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The Independence of moral from Religious Discourse in the Believer's Use of Language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Larry K. Nelson
Larry K. Nelson
Affiliation:
Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, Berkeley, California 94708
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Extract

In the continuing debate over the question of the independence of morality and religion there is a set of issues pertaining to the relation of moral obligation and the expressed will of God which would benefit from some further conceptual clarification. Most often the debate amounts to a defense of one form or another of the following alternatives: either it is true by definition that whatever God wills ought to be obeyed because an expression like “ought to be obeyed” means “willed or commanded by God” (in which case morality is entirely dependent on religion) or it is only a contingent truth that whatever God wills ought to be obeyed because an antecedent moral judgment as to the goodness of God's will is required for its assertion (in which case morality is entirely independent of religion). It is my contention, however, that so long as the debate is carried on in these limited terms we will necessarily be dissatisfied with whichever way the argument goes, for neither alternative can be made fully to harmonize either with our common moral and religious sensibilities or with the facts of our moral and religious usage.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , April 1975 , pp. 167 - 195
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1975

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References

1 This way of arguing has had many defenders from Plato to Kant, from Mill to Russell, but some among its more recent proponents are: Hepburn, R. K., Christianity and Paradox (New York: Pegasus, 1968) ch. 8Google Scholar; Nielsen, Kai, “Some Remarks on the Independence of Morality from Religion,” Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy (ed. by Ramsey, Ian; New York: MacMillan, 1966) 140–51Google Scholar; Falk, W. D., “Moral Perplexity,” Ethics 66 (January, 1956) 125–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baier, Kurt, The Moral Point of View (New York: Cornell University Press, 1958) 6–8 and 178ff.Google Scholar

1 This way of arguing has had many defenders from Plato to Kant, from Mill to Russell, but some among its more recent proponents are: Hepburn, R. K., Christianity and Paradox (New York: Pegasus, 1968) ch. 8Google Scholar; Nielsen, Kai, “Some Remarks on the Independence of Morality from Religion,” Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy (ed. by Ramsey, Ian; New York: MacMillan, 1966) 140–51Google Scholar; Falk, W. D., “Moral Perplexity,” Ethics 66 (January, 1956) 125–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Baier, Kurt, The Moral Point of View (New York: Cornell University Press, 1958) 6–8 and 178ff.Google Scholar

2 Camus, Albert, The Rebel (New York: Vintage Books, 1956) 62.Google Scholar

3 Phillips, D. Z., “God and Ought,” Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy (ed. by Ramsey, Ian; London: SCM Press, 1966) 133–39Google Scholar; idem, “Moral and Religious Conceptions of Duty: An Analysis,” Mind (1964) 406–12. Though the argument for this viewpoint is not always cast in precisely this logical form, the viewpoint is widely held among Christian theologians both historical and contemporary. Among the latter, see, for vexample: Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Ethics (New York: MacMillan, 1965) part I, ch. 7Google Scholar; Ramsey, Paul, Basic Christian Ethics (London: SCM Press, 1953).Google Scholar

4 Phillips, “God and Ought,” 137.

5 Ibid., 133.

6 Ibid., 137.

7 Ibid., 138; from Kierkegaard, Søren, Fear and Trembling (New York: Doubleday, 1954) 70.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., 138–39.

9 Ibid., 138–39.

10 So, for example, Kai Nielsen (“Some Remarks,” 146) claims, “The believer can say ‘God commands me to do X’ implies ‘I ought to do X’ only because he has made the logically prior moral judgment that ‘Whatever God commands is good.‘” The latter claim, if our analysis is correct, embodies not a moral judgment about the goodness of what God commands, but rather, as we shall argue shortly, a “constitutive rule” determining the deployment of the concept of God's will or command within the framework of religious discourse.

11 St. Anselm, in Cur Deus Homo (Proslogium; Monologium; An Appendix in Behalf of the Fool by Gaunilon; and Cur Deus Homo [Tr. by Deane, Sidney Norton; Chicago: The Open Court Publ. Co., 1926] 205)Google Scholar makes precisely this point: “When it is said that what God wills is just, and that what He does not will is unjust, we must not understand that if God willed anything improper it would be just, simply because he willed it. For if God wills to lie, we must not conclude that it is right to lie, but rather that he is not God.”

12 For a related discussion of the nontautologous character of constitutive rules see Hare, R. M., “The Promising Game,” Theories of Ethics (ed. by Foot, Philippa; London:. Oxford University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; reprinted from Revue Internationale de Philosophie 70 (1964) 398–412.Google Scholar

12 For a related discussion of the nontautologous character of constitutive rules see Hare, R. M., “The Promising Game,” Theories of Ethics (ed. by Foot, Philippa; London:. Oxford University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; reprinted from Revue Internationale de Philosophie 70 (1964) 398–412.Google Scholar

13 Gen 18:20, 23–25 (RSV).

14 Gen 18:21.

15 Jer 12:1.

16 Cf. Spiegel, Shalom, The Last Trial (tr. by Goldin, Judah; New York: Schocken, 1967) 63–64Google Scholar; and Vaux, Roland de, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions (tr. by McHugh, John; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961) 442–43.Google Scholar

17 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 70.

18 Ibid., 78.

19 See below, 186.

20 Whether such an immediate or direct and, therefore, self-evidently certain perception of God's will by a believer is possible is, of course, a legitimate theological and epistemological question. Again, partly in the interest of posing the challenge in the starkest possible terms and partly because the epistemological question lies outside the scope of what can be attempted in a paper of this sort, I wish to withhold a decision on that question in order to ask, what if Abraham had received a direct, intrinsically certain revelation of God's will and, therefore, acquired an absolute duty toward God, as Kierkegaard assumes in his interpretation? Further, what if this duty were in sharpest possible conflict with his duty morally understood? Would we even then be forced to abandon our thesis? What would the tension between the moral and the religious, thus heightened to this extreme, reveal to us about the logical relations between these two strands of discourse in the believer's usage?

21 See below, 188.

22 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 80.

23 Ibid., 82–84.

24 Ibid., 84.

25 Ibid., 64–77.

26 See above, 183.

27 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 46.

28 Ibid., 47.

29 Ibid., 124.

30 See above, 169.

31 Cf. above, 183.

32 Bonhoeffer (Ethics, 278) paradoxically, would seem to place himself in that minority, however; for even though on the one hand he denies that “at every moment of our lives we may be informed of the commandment of God by some special direct divine inspiration,” he nonetheless also asserts of this commandment, “Both in its contents and in its form it is concrete speech to the concrete man. God's commandment leaves man no room for application or interpretation. It leaves room only for obedience or disobedience.”

33 Kant, (Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone [tr. by Green, Theodore M. and Hudson, Hoyt H.; New York: Harper, 1960] 175)Google Scholar, for example, argues that a command of God which runs counter to what seems to be required by strictly moral considerations “is never apodictically certain. … Even did it appear to have come from God himself (like the command delivered to Abraham to slaughter his own son like a sheep) it is at least possible that in this instance a mistake has prevailed.” For Kant, there can never, therefore, be adequate grounds for a “suspension of the ethical.”

34 Cf. Mic 6:6–8; Isa 11:11–17; Amos 5:21–24.

35 For a relatively thorough and admirably perspicuous treatment of this subject, see: Gustafson, J. M., “The Place of Scripture in Christian Ethics: A Methodological Study,” Interpretation 24 (1970) 430–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 I borrow this term, if not precisely the idea, from Gustafson, “The Place of Scripture in Christian Ethics,” 451.

37 Cf. Baier, The Moral Point of View, 178.

38 Cf. Curran, Charles, “Absolute Norms in Moral Theology,” Norm and Context in Christian Ethics (ed. by Outka, G. and Ramsey, P.; New York: Scribner's, 1968) 139ff.Google Scholar