Divine Love Theory and the Trinity

KEVIN HARRIS: We’re looking at an article^[1], Bill, by Adam Lloyd Johnson who co-authored a book on God and morality with you – A Debate on God and Morality: What is the Best Account of Objective Moral Values and Duties? He says in this article,

The moral argument is often presented as follows:

1.     There are objective moral truths.

2.     God provides the best explanation for objective moral truths.

3.     Therefore, God exists.

That’s not usually how you present it, Bill, but comment on that syllogism if you would, please.

DR. CRAIG: The formulation I usually give is a deductive argument that goes like this:

1. If God does not exist then objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Adam prefers an abductive formulation rather than a deductive formulation of the moral argument. This is the version that is championed, for example, by David Baggett who is one of the principal defenders of the moral argument today. Basically what it does is that it begins with the accepted fact that objective moral values exist. It's taken as common property for both sides of the argument that they accept that, and then the argument is: Well, what's the best explanation for objective moral values? The secularist will attempt to give one account of objective moral values and duties. Then the theist will offer his account. And the argument will be: Which account is the best explanation?

KEVIN HARRIS: Dr. Johnson continues in this article,

Because relative morality has been so popular, Christians have mostly focused on defending premise one. However, many atheists are now affirming objective morality. In particular, Erik Wielenberg pointed out that “… a brand of moral realism that hearkens back to G. E. Moore has found new life . . . In the early twentieth century Moore argued that moral goodness was not a natural property, such as human pleasure, like the utilitarians maintained, nor a supernatural property connected somehow with God. Instead, he argued that goodness is a simple non-natural property.

To my ears, that sounds rather Platonic. How could goodness be a non-natural property, I wonder?

DR. CRAIG: It is Platonic in Wielenberg’s hands. He makes it very clear in his book that he is a moral Platonist. The first portion of the book is dedicated to the metaphysics of morals, and he defends the view that there are objective moral properties that are Platonic or ideal or abstract objects. He maintains that somehow these abstract objects come to supervene upon physical states of affairs. For example, two people loving each other. That's a physical state of affairs. And then this abstract Platonic moral property of “Goodness” comes and supervenes on that physical state of affairs so that these two people loving each other is good. So a major part of the theory as he originally presents it is Platonism. And in our debate that was what I perceived to be the Achilles Heel of the position, and I really went after it.

KEVIN HARRIS: Continuing this article, Johnson says,

. . . David Enoch, described his position as the idea that “… there are response-independent …, irreducibly normative truths … objective ones, that when successful in our normative inquiries we discover rather than create or construct.” Theistic philosopher C. Stephen Evans even congratulated Enoch for offering what he considers to be the most comprehensive case for objective morality. Enoch explained that when he first defended this position in 2003, he “… claimed the great philosophical advantage of being in the ridiculed minority, putting forward a view many don’t think is even worth considering ….” However, he went on to explain that this position is “now making an impressive comeback,” and noted how Stephen Finlay “classifies this as the now dominant view.” Thus, Christians need to move beyond merely fighting yesterday’s enemy of relative morality and focus more attention on arguing that God is the best explanation for objective morality.

I don't know whether this is good news or bad news. It seems like we Christians made a lot of impact when we argued for the objectivity of moral values and duties which then pointed to God. Now secularists are accepting that they are objective but many still want to avoid God as the best explanation.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, that's exactly right. It really tickled me when he spoke of the great philosophical advantage of being in the ridiculed minority which is a position we've enjoyed for many years. It's such a peculiarity of philosophers that whereas, say, biblical scholars rejoice in being in the majority opinion (that the majority of scholars hold this), philosophers love to be in the minority because it underlines their originality and creativity of having a vigorous defense of a ridiculed minority view. But now Enoch says the view that objective moral values and duties exist is the dominant view. So the question will be: What's the best explanation? My personal view is that we can't let up on either front. We do need to give a robust defense of the objectivity of moral values and duties against the relativists (who are always going to be with us), but as well to try to explain why a theistic account of objective morality is a superior account. We need to be active on both fronts.

KEVIN HARRIS: Johnson continues in the article,

Though Christians agree that God is the best explanation for objective morality, they disagree about how—by His commands, because of His moral nature, through ideas in His mind, as a moral exemplar, in creating human nature with a certain purpose (telos), etc.

Divine Command Theory versus other theories?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. There are a number of theistic accounts of morality. The one that I find particularly persuasive is so-called Divine Command Theory which has been championed by people like Robert Adams, Phillip Quinn, William Alston, Janine Marie Idziak, and others which says that God himself is the paradigm of moral goodness and that his commands to us constitute our moral duties. Now, there are other theistic views. Most popular would probably be some kind of natural law ethic where God is a moral Law Giver who promulgates a moral law. I think, ultimately, all of us theists want to ground objective morality in God in some way. But I do find Adam's Divine Command Theory to be especially persuasive.

KEVIN HARRIS: Johnson starts to get into the crux of his view here. He says,

I’ve developed what I call a Divine Love Theory which proposes that the love between the members of the Trinity is the source and foundation of morality and argue that this is a better explanation of objective morality than atheistic theories.

To construct my theory, I began with Robert Adams’s model and then added to it God’s triunity to expand upon it in significant ways, shed greater light on the nature of morality, and more clearly show how trinitarian theism provides a better explanation for morality than atheistic theories. Adams proposed that God’s nature provides the ultimate foundation for moral value (what’s good and bad) and His commands generate our moral duties, that is, our moral obligations (what’s right and wrong). Duties have to do with what we should, or ought, to do. In moral theory it’s important to distinguish between moral value, what’s good and bad, and moral duty, what’s right and wrong, because in some situations only one or the other applies. For example, there are actions that would be morally good for me to do, such as building an orphanage, but it’s not necessarily my moral duty to do so.

We will get into why he proposes the Trinity in this theory a little bit later in the article but for now you've emphasized the difference between moral values and moral duties in your work.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, that's right. I think that Adam Johnson is articulating this correctly. There's a difference between good and bad and between right and wrong. The first has to do with the moral worth of something, the second has to do with your moral obligations. So a complete theory needs to provide a grounding for both moral values and moral obligations.

KEVIN HARRIS: Continuing he says,

As for the first part of Adams’s theory, moral value, Adams explained that “[t]he part played by God in my account of the nature of the good is similar to that of the Form of the Beautiful or the Good in Plato’s Symposium and Republic. God is the supreme Good, and the goodness of other things consists in a sort of resemblance to God.” According to Adams, humans are morally good when they resemble God in a morally pertinent way. The Bible affirms this idea in that it often explains moral principles (especially the greatest ones—love God and love others), in terms of imaging, resembling, or reflecting God.

DR. CRAIG: Here I have to express reservations about Johnson's theory. He calls it the Divine Love Theory, and he says it proposes that the love between the members of the Trinity is the source and foundation of morality. I think that that is a distorted and lopsided view because, as important as divine love is, it also equally belongs to God's moral perfection to be just and to be holy. This, in fact, was one of the deficits that Robert Adams detected in his early articulation of his Divine Command Theory. He initially said that our duties are constituted by the commands of a loving God, and he was criticized by the great ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre as omitting justice – that it's absolutely critical for moral duty that what you're demanded to do is just. So Adams actually revised his view to take account of not only God's love but also of his justice. Adam Johnson's Divine Love Theory doesn't do that. It bases morality entirely in the divine love to the neglect of God's holiness and justice. I recently came to articulate a position on this while working on divine goodness for my systematic philosophical theology. I gave a paper on the question, “Is God's moral perfection reducible to his love?” – a paper that I presented about a month ago at a conference in Poland. This is now on YouTube for anybody who is interested. In it I criticize this so-called identity thesis that identifies God's moral perfection with his love and try to show how this is in fact biblically inadequate and does not take adequate cognizance of the fact of God's justice which is just as essential and just as significant as divine love. We have to include both in God's moral perfection.

KEVIN HARRIS: So now Johnson gets to the Trinity. He says,

My Divine Love Theory extends this idea by proposing that the inner-trinitarian love provides the ultimate foundation for objective morality and that humans are good when they resemble this divine love in a morally pertinent sense.

DR. CRAIG: This bears out the point I was just making. He says “the inner trinitarian love provides the ultimate foundation for objective morality.” I think that that's a mistake – that is wrong. The foundation for objective morality needs to include both love and justice. So while Adam is right that humans are good when they resemble this divine love in a morally pertinent sense, what about when they're not good? What about when they flout God's moral commands and they act hatefully and wrongly towards one another? Is there no retributive justice on God's part to be demanded as punishment for sin? I think biblically there certainly is. We incur a just desert for our failure to obey God's commands and to resemble his love in a pertinent way. So I think this first sentence of the paragraph you just read illustrates exactly the deficit that I'm talking about.

KEVIN HARRIS: He continues,

There are several reasons it’s important to include God’s inner-trinitarian love when it comes to explaining how God serves as the foundation of moral value. For example, because the inner-trinitarian love is a key aspect of God, it should be expected that this love would aid us in understanding how God serves as the foundation of morality. To say morality is only based on His nature doesn’t include the entire picture of all that God is because, by leaving out the inner-trinitarian love, it ignores the important relational aspect of God that’s helpful in understanding the roots of love and morality. Including these divine relationships in a moral theory provides a more complete picture of how God is the source of morality and helps resolve various philosophical problems and puzzles. Thus, my Divine Love Theory brings in important truths regarding God’s triunity and shows how love exists at the highest level of ultimate reality, that is, within God.

That makes sense to many ears because a lot of laymen have been taught that there is giving and receiving of love possible in the Trinity thus that is the true nature of love. In fact, Johnson writes, “if God is the ultimate reality, and if He exists as three divine persons in loving communion, then love is the basic fabric of reality.”

DR. CRAIG: That again is this identity thesis – love is the basic fabric of reality. That God's moral character is identical with or reducible to his love. And that leaves out divine justice. It is radically incomplete. Therefore, although I like his emphasis upon relationality in God himself and the importance of maintaining love relations, that's very positive. But it's incomplete. I think Adam needs to supplement his theory with a robust account of God's retributive justice and holiness.

KEVIN HARRIS: A couple more excerpts that we'll look at next. He writes,

The second part of Adams’s model is a theory of moral duties. According to Adams, our moral duties arise out of our relationship with God and are generated by God’s commands. Adams has made a strong case that moral obligations in general arise from a system of relationships. My Divine Love Theory builds upon this idea by adding to it important truths concerning the Trinity. . . . understanding the trinitarian context of ultimate reality helps us understand how and why obligation arises from relationships, as Adams proposed. Since God exists as divine persons in loving communion, there’s a sense in which ultimate reality itself is relational and thus all of reality takes place in a relational context. In other words, relationships were not something new that came about when God created other beings sometime in the finite past but are a necessary part of ultimate reality. This tells us that relationships are part of the fabric of being itself and thus we shouldn’t be surprised that relationships play such a large role in moral obligation.

I'm curious – do you think that if God were just one person (like some monotheistic religions teach) that this loving, relational, communal aspect of morality would not be possible?

DR. CRAIG: Well, I think that would be difficult to prove because it seems to me that a unitarian God could still create created persons and love them and cherish them and hope that they would love him as well so that there would still be relations that would be important to morality. But I think Adam would be right. It wouldn't be grounded in ultimate reality in that God himself would not be relational. I think the advantage of the Trinity is that those relationships are in the very being of God himself and not merely something that's contingently created when God creates human persons. So I think on a unitarian view God could command us to relate but he wouldn't model it for us, whereas on the trinitarian view God actually models these relationships for us, he doesn't simply command us to relate.

KEVIN HARRIS: The article concludes,

In addition, the trinitarian communion illumines Jesus’s proclamation that the greatest commandments are to love God and to love others and His explanation that all of God’s other commands rest upon this foundation (Matt. 22:36–40). They rest on this foundation because these two greatest commands instruct us to be like God, that is, like the members of the Trinity who both love God (the other members of the Trinity) and love others (the other members of the Trinity). Love is the basis of morality and it originates from within God’s inner life of three divine members in perfect loving communion with one another.

Bill, your conclusions?

DR. CRAIG: This paragraph was interesting to me because it is the same justification that defenders of the so-called identity thesis like Jordan Wessling provide for equating God's moral perfection with his love. I think that the argument fails to take account of what one's just desert is for failing to keep God's commandments. It articulates our moral obligations to God and one another in terms of these loving relationships, but it fails to provide any account of one's just desert for sin, for failing to keep God's commands. Therefore, I think it's seriously inadequate as a moral theory.

KEVIN HARRIS: In conclusion, I want to encourage people to go to YouTube and see your lecture on this^[2] and will be able to get some further details on this.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. Thank you. The title again is “Is God’s Moral Perfection Reducible To His Love?”.^[3]