewing that object as being in some way valuable for itself; at least
what they appear to intend is something stronger than simply "someone has an interest
in X." To hold that X is [294] "good" in
customary discourse usually implies that others should value it. It is normally not
muddled to appraise some-one’s interest as bad or evil; however, Perry’s
construction would make it so. How does Perry’s relational view of "good"
account for this stronger use of the term at all? Unless an intrinsic notion of goodness
came into being as an apprehension of some objective reality, it would seem to be
senseless; yet most people do not consider that it is absurd to view certain items or
behavior as good irrespective of what people may think about them. Perry’s
view must stretch the general limits of plausibility in order to account for the
"forbidden fruit syndrome" (i.e., seeking the immoral for immorality’s
sake). To explain this facet of moral experience by reference to ignorance or a confusion
of priorities is simply not accurate or true to human nature at all. Perry’s view
falls into the same pitfalls as subjectivism: there is no moral authority, universal
obligation, or concrete direction offered by a theory which is at root nothing more than
moral relativism. |
|
| Another form of subjectivism is societal subjectivism;
it holds that "good" applies to those things of which the group approves (e.g.,
Durkheim) or which is the law of the land or which has the sanction of tradition. Yet to
say that something is "good" because it evokes the approval of most people has
blatant difficulties. Obviously the majority is not always right; moving from 49% to 51%
in the opinion polls does not make a certain behavior right. Again, it is not meaningless
to ask whether what the group decided upon was in fact "good"; yet on this view
the majority or common law or tradition would be right by definition! Furthermore, if this
social approval view were correct, then all obligations could be removed by secrecy-which
from an ethical viewpoint seems nonsense. All forms of subjectivism inherently destroy
what ethics strives to attain: objective standards which can properly correct and direct
man’s behavior. If moral principle has no restraining or corrective element, why
should one bother to enunciate it? [295] |
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Existentialism
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|
| Existentialism is preoccupied with ethical situations
where genuine decisions must be made by the "free" man. Being disenchanted by
the total lack of help the noncognitivist schools offer one in making difficult moral
decisions, and being entirely skeptical of all the solutions offered by the informativist
schools of ethics, the existentialist centers on the moral psychology which comes to play
in profoundly complex and extraordinary circumstances requiring definite ethical decision.
The virtues of authenticity and radical freedom are extolled; this fact, coupled with the
existentialist emphasis that all human situations are morally unprecedented (a man cannot
look to previous answers) and that each man chooses for all men in his moral
decisions, puts an intolerable [300] strain upon the
moralist. He is to consider himself completely alone and without any moral guidance
whatsoever; the dreadful responsibility he has leaves him in the anguish of moral
paralysis. Out of such a situation authentic decisions can be made by the radically free
man. This is the one virtue: that the moralist acts. The direction he takes in his
behavior is irrelevant; what counts is that he alone made the bold decision and
dramatically acted. He can help the man who is being mugged, or lie can help mug him;
either act, if an authentic choice, would be moral. Ethical decisions must be spun right
out of thin air, for the man who makes the "authentic" decision must be free
from his passions (for he chooses whether to resist or give in to them), from
motives (since there is no psychological centrum or ego to which motives could
adhere, and since the agent himself must first decide what kinds of reasons he will
allow to have weight before he begins to rationally deliberate), from
reality-in-itself (since man, who is being-for-itself, lies outside the causal series
altogether), and from any human essence (since existence precedes and formulates essence).
Existentialism, then, does not even have the advantage of being an unethical ethics of inclination
(like emotivism, etc.); it is simply an ethics of pure volition (or alleges that
it is anyway). Man is free from any antecedently fixed values according to the
existentialist; value is defined as it is chosen. Jean-Paul Sartre says that
the very starting point of existentialism is Dostoyevsky’s words, "If God did
not exist, everything would be possible"; based on the absence of God, says Sartre,
man has nothing to cling to and all values disappear. Every choice is consequently as
justifiable as it is absurd; there are not good and bad choices, but just choices. Sartre
has the protagonist, Orestes, say in The Flies, "I am doomed to have no other
law but mine. Sartre says of Mathieau, the protagonist of The Age of Reason, "There
would be for him no good nor evil unless he brought them into being." Obviously
existentialism is the complete annihilation of ethics, for within that school of [301] thought it is impossible to make a wrong free
choice. Responsibility and ethic are appropriate only to a world in which there are
objective moral principles which can be accepted or rejected, followed or violated. There
is nothing ethical at stake in a "moral decision" for the existentialist; hence,
negative ethical judgments are impossible and positive ones are superfluous. |
|
Evaluation and Comparison
|
|
| Such then is the graveyard of autonomous ethics; each
gravestone reads the Satanic temptation, "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and
evil." When man turns away from covenantal theonomy to autonomy, when he despises
God’s law in favor of humanistic self-law, the inevitable result is spiritual death
for man and the loss of any hope for ethics. The autonomous philosophies of man have
failed to answer the crucial questions of both normative ethics and metaethics; they have
thus failed because each has assumed a nonbiblical anthropology wherein man is not the
creature of an authoritative and sovereign Lord-Creator who has placed His indelible image
in man and has perspicuously revealed Himself to each man in every fact of man’s
environment. Rather man is taken to be, as Sartre unpretentiously puts it in Being and
Nothingness, "the being who tries to become God." Rather than submitting
himself to God and God’s self-attesting word, man has attempted to deify himself; the
consequence of this in the area of ethics is that God’s law is rejected or ignored in
favor of a moral law which man himself will devise or validate. Man is culpable for
trying to develop his own ethic, for God’s image and revelation are inescapable; man knows
himself to be a creature accountable to God and responsible to God’s demands.
Theonomy condemns autonomy. The very fact that God has uttered the law makes man
obligated to it since he is the creature of God. God’s law is ethically
self-attesting; as such it cannot be questioned, appealed, ignored, or replaced. [302] |
|
| Autonomous ethics has failed to supply an adequate
meaning for "good." It has failed to supply any genuine authority for
ethics. All of the autonomous schools of ethics finally fall short of providing actual
moral direction and correction; they do not supply the guidance which man longs for
in studying morality. An effective motivation is not suggested in the ethics of
autonomy; nor is ethical power provided. A final goal or aim of ethics is
either unknown or open to question in autonomous ethics. In one or all of these vital
elements of a genuine ethic the philosophies of autonomy let man down. |
|
| By contrast, the ethics of theonomy is a genuine ethic.
"Good" is identified with God; anything which is good is God-like. God reveals
to man what is God-like behavior; He tells the creature how to practice holiness.
The law of God is good, for its Author is good; the law is the transcript of God’s
holiness. This law is very explicit with respect to moral directives and correctives; man
is given concrete ethical guidance by the law of God. This law is also authoritative, for
the Lord-Creator stands behind it and will judge on the basis of it. All men have a clear
revelation of God and know that they are obligated to keep His word; there is no
epistemological skepticism with respect to morality. Ethics has a definite relation to facts;
the same God who created and defined the material world is the Law-giver who demands
the obedience of man. Because the world is as it is, because God is Who He is (Creator and
Lord), man must behave as prescribed in God’s law. Obligation can be derived from the
facts of God’s character and existence. Because the biblical God is the living and
true God who shall hold man accountable, man is accountable to God and obligated to
keep God’s law. Man should be motivated to keep this law by faith in God and
reverence for His Person; in the light of God’s grace and/or coming judgment, a
person is impelled to obey the commandments of God. The enabling power of obedience to
God’s law for the believer and the effective agent which restrains the [303] unbeliever from being as unlawful as he could be is the Holy
Spirit; God supplies His Spirit, who exercises the power of common grace and sanctifying
grace. The power of obedience is most intensely and genuinely known by the Christian who,
under the New Covenant, has the law written upon his heart by God; the Spirit causes him
to grow up into the obedient stature of Christ, thereby fulfilling the law in the
believer. The goal of theonomic ethics is the glory of God and service of His kingdom; by
obeying God’s law the Christian honors and magnifies God’s name, bows to His
authority, extols His wisdom. Through obedience to God’s law the believer is an
effective servant of the kingdom by promoting and seeking its righteousness, by enforcing
its demands in the world, by spreading its bounds; the demands of God’s kingdom are
applied to self, family, society, and church. This then is the only true ethic for man; to
follow another is to deny God His due. Commitment to an autonomous ethic (any moral system
which does not fully acknowledge and promote the law of God) is a choice of death and
curse in the face of blessing and life. |
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| All non-Christian ethics ultimately seek information and
a standard for ethics in man’s moral consciousness; it attempts to divorce the
metaphysical question from the ethical. The nature and authority of morality must exist
independently of God for the unbeliever; the "good" must be impersonal. Man
is forced to find direction for himself; and the inevitable outcome is subjectivism or
relativism. There is no hope in non-Christian ethics; there is no promise of
enabling power, of sure direction, of the victory of the right. Having no grounds for
ethical responsibility and no justification for the consistency and validity of moral
demands, the non-Christian ethic becomes ego-centric rather than ego-regulating. Man is
not dealt with as a unity by the autonomous ethicists; he is dichotomized into
phenomenal/noumenal categories, and there is a one-sided stress on his intellect, or
emotions, or volitions. [304] |
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| How totally different is the biblical ethic of theonomy!
Christian ethics is bound to an absolute, objective authority in God; good does not exist
independently of Him and cannot be discussed without bringing Him into the picture. The
moral principles followed by the Christian are personal imperatives, not abstract
ideals; they can only be learned by revelation, never by man’s own searching. The
Christian does not assume that the present state of the world is normal or that his moral
consciousness is normal; this is the fatal presupposition of autonomy. The believer knows
that he needs to be corrected and directed, for he cannot trust his own reasoning or
inclinations; even God’s general revelation must be seen through the corrective
lenses of Scripture. Evil is not inherent in the world; so the Christian has the bright
hope of its defeat and judgment. The power of the Spirit and pattern of the law are
sufficient to destroy the bondage and effects of Satan in a person’s life and world
conditions. Although perfection is not possible until final glorification, and although a
thoroughly righteous society will not exist until the establishment of the eschatological
new heavens and earth, nevertheless God is at work in the Christian and in His Church even
now; sanctification is taking place, and the forces of evil can be reproved and nullified
by the positive forces of God’s Spirit in accordance with His holy law. The Christian
is never left in situations of moral perplexity; everything he needs to be perfectly
equipped for all good works has been supplied to him (2 Tim. 3:16 f.) and there is no
situation in which he is left in utter moral insolubility (1 Cor. 10:13). Obligation to
God’s law is grounded in His authority as Creator; His final judgment will punish all
disobedience and redress all moral imbalance. God, through His law, deals with man as a
unified personality; He makes an absolute demand upon man’s thinking, feeling, and
willing, for His law touches upon every area of life. The ethics of theonomy is
God-centered, then, rather than man-centered; it will regulate and correct man in order [305] to bring glory to God. Only the ethics of theonomy can
supply man with his needed moral system. |
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| The main problem with autonomous ethics is that it
ignores God’s authority and revealed will; this in itself is immoral and rebellious.
It should be rather clear, therefore, that genuine Christian ethics must not align itself
with the autonomous methodology and systems of unbelieving philosophy. The Christian
should never attempt to find out the principles of morality outside of God’s
revelation and direction; the neutrality proposed by Plato in the Euthyphro is sin.
The Christian is not relieved of his obligations as a son of God when he studies
ethics; God’s clear revelation is the light in which all moral questions (as with all
questions) must be answered. Theonomy must be central in Christian ethics. We
do not decide to follow God’s law after it has been validated by the categorical
imperative or paralleled by any other secular philosophical ethic; we do not demand
autonomous justification for God’s commandments. We obey because we love, revere, and
trust our Creator, never questioning His wisdom. No apostate standard shall be allowed to
evaluate and pass judgment upon God’s law. Theonomy, and theonomy alone, must be the
standard of Christian ethics. The sole Law-giver and Judge is God. Hence God’s law
must be the criterion by which we evaluate the secular systems of ethics. The
"goodness" of God and absolute authority of His word are a priori
presuppositions for the Christian. The clay cannot talk back to the potter (Isa. 45:9),
and the vassals have no right to question the Lord (cf. Matt. 20:1 ff.). We will be
blessed only if we faithfully obey the directives of our God without questioning
His word, just as Abraham did (Gen. 22:1 ff.; Heb. 11:17 ff.). When Job demands an
interview with God, it is God who does the questioning, thereby asserting His
sovereign Lordship and affirming that man cannot call Him into question (1ob 38-42).
"Let God be true and every man a liar" (Rom. 3:4), for "His work is
perfect, for all His ways are just; a God of faithfulness and without injustice, righ [306] teous and upright is He" (Deut. 32:4, NASV). The
only foundation for a Christian ethic, and hence the only foundation for any genuine and
true morality, is the holy law of God. |
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| Theonomy is pitted against autonomy; no man can take
stand in between, for no man can serve two masters (Matt. 6:24). The authority and
righteousness of God must be asserted against any and all serpents who question His
goodness and veracity. Even if God should ask that we sacrifice the only son of promise,
we must never demur or question; His revealed will alone defines the righteousness which
is becoming of the believer (cf. Gen. 22; Heb. 11:17-19). We do not attempt to be as God,
determining good and evil; rather, we gladly take our place beneath the sovereign Lordship
of the Triune God. His word, not our autonomous reasoning, is our law. Theonomy is the exclusive
normative principle, the only standard, of Christian ethics. It is all or nothing,
ethic or nonethic, obedience or sin |
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