Month: February 2019

Heartbreak and Hope

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I have waited several days to write this post in hopes that that would give my emotions and chance to settle so that I could write from a place of reason, reflection and respect rather than one based upon frustration and anger. Even now, I’m not sure the extent to which that’s actually possible, but I’ve decided not to wait and to do my best.

A short summary of events for those who were unable to get the play-by-play: On Sunday, the delegates ranked each petition submitted to the Conference by “high priority” or “low priority,” creating a ranked list that established the order in which petitions (or bundles of petitions in the case of the plans) would be reviewed. The highest priority issue for the delegates: pensions. Not whether we could keep the Church together, but whether we’d protect the retirement funds of those who decide to leave. Not a good sign. The Traditional Plan ranked next, followed by two “disaffiliation plans” (read: exit plans), only then followed by the One Church Plan.

On Monday, to satisfy procedural requirements that all petitions first pass through a Legislative Committee, the entire body of the General Conference met as that Legislative Committee to determine what the delegates would actually vote on come Tuesday. The Traditional Plan was relatively quickly passed on to the general body by a vote of 461 to 359. The two disaffiliation plans were sent onward. By vote of 436 to 386 (about 53% to 47%), the One Church Plan was kept from moving forward.

The UMC’s Judicial Council (the church law version of a Supreme Court) determined that a number of provisions in the Traditional Plan violated the UMC constitution (to be fair, there were several provisions in the One Church Plan also found to be unconstitutional). Many efforts were made to amend the Traditional Plan at the conference to pass constitutional muster, but it doesn’t seem that this was effective. Those parts of the plan that are constitutional will (most likely) become church law, for the time being.

The more punitive of the “exit plans” was also passed, one which would extensively reduce the resources of any church that decided to leave. I have heard both that the exit plans were submitted so that the Weslayan Covenant Association members and others could leave the UMC if they didn’t like the result at GC and as a measure to undermine the will of progressives to fight by making it easy for them to leave. I think both were true and, when the very-well-organized conservatives saw how things were going with the Traditional Plan early in the conference, they reasoned that they might be able to take control of the church as a whole and keep the majority of the resources for themselves when progressives left as they were urged to. This is, of course, speculation.

I watched the vast majority of the General Conference 2019 as it happened. I hoped and prayed for a miraculous movement of the Holy Spirit to change the trajectory of the conference. While I’m extremely unhappy with the result of the Conference, I know that God often surprises us and moves in ways we do not expect. I remain faithful that what is true and right will prevail in the end and I, for one, remain committed to the United Methodist Church and for advocating that the UMC become a place of inclusion and not rejection, an arm of the greater catholic church that spreads the love of God through Jesus Christ in a manner that accurately reflects that love instead of relying on ignorance and human stubbornness to suborn holy scripture for the isolation and judgment of others.

In the meantime, I am embarrassed to be a United Methodist. I am embarrassed that, any time I want to discuss my faith with others and reveal my denominational affiliation, I must overcome a presumption of bigotry. I am embarrassed that this General Conference did more to support the stereotype of Christians as dogmatic, unthinking zealots who care more about their own feigned self-righteousness than anything else it might have accomplished. I am embarrassed that a very slim majority has overshadowed the fast-growing minority to the greater populace.

My personal experience of the General Conference returned me to my teenage years. I spent a long time in high school and college wondering if I really was a Christian, because those who taught me in Sunday School told me that I had to believe particular things that I could not to be a Christian. The loudest voices among the traditionalists on the floor of conference essentially argued that one must believe that homosexuality is a sin to belong in the United Methodist Church, perhaps even to call yourself a Christian. Others were smarter than to say such things aloud, but I wonder whether they’re thinking them. Still, such sentiments cannot be fairly imputed to all traditionalists or conservatives, and we did hear speeches on the floor of the Conference from conservatives willing to maintain unity with progressives and willing to hold to their beliefs while showing grace to those who disagree. I very much appreciated that kind of honesty and humility.

The speeches from the floor of the Conference did much to reveal the nature of the two sides of the homosexuality issue. The progressives came willing to compromise, saying, “Let’s use the One Church Plan to continue to live in productive fellowship despite our theological differences, because that diversity should not be viewed as blessing and not a curse.” The conservatives came saying, “We are right, you are wrong, and there’s no room for discussion.” In my mind, that behavior demonstrates the flaws in the conservative position as much the lack of careful consideration and reason in their theology. The progressives made arguments for unity; where they provided support for the reasonableness of their position, they pleaded only for understanding sufficient enough to acknowledge the slimmest possibility that their theology could be right, just enough to live in fellowship with them. These arguments were varied and drew upon scripture, logic, experience and tradition. The conservatives only brought the refrain, “the Bible says homosexuality is wrong and that’s all there is to it; we cannot allow impurity into our church.” Get in line, or get out.

That the conservatives had the presumption to make the General Conference a zero-sum game and then to complain that we’re collectively right back where we started before the GC despite all of the effort and resources put into the Commission on a Way Forward and the Special Session of the General Conference, frankly, appalls me. I just cannot find sympathy for those who refuse any resolution but their own way and then complain that they didn’t get everything they wanted–even when, on paper at least, they did.

Likewise, I find some irony in conservatives complaining that they have been called hypocrites by those who believe that Traditional Plan and the values that accompany it are immoral when the thrust of their action and exclusivity is based on their precept that homosexuality is immoral. They want to play the righteousness card for themselves, but they don’t like it when others want to play it against them. This, I think, is the microcosm of making personal holiness the linchpin of one’s faith, the very reason we are warned not to judge, lest ye be judged. I have things to write about this specifically, but I think they’re better saved for another post.

But this is a good time to temper things a little bit in fairness. As I mentioned above, not all conservatives are unreasonable, and it’s unfair to demonize them on any personal level, particularly as a generality. It is one thing to say that they have been lead into hypocrisy and away from what Jesus calls us to by well-intentioned misguidedness; it is another to say that they are evil. I do not believe the latter. To my mind, their dilemma is a failure of understanding, not a matter of malice. This is why I remain willing to be in fellowship with conservatives just as I vehemently oppose their values on this topic. There is far more that we agree about than that we don’t, I think, and I can’t think of a single traditionalist with whom I’m familiar about whom I would not readily say that they genuinely want to walk closer to Christ–and many of them do a better job of it in practice than I do. As much as I’m heartbroken by the feeling that they’ve by and large told even I–who is not part of the LGBTQ community directly but who believes strongly in its inclusion within the Church–am also unwelcome, I’m not interested in giving up on them or our relationship. And I still don’t think that some form of schism leaves us “better off.”

I also want to say that there were people on both sides who behaved badly. And there were people on both sides who set amazing and especially-Christian examples of respect and love for those who disagree with them. Perhaps one of the saddest aspects of the General Conference was that there was not more of that to be found.

Despite the great harm that was suffered by the LGBTQ community and its supporters at the General Conference, I did manage to find some hope. I’d refer you to two high points directly:

JJ Warren Speaks From the Floor
Adam Hamilton Speaks Against the Traditional Plan

The presence of so many rainbow-stole-wearing supporters of full inclusion at the conference brought great joy to my heart. As Rev. Hamilton opined, the conservative approach to General Conference has inspired and mobilized both progressives and centrists who had not previously been active in their support of full inclusion. This gives me hope.

Additionally, as I argued in my post, The UMC “Traditional” Plan is a Fantasy, the passage of the Traditional Plan will not accomplish what the conservatives wanted to accomplish–at least not fully. In very conservative conferences such as the one to which I belong (the Texas Annual Conference), unless the entire TP is struck down by the Judicial Council, there will be increased opportunities to marginalize and punish members of the UMC who are also members of the LGBTQ community (particularly if they’re also clergy or want to become clergy) as well as their supporters. But in those annual conferences already committed not to play the conservatives’ inquisitorial games, the passage of the Traditional Plan won’t change that.

The numbers from GC are also inspiring. The margins by which votes for the Traditional Plan and Exit Plans passed (and conversely, by which the OCP failed) were far narrower than expected. Traditional wisdom (at least in my part of the country) would be that the vote should have been about two-thirds to one-third. The Good New Network, the WCA and other conservative organizations within the UMC are well-funded and highly mobilized. The numbers from GC2019 show a very different story. To be fair, the voting numbers alone remain somewhat opaque–it’s impossible to parse out who voted against the Traditional Plan or for the One Church Plan because they are progressives in favor of full inclusion, because they are conservatives who value unity more than passing “their” plan (as if there is no diversity amongst the conservatives at all), or for some other reason. But that combined will is a voice that must be respected. Even with passing the Traditional Plan, if the conservatives do not realize that the tide is changing, and faster than they would like to think, there will be some rude awakenings in the near future.

I’ll conclude with this: a friend of mine who is not a Christian asked me this week why it was so important that we don’t split when there’s clearly so much disagreement within the church. I told him that part of our core witness as Christians is that God, the Creator of all things, is fundamentally about love and relationship. If we cannot demonstrate love and relationship between Christians in our own denomination, who can we convince those who are not believers of the truth we know but fail to practice?

 

The End of the Beginning

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(This is the 9th of 17 posts in my “200 for 200” challenge. Please continue to repost, link, and send your friends my way!)

(The picture above is graciously provided by K, who is attending the Called General Conference as a witness for full inclusion.)

Today the Called Session of the General Conference of the United Methodist Church begins to determine the fate of the denomination. Many of us have waited with bated breath to see if these events will unfurl with justice and unity or unravel into division and fractiousness. After nearly fifty years of debate since the institution of anti-homosexual language into the first UMC Book of Discipline (by amendment from a layperson from the floor of the conference, against the advice of the committee who had prepared the language for the BoD) in 1972, there finally seems to be a move toward resolution of the issue.

But this is not the first time such a resolution has been broached–the General Conference established in 1988 a “Committee to Study Homosexuality” (which included no person who identified as belonging to the LGTBQ community) to report to the General Conference in 1992. The report included agreement by the Committee on four points: (1) the seven references to homosexuality in the Bible are artifacts of ancient culture and not definitive expressions of the will of God; (2) Homosexuality is a normal sexual variation which can be expressed in a healthy way; (3) the Church should affirm committed and monogamous homosexual relationships; (4) God’s grace is visible in the life of lesbian and gay Christians.

The majority report from the Committee stated the following:

“The present state of knowledge and insight in the biblical, theological, ethical, biological, psychological and sociological fields does not provide a satisfactory basis upon which the church can responsibly maintain the condemnation of all homosexual practice.”

The same year that this Committee reported, the General Conference voted 3 to 1 to affirm the language: “we do not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider this practice incompatible with Christian teaching.”

Since 1972, but particularly in the years since the 2016 General Conference, both conservatives and progressives have been maneuvering for advantage in the moment that is now, finally, at hand. Some of the loudest voices on the conservative side, such as Reverend Rob Renfroe at The Woodlands UMC, have long been advocates of a church split. Members of the Weslayan Covenant Association, the Good News Network and other conservative organizations have spent as much time pushing for a “graceful exit strategy” as for their conservative position; this is my mind has always been a strategy to make it easier for progressives to leave rather than advocate for justice rather than a real measure of grace. As one of the speakers at the last Texas Annual Conference argued (in paraphrase): “When your marriage is in trouble, you don’t begin the conversation with: ‘here’s our divorce plan if we can’t work things out, now let’s talk about the issue.'”

Unless some unforeseen and unlikely change happens over the next few days, the choice really comes down to the One Church Plan and the “Modified” Traditional Plan.

Under the One Church Plan, annual conferences will be able to decide whether they want to allow LGBTQ clergy, each pastor will be able to decide whether to perform LGBTQ marriages, and each congregation will be able to decide whether to host LGBTQ marriages in their facilities while, at the same time, no clergyperson may be forced to go against his or her conscience and perform a ceremony they do not want to perform.

Under the Traditional Plan, we maintain the status quo except to spend more time, energy and money on church trials for those who advocate for full inclusion.

I have written about both plans on this blog and rehashing them is not the point of this post.

Instead, I want to remind readers that the next few days, regardless of what happens, are not the end of the matter, but another beginning.

It is my sincere hope and prayer that, through both human agency and the movement of the Holy Spirit, the One Church Plan will pass. It is not a panacea and does not give the LGTBQ community the vindication and respect they are owed, but it is a step in the right direction that helps to maintain the unity of the UMC.

Regardless of the result, some congregations will leave the Church. At least some of those who remain will view the events of this Called General Conference as a “loss” for their “side.” There will be hurt feelings, fear, disappointment, anger–and another General Conference in 2020 where, depending upon what happens in the next few days, there may be an attempt to undo what happens in this Called Conference and/or a need to find a way to allow the exit of some congregations without the decades of litigation that have followed the split of other denominations.

Regardless of result, there will be an increased need for Christians of all theologies within the UMC to do what all Christians are called to do–to love their neighbors, to show grace to others, and to be agents of peace and reconciliation, not causes of discord nor gloaters in some imagined “victory.”

As such, no one should view the next few days as the end of anything, only another step in the path. For those who, like myself, are progressives with theologies of full inclusion, there will be a very difficult line to walk if the One Church Plan passes. We will need to continue to advocate for the rights of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters within the Church while showing grace to conservatives and ensuring that they remain welcome and valued members of the UMC. We are much more than our positions on homosexuality and related issues, and the people involved in this debate, regardless of position, are well-meaning with the intention of seeking after Christ in a genuine and faithful manner. There is much good done in the name of Christ by the conservatives, even if I wholeheartedly believe that their actions regarding human sexuality have been misguided at best. I am proud to call them my brothers and sisters in Christ.

How do we progressives walk this fine line of the One Church Plan passes? I must admit that I do not know. But I do know that we must seize opportunities for reconciliation, healing, and increased respect and understanding between the conservatives and the progressives in the wake of the Called Conference. Even as we wait for events to unfold over the next few days, we must remember that our work is far from done and that there will be much of great import to do in the days that follow as we try to bring the Kingdom of Heaven a little bit closer to Earth.

Accounting for Respect

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(This is the 8th of 17 posts in my “200 for 200” challenge to myself. We’ve hit over 200 followers in total, but the goal is to have 200 followers through Wordpress subscribers–there are currently 147).

It has recently struck me that we talk about respect as a currency. We do certain things to “pay our respects,” and we talk about those to whom “respect is owed.” We talk about respect being “earned, not given.” Several sci-fi settings I’m aware of–the Eclipse Phase RPG and even The Orville TV show–discuss the use of reputation as a form of currency in a semi-or-fully-post-scarcity economy.

1 Timothy 6:10 tells us that “The love of money is the root of all evil.” Out of curiosity, I went to Strong’s Concordance to look up the word use for “love of money.” It’s philargyria, which comes from a root indicating “avarice” or “avariciousness.” Avariciousness can be applied to more than just money–it applies to the “miserly hoarding of wealth” in a general sense. Greed. This is what I expected to find; it’s axiomatic that it’s the feeling, the obsession and the behavior, rather than the object, that causes the problem.

And here’s where my concern comes in: should respect be something that we commoditize? In other posts (like this one), I’ve talked about the societal tendency (at least in Western cultures) to value people in a capitalistic way–a person is only worth what they produce for consumption or what they generate in terms of income. This, I think, is why stay-at-home parents face a stigma despite the fact that managing a household and rearing children is as or more difficult than many jobs for which people get paid (which, ironically, includes both household management and child-rearing!).

These issues (assigning capitalistic value to a person and commoditizing respect) are related, perhaps symptoms of the same malady, but they’re different things. The previous post referred to above deals with the problem of how we assign value to other people. This post is about the problem of seeing reputation as a form of currency.

As is often the case on this blog, the topic is complex and filled with nuance. In her book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, the anthropologist Ruth Benedict drew a distinction between “guilt” cultures and “shame” cultures, with an assertion that Christian societies were mostly “guilt” cultures (with notable exceptions) and a focus on Japanese culture as a “shame” culture. These assignments are, of course, debatable, and further categories (“fear” culture and the “shame” culture is now sometimes discussed as the “honor-shame” culture) have since been developed. We can also talk about “face” as an aspect of honor-shame cultures and we can debate whether the part of the United States we think of as “the South” is (or formerly was) an honor-type culture where the rest of the country may be something else.

The basic premise of this anthropological view of cultures is that guilt cultures rely on the concepts of justice and punishment (temporal or spiritual) as the enforcer of societal norms and the honor-shame culture relies on the judgment of other by society as the enforcer of norms.

This post is not about an anthropological dissection of social constructs; it is a reflection on the consequences of assigning value to reputation. In my own studies (and I’m accepting this as generally true for sake of discussion), I’ve read writers who argue that many agriculturally-based societies tend to be honor societies (pointing to the agriculturally-dominated economy of the antebellum “South” as an example). I’d like to use this idea to give some form to my thoughts. The argument goes that honor societies (here sometimes contrasted with law societies) use a person’s reputation as a regulatory structure in place of reliance on a legal code. The Southern gentlemen who disavowed a business agreement after the fact would suffer economic consequences for his actions (others would be unwilling to deal with him in the future); this cause-and-effect serves to enforce expectations and provide the predictability and stability that an economy needs to thrive.

It also meant that challenges to a person’s sense of honor unrelated to business dealings had to be vigorously defended, lest an affair unrelated to one’s livelihood bleed over into economic ruin. Hence dueling, honor killings, and all other manner of senseless activities that occupy the fringes of some honor/shame societies, historical and present. It seems especially true that women tend to suffer most from honor-based cultures. I would argue that this is strongly related to the preservation of property rights–both the intense focus on the maintenance of virginity and the use of honor killings as a consequence for premarital sex or adultery stem in great part from controlling who might inherit a family’s property and economic wealth.

That writes large one problem with commoditized reputation: it gives incentive to do things which may be immoral to protect a source of wealth and livelihood. But it also–as with all forms of wealth–has a disproportionate effect, because those will little economic power to begin with are disincentivized to participate in the system. This, in turn, means that those with wealth, reputation and the power that goes along with both being to see those without wealth or reputation as inherently immoral or amoral (though the reliance on this system of honor means that morality is not typically the first motivating factor for anyone). This gives those with power freedom to further exploit and oppress those without by viewing them as morally bankrupt. As Shakespeare’s Apothecary says, “My poverty, but not my will, consents.” Come to think of it, Romeo & Juliet is an excellent example of a contemporary critique of Renaissance European honor culture, given that the crux of the play hangs on the tensive nature of the relationship between love as moral motivator and honor as destroyer of that which love builds up.

Likewise, the Renaissance historian, philosopher and (in my opinion, at least) funny-man, Francesco Guicciardini gave this advice (paraphrased): If you want to ingratiate yourself with someone, do not do a favor for them, ask them for a favor. People would much rather feel that someone is indebted to them than that they are indebted to another, and this creates a bond between you that invites them to return to you to call in that reciprocal favor. The context of the time–Guicciardini was friends with Machievelli and a product of the same tumultuous political systems (and experiments) of early sixteenth century Italy–jibes well with this sort of thinking. But, of course, it is based upon a background of often life-or-death political competitions and the assumption that every man’s ambition should be the accumulation of social, political and economic power. This is the very thing Scripture warns us about, because it skews what is truly important in favor of what is, fleeting, ultimately disappointing and often self-destructive.

And that’s the problem with our tendency to make a commodity of respect and reputation. Our reputations are inextricably bound up in the web of relationships we have with others, our “social networks.” When our focus is on leveraging those relationships–which is really a matter of exploiting the people on the other end of them–we’ve lost sight of the types of relationships we should have with others. Respect merely becomes a currency we cash in for personal benefit. Such an approach removes even the possibility that our relationships are about mutual admiration and celebration of the uniqueness and sacred worth of others.

When we look to the example of Jesus, we see someone who looks past reputation to acknowledge the value of the person. He dines with the sinners and bears harsh words to the Pharisees, whose power and reputations allow them to reject and exploit those “beneath” them.

What would it look like if we viewed respect as something that ought to be shown to every person simply because they, too, are a child of God? What would happen if we stopped talking about “earning respect” and removed our respect for each other as a commodity to be traded for personal benefit? I think we’d have brought the Kingdom of Heaven just a little closer to Earth.

Morality and God’s Choice, Part I: Divine Command Theory

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(This is the 7th of 17 posts in my self-imposed “200 for 200” challenge. Send your friends my way!)

In thinking about the conflict over sexuality in the United Methodist Church–and the impending General Conference later this month, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about morality in general. This is in great part because many conservatives within the Church have made the sexuality issue one of morality in that they say that they cannot be in fellowship with those who support the “immoral” practice of homosexuality.

With that background, I’m not actually interested in discussing (in this post, at least), the sexuality issues before the UMC–there’s plenty of discussion to be had on that topic, which I’ve written on in the past and will continue to do. Here, though, I’d like to talk more generally about morality.

The Source–and What Does That Mean?

Most Christians will tell you that God is the source of all morality. I would agree; if God is the Creator of all that is, then it necessarily follows that morality in any absolute sense flows from God and God’s creation. For many, though, that’s the end of the analysis–or rather, the analysis goes like this: all morality comes from God, the Bible is God’s word, therefore the Bible contains the black-and-white guidelines to all moral questions.

If only things were so simple! I’ll be talking about the interpretive issues in such an approach in much greater detail next week in a special post. For now, let’s combine a  logical/philosophical approach with Scripture and see where that leads us.

I’ve written elsewhere a little about Divine Command Theory, the theory that underlies what I’ll call the “Simple Approach” to Christian morality. For convenience, the short definition of the Divine Command Theory is the idea that something is morally good if God commands it because God commanded it.

This is not really a statement of morality, though. It relies on the premise that the created has no right to question the Creator. That may be true, but it is a statement of power and authority one over the other, not one of morality.

Here is probably a good place for a quick break to talk about terminology. I’m going to have to use my own definitions to avoid the sort of circular logic I see in dictionary definitions of the terms that I’ll use. When speaking of “morality,” I mean those thoughts and actions that are “right” or “good”: for now let’s say that this means those thoughts and actions that are beneficial to others and not injurious (we’ll look at a more Biblical definition later). When speaking of “justice,” I’m going to use a common-sense definition of “equity and fairness.”

With this terminology, I’m going to ask a series of related questions:
(1) If morality comes from God, can God be moral?
(2) If the answer to (1) is “yes,” is God moral?
(3) If God is the source of morality, has morality become independent enough of God that humans could evaluate the morality of God’s action?
(4) If the answer to (3) is “yes,” what should our evaluation be?
(5) In light of the answers to the above, how do we determine what God has determined is moral and what is not moral?

Moral action requires free will–without the ability to choose one’s actions, there can be no praise or condemnation for actions taken, because the actor could not have done differently. With this in mind, going to offer two possibilities that comport with Divine Command Theory:

Divine Command Theory, Option 1 – Morality is Mandatory
In this possibility, we accept that Divine Command Theory is an existential truth, a law of reality that simply is, whether God wills it or not.

This approach is on its face unacceptable, for two reasons. The first is the logical necessity of will and causation in moral culpability. In this formulation, God’s action by necessity is moral; there is no possibility of immoral action. This removes any meaning of the word “morality” from God’s action–the terms simply stops making logical sense because there is no alternative and therefore there can be no distinction between moral and immoral.

The second is that such a statement undermines God’s sovereignty (the whole point of the Divine Command Theory in the first place). If God cannot act in a way that is immoral, than God is not impassible and some external force has a power over God, which seriously injures the commonly-accepted idea that the definition of God in the monotheistic sense implies that there is no higher power. Certainly, in the usual Christian understanding, such an admission is extremely problematic.

To be fair, though, I don’t think that the above is the intent of anyone making an argument for Divine Command Theory, so let’s dismiss this out of hand.

Divine Command Theory, Option 2 – Essential Nature
We might be able to salvage the argument made in Option 1 if, instead of saying that Divine Command Theory is a truth of reality that stands above God, we argue that Divine Command Theory is true because morality is simply part of the essential nature of God, therefore it follows that everything that God does is moral and the Theory holds.

Ultimately, though, we are faced with the same dilemma. If God is unable to self-determine whether or not God is moral, we have problem with God’s sovereignty. This is a distinction without a difference from Option 1–we’ve simply moved the mandatory nature of Divine Command Theory from the external to the internal. But, in either place, the claim that Divine Command Theory is inherently true raises the same challenge to God’s sovereignty by placing some restriction on the free and unfettered will of God to determine reality, internal or external.

Divine Command Theory, Option 3 – God is in Control
Under this formulation, Divine Command Theory is a result of God’s choice to create in such a way that Divine Command Theory is a fact of reality. This preserves God’s sovereignty in that it is the will of God that determines the existential fact of Divine Command Theory.

On its face, this option is logically consistent; it allows Divine Command Theory to be true while maintaining God’s sovereignty and God’s place as the arbiter of morality. For these reasons, if we rely solely upon our philosophical approach, we must admit the possibility that Divine Command Theory is true under this statement of it.

But there are consequences (as always). If this statement of Divine Command Theory is true, what does it say about the character and nature of God? Under this formulation, God has chosen amorality for God’s self. God would be amoral because it would be logically inconsistent to say that God acted or commanded immorally if it is necessarily true that God’s action or command is moral. Without a choice between the moral and the immoral, there cannot be a determination of morality because there are is no meaningful difference or alternative. As we stated above, it is the use of the will to choose between alternatives that makes moral responsibility possible.

The only choice between alternatives that God could be said to have made under this ideology is that God chose arbitrarily to be counted as moral. This choice is not so much a choice about moral action but a choice to be unaccountable to anyone (or anything) for moral judgment. God would stand above any concept of morality.

Again, there is no logical problem with such a reality, but there are some practical and Scriptural problems.

In general, the Christian understanding of God includes an acknowledgment that God is good. It is tempting here to use John 3:16 as a Scriptural support for this idea. For now, though, I’m going to play devil’s advocate and temper that understanding by reference to Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5:44-46, Jesus calls for his followers to love not just those who love them (which even the tax collectors do!) but to love their enemies. For Jesus, love alone is not the factor that determines morality–the choice to love those who may be difficult to love is a sign of morality.

That passage in Matthew in and of itself provides some basis for a Biblical definition of morality. In the last sentence of Chapter 5, Jesus tells us to “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Sidestepping any trinitarian dilemmas there, is that a meaningful statement if we are to understand that God has chosen to be above any human concept of morality?

Likewise, what do we do with Jesus’ statement in Luke 18:19 that “No one is good–except God alone.” Admittedly, that statement could be true under the Divine Command Theory, because God could have decided that God is “moral” and no created thing is (because, of course, no created thing is God) in establishing DCT as a fact of reality. But think about what it says about the nature of God if that’s the way we read the statement. It becomes a reminder only of God’s sovereignty, empty of the hope that lies in a knowledge of God’s goodness.

To take a broader approach, can Divine Command Theory co-exist with most (perhaps all) of our theories of atonement in Christ? If as we trinitarians believe, Jesus Christ is God, and if God is necessarily moral and unable to be questioned on a moral basis by humans, do Jesus’ deeds really count for much as a poultice for the many misdeeds of humanity? If Jesus was incapable of immorality (whether by necessity or by will exercised at the time of Creation), could Jesus be the resolution of Adam’s Fall?

If God so ordered all Creation such that God could never be immoral, would God be just? From a standpoint of pure power, the answer is “yes,” because no created being has the power to question God.  But, from a human perspective (insufficient for a real determination of reality as that is) would God’s judgment of the created be just when God refuses to allow judgment of God’s action by the created?

I have referenced elsewhere the following quotation from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, but it bears repeating here. The character Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw says:

“For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour–you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. ”

Finkle-McGraw goes on to state that that’s not a terribly fair approach to apply to humans, who might earnestly believe the values they espouse but prove through human frailty to fail to meet their own values in their actions. For God, though, there is no such caveat. Regardless of the question of God’s morality, if God were to issue a moral command to humanity that God refused to follow God’s self, there would be an argument against God’s justice there. And we return to the point here, I think: if God chooses to be morally unquestionable by the created, then God has prioritized power and authority over goodness. God would be entitled to do such a thing (how could we resist it?), but is that the God of the Gospels? That’s a question we’ll try to answer in this series.

In the next post, we’ll take a look at Job and God’s response to just this situation–being questioned by the created.