Section 9
Go to Chapter 7 – The Indispensibility of Reason and Logic in Biblical Interpretation
Philosopher-theologians David Baggett and Jerry Walls wrote a book titled Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality. Their primary focus in the book is the moral argument for God’s existence. It is not necessarily an extensive critique of Calvinist soteriology. Nevertheless, Baggett and Walls show how the Calvinist view undermines the Christian apologist’s moral argument for the existence of God.
In Chapter 4, “The Reformed Tradition Not Quite Right,” they expose several problems with Calvinism in the context of the voluntarist horn of the Euthyphro Dilemma. That option or horn of the dilemma asks whether whatever God commands and wills is good simply by virtue of his willing and commanding it. This is the aspect of the dilemma that applies to Calvinism. Calvinists, for instance, talk about salvation as God willing someone to be saved and willing someone to be reprobate. God just wills people’s eternal destinies. So, on Calvinism, something is good simply by virtue of God having willed it to be. Hence, it is right and good that a multitude of persons be predestined to eternal punishment in hell simply because God wills it. And therefore we are to believe it. But this raises perplexing moral questions and issues. The Calvinist view sounds so strange in relation to what else we know of God – that he is loving, gracious, just, and equitable (he does not show favoritism) in his nature. It also appears to be in conflict with what we know of the definition and content of the “good news” and the way God has established salvation by faith, as we read of the nature of salvation and faith in the Bible. It also sounds so foreign to what we know to be loving, gracious, and just. Calvinist predestination appears contrary to our own human sense of morality and justice. Hence, if that is what the Calvinist is saying God is like, and that is vastly different than what we perceive to be morally loving, just, and good, along with other things we know about God’s character from Scripture, then do we and can we really know the true character and nature of God? Shouldn’t God’s nature be recognizable to us in what seem to be his most fundamental characteristics? For if they are not recognizable to us such that there is consistency between our logical and moral sense and God’s will, then can we really know what God is like? Does whatever a certain theological tradition says is God’s become the right and the good regardless of the logical, moral, theological, and experiential incoherencies and contradictions that it generates for us?
C. S. Lewis summarizes the issue well when he writes,
“…if God’s moral judgment differs from ours so that our “black” may be His “white,” we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say “God is good,” while asserting that His goodness is wholly other than ours, is really only to say “God is we know not what.” And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying him. If He is not (in our sense) “good” we shall obey, if at all, only through fear – and should be equally ready to obey an omnipotent Fiend. The doctrine of Total Depravity – when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing – may thus turn Christianity into a form of devil worship.
Beyond all doubt, His idea of “goodness” differs from ours; but you need have no fear that, as you approach it, you will be asked simply to reverse your moral standards…This doctrine is presupposed in Scripture. Christ calls men to repent – a call which would be meaningless if God’s standard were sheerly different from that which they already knew and failed to practice. He appeals to our existing moral judgment – ‘Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?’ (Luke 12:57)”[46]
“God’s good can’t be our evil…We may not always see what God’s goodness entails, but we can be confident of some things it precludes.”
David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 80.
What I am arguing is that there is a consistency between God’s nature and our perceptions of what is morally good and just. Our human reason and our moral intuitions are the primary and necessary faculties granted to us by God himself to make sense of our relationship to God, others, and the world he has made. There is, therefore, a reliable correspondence between God’s nature as morally just and good and our conceptions of what is morally just and good. As such, since the Calvinist doctrines of an eternal divine decree and unconditional election are to us unjust in willing one person to salvation as opposed to another for no apparent reason, and morally repugnant with their inevitable corollary of willing the reprobation of multitudes who have no way of avoiding their eternal damnation, we must conclude that God cannot be like the Calvinist says he is. These doctrines do not accurately represent the character of God. Therefore, they should not be received as biblical or believed as Christian theology. Furthermore, because we need God to reveal himself to us for us to know him correctly, this should not mean that the proper understanding of that revelation need not be logically, rationally, and morally consistent. And this must be the case, as we understand and practice interpretation; otherwise, God is made to be arbitrary, and we cannot be sure that we know anything true about God. We do not claim that we can fully apprehend God through reason. We are not demanding reason provide what it cannot attain. What we do demand is that what has been revealed cannot be interpreted inconsistently or contradictorily. What we maintain is that what God’s revelation means to say is not against reason, but that reason be employed where it is perfectly suited to function and has been designed and granted to us by God to perform for us. It has been granted to us by God himself to determine the meaning of that written revelation once it is given and received. We come to understand the meaning of divine revelation through our reasoning ability and moral faculties. Once revelation is given, reason or philosophy and our moral intuitions are to be the arbiters among various interpretive and theological claims that we detect are inconsistent or incoherent. Once revelation is given, logical and moral reasoning are absolutely necessary and suited to the task of discerning the truth between competing claims about what that revelation means. We need to acknowledge that reason, formally exercised in the discipline of philosophy, as well as our moral sense, are God-given and therefore are indispensable means by which we evaluate any truth claims, including biblical/theological truth claims. This is what Calvinists refuse to acknowledge, and this is why Calvinism is not a credible biblical theology or soteriology.
Read the next section – Craig and Moreland on the Indispensable Role of Philosophy
Footnotes
[46] C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 37-38.
The Truth of the Gospel 