Is God's Moral Perfection Reducible to His Love?

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, there is a video on YouTube of your lecture on God’s moral perfection – it is titled, “Is God’s Moral Perfection Reducible to His Love?”^[1] We encourage everyone to check out that video. But today let’s synopsize it and interact with some of the questions and comments that have shown up on that video. Start with the title. It is a question: “Is God’s Moral Perfection Reducible to His Love?”

DR. CRAIG: Yes. God is a morally perfect being and as such has many moral properties such as goodness, fairness, justice, love, kindness, compassion, and so forth. Some theologians have suggested that we can reduce all of these moral qualities to one, namely, God's agape love – that any other moral property that God has is, in the end, reducible to his love. So that's the question that I want to explore in this talk.

KEVIN HARRIS: The first thing you point out is God's being worthy of worship. We've talked about this in podcasts. Suppose a powerful alien came to Earth and he brought a cure for all diseases and he fixed the economy, and you point out that such a being may merit our admiration but would still fall short of being worthy of worship. Why is that?

DR. CRAIG: I think it's because to be worthy of worship requires moral perfection. A being that was very, very good but nevertheless morally imperfect in any way would not be worthy of worship – of adoration and just unreserved self-giving – in the way that God is. So it's essential to the very nature of God to be morally perfect.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next you look at the biblical data on God's attributes of goodness, his love, his mercy, his kindness, and so on. What do we often get wrong when referring to God's goodness?

DR. CRAIG: I thought, when I approached this topic initially, that God's moral perfection would be identical to what the Bible calls God's goodness – that God is good. Indeed, he's so good he's morally perfect. But what I found in looking at the Scripture is that that is not really correct. The way the Scripture uses the word “goodness” of God, it refers to his generosity or his beneficence. The Psalms, for example, are filled with praises to God for his goodness to Israel. It's not really the goodness of God that we're after when we talk about moral perfection. Rather, the word that the Bible would use to express God's moral perfection would be his righteousness. God is perfectly righteous, and that would encapsulate the notion of his moral perfection.

KEVIN HARRIS: How is this related to the so-called New Perspective on Paul?

DR. CRAIG: The New Perspective on Paul was a movement among New Testament theologians to provide an analysis of the righteousness of God in terms, not of God's moral perfection, but in terms of God's faithfulness to his covenant. Advocates of the New Perspective said that when Paul speaks of the righteousness of God, what Paul really means is God's faithfulness. God is faithful to the covenant that he has made with Israel or with Christian believers, but it is not a reference to his moral qualities or perfection.

KEVIN HARRIS: How do you critique that view?

DR. CRAIG: When you analyze how Paul uses the expression “the righteousness of God” he does not use it to refer to God's faithfulness to his covenant nor is this the way the Old Testament uses the expression “God's righteousness.” Rather, righteousness in the Scripture is a moral property that denotes a moral norm that is centered in God himself. It expresses itself in God's goodness to his people, but then also in his punishment of the wicked. God, being righteous, can be counted upon to restore right moral order in the world, and that will involve not only rescuing the righteous but will also involve punishing the wicked. So, fortunately, advocates of the New Perspective have backed away from their reductionistic analysis of the righteousness of God and have now come to recognize, I think, that God's righteousness is, in fact, a moral property that is not simply equivalent to his faithfulness.

KEVIN HARRIS: All of this brings up an important issue concerning God's justice. Let's touch on that a little bit. You point out a distinction between God's punitive or retributive justice when he deals with sin and wickedness, and a natural consequences theory. Can you summarize that for us?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. On the theory of retributive justice, God gives people their just desert – the guilty deserve to be punished. Therefore, it is good that God punishes the guilty. On the other hand, the innocent ought not to be punished, and therefore God will not punish the innocent. That is the notion of retributive justice. Now, the natural consequences theory says that God does not, in fact, punish sin. Sin simply has the natural consequence of being self-destructive. It alienates one from God and from the life of God. So sin is rather like having a disease. When you get all the horrible symptoms and debilitating effects of a disease, these are not punishments of the disease. These are simply the natural consequences of having that disease. Similarly, the natural consequences view treat sin as rather like a disease that we have that has these very deleterious consequences including ultimately separation from God. But God does not, in fact, exercise retributive justice. He does not give the guilty their just desert.

KEVIN HARRIS:  When I think about it, most laypeople – I look back at my own history of thought – it's like a combination of all this. It is kind of like the atonement. I'm so glad that you cleared up some things on the atonement in your book. Now you're clarifying this a little bit. We talk about retribution because people deserve it, but then we talk about, “Hey, it's a natural consequence.”  So it's kind of a combination. Where do you fall on this? Which way do you lean?

DR. CRAIG: I agree with you. I think this is a both-and. It's not an either-or. Of course sin has natural consequences. When you are alienated from God and focused on self, you become a bad person. You become selfish, greedy, grasping, unloving, and so forth. So of course there are natural consequences of sin in our lives. I think it helps to avoid sin when we realize how really self-destructive sin is – that when we succumb to temptation, we are inflicting injury on ourselves. So I agree that, of course, sin has deleterious natural consequences. But nevertheless the Scriptures clearly state that God exhibits retributive justice. He does give the guilty their just desert and that he will by no means clear the guilty. The Scriptures are filled with words like retribution or vengeance that indicate that God's justice is, in some considerable measure, retributive. So it's both-and. Death, separation from God, eternal destruction – these are both the just desert of the wicked and also a natural consequence.

KEVIN HARRIS: At last count, there were over 50 comments in the comments section of this video. Let's look at some of those and get you to interact with this. First, Ichthus77 says,

Thank you, and I mostly agree, but… God’s love, manifested/demonstrated/concretized in Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and future return/restoration, is composed of his righteousness and justice . . . The Lord disciplines those he loves, and it is unloving to leave us lost and wallowing forever, unless we choose it. Respectfully submitted.

DR. CRAIG: Let's cut some of the verbiage in Ichthus’ question and see the core of his claim. The core claim here, he says, is God's love is composed of his righteousness and justice. That seems to me to be incorrect. I would say God's righteousness is composed of his love and justice. Love and justice are the two constituent parts that make up God's righteousness. So I think that Ichthus has misexpressed the relationship between these moral properties.

KEVIN HARRIS: Kind of an involved comment here from Christine Chandler. Let's see if we can look at it. It says,

Jesus stated that the wicked shall be cast into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. This idea of God casting the wicked off of the Earth is repeated in the book of Job.

It is stated in second Thessalonians that the wicked shall be punished at the end of this age "because they had no love of truth but delighted in injustice (wickedness).

. . .

Certainly, the wicked will be able to see the Earth ruled under Christ and His priests. They shall see it but not partake of it . . .

What is the joy of the truly wicked? It is to upset and destroy all that is good. They are like addicts attempting to fill their own emptiness with more drugs. So it will be with the unredeemable wicked that their Hell shall be to see the Earth and all creation free from injustice, murder, thefts and deception but they shall not partake of it nor ever touch the Earth again.

DR. CRAIG: I can understand why Christine would offer this speculation that part of the torment of the wicked in hell will be seeing the goodness of God on Earth in a creation free of sin and being unable to partake of it. But, honestly, I don't see that anywhere taught in the Bible. I think this is just conjecture on Christine's part, but there isn't any biblical basis for thinking that the damned in hell will be observing the going on of the redeemed in the new heavens and the new Earth.

KEVIN HARRIS: Hyreon says,

Does the existence of Hell really provide concrete proof for retribution? Is it not possible that existence in Hell is somehow better than not existing at all? Not those suffering in Hell, but for some other purpose.

DR. CRAIG: It seems to me that the doctrine of hell really does provide a very compelling reason to think that God's justice is retributive because at that point all possibility of redemption is passed. There isn't any sort of reformative purpose that could be served by divine punishment at that point. It is simply to give the wicked their just desert. Otherwise, why not simply annihilate the damned? If God were to simply annihilate them then they would not get their just desert, they would not be punished, but they would be put out of existence. It's hard to see any reason for keeping them in existence apart from retributive justice demands it. Now, I would agree that there can be some other purpose served by having the damned in hell, namely, the execution of retributive justice. But I don't think it's possible for existence in hell to be better than being annihilated. It is far better not to exist than to exist in hell. So it's better, yes, in the sense that there is the good of retributive justice, but that is exactly my position that I'm defending. It is certainly not good for those who are in hell.

KEVIN HARRIS: Dr. Knows says, “William Lane Craig is the GOAT.” Bill, do you know what being a GOAT means?

DR. CRAIG: I do because we watch Buccaneers football and know about Tom Brady.

KEVIN HARRIS: About a year ago I had to ask my nephew because he was always saying that. G-O-A-T – the GOAT – is the greatest of all time. I'm glad I knew that or I thought the guy would be putting you down here.

DR. CRAIG: Right! Traditionally, it’s an insult to be the goat.

KEVIN HARRIS: Not anymore! If you're the GOAT, you're the G-O-A-T. You're the greatest of all time. He continues,

However, as a classical theist, this is where I have to completely disagree with WLC. God simply is each of his attributes and each of his attributes are simply names we give to the experience of God’s simple being that we interpret as various attributes. Classical theism is far and away a more biblically sound and empirically consistent understanding of God's being.

DR. CRAIG: Let's leave aside that last claim that biblical theism is classical theism that affirms this very, very strong doctrine of divine simplicity. I think the more fundamental point is that this so-called identity thesis that God's love and justice are identical and that his justice is reducible to his love is not something that is part of divine simplicity. Often divine simplicity is compared to the different colors of the spectrum. All of the different colors of the spectrum – red and yellow and blue and green and so on – are part of white light. They combine to make this simple white light, but nevertheless red is not the same as yellow and they're not the same as green. These are distinct. So, similarly, love and justice and omniscience and omnipotence are different properties even if they are merely expressions of some overriding super-property which is simple and just is God himself. This is a quite different claim than the claim that the content of God's justice is the same as the content of his love.

KEVIN HARRIS: That clears that up. The Autodidactic Layman says,

I’m having a really difficult time understanding what would motivate God to be righteous in the first place. The only reason I could think to affirm Christianity over some form of Deism is precisely the fact that because God is Love, God acts. . . . That’s why I lean more towards agreeing with the view that Dr. Craig is critiquing here, but I’m going to listen to this a few more times before I say much more.

DR. CRAIG: I appreciate Autodidactic Layman keeping an open mind on this. God doesn't need to be motivated to be righteous. The idea here is that love and justice are essential properties of God and therefore God is necessarily loving and just. He doesn't need any sort of motivation. This belongs to his very essence or nature. The question before us is: Is God's justice a different moral property than his love? And I think, as I've argued, that it clearly is.

KEVIN HARRIS:  Stvdia Theologica says,

The real question is can we make room for moral imperfection in God by reducing His Love? The answer, of course, is no. God's Love cannot be reduced simply because it is an inconvenience for traditional notions.

DR. CRAIG: While I don't see the relevance of this comment, he's certainly right in saying that God's moral perfection cannot be reduced. We cannot attenuate his love; neither can we attenuate his justice. These are co-equal essential attributes of the divine nature.

KEVIN HARRIS: Final question here from this comment that we're looking at. Grant Holland said,

Sin is the enemy, not God's wrath. Craig ropes in the penitent with "God won't clear the wicked" But God does clear the penitent, these are not the same category.  This thesis makes God the wicked servant of Math 18, who will not forgive without retribution. I think the damage was done by Auguatines works covenant, it gets the whole character of God's relationship to man wrong..

DR. CRAIG: I agree with Grant that sin is the enemy, not God's wrath. God's wrath is simply the affective expression of his perfect justice. I would simply argue biblically with Grant, as I do in the talk, that over and over again the Bible ascribes to God retributive justice. So his forgiveness is free and offered to every person I would say, but if you are impenitent and refuse God's grace and forgiveness then he has no choice but to give you what you deserve – your just desert. So there's no inconsistency between God's being all-loving and forgiving and his being perfectly just.

KEVIN HARRIS: If you could, summarize some things for us here as we end today's podcast. It seems like you're trying to bring some clarity to some issues – clear some things up – including the identity thesis. What are some things that you hope to clarify and perhaps even correct in your talk?

DR. CRAIG: What I want to help people see is that God's moral perfection – his righteousness – comprises two co-equal elements; namely, his perfect justice and his perfect love. And that these are compatible with each other and are beautifully expressed at the cross. At the cross of Christ we see the love and the justice of God kiss. At the cross we see God's love as he himself bears the punishment for sin that we deserve. He takes upon himself the just desert of our wickedness and sin. But at the same time we see at the cross God’s perfect righteousness as he justly punishes sin and bears that himself. So at the cross both the love and the justice of God find their perfect fulfillment.^[2]