So this week we’re going to dive into a little bit of philosophy. In our churches and at our dinner plates we say, “God is good.” But what makes God good? Is God good because God’s self defines what is good? Or is good something that exists independently of God, and God’s character only chooses to do what is good?
Now before you glaze over and say “who cares” I believe that how you answer this question greatly informs how you view what is good and righteous in the world. This conundrum was first crafted by Plato in the Euthyphro Dilemma. Euthyphro and Socrates enter a circular argument over whether things are pious because the gods love them, or whether the gods love them because they were already pious. In the 1600s, German philosopher Gottfried Liebnez posed the question for philosophical monotheism:
“It is generally agreed that whatever God wills is good and just. But there remains the question whether it is good and just because God wills it or whether God wills it because it is good and just; in other words, whether justice and Goodness are arbitrary or whether they belong to the necessary and eternal truths about the nature of things.” – Leibniz, Reflections on the Common Concept of Justice.
God wills it because it is good.
If you’re in this camp, then you believe that at the very least, some morality exists independently of God’s will. You believe that natural law is as unchanging as mathematics. For instance, it is always immoral to torture and kill one’s children. God would never require anyone to go against natural law because God loves what is good. You would argue that if something is only good because God commands it, then goodness is arbitrary, based solely on the whims of the most powerful being, thus might is right.
It is good because God wills it.
If you’re in this camp, you believe what’s called divine command theory, or voluntarism. You believe that nothing is good or righteous unless God commands it, there are no moral standards or natural law apart from God’s will. Martin Luther and John Calvin held God’s sovereignty as the chief attribute of God, therefore there could be no right or wrong independent of God’s will. William of Ockham went so far as to say that God could will for a creature to hate God and it would become the right thing to do.
There’s no either or.
The third option just rejects the dilemma to begin with because well, who needs Plato. I think John Wesley falls in this camp, though I’m happy to be corrected by scholars greater than I. Wesley stood firmly against the Calvinist perspective on this issue, but insisted that God’s sovereignty could only be defined by God’s character. God’s character is that of a loving parent. God as Trinity is the definition of love, and therefore God will only choose to do that which is loving, thus defining love. God cannot will for us to do unloving things because that is contradictory to the character of God. This line of thinking was also played out by St. Thomas Aquinas.
Does your brain hurt yet?
Aren’t you glad you didn’t major in philosophy? This stuff is crushing my brain, but I do believe it’s important to think through what we mean when we say “God is good.” There are plenty of Christians who do hateful things in the name of God. The Westboro Baptist (“God hates f-gs”) church firmly believes that when they preach hate, it is the most loving thing they could do. Parents who kick out their LGBTQ kids or Christians who discriminate against gay people believe they are doing what is the most loving thing because deep down they believe they are following some good rule of God’s. But what fruit is born by this type of “love”? Almost never conversion, almost never wholeness and abundant living. If it doesn’t look like love, just maybe, it’s abuse. If it doesn’t look like good, just maybe, it’s actually evil. For John Wesley, interpreting scripture always meant starting with the belief that God was our Loving Parent, and that guided how we interpret passages that don’t seem good or loving.