There are a few people in life who I wish that I could of or still might study under before they die. To name a few is Jesus Christ, Plato, John Calvin, Van Till, Greg Bahnsen, John Frame and James White.
In this post I will let one of the masters speak for himself, This is a chapter from his book which is yet to be published! Its called "The Doctrine of the Christian Life"
In this chapter Frame looks at the subject of "Ethics and other Religions"
Chapter 5: Ethics and the Religions
In the first four chapters, I have introduced the subject of ethics, relating it to the lordship of God. I suggested that we can fruitfully investigate ethics under three perspectives related to God’s lordship attributes: the situational, the normative, and the existential. I also used the lordship attributes to distinguish in general between biblical and nonbiblical approaches to ethics.
Ethics and Religion
So first on our agenda is to discuss non-Christian approaches to ethics. Among these non-Christian approaches are some that are connected with the great religions of the world, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism. Others purport to be secular, non-religious, such as the predominant schools of western ethical philosophy: Aristotelianism, utilitarianism, deontologism, and so on.
Secular philosophies, of course, do not demand church attendance or participation in religious ceremonies. But in other respects, they are religious. Roy Clouser, in his The Myth of Religious Neutrality, discusses the difficulty of defining religion. What, he asks, do the great religions of the world have in common? That question is more difficult that it might seem, Clouser argues. We might think that all religions include ethical codes, but Shinto does not. We might think that all religions acknowledge a personal supreme being; but Buddhism and Hinduism do not. Or we might propose that all religions demand worship. But Epicureanism and some forms of Buddhism and Hinduism do not. Clouser concludes, however, that it is nevertheless possible to define religious belief, and he suggests the following:
A religious belief is any belief in something or other as divine.
‘Divine’ means having the status of not depending on anything else.
Clouser’s definition of divine does not suffice to define fully the biblical God, or, for that matter, the gods of other religions. But it does define an attribute of the biblical God, an attribute also ascribed to absolutes of other religious traditions. All systems of thought include belief in something that is self-sufficient, not dependent on anything else. In Christianity, the self-sufficient being is the biblical God. In Islam, it is Allah; in Hinduism, Brahman. Clouser points out that in Greek polytheism the gods are not divine according to his definition, because they depend on realities other than themselves. The flux from which all things come, called Chaos or Okeanos, is the true deity of the ancient Greek religion. Even purportedly atheistic religions like Therevada Buddhism have deities in Clouser’s sense. Therevada holds that the Void, the ultimate Nothingness, sometimes called Nirvana, is not dependent on anything else.
But such a definition of religion makes it impossible for us to distinguish sharply between religion and philosophy, or indeed between religion and any other area of human thought and life. Philosophies also, however secular they may claim to be, always acknowledge something that is divine in the sense of "not depending on anything else." Examples would be Thales’ water, Plato’s Form of the Good, Aristotle’s Prime Mover, Spinoza’s "God or Nature," Kant’s Noumenal, Hegel’s Absolute, the Mystical of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. In the epistemological sphere, also, philosophers typically acknowledge human reason as self-sufficient in the sense that it requires no justification from anything more ultimate than itself. When they appear to deny autonomous reason (as with the Sophists, Duns Scotus, Hume, existentialism, and postmodernism), they typically exalt autonomous will or feeling, as we shall see in the next chapters, so that will or feeling become divine.
The biblical point to be made here is that nobody is really an atheist, in the most serious sense of that term. When people turn away from worship of the true God, they don’t reject absolutes in general. Rather, instead of the true God, they worship idols, as Paul teaches in Rom. 1:18-32. The great division in mankind is not that some worship a god and others do not. Rather it is between those who worship the true God and those who worship false gods, idols. False worship may not involve rites or ceremonies, but it always involves acknowledgement of aseity, honoring some being as not dependent on anything else.
Now in this chapter I will discuss the ethics of what we usually call the world’s religions, and then in the following chapters I will focus on what are usually called the traditions of secular ethics. As we’ve seen there can be no sharp distinctions between these. The systems discussed in this chapter might be called "more explicitly religious" and those in the next chapters "less explicitly religious," but the difference is in the trappings, not the essence. It is a difference of degree, not a radical difference. The more explicitly religious systems typically advocate worship, observe religious holidays, promote prayer and ceremony. The less explicitly religious systems do not. But the two are agreed in basing their thinking and living on something that is not dependent on anything else.
Ethics Based on Fate
It should not surprise readers too much that I divide the ethical approaches of the world’s religions into three types: ethics based on fate (situational), ethics as self-realization (existential), and ethics as law without gospel (normative). These are perspectives, for each of the world’s religions can be characterized in all three of these ways. But some religions emphasize one, some the other. The first type is impressed most by what we called in Chapter 4 the teleological principle. The second type stresses the existential principle, and the third the normative principle. In this section we will look at the first emphasis.
In polytheism, as Clouser points out, the gods themselves are not ultimate. They are not a se; they do not exist independently. Nor do they serve as ultimate ethical authorities. Indeed, they are frequently guilty of ethical transgressions. They are jealous, angry, mischievous, rebellious, adulterous, and so on. What is actually divine in Clouser’s sense is something impersonal. As we saw earlier, Clouser says that the true self-existent being in Greek religion is that primal flux called Chaos or Okeanos. Greek literature also speaks of "fate" (moira, ate) as the ultimate determiner of life and death.
Is fate another name for Chaos, or is it something even more ultimate? Hard to say. The literature uses the language of fate to indicate what directs nature and history, the language of chaos to indicate the unpredictable movement that is nature itself. But if there is no personal supreme being, what does it mean to say that fate "directs" history? Rather, it seems that fate is a synonym for "whatever happens," as in "whatever will be, will be." And Chaos, or Chance, is another name for whatever happens. Fate is whatever happens, conceived as a rational process; change is whatever happens, conceived as an irrational process. Fate and chance are the same, but they represent a rationalistic and an irrationalistic vocabulary, respectively.
Reference to impersonal fate as an ultimate can be found also in Egyptian (maat), Babylonian (me) and Confucian (tien=heaven) texts. In Confucian (and some expressions of Greek) religion, fate is powerful in its own right, working vengeance against those who defy it. In Egypt, Babylon, and some other Greek sources, there is more of an emphasis on the enforcement of this impersonal law by gods and human rulers. That notion encourages hierarchicalism in society: the Egyptian Pharaoh, for example, is the link between heaven and earth, the absolute arbiter of right and wrong. Some Chinese texts regard the emperor similarly.
So these systems tend to require an epistemology strongly based in human authority. How do we know what is right and wrong? By the word of Pharaoh, the emperor, or perhaps the priests, scribes, or Confucian scholars. How do they know it? Either by revelation from a god or by their own observation of the processes of nature. If revelation comes from a god, it is based on the god’s observations of these processes. For fate itself does not speak, since it is impersonal. It does not reveal anything. It just makes things happen, or, perhaps, again, fate itself is simply the sum-total of what does happen.
So the epistemology of ethics in fatalistic systems is essentially empirical, based on experience of what happens in the world. When people do right, fate rewards them; when they do wrong, it punishes them. But then we must define right behavior as what gets rewarded by fate, and wrong behavior as what gets punished. This is the way that the teleological principle is taken by those who hold a fatalistic view of ethics. Right behavior brings happiness, and wrong behavior brings pain, because fate ensures it. Therefore, we should do right and avoid doing wrong. There are several serious problems with this view:
1. One problem with this epistemology, of course, is that fate, so far as anyone can observe it, is inconsistent. Sometimes people who seem to live moral lives are rewarded, sometimes not. Sometimes the wicked are punished, sometimes rewarded. These religions do sometimes posit afterlives in which such injustices are eliminated. But the afterlife is not an element of empirical knowledge for human beings. The gods, of course, may have some empirical knowledge of what happens to human beings in the afterlife. But until the gods themselves receive proper recompense for their own good and bad deeds, injustice continues. And as long as there is injustice, there is empirical uncertainty as to what fate decrees to be good and bad. So it is unclear how a god, or Pharaoh, or a priest, actually knows what fate has determined to be right or wrong.
2. But the problem is even worse than that. I would argue that it is not only hard for people to learn right and wrong on this basis; it is impossible. For many have observed that ethical principles must be universal, necessary, and obligatory. Universal means that the principle must apply to everyone without respect of persons. If it is wrong for me to covet, it is also wrong for you (in the same situation) to covet. But empirical knowledge is never universal. Our experience is never omniscient; it never exhausts the universe.
Necessary means that the principle must be obeyed. It is not optional. And it does not just happen to be mandatory. But empirical knowledge cannot discern necessity. As David Hume said, from sense experience you can discern that one billiard ball moves when another one does. But sense experience does not tell you that the second ball had to move.
Obligatory means that those who violate the ethical principle are ethically wrong, morally guilty. But this quality, no more than the others can be discerned through mere sense experience.
3. But the problem is not just a weakness in our sense experience, as if our moral perception could be improved by better vision or hearing, perhaps by super vision and super hearing, the vision and hearing of a god, perhaps. For the attempt to derive moral principles from impersonal realities is even a violation of logic. Impersonalist views of ethics fall prey what G. E. Moore called "the naturalistic fallacy." Moore’s discussion builds on an argument in David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature to the effect that one cannot deduce ought from is. That is to say, from premises about what is, about factual observations, you cannot deduce conclusions about what you ought to do. For example, you cannot reason from "Ice cream tastes good" to "you ought to eat ice cream," or even from "immunizations prevent disease" to "you ought to be immunized." According to Hume and Moore, facts of nature do not carry with them moral obligations.
Facts can be learned through observation and scientific method. But moral obligations cannot be seen and heard. They cannot be observed. No scientific experiment can identify them. "Oughtness," right, and wrong are mysterious, invisible. You can see a thief walk into a bank, put on a ski mask, take out his gun, demand money, put it in his bag, and walk out. When you see that, you say, "that was wrong." But you don’t actually see the wrongness of it. So, although you may believe strongly that what the thief did was wrong, you cannot deduce the wrongness of his action from a mere description of the visible events.
Some have directed this argument also against Christian ethics. Some have claimed that to reason from "God says x is wrong" to "x is wrong" is an example of the naturalistic fallacy, for God’s speaking is a fact, "x is wrong" a moral obligation, and we may never deduce obligations from mere facts.
That objection calls for more analysis. Why is the naturalistic fallacy a fallacy? Why is it that is does not imply ought? Evidently because there is no ought in the premise, but there is an ought in the conclusion, as in:
Argument 1
Premise: x is pleasurable.
Conclusion: We ought to do x.
But the following is not a fallacy:
Argument 2
Premise: x is morally right.
Conclusion: we ought to do x.
The reason argument 2 is not a fallacy is that in effect there are oughts both in the premise and in the conclusion. The term "morally right" is equivalent to the phrase "what we ought to do." Now argument 2, like argument 1, can be described as "deducing a value from a fact," but in the two types of argument the factual premises are very different. In argument 2, the fact in the premise is, we might say, a moral fact. So we should formulate the naturalistic fallacy more precisely as follows: one may deduce moral conclusions from moral facts, but not from nonmoral facts.
Now consider this argument:
Argument 3
Premise: God says stealing is wrong.
Conclusion: Stealing is wrong.
The Christian claims that this argument is not a naturalistic fallacy, because the premise is a moral fact, not a nonmoral fact. There is an ought implicit in the premise. For what God says is never a mere fact; it is also a norm. God’s word bears his lordship attributes of control, authority, and presence, and his authority makes whatever he says normative for us. So whatever he says, we are obligated to believe, and whatever he commands, we are obligated to do. Whatever God says is normative. That is, to whatever he says, there is an ought attached. Argument 3 is not a naturalistic fallacy, then, because it is an argument from moral fact to moral conclusion, from one ought to another.
But what about religious fatalism, the type of ethical system we are discussing in this section? For a religious fatalist, we learn morality from this kind of argument:
Argument 4
Premise: Fate rewards people who do x.
Conclusion: People ought to do x.
Thus appears the teleological principle, as it fits into a fatalistic system. "A good act maximizes happiness" means that we determine the good by deciding what sorts of acts bring about a happy fate.
Is this a naturalistic fallacy, or does it reason from ought to ought? Well, is there an ought in the premise? Not in any obvious way. The fact that an impersonal process prospers people who behave in a certain way doesn’t make that behavior obligatory, or even right.
That is even true of personal processes of a similar kind. Think of persons who give rewards to people who serve them. Josef Stalin, for example, gave handsome rewards to many of those who murdered his enemies. Does that make their conduct morally right? Obviously not. Even less should we allow the apparent preferences of an impersonal fate (but how can an impersonal principle even have preferences?) to dictate our moral obligations.
Some writers, ancient and modern, have praised the courage of those who have defied what seemed to be their fate, however hopeless their defiance may have been. For these writers it is opposition to fate, the struggle against it, that is morally praiseworthy. Prometheus became a hero by defying Zeus, and we admire Antigone for her hubris in opposing fate. So it seems to be at least an open question as to whether following fate, even if we could follow it, is a morally admirable course of action. But if fate, unlike the biblical God, is not fit to be a moral standard, then argument 4 is a naturalistic fallacy.
The fundamental question is whether any impersonal principle provides a sufficient basis for morality. In my judgment, the answer is no. Even if the universe were governed by an impersonal principle, and even if it were possible for people to discern what kinds of behavior that principle rewarded or punished, it would remain an open question of whether we ought to practice the rewarded behavior. And I cannot imagine any reason why we should feel morally bound by the dictates of any impersonal principle at all. Impersonal principles, like gravity, electromagnetism, and the like, have the power to push us around, but they don’t have the power to tell us what we ought to do. To claim they do is a naturalistic fallacy.
If morality cannot be based on anything impersonal, where can we find a basis for it? In the realm of the personal, of course. We learn our moral principles in a personal context: at mother’s knee, in school, in church, in national celebrations. By their very nature, moral principles presuppose an interpersonal context. Virtues like loyalty, love, courage, and kindness presuppose a society. Typically, people come to believe in loyalty, for example, as a moral virtue, because they have grown up in a home in which parents were loyal to one another and to their children, and in which it therefore did not seem unreasonable for parents to expect the same from their children. Similarly obedience and love. It should not be hard to understand how the modern breakdown of the family has led to uncertainty about obligations.
So children learn morality from their parents, not by appealing to some impersonal principle. But of course parents are morally as well as intellectually fallible. So, as they mature, children often find themselves looking for a higher standard. If children learn morality from their parents, where did their parents learn it? How did our first parents learn it? And who makes the rules, ultimately, that govern all parents and all children? Evidently someone who is not fallible, for he or she must stand as the very criterion of right and wrong. But that criterion must be someone, not something, if it is to commend our ultimate loyalty, obedience, and love.
The absolute moral standard must be an absolute person. And the only absolute person anybody knows about is the God of the Bible. The Bible is unique in teaching that the supreme moral authority is an absolute person. Other religions and philosophies proclaim absolutes, but those absolutes are not personal. Still other worldviews, like polytheism, teach the existence of supernatural persons, but these are not absolute. But if morality must be based on one who is both personal and absolute, then the God of the Bible is the only viable candidate.
I conclude, then, that fatalist religions cannot supply an adequate basis for morality. It is not clear why anyone should think that the workings of fate are morally consistent, how one can know the dictates of fate, or, even if we could know those dictates, why they would have any moral authority at all.
To claim a knowledge of morality from observing fate is a rationalist claim, for it exalts the powers of the human mind far beyond anything we can legitimately claim to know. It is also irrationalist, because if the universe is ultimately impersonal (review Chapter 3), then it is impossible to know anything about our moral responsibilities. So in this kind of ethic, we have a good illustration of Van Til’s rationalist/irrationalist dialectic (review Chapter 4).
Ethics as Self-Realization
Another type of "more explicitly religious" ethics can be found in the monist religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. Monism is the view that all things are ultimately one. In the west, ancient Gnosticism was essentially monistic, and that worldview is echoed in neoplatonism and medieval mysticism. Peter R. Jones has also identified modern movements, known as "New Age" thinking in the 1980s and ‘90s, which he now refers to as "neo-paganism," as essentially monistic. Jones is a student of Gnostic texts, and he argues that these modern movements are virtually equivalent to Gnosticism.
Since on their view everything is essentially one, monists believe that if God exists he is essentially one with the universe, not a being distinct from it. In Scripture, there is a sharp distinction between creator and creature. But monism denies that fundamental distinction. Indeed, for many monists, God is a name for our true inner self. When we gain a really deep insight into ourselves, we discover that we are God and he is us. This idea is what I described in Chapter 4 as "nonbiblical immanence" (4 on the rectangular diagram). Popularly this view is called "pantheism."
But monism also expresses itself in terms that suggest nonbiblical transcendence (3 on the rectangle), somewhat like the deism of the Enlightenment period. For the Gnostics, the supreme being was so far from the world that he could not be named or known by human beings. He, or it, is such a vast mystery that we can have nothing like a personal relationship with him. Indeed, he can have nothing at all to do with the material world, because any relationship with matter would compromise his perfect spirituality.
Clearly such monism presents the sharpest possible contrast with biblical Christianity. (See positions 1 and 2 on the rectangle.) Yet Elaine Pagels and other recent theologians have tried to influence the church to accept ancient Gnostic texts as equal in authority to the canonical Scriptures. The church should not accept such advice.
These twin emphases on transcendence and immanence formally contradict one another, and critics of Gnosticism from the Church Father Irenaeus to the present have pointed that out. On the other hand, there is at another level a coherence between these two themes. For if God is not distinct from the world (nonbiblical immanence), then of course we are unable to specify any distinctive characteristics that may belong to him (nonbiblical transcendence).
These forms of immanence and transcendence collaborate to destroy any biblical notion of ethical responsibility. If we are God (nonbiblical immanence), then we are responsible to nobody except ourselves. If we cannot know God (nonbiblical transcendence), then, again, we cannot be responsible to him. Thus monistic systems erase all three perspectives of ethics: (1) The normative, because in monism there is no ultimate distinction between right and wrong. (2) The situational, because the world as we experience it is an illusion. So one seeks detachment from things rather than a God-glorifying use of them. (3) The existential, because the self, and other selves, are also illusory. In this area too, monism emphasizes detachment rather than, as in Scripture, love. Thus personal and social ethics become meaningless.
Nevertheless, Eastern religions and western Gnosticisms do emphasize ethics. As with religious fatalism, they teach many ethical precepts that are not too different from those in Scripture. We should not be embarrassed on this account, for Scripture itself tells us in Rom. 1 and elsewhere that God has revealed the knowledge of his moral law to everyone in the world. Though people repress and disobey this law, they cannot escape it entirely.
But it is important for us to understand the role that ethics plays in monistic worldviews. Essentially for these systems ethics is a discipline by which we can escape from the illusion of plurality and can become conscious of our oneness with God and with the whole world. By ethical and other disciplines, we ascend on a ladder of knowledge to a realm above ethics. It is therefore a tool of self-realization, a means by which we can be aware of the real nature of the world.
Of the three principles we discussed in Chapter 4, therefore, monists are most impressed with the existential principle, the principle that ethics is primarily a matter of the inner life of the self, a means of self-enhancement.
The trouble is, that these ethical disciplines, if successful, carry each person to a realm in which ethical distinctions, like right and wrong, good and evil, have no meaning. If the world is one, then good and evil are one, and right and wrong are one. And without such contrasts, there is no such thing as good, or evil, or right, or wrong. On these views, ethics is part of our quest for the trans-ethical.
Buddhism, for example, puts much emphasis on right living. But the goal of right living is to achieve Nirvana, a kind of Nothingness, in which there is no more suffering. Nirvana takes away the curse of perpetual reincarnation, in which souls are born and reborn in different forms according to the karma gained from their good or bad deeds. We might be inclined to charge Buddhism with being egoistic in that it makes ethics a tool of personal salvation. We must remember, however, that the Mahayana tradition of Buddhism encourages altruism, referring to the image of Buddha, about to enter Nirvana, who instead turns around to offer assistance to others. But we should ask, nevertheless, why the Buddha should have made such a decision. If the whole point of ethics is to achieve Nirvana, why should any altruistic purpose deter one from that goal? We should commend the altruism of Mahayana. But Buddhism, in the final analysis, has no basis for altruism, or for any other moral principle.
As another example: the ancient Gnostics were divided into two ethical camps. Some were ascetic, denying to themselves pleasures and possessions, because they sought escape from the material world into the spiritual oneness of the supreme being. Others, however, were libertine, denying themselves no pleasures at all, because they believed that ultimately the material world was an illusion and unimportant. Doubtless some tried to find a happy medium between these extremes. But what principle could guide such a decision? Again, we see how monism makes it impossible to specify moral distinctions.
The root problem may be stated thus: in monism, ethics is subordinate to metaphysics and epistemology. For the monist, our problem is epistemological deception as to the metaphysical nature of the world and ourselves. The remedy is to overcome that deception and to recognize that we are essentially one with everything that is. For the Christian, the problem is very different: God made human beings different from himself, but reflecting his glory. But they disobeyed him, creating an enmity with God that must be relieved through sacrifice. In Christianity, the problem is a problem with an interpersonal relationship, a relationship between finite persons and the infinite person. It is about ethics: love, obedience, sin, redemption. In monism, the issue is fundamentally impersonal: dispelling illusions about metaphysical separations.
So, as with the religious fatalist, the monist has no personal basis of ethics. His sense of obligation must come from the impersonal nature of the universe itself. In the previous section of this chapter, however, we saw how an impersonal reality can provide no basis for ethical standards.
Ethics as Law Without Gospel
My critique of fatalism and monism has centered on the impersonalism of those positions. A worldview in which the highest reality is impersonal is incapable of providing a basis for ethical decisions. But what of religions other than Christianity that do base their ethics on the revelation of a personal absolute? This would include traditional Judaism, Islam, and Christian heresies such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and theological liberalism.
We should note that the reason why these religions affirm an absolute personal God is because they are influenced by the Bible. As I mentioned earlier, it is a remarkable fact that belief in a personal absolute is not found in any religion or philosophy except those influenced by the Bible. Traditional Judaism, of course, adheres to what Christians call the Old Testament. Christians and Jews deeply disagree as to how that book should be interpreted, but they do share the belief that that book is the authoritative word of God.
From a Christian point of view, Judaism is a Christian heresy. Christian heretics (like Sabellians, Arians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and many in the tradition of theological liberalism) claim to believe the Bible, but they interpret it in ways that deny the essence of the Gospel, or they pick and choose what to believe in Scripture, ending up with a deeply unbiblical theology. The dispute between Christians and Jews is in this respect the same.
Islam, too, may be understood as a Christian heresy. Its founder, Mohammed, initially respected the "peoples of the book," the Jews and Christians. He sought to promulgate the monotheism of Scripture among his own people. But eventually he produced another book, the Qu’ran, which denied many fundamental teachings of Scripture, such as Jesus’ deity and his atoning death. Even then, Muslims regarded Scripture as a divine revelation, but argued that it had been corrupted during the centuries of its transmission. They respected Jesus as a prophet, believed in his Virgin Birth, his miracles, and his return at the final judgment. Indeed, they turned to the Bible for their own apologetic purposes, for they argued that biblical prophecy predicts the coming of Mohammed.
So, as with Judaism, the debate between Christianity and Islam is to some extent exegetical, to show that (1) the Bible does not, in fact, predict the coming of Mohammed, for the passages at issue fit only Jesus, and that (2) it is impossible to argue that the biblical text was corrupted to the extent that Muslims believe.
But both Islam and Judaism do claim to base their ethics on the revelation of a personal absolute, indeed on the revelation of the God of Scripture. So we cannot argue against Judaism and Islam in quite the same way we argue against fatalism and monism. Theological liberals sometimes do and sometimes do not claim to believe in such a basis for ethics. When they do not, their positions amount to religious fatalism or monism. When they do, however, we must deal with them differently.
I say that we cannot argue against these positions in "quite" the same way as we argue against fatalism and monism. Nevertheless, there are significant parallels between fatalism and monism on the one hand, and Judaism, Islam, and liberalism, on the other. For the defections of these religions from Scripture affect their doctrine of God to some extent. Most obviously, these religions are Unitarian, not Trinitarian. They deny the full deity of Christ and therefore see God as a oneness without plurality.
Without a doctrine of plurality in God, these religions have less ability to regard God as the ultimate ethical standard and exemplar. In discussing fatalism, I pointed out that virtues like loyalty, mutual submission, and love, require a society for their exhibition. They are interpersonal virtues, not merely personal ones. A Unitarian god cannot exemplify these until he creates finite persons to relate to. But when he does that, his loyalty, submission, and love are relative to, dependent on, the creation. With regard to these virtues, the Unitarian god is not the ultimate standard, not even divine, in Clouser’s sense.
Further, a Unitarian concept of God easily slips into an impersonal concept: (1) Theologies based on Judaism, Islam, and liberal Christianity, commonly view God’s transcendence in the nonbiblical way shown in (3) of the rectangular diagram of Chapter 4. On this view, human concepts of God are, strictly speaking, impossible. We cannot regard God as personal or as impersonal. But we have seen that ethics requires a clearly personal concept of God.
(2) In Islam, the biblical doctrine of predestination becomes a form of fatalism, in which free human choices have no ultimate effect on the course of events. But such fatalism is mechanical, not personal.
(3) In some Jewish and liberal theologies, the opposite problem occurs, in which God himself is so limited by human free will that he cannot even know the future in an exhaustive way. In those theologies, God is not the sole origin of what occurs (contrary to Eph. 1:11 and Rom. 11:36). He is himself subject to the created world. Given such assumptions, it is gratuitous to posit God as the sole source of ethical standards.
So Judaism, Islam, and the Christian heresies are not immune to the charge of impersonalism that I have brought against fatalism and monism. But even if we assume that these religions do believe (as they sometimes claim) in a personal God, there is yet more to be said.
These religions, indeed all religions except biblical Christianity, are religions of works-righteousness. That is, they are religions in which the members try to seek moral status by doing good works. This principle is directly opposed to the biblical gospel, which says that even our best works are insufficient to gain favor with God. Isaiah 64:6 reads,
We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
In Rom. 8:8, the apostle Paul says that they that those who are "in the flesh," that is, those who have not had their sins forgiven through the atonement of Christ, "cannot please God." In Scripture, our only hope, therefore, is in Christ. Paul says,
23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith (Rom. 3:23-25a).
So salvation is entirely by God’s grace, his free gift, not by our works:
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Eph. 2:8-10).
In Judaism, Islam, and the Christian heresies (and the same may be said also of fatalism and monism) there is no doctrine of salvation by divine grace. Rather, people are expected to lead good lives, hoping that God will accept them. But this doctrine of works righteousness leads either to pride or despair. It leads to pride on the part of those who think they can meet God’s requirements on their own. This is, of course, a pride based on self-deception. People with this ambition are quite ignorant of God’s standards, and they flatter themselves beyond measure to think they have measured up even to a minimal understanding of God’s requirements. They have suppressed (Rom. 1:18) their very knowledge of themselves, of the vast number of ways in which they have fallen short of God’s perfection.
The doctrine of works righteousness also leads to despair, among those with better spiritual perception. They see the huge discrepancy between what God requires and what they have done, and they lose all hope of attaining fellowship with God.
It is only the cross of Christ that can put to rest that pride and despair. God’s grace brings us fellowship with God that is not based on our works, so we may not boast (Eph. 2:8). And it brings us into deep fellowship with God as he sees us in his beloved Son, so we may not despair.
When Christians discuss ethics with Jews, Muslims, liberals, indeed with fatalists and monists, they should try hard to direct the conversation to the cross. For that is the most important issue, in the final analysis, and the most urgent for any inquirer. We should be willing to discuss metaphysics and epistemology as above, to question whether non-Christian religions have a basis for ethical claims. As Francis Schaeffer used to say, we should be ready to give honest answers to honest questions. But in the end the Gospel is by far the most important thing.
All three types of non-Christian religions offer us, at most, law without gospel. Religions of the third type have a special focus on law, their application of the normative principle. As we shall see in later chapters, I don’t believe that law and gospel are separated in Scripture itself, in the manner presented, for example, in Lutheran theology. In Scripture, the law is the law of the God who saves, the law of the kingdom of God. The gospel is the message that that kingdom is coming and that therefore God will save his people. But there is something of a law/gospel distinction between general and special revelation. Rom. 1 teach us that God makes his moral standards, his law, known to all people through natural revelation. It does not teach that he also reveals therein the way of salvation. Rather, "faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ" (Rom. 10:17). And of course our salvation comes, not through keeping the law, but by receiving the grace of Christ, known only through special revelation.
Grace is only possible in a universe governed by an absolute person. Impersonal forces, like gravity and electromagnetism, treat everybody equally, according to the sheer force of whatever laws they obey. If you place your hand on a live wire, you will receive a shock, whether you are righteous or wicked. The live wire does not make a loving decision to give some people a free gift of electrical-shock immunity. So impersonalist systems tend to be universalistic—to say that everyone will be saved in some way or other, or, as in secular impersonalisms, that we shall all be equally destroyed by natural forces. Christianity is not universalistic, for according to Scripture human beings are ultimately in the hands of a thoroughly personal God. He decides, for his own reasons and personal affections, who will be saved and who will be lost.
So those apparently personalist religions that promulgate law without gospel have a view of ethics that is not much different from that of impersonalist religions. For all three forms of non-Christian religion, ethics is obedience to law without hope of forgiveness for sin. And in all three forms, even the law is questionable, because we cannot specify its content in an impersonalist universe.
