Chapter 2: The Moral Necessity
THE MORAL NECESSITY
We now turn to the second area of philosophic thought, which is man and the dilemma of man. There are, as we have seen, two problems concerning man and his dilemma. The first of them is the fact that man is personal, different from non-man, and yet finite. Because he is finite, he has no sufficient integration point in himself. Again, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, if a finite point does not have an infinite reference point, it is meaningless and absurd.
Yet despite this, man is different from non-man; he is personal; he has the mannishness of man which distinguishes him from non-man. This is the first problem: he is different because of his mannishness, and yet he is finite. He does not have a sufficient integration point within himself.
The second point concerning man and the dilemma of man is what I call the nobility of man. We might not like this term because of its romantic ties with the past, but still there is the wonder of man —but contrasted with this there is his cruelty. So man stands with all his wonder and nobility, and yet also with his horrible cruelty that runs throughout the warp and woof of man’s history.
Or we could express it in yet another way —man’s estrangement from himself and other men in the area of morals. And this brings us to the word “morals.” Up to this point we have concerned ourselves with the problem of metaphysics, but now we enter the area of morals.
Leaving aside the “answer” that says there are not answers in the area of reason, the first answer given to this dilemma of morals is (as in the area of metaphysics) the impersonal beginning. As we consider man’s finiteness and his cruelty, it would certainly seem that these things are not one, but two. Mankind has always thought of these things as being different. Man’s finiteness is his smallness; he is not a sufficient reference point to himself. But his cruelty has always been considered as distinct from his finiteness. Yet we must notice something. If we accept the impersonal beginning, finally we will come to the place where man’s finiteness and his cruelty become the same thing. This is an absolute rule. No matter what kind of impersonality we begin with, whether it is the modern scientist with his energy particles, or the paneverythingism of the East, or neo-orthodox theology, eventually these two things merge into one problem rather than two. With an impersonal beginning, morals really do not exist as morals. If one starts with an impersonal beginning, the answer to morals eventually turns out to be the assertion that there are no morals (in however sophisticated a way this may be expressed). This is true whether one begins with the Eastern pantheism, or the new theology’s pantheism, or with the energy particle. With an impersonal beginning, everything is finally equal in the area of morals. With an impersonal beginning, eventually morals are just another form of metaphysics, of being. Morals disappear and there is only one philosophic area rather than two.
Left in this position, we can talk about what is antisocial, or what society does not like, or even what I do not like, but we cannot talk about what is really right and what is really wrong. If we begin with the impersonal, man’s alienation as he is now is only because of chance; he has become that which is out of line with what the universe has always been, that is, the impersonal. So man’s dilemma, man’s tension, is never on the moral side, if you begin with the impersonal; but rather, if you extend the argument far enough, man has been kicked out of line with the universe as it always has been and is intrinsically.
Assuming the beginning was impersonal, man has, by chance, become a being with aspirations, including moral motions for which there is no ultimate fulfillment in the universe as it is. Man has been “kicked up” in the way that he has developed a feeling of moral motions, when in reality these have no meaning in the universe as it is. Here is the ultimate cosmic alienation, the dilemma of our generation —Giacometti, with his figures standing there always alienated from everybody else and from the spectator as he observes them in the museum. The problem of our generation is a feeling of cosmic alienation, including the area of morals. Man has a feeling of moral motions, yet in the universe as it is, it is completely out of line with what is there.
You may ask why I use the term “moral motions.” I choose the term simply because I am not talking about specific norms. I am talking about the fact that men have always felt that things are right and things are wrong. I am not talking about certain norms being right or wrong. All men have this sense of moral motions. You do not find man without them anywhere back in antiquity. You do not find the little girl prostitute upon the street without some feeling of moral motions. You do not find the determinist, the behaviorist in psychology, without the feeling of moral motions, even if he says morals as morals do not exist. So we find man cast up with a feeling of moral motions, which in reality leads only to a complete cosmic alienation, because if you begin with the impersonal, in the universe as it is there is no place for morals as morals. There is no standard in the universe that gives final meaning to such words as “right” and “wrong.” If you begin with the impersonal, the universe is totally silent concerning any such words.
Thus, to the pantheist, the final wrong or tension is the failure to accept your impersonality. If you look to those places in the East where pantheism has worked itself out more consistently than in our modern liberal theology or the hippie-type of pantheism, you will find that the final wrong in the man, the final Karma, if you will, is the fact that he will not accept his impersonality. In other words, he will not accept who he is.
In the Hindu paneverythingism there is a high development of the fact that there is no ultimate difference between cruelty and non-cruelty. This can be seen clearly in the person of Kali. In all the Hindu representations of God, there is always a feminine figure. Sometimes people say there is a trinity in Hinduism because there are three different faces shown in a bas-relief. But this is only because they do not understand that it is only a bas-relief. There are really five faces in a Hindu presentation —four around, if you have a free-standing figure, and one on top, looking upward, even if you cannot see it or even if it is not actually carved. There is no trinity in Hinduism. Not only is it not three but five, but even more important, these are not persons; they are only manifestations of the final, impersonal god. But one of the manifestations is always feminine, because the feminine must be there as well as the masculine. But interestingly enough, the feminine Kali is also always the destroyer. She is often pictured with great fangs and with skulls hanging around her neck. Why? Because finally, cruelty is just as much a part of what is as is non-cruelty. So you have Vishnu taking his three constructive steps, but on the other hand you must always see Kali, the one who tears down, the one who destroys, the one who is ready to devour your flesh and tear you to pieces. Cruelty is as much a part of all that is as is non-cruelty.
Why is the cruel part always feminine? Nobody knows, but I would hazard a guess that it is a perverted memory concerning Eve. Myth usually says something —it goes back to something —but it has also usually become perverted.
But eventually, as you examine the new theology as well as the pantheism of the East, you come to the place where you cannot rightly speak of right or wrong. In Western religious paneverythingism, we find men trying to stem off this situation, and to retain a distinction between cruelty and non-cruelty. They try to hold off the arrival at the place where they have to acknowledge that there are no basic meanings for the words “right” and “wrong.” But it cannot be done. It is like starting a stone downhill. Beginning with the impersonal, though one may use religious terms and even Christian terms, there is no final absolute and there are no final categories concerning right and wrong. Hence what is left may be worded in many different ways in different cultures, but it is only the relative —that which is sociological, statistical, situational —nothing else. You have situational, statistical ethics —the standard of averages —but you cannot have morality.
Finally, we must understand that in this setting, to be right is just as meaningless as to be wrong. Morals as morals disappear and what we are left with is just metaphysics. We are just the little against the big, and nothing that has meaning in right and wrong.
We are rapidly coming to this in our modern culture. Consider Marshall McLuhan’s concept that democracy is finished. What will we have in place of democracy or morals? He says there is coming a time in the global village (not far ahead, in the area of electronics) when we will be able to wire everybody up to a giant computer, and what the computer strikes as the average at the given moment will be what is right and wrong. You may say that this is farfetched; not so, because you must understand that that is exactly what Kinsey set forth as statistical sequel ethics. It is the way modern Sweden runs its sequel ethics. This is not theoretical. We have come to this place in our Western culture because man sees himself as beginning from the impersonal, from the energy particle and nothing else. We are left with only statistical ethics, and in that setting, there is simply no such thing as morals.
If we use religious language instead of secular language, it may seem to remove the strain somewhat. But when we get behind the religious words, they have no more real meaning than the naturalistic, psychological reduction of morals to conditioning and reflexes. Behind the religious-connotation words, we find only the same problem as we find in the secular world. The concept of morals as morals eventually just disappears. The man who has expressed this better than anyone else is the Marquis de Sade, with his chemical determinism, who simply made this statement: “What is, is right.” No one can argue against this if we begin with an impersonal beginning.
Let us summarize: Beginning with the impersonal, there is no explanation for the complexity of the universe or the personality of man. As I said in the previous chapter, it is not that Christianity is a better answer, but that if you begin with the impersonal, in reality you do not have any answer at all to the metaphysical questions. And the same thing is true in the area of morals. If you begin with an impersonal, then no matter how you phrase that impersonal, there is no meaning for morals.
Now, let us look at the opposite answer —the personal beginning. In this answer, there is a possibility of keeping morals and metaphysics separate. This is a profound thing, though it may sound simple. Whereas the impersonal beginning leads us to a merging of morals and metaphysics, the personal beginning provides the possibility of keeping them separate. In other words, man’s finiteness may be separated from his cruelty.
However, as soon as we say this, we are faced with a tremendous question. If we begin with a personal beginning, and look at man as he now is, how do we explain the dilemma of man’s cruelty? In what perspective do we regard this?
There are two possibilities. The first is that man as he is now in his cruelty is what he has always intrinsically been: that is what man is. The symbol m-a-n equals that which is cruel, and the two cannot be separated. But if it is true that man has always been cruel, we are faced with two problems.
I want to deal with the first of these at length. If man was created by a personal-infinite God, how can we escape the conclusion that the personal God who made man cruel is himself also bad and cruel? This is where the French thinkers Charles Baudelaire and Albert Camus come on the scene. Baudelaire, who was a famous art historian and a great thinker, has a famous sentence: “If there is a God, he is the Devil.” At first, Bible-believing Christians may react negatively to this sentence. But after some thought, a real Christian would agree with Baudelaire that if there is an unbroken line between what man is now and what he has always intrinsically been, then if there is a God, he is the Devil. Although as Christians we would definitely differ from Baudelaire, we would agree with this conclusion if we begin with his premise.
Now, Camus dealt with the same problem from a slightly different viewpoint. He argued that if there is a God, then we cannot fight social evil, for if we do, we are fighting God who made the world as it is. What these two men say is, I think, irrefutable if we accept the basic premise that man stands where he has always stood —that there has been a continuity of intrinsic cruelty.
At this point, there are those who offer a selective answer in the area of irrationality. The first class of answer we dealt with in chapter 1 was the one which says there are no answers —everything is finally chaotic and irrational. Much that is religious, and specifically the Western liberal theology, moves over into the field of irrationality and says, “We have no answer for this, but let us take a step of faith against all reason and all reasonableness and say that God is good.” That is the position of all modern liberal theology, whether it is the old-line rational liberalism or whether it is the Barthian thinking. But this should be seen for what it is: a part of the answer of chaos and irrationality.
I have said that people who argue irrationality to be the answer are always selective about where they will become irrational. That is certainly true of this area. Suddenly, men who have been saying that they are arguing with great reason become irrationalists at this point, and they say that there is only an irrational answer for the question of how God is good. Modern liberal theology is firmly fixed in this classification.
Let us look at this more carefully. As soon as irrationality is brought in at this point, it will lead to tension in two directions at the same time. First, there will be a motion back toward reason. As people argue that God is a good God against all reason and rationality, there is something in them that is in tension. Consequently, liberals who offer this answer frequently split off back into reason, and every time they do, they lose this blindly optimistic answer. As soon as they enter reason, the optimistic answer is gone, because all the optimism concerning God’s goodness rests upon irrationality. If they step back into the area of reason, they are back into pessimism; that is, if there is a God, he is a bad God. In Baudelaire’s words, he is the Devil. As one flees into irrationality at this point, there is the tendency to spin off back into pessimism.
The other tension that is immediately set up when people give this answer is to spin off in the opposite direction, toward making everything irrational. As they spin off toward irrationality, they ask, where do I stop? They tend to say that perhaps one should just accept the whole irrational, chaotic situation, and decide that there is no meaning in the use of religious “god-words” at all. Irrationalism cannot be shut up to saying God is good against all reason. These are the two tensions that are set up as soon as one tries to bring in the answer of irrationality at this crucial point.
The second problem inherent in this situation is that if we say that man in his present cruelty is what man has always been, and what man intrinsically is, how can there be any hope of a qualitative change in man? There may be a quantitative change, that is, he may become just a little less cruel, but there can never be qualitative change. If God has made man as man now is, then this is what man as man is. So we are left with pessimism in regard to man and his actions. These are the two problems that arise if one takes the position that man is made by a personal God, that man has a personal beginning rather than an impersonal beginning, and that man has always been what he now is.
Let us go back, however. Let us say that we are on the side of a personal beginning, that man has been made by that which is personal rather than merely being a part of a total, final, complete, impersonal everything-there-is. We come back to a personal beginning for man, man created by a personal God. At this point we must recognize a second possibility: that man as he is now is not what he was; that man is discontinuous with what he has been, rather than continuous with what he has been. Or, to put it another way, man is now abnormal —he has changed.
This involves yet another question and choice: If God changed him, or made him abnormal, then he is still a bad God, and we have solved nothing. But there is another possibility: that man, created by God as personal, has changed himself —that he stands at the point of discontinuity rather than continuity not because God changed him but because he changed himself. Man as he now is by his own choice is not what he intrinsically was. In this case we can understand that man is now cruel, but that God is not a bad God. This is precisely the Judeo-Christian position.
We have taken all the philosophical possibilities and we have seen what is wrong, and where they lead in each case. Now we have come to the other possibility, the Judeo-Christian position. There was a space-time, historic change in man. There is a discontinuity and not a continuity in man. Man, made in the image of God and not programmed, turned by choice from his proper integration point at a certain time in history. When he did this, man became something that he previously was not, and the dilemma of man became a true moral problem rather than merely a metaphysical one. Man, at a certain point of history, changed himself, and hence stands, in his cruelty, in discontinuity with what he was, and we have a true moral situation: morals suddenly exist. Everything hangs upon the fact that man is abnormal now, in contrast to what he originally was.
The difference between Christian thinking and the non-Christian philosophy has always been at this point. The non-Christian philosopher has always said that man is normal now, but biblical Christianity says he is abnormal now. It is interesting in this regard that the later Heidegger saw that you could not come up with final answers if you said that man is always normal, and he in his own way says man is abnormal. But he proposed a very different kind of abnormality, an epistemological one, at the point of Aristotle. This does not give any real answer to the problem, but it is intriguing that Heidegger, perhaps the greatest of the modern non-Christian philosophers, did see that the position that man is normal leads to a dead end.
When you come to the Christian answer, however, that is, that man is abnormal now because at a point of space-time history he changed himself (not epistemologically but morally), four things immediately emerge.
1. We can now explain what is, namely, that man is now cruel, without God being a bad God.
2. There is a hope of a solution for this moral problem which is not intrinsic to the mannishness of man. If his cruelty is intrinsic to the mannishness of man —if that is what man always has been intrinsically, then there is no hope of a solution. But if it is an abnormality, there is a hope of a solution. It is in this setting that the substitutionary, propitiatory death of Christ ceases to be an incomprehensible concept. In liberal theology, the death of Christ is always an incomprehensible god-word. But in this setting to which we have come, the substitutionary death of Christ now has meaning. It is not merely god-words or an upper-story, existential thing. It has solid meaning. We can have the hope of a solution concerning man if man is abnormal now.
3. On this basis, we can have a real ground for fighting evil, including social evil and social injustice. Modern man has no real basis for fighting evil, because he sees man as normal —whether he comes out of the paneverythingism of the East or modern liberal theology, or out of the paneverythingism of everything’s being reduced (including man) to only the energy particle. But the Christian has —he can fight evil without fighting God. He has the solution for Camus’s problem: we can fight evil without fighting God, because God did not make things as they are now —as man in his cruelty has made them. God did not make man cruel, and he did not make the results of man’s cruelty. These are abnormal, contrary to what God made, and so we can fight the evil without fighting God.
In another one of my books, I have used the account of Jesus before the tomb of Lazarus. To me, what Jesus did at the tomb of Lazarus sets the world on fire; it becomes a great shout into the morass of the twentieth century. Jesus came to the tomb of Lazarus. The One who claims to be God stood before the tomb, and the Greek language makes it very plain that he had two emotions. The first was tears for Lazarus, but the second emotion was blinding anger. He was furious, and he could be furious at the evil of death without being furious with himself as God. This is tremendous in the context of the twentieth century. When I look at evil —the abnormal cruelty that is not the thing as God made it —my reaction should be the same. I am able not only to cry for the evil, but I can be angry at the evil —as long as I am careful that egoism does not enter into my reaction. I have a basis to fight the thing that is abnormal to what God has made.
The Christian should be in the front line, fighting the results of man’s cruelty, for we know that it is not what God has made. We are able to be angry at the results of man’s cruelty without being angry at God or being angry at what is normal.
4. We can have real morals and moral absolutes, for now God is absolutely good, with the total exclusion of evil from God. God’s character is the moral absolute of the universe. Plato was entirely right when he held that unless you have absolutes, morals do not exist. Here is the complete answer to Plato’s dilemma; he spent his time trying to find a place to root his absolutes, but he was never able to do so because his gods were not enough. But here is the infinite-personal God, who has a character from which all evil is excluded, and so his character is the moral absolute of the universe.
It is not that there is a moral absolute behind God that blinds man and God, because that which is farthest back is always finally God. Rather, it is God himself and his character which is the moral absolute of the universe.
Again, as in the area of metaphysics, we must understand that this is not simply the best answer —it is the only answer in morals for man in his dilemma. The only answer in the area of morals, as true morals, including the problem of social evil, turns upon the fact of God’s being there. If God is not there (not just the word “God,” but God himself being there, the God of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures), there is no answer at all to the problem of evil and morals. Again, it is not only necessary that he be there, but that he is not silent. There is a philosophic necessity in both metaphysics and morals that he is there and that he is not silent. He has spoken, in verbalized, propositional form, and he has told us what his character is.
Evangelicals often make a mistake today. Without knowing it, they slip over into a weak position. They often thank God in their prayers for the revelation we have of God in Christ. This is good as far as it goes, and it is wonderful that we do have a factual revelation of God in Christ. But I hear very little thanks from the lips of evangelicals today for the propositional revelation in verbalized form that we have in the Scriptures. He must indeed not only be there, but he must have spoken. And he must have spoken in a way that is more than simply a quarry for emotional, upper-story experiences. We need propositional facts. We need to know who he is, and what his character is, because his character is the law of the universe. He has told us what his character is, and this becomes our moral law, our moral standard. It is not arbitrary, for it is fixed in God himself, in what has always been. It is the very opposite of what is relativistic. It is either this or morals are not morals, but simply sociological averages or arbitrary standards imposed by society or the state. It is one or the other.
It is important to remember that it is not improper for men to ask these questions concerning metaphysics and morals, and Christians should point out that there is no answer to these questions except that God is there and he is not silent. Students and other young people should not be told to keep quiet when they ask these questions. They are right to ask them, but we should make it plain to them that these are the only answers. It is this or nothing.
But if this is true, then man is not just metaphysically small, but really morally guilty. He has true moral guilt, and he needs a solution for it. As I have said, it is here that the substitutionary, propitiatory death of Christ is needed and fits in. And his death must be substitutionary and propitiatory, or the whole thing has no meaning. There is nothing wrong with man’s being metaphysically small, in being finite. This is the way God made him in the first place. But we need a solution for our true moral guilt before the absolutely good God who is there. That is our need.[3]
Finally, as in the area of metaphysics, we must stress that the answer can never lie in the word “God”; that will never do. Modern men are trying to find answers just in the word “God,” in god-words. This is true of the new theology, the hippie cult, and some of the “Jesus people.” But the answer is not in the use of the word, but in its content: what God has told us concerning himself, as being the infinite-personal God and the true Trinity.
In the area of morals, we have none of these answers except on the basis of a true, space-time, historic fall. There was a time before the Fall, and then man turned from his proper integration point by choice, and in so doing, there was a moral discontinuity; man became abnormal. Remove that, and the Christian answer in the area of morals is gone. Often I find evangelicals playing games with the first half of Genesis. But if you remove a true, historic, space-time fall, the answers are finished. It is not only that historic, biblical Christianity as it stands in the stream of history is gone, but every answer we possess in the area of morals, in the area of man and his dilemma, is gone.