The Moral Argument(s) and Christian Theology, Part II: Sanctification

The first installment of this series covered forgiveness. To be made right or reconciled with a holy God involves forgiveness for the many ways in which all of us fall short. More than this is required, but such forgiveness is an ineliminably important part of this process. Mercifully, because of God’s provision in Christ, forgiveness is available for those who seek it.

Another part of a reconciled relationship with God has to do with the next step or stage of salvation—still tied to the theology of “justification,” but usually more associated with what theologians call “sanctification.” Intimate and organic connections obtain between justification and sanctification, but rather than offering an exegetical analysis, we are using these categories as a way to connect the parts of Christian salvation with aspects of the moral argument. After our conversion to Christ, we are still left with a moral gap—the space between where we are morally and spiritually, on the one hand, and where we need to be, on the other. We have a long way to go. That gap needs to be closed. To be forgiven without being changed leaves too much undone.

Another way to put it is like this: we need more than our sins to be forgiven; we need our sin problem itself to be taken away. A documentary concerning the issue of nutrition and physical health I saw a few years ago may be helpful here by way of analogy. One of its basic claims is that doctors do not really produce health. About the best they can do is remove some barriers that impede and stand in the way of health. What actually produces health is the properly functioning body—a healthy immune system, a body, properly treated and fed, doing what it was meant to do.

This is most clearly seen when it comes to chronic diseases. Doctors and pharmaceutical companies cannot fix such problems. What they can do is provide medicines that help alleviate and manage certain symptoms and make life more comfortable for the patient, even while the affliction persists, managed to one degree or another. Although medical practitioners are rather limited in what they are able to do, the body is remarkably resilient in its ability to ward off diseases, recover from various injuries, and heal itself. This is why proper nutrition and exercise are so important, because they enable the body to do what it does best. Chronically undernourished or sedentary bodies eventually become impaired in their ability to perform their proper functions.

The point of the documentary was well made: there is a crucial difference between genuine health, on the one hand, and merely improving conditions, on the other, however much a blessing the latter can be. Another fitting analogy would be the distinction between pulling out a weed versus killing its root. The former is at best a temporary fix; the underlying problem will recur until the latter step is taken.

A similar distinction holds in the arena of morality. One option is merely to deal with symptoms, settling for marginal moral improvements, avoiding hurtful consequences by our actions. True achievement of integrity, virtue, and holiness, though, requires considerably more. In light of what seem to be some deeply entrenched patterns of selfishness and moral weakness endemic to the human condition, we need powerful resources to meet the moral demand and effect the needed change in our character.

Benjamin Franklin once tried to do this on his own, setting himself to the formidable task of achieving moral perfection. In “Arriving at Perfection,” an excerpt from his Autobiography, he wrote about his plans to conquer all imperfections that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead him into, but “I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined. While my care was employ’d in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason.”

Immanuel Kant recognized that we fall short of what morality requires, and so he said we need to have moral faith: the belief that the moral life is possible. But in light of our moral malady, this requires radical transformation. Can we be transformed? This is a second great existential moral need, after forgiveness. Perhaps owing to his Lutheran upbringing, Kant was quite sure that human beings have a deep moral problem, a tendency to be curved inward on themselves, an intractable ethical taint, a deeply flawed moral disposition in need of a revolution. Kant saw clearly that the moral demand on us is very high, while also recognizing that we have a natural propensity not to follow it.

Malcolm Muggeridge once said that the depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact. In Kant, the parallel suggestion seems to be not just that we happen to fail to meet the moral demand, but that our failure is inevitable. We have a problem, one too deep for us to solve on our own. Humans are not essentially good. We are broken, deeply broken, and need to be healed at the root, not merely the symptoms removed. Like Clay Jones puts it, all of us are born Auschwitz-enabled—the people responsible for such unspeakable atrocities of history were not, as human beings go, preternaturally bad people. They were garden variety human beings who, when certain circumstances presented themselves, behaved deplorably. All of us have that hideous potential. Moral ugliness lurks in each of our hearts. There is something in need of radical fixing deep within us. We need major moral surgery.

The moral standard remains obstinately in place, but because of our moral weakness, corrupt characters, irremediable selfishness, intractable egoism, and the like, we are unable to meet that standard. An axiomatic deontic principle is that “ought implies can” in some sense, and yet we seem to be obligated to do what we simply cannot. How can this make sense? Augustine offered the crucial insight: God bids us to do what we cannot, in order that we might learn our dependence on Him.  We cannot live as we ought in our own strength alone, but we can by God’s grace, with divine assistance.

So, even without sugarcoating our brokenness, there is great hope. Christianity says the needed resources for transformation are available. Although we cannot meet the moral demand on our own, God himself has made it possible, if we but submit and allow Him to do it through us. It may well require a painful process, but it is possible.

Having started his book Mere Christianity with talk of the moral gap between what we are and what we ought to be, Lewis then explained his reason for doing so. His explanation is telling. The passage can be found in his concluding paragraph of Book 1:

My reason was that Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing. Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. … It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power—it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk. When you know you are sick, you will listen to the doctor. When you have realized that our position is nearly desperate you will begin to understand what the Christians are talking about. They offer an explanation of how we got into our present state of both hating goodness and loving it. They offer an explanation of how God can be this impersonal mind at the back of the Moral Law and yet also a Person. They tell you how the demands of this law, which you and I cannot meet, have been met on our behalf, how God Himself becomes a man to save man from the disapproval of God.

God can do more than merely ameliorate the symptoms of our chronic moral malady. In the face of our urgent need to become not just better people, but new people, and our desperate need for a revolution of the will and for radical moral transformation, the death and resurrection of Christ is indeed “good news.” This issue of transformation, again, is the theological category of sanctification. Just as God answers our need for forgiveness, God’s grace in sanctification answers our need for radical moral transformation.

By the way, biblical holiness is not just individual, but social. And here one like Paul Copan has done us a great service by bringing a historical twist to the moral argument. He has shown how historically it has been Christ followers who were largely responsible for such significant social advances as building orphanages, arguing for the inherent dignity of the handicapped and infirmed, fighting for women’s suffrage, standing against foot-binding, and so forth. This investigation gets into historical contingencies, but it remains an important empirical consideration, one that brings to mind John Wesley’s refrain that there is no holiness without social holiness.

Having discussed our need for and God’s gracious gift of both forgiveness and transformation, next time we will discuss a third deep existential and spiritual need, namely, to be morally healed completely, saved to the uttermost.

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.

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The Moral Argument(s) and Christian Salvation, Part I: Forgiveness

Over the next three installments, we will extend the discussion of moral apologetics and Christian theology by connecting the moral argument—particularly one version of it—with three deep moral needs we as human beings display: our need to be forgiven, our need to be changed, and our need to be perfected. Each of these profoundly existential needs we possess as human beings corresponds to an important aspect of Christian salvation.

When I say “the moral argument,” I’m using that phrase in a general sort of way. In truth there’s more than one moral argument. There’s a whole range of them. If you prefer, you can think of one moral argument with a number of different parts. At least most of the time that works pretty well since the different variants of the argument tend to be rather consistent with one another. The specific formulation of the moral argument we will consider today is what John Hare calls the “performative” version or, for reasons that will become clear, an “argument from grace.”

You might remember in Book 1 of Mere Christianity C. S. Lewis says two things are at the heart of our understanding of reality: First, there’s a moral law, and second, we all fall short of it. On his claim we can start to build a performative moral argument. There is a moral standard that’s objective and universal. It’s binding and authoritative on us, but we invariably fall short of meeting it. This results in the “gap” between the best we can do and what morality requires. And this gap needs addressing. We find ourselves as having fallen short, and we know it.

How do we know we’ve got a moral problem on our hands? One way, you might say, is by our moral sense, which even plenty of secular thinkers recognize as in some way significant. Take Charles Darwin, for example, who thought it’s our moral sense that best distinguishes human beings from the animals. Indeed, he begins chapter 5 of Descent of Man with this admission: “I fully subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important.” He even says he considers the moral sense, our sense of “ought,” to be “humankind’s finest quality.” Elsewhere in the same book Darwin casts both “ought” and “disinterested love for all living creatures” as the noblest attribute of man.

Darwin intuitively felt the importance of morality, even if he ended up embracing a deflationary analysis of its import. Similarly Sigmund Freud. To Freud’s thinking, the problem of guilt is so severe that he diagnosed it in Civilization and Its Discontents as the single most important development of civilization—a problem so acute that it is the thing most responsible for our unhappiness. Perhaps what helps explain Freud’s conviction is that his analytic work found that nearly every neurosis conceals an unconscious sense of guilt, which in turn “fortifies the symptoms by making use of them as punishment.”

For both Darwin and Freud, the phenomenon of guilt was both interesting and important, even revelatory. Recall their depictions: Darwin thought our capacity for experiencing the moral sense and a painful conscience is by far the most important distinction between us and the animals; our sense of ought and disinterested love for all creatures, he believed the noblest virtue of man. And Freud took the problem of guilt as the single most important development of civilization. But they mistook its import, I suspect, embracing reductionist analyses and taking guilt itself as the essential problem, rather than the deeper malady of which guilt is but the symptom. Rightly construed guilt is semiotic, pointing beyond itself.

That we intuitively sense there to be a moral standard that we fall short of leaves us with a condition of guilt in need of fixing. And if we take our feelings of guilt as more than mere feelings, and something like a real objective condition of guilt, we are left wondering if there’s a solution. We need forgiveness for having fallen short of the moral standard—and not just falling short in the past, but continuing to fall short all the time. Forgiveness is a basic and chronic existential human need. 

I rather doubt Freud was wrong about guilt creating quite a bit of unhappiness, which makes it understandable that our secular friends see the need to deal with it, usually by trying to deny that we are really that guilty. Unaddressed guilt eats us up. And sometimes people do have an overactive superego and feel guilty for all sorts of things that they’re not really guilty of. But at other times, most of us intuitively recognize, our guilt isn’t a mistake, but a real insight into ourselves. We don’t need our guilt explained away, in those cases, but taken away, forgiven.

And of course this is one way that the moral argument serves as the perfect pathway to the gospel of Christ—indeed we have fallen short, and are in need of forgiveness. And God offers us that forgiveness through the death and resurrection of Christ. Not only does God offer us forgiveness, but we as his forgiven children can extend forgiveness to others. This is why it’s so imperative we maintain a stance of forgiveness toward our neighbors, modeling the grace God has shown us. And of course many will recognize that all of this broaches the whole theological topic of justification.

So you might wish to approach this philosophically—talking about guilt and our need for forgiveness, and then showing how philosophy leads you to the brink of theology. Or start with a theological discussion of justification, and then show how it comports with what we learned from our moral experience and what we might call general revelation. Or take the deliverances of theology like justification and use insights from moral apologetics to spell out part of what’s going on—that’s doing philosophical theology.

However we approach it, the moral argument, from this angle, functions as an ideal way to introduce the good news of the gospel. We have a problem, yes, but God offers the solution.

In the next installment we will discuss the moral argument and moral transformation.

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.

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