An Ethical Example: Responding to “On Not Being Narrow-Minded”
After perusing the latest issue of the Ichthus, I had some reflections on Nick Nowalk’s latest feature “On Not Being Narrow-Minded.” Nick focuses heavily on the writings of Jonathan Edwards, a preacher from the first Great Awakening who was quite influential despite the fact that he graduated from Yale. Edwards resisted the Enlightenment thinkers who increasingly strove to separate ethics from Christianity. Instead, as Nick put it, “he insisted upon a teleological ethic grounded in God’s purpose in creating the universe.”
Jonathan Edwards: the Billy Graham of the 18th century.
Yet Nick points out that “Edwards is also keenly aware of this objection: the moral conduct of those who ignore or reject God’s design for their existence often seems less than evil and sometimes even praiseworthy.” He then describes three of Edwards’ examples (I’ve heard Edwards was a huge Bono fan) of people whose actions seem praiseworthy at first, but turn out to be evil. Yet this strikes me as a bit of a straw man. The goal of the examples is to refute the idea that godless people could be good, but I don’t think anyone defending that proposition would necessarily lift up any of those three people as great moral examples. The examples only appear compelling because of the way in which the behavior is revealed: we catch a glimpse of the person’s good attributes before their truly ugly side comes into view. In the case of the adulterous wife, her good attributes are simply a ruse to cover up her sin. This is not what most people think of when they imagine the good godless person.
Instead, I’d like to offer a more personal example of the godless good person which I think most people would find significantly more compelling: my mother. (I promise to not take any criticisms too personally, so long as the conversation does not degrade into “your mom” jokes.) My mother is an atheist and has been for the greater portion of her life. She just celebrated her 20th wedding anniversary with my father and has stayed faithful (as far as I’m aware) the whole time. She works in an office and does her job very well. A few years after starting this job, she decided to take charge of the community outreach for her company (the Gap) and organizes community service events for all of the employees in Orange County and sometimes even Los Angeles. She has built houses with Habitat for Humanity and regularly helps low-income kids in LA apply to colleges. She doesn’t do it to elevate her position in the company. She doesn’t do it to cover up the fact that she committed some grievous sin. She hasn’t ruined a beautiful peace of music by adding cacophony. She simply cares about other people deeply.
So when I look at my mother, how do I square my experience with her genuinely good-heart and the passages (Genesis 6:5, 8:21, Psalm 14:1-3, 53:1-3, 58:3, 143:2, Proverbs 20:9, Ecclesiastes 7:20, 9:3, Isaiah 64:6, Matthew 19:17, Romans 3:9-20) listed by Nick? I cannot take the easy way out by attributing some horrible sin to her as Edwards does, but I can imitate him by altering the way in which I think of morality.
First, I recall Romans 3:23 – for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. The glory of God is our standard. Perfection is our standard. That is both terrifying – we can never live up to the standard – and comforting – no one can ever live up to that standard. As good as my mother may be, she is not perfect. There are still crooked corners of her soul, just as there are for everyone else.
Second, I have to reorient my thinking about what goodness actually is. Having grown up in the household of a philosopher fond of John Locke, I have been bombarded with Enlightenment-era thinking since my youth. My own intuitions about goodness would never make me guess that it is some tragic or horrible sin to deny God or Christ as His Son. I have too many nice non-Christian friends to come to that conclusion on my own. But in this area, I must re-evaluate my notions about goodness and come to a better definition to understand the Scriptures. I must read the old books, as Nick urged, to get past my limited and narrow-minded perspective.
Augustine described sin as inordinate desire; that is, there is a natural ordering of how much we should want things with the eternal being more valuable than the transient and sin consists of reversing these values. Every sin can be reduced to valuing a temporal thing (money, fame, members of the opposite gender) more than the eternal (God). It is not bad to want certain things in this world, so long as we do not desire them more than we desire communion with God. If one denies God, one denies the eternal and can never desire the true source of all goodness in this world. One will always have inordinate desire because there can be no longing for the only inherently valuable entity.
As C.S Lewis puts it in The Weight of Glory: “These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
So long as my mother is an atheist, she may be good, but she can never desire the ultimate good. She can never know the beauty and perfection that is the eternal and Almighty God. This is the only way I can come to agree with “Jonathan Edwards’ essential contention…: whatever ‘secondary beauty’ may exist among those who have chosen to rupture the harmony of God’s creation song by singing their own tune in a different key, the best of this fallen human conduct apart from Christ will turn out to be, upon closer inspection, mere honor among thieves.”
This is not an easy idea to swallow, particularly since many of us are surrounded by good non-Christian friends, but such a conclusion is not condescending so long as we realize that we, too, are mere thieves without redemption through Christ.
I think you may have misunderstood the point of Nick’s examples. In effect, Nick purports to do exactly what you do with the example of your mother: show how someone can appear to be morally good from one limited perspective without truly being morally good – something we only realize when we analyze the situation from the correct perspective.
So the point isn’t that your mom (or most “virtuous pagans”) is tantamount to an adulteress, but rather that what we have to say about the goodness of her conduct depends on our perspective. Our perspective, unfortunately, often fails to consider God as a person (which He is) to whom we are deeply obligated. Once we remember that, it becomes clear that a life that does not acknowledge God is lacking in a fundamental way.
Perhaps a better analogy would be a man who is a devoted husband and father to all but one of his children. His conduct towards his wife and most of his children is laudable, but that does not, in and of itself, excuse his conduct toward the one neglected child. In the same way, your mother’s genuine concern for the needy and her love for your father do not, in and of themselves, justify her lack of concern for God.
I think the larger problem for Nick’s (and Edwards’) point is demonstrating that epistemological vantage point of “virtuous pagans” is such that they should believe in (the Christian) God and act accordingly; without clarifying how that is the case, their neglect for Jesus seems no different from my neglect for Allah.
(My apologies for bringing your mom into this.
)
Thanks for interacting with my article, Jordan! I agree with what Joseph said about the thrust of my three examples, but after going back and looking at how I compressed it so tightly into such a short space, I see how you read them this way. I should have been clearer, and this makes me want to expand it a bit at some point in the future.
If these three scenarios were functioning as direct correlations of how secular virtue is not, in the end, all that impressive because of hidden yet blatant immorality, then I would agree with you that they are indeed straw men! There are many unbelievers who live consistently upright lives, from a limited perspective, one in which the God who makes himself known in Jesus is conveniently left to the side. However, my (poorely executed) intention was to set them forth as instances in which an initial “narrow” glance leaves us believing a person is good, but a wider perspective goes on to reveal to us that all of their goodness is actually tainted and ruined because of the overall framework in which the morality is embedded, and which they fail to live according to. Indeed, on my examples, each person could be absolutely blameless in outward standards of conduct, and STILL be immoral for neglecting the overall duty and obligation towards the most important relationship they are committed to (i.e. husband, king, symphony). Perhaps another way of saying this is that our motives are absolutely essential to take into consideration when we evaluate moral acts–not just what we do, but why we do them. Just as the adulterous wife’s acts all seem praiseworthy from the narrow view towards her husband, if she is not motivated and driven by love and faithfulness and delight in him, he will despise all she does regardless of her spotless record viewed apart from the affair.
In the same way, whether because of our cultural background or because of the effects of our universal spiritual deadness (or both!), none of us seems to be naturally wired in our intuitions to take God seriously as the most significant relationship we are obligated and bound to in our lives. We cannot ignore or reject him without twisting everything else we do and reach for within the narrow perspective of our lives, considered in isolation from Him.
As for Joseph’s last point, that JE (and I) have a problem in establishing WHY this should be considered objectively true for all people (not just Christians), I would just point you to the first half of JE’s “Two Dissertations”, called “The End For Which God Created The World.” Here Edwards labors to show that the purpose of our existence is to participate in God’s own triune life of knowledge and love and joy, and that we do this only through the Son and the Spirit–mere morality, or even religion in general, is not the goal. It’s been a monumental and formative work for my grasp of the bigger picture–I can’t commend it highly enough.
Regardless, whether JE is successful in demonstrating this reality or not, it is only then that he moves on to consider the question of what moral virtue looks like for God’s image bearers, given this prior divine design for human beings. Frequently we Christians move too quickly into ethical questions without first considering the goals of God in creating us, and thus reduce our virtue theory to mere rules (don’t steal, don’t murder, don’t committ adultery, etc.). Of course, all those things are true, but you can obey all of them rigidly and STILL not be a virtous person, IF Christianity is true and we are intended to relate to everything in this world through the lenses of our overarching relationship with God in Christ. Spiritual adultery, treason, and disharmony (to allude to my three examples) are all still on the table, even if from the narrower perspective we are “good” people.
I realize that Nick and I have the same goal. I just take some issue because those examples (indeed, many of the examples offered by contemporary Christians) are “virtuous pagans” who really aren’t all that virtuous. So when we use them as examples, we make it sound as though no person could be all that good without being Christian – an idea which is untrue and offensive. I think we should be avoiding such insinuations at all costs because it is unnecessarily alienating. Using an example of someone who is virtuous in almost all ways besides her lack of concern for God allows us to focus in on the real issue at hand: why God is the source of goodness and not other things.
I appreciate the analogy of the father. Even separate from proving epistemologically why pagans should prefer the Christian God to Allah, I think demonstrating why Christians believe faith in God is essential for goodness is useful. Many pagans think things like “Even if the Christian God existed, it wouldn’t make sense for him to think it sinful to not believe in Him.” Proving why that idea is false and why it is *justly* false is one of the first steps in helping pagans understand and respect Christian ideas.
Gents -
Thanks for the article and posts. I’ve often struggled with this same issue – not primarily in my own mind, but in how to explain it to other people. One example that I have frequently used and find helpful with regard to the ‘virtuous pagans’ is Mother Theresa.
If Mother Theresa lived in the slums of India, helped the poor, took in orphans, and fed the homeless because it was her heart felt response to what God had done for her in Jesus Christ then her actions were about as virtuous as it gets. If Mother Theresa lived in the slums of India, helped the poor, took in orphans, and fed the homeless because she was trying to earn her righteousness before God then her deeds were not virtuous because she was broadcasting the inadequacy of Jesus’ sacrifice and the ability for humans to earn their own righteousness (contrary to Isaiah 64:6, Phil 3:8).
Why you do something is essential for understanding if it is virtuous or not. That is one of the reasons sin is so deceptive, because so often we (believers) deceive ourselves into believing we are doing things for virtuous reasons when in fact it is to satisfy carnal, sinful desires.
Ultimately we don’t know why she did what she did. But, she does provide an interesting example showing how deeds could be good on one level and not good in the ultimate sense.