I assuming you are interested in actually understanding how I as a follower of Jesus understand some of this, so I’ll flush out a bit of a response. I have zero interest however in arguing over any of it, or trying to defend God. I think he’s more than capable of doing that for himself should he choose to.
The Bible is pretty clear about a bunch of things (and unclear about a bunch of other things). As it relates to your comment / question, I think it’s pretty clear about the following:
- God is love. He is 100% perfect love, and demonstrated his love to us through the sacrifice of his only son Jesus.
- Human’s are moral failures. Most of us attempt to live good moral lives, but (by God’s standard of perfection) we don’t measure up.
God is also 100% just. All moral failures on our part require punishment. This punishment is eternal and thus our physical death while not punishment in and of itself is often treated in the Bible as a representation or proxy for that eternal punishment.
Ultimate happiness, joy, satisfaction… come from a relationship with Jesus, not from a lack of pain or suffering.
I realize you’ll disagree with most if not all of the above statements. However, to understand how I understand God’s actions in the world, you have to start with those axioms of my faith that I see clearly laid out in the Bible.
Given the above, specifically that we are fundamentally flawed morally, it really doesn’t make any sense for us to call God’s actions evil. Our moral compass is so fundamentally flawed that we are unable to accurately evaluate true love or true evil. Part of this failure can be seen in our focus as human’s on ourselves rather on a relationship with the God who made us.
While I have no intention (or ability) to defend Piper (or God for that matter), I don’t think the above is really a great summation of Piper’s view as I understand it. I think Piper’s view would closer to my own which is
God is perfect, in love and justice. Our ability to take another breath lies at his discretion. As a morally flawed human, who am I to question his choice of timing or method in executing the punishment humans deserve and eventually having coming to them, unless they accept the gift of Jesus.
So far he has not responded. I don’t think he’s ever posted here.
But that isn’t just. Justice requires that the punishment fit the crime, and this is true for all theories of punishment, whichever you may ascribe to: atonement, deterrence, etc.
If that’s so, then how can we know that God is love, is just, or is not evil? If that’s so, there can be no sensible discussion of any of those subjects. God’s actions must be inexplicable to us in any terms, and there can be no justification of any opinion of them.
I can’t understand this position. It seems self-contradictory. And by its very nature it also seems impervious to reason. It must be believed solely because one believes it. There can be no evidence for or against it, once we accept the premise. It’s the Euthyphro dilemma again. However, if we are capable of any moral judgment at all, we must be able to use that judgment to assess God as well as other people. And if we do so, your justification is reprehensible.
If I could send 10 questions for God to answer, one of them would be why he’s chosen to remain so “passive” in interacting with humanity in the digital age.
It doesn’t feel just. By I’d suggest that as morally flawed humans that our calibration of the magnitude of our “crime” is not inline with God’s.
John, I get everything else you’ve said. But I don’t follow why we have to be able to use our flawed moral judgement to evaluate God. In my world, and measurement device known discovered to be mis-calibrated is immediately immediately removed from circulation as it can no longer be trusted, until it is re-calibrated. To extend the analogy, I believe God gave us the re-calibration instructions in the Bible.
Back to Euthryphro. If we have no moral judgment, you have no basis for considering God just. I would consider this an immoral abdication of personal responsibility.
But you have no basis for that belief, since your judgment is useless. You can’t have it both ways.
I guess my answer is that I don’t trust my moral judgement to believe God is just. My inclination is to ask the same questions you kicked this discussion off with. Instead it’s based on a personal relationship with Jesus, that has found him and his words (the Bible) trustworthy, even when my natural inclination is to think I’ve got it wrong.
So the question is whether you’re capable of judging whether Jesus is trustworthy. You would seem to be arguing simultaneously that you aren’t and that you are. One way of escaping the Euthyphro dilemma is to argue that while there is an objective standard that’s the basis of morality, we are incapable of knowing what that standard is other than by God telling us. That, however, is not an escape, because we must have some standard by which to judge whether God is telling us the truth. Once our judgment is accepted to be useless, there can be no justification for anything.
My take: even if we accept as a premise that God is and is good and just, and further that we are woefully inadequate to judge him morally – we are still obliged to rely on our own moral judgment, however imperfect, to evaluate things like the Exodus and the Conquest. That’s because we don’t have direct access to God’s views on the matter. All we have is people – people who tell us what they think God wants, or writing what they think God wants, or telling us that something somebody else wrote represents what God wanted. It’s all the word of people – and people are not the most reliable sort of folks. Some of them, in fact, are just no good at all.
For me, if I do subject some of the stories in the Bible to that kind of moral scrutiny, I find them to be moral abominations. As far as I can tell, the best way make sure I never find myself massacring infidels or slaughtering babies (or even doing less dramatic sorts of evil) because it’s “what God wants” is by stopping to ask whether this is indeed something that a loving God would actually want. In other words, yes, I have to rely on my own moral compass. Hence my simplistic conclusion (which I think I’ve previously mentioned on BioLogos): if somebody tells me that God wants me to kill babies, he’s not speaking for God.
It’s not so much our judgment being useless (and I concur with @cdods, that our judgement is intrinsically flawed), but hubristically presuming it’s adequate to supersede and surmount God’s judgment. We don’t have all the data and judicial criteria.
The Euthyphro Dilemma is new to me (at least under that name). I took a quick look and based the following link it seems a false dilemma to me based on my understanding of God.
However, I have neither the time nor inclination to tackle breaking it down, given I doubt anything I say will be worth more than I’ll be paid to write it.
We have enough. In the two cases I’ve mentioned, we have what the bible states as God’s motives in each case, and they aren’t motives one would consider justifications for murder in a human. And as @glipsnort has pointed out, if we have no way to judge actions said to be from God, we may end up having to kill babies. If God told you to commit a massacre, would you do it?
The so-called dilemma is easily dismissed for us as Christians, because all we have to do is recall that God is our loving, and lovable, adoptive Father. His laws are laws of love* and for our own benefit. We obey them, not because we have to (our adoption is never in jeopardy), but because we want Father’s smile. They are for our benefit, and if we ignore them, we harm ourselves. An pertinent example is volunteerism – it is big because even unbelievers know that it makes them feel good. The Christian would attribute it to the imago dei – it’s built into us.
We have enough – but only when you consider the whole context of scripture. They may be the only motives stated in the local context, but motives are rarely singular. They are complex, rather, and not easily distilled or legitimately made simplistic.
Calling it simply murder is indeed simplistic. You also devalue honor and set it to naught. There are some things of more value than life and your question is merely a straw man.
If it is simplistic to call the intentional killing of infants ‘murder’, then put me down as ‘simplistic’. I’d much rather be someone who is simplistic and doesn’t kill babies than be nuanced and subtle and kill babies.
And honor isn’t one of them. That is, my honor isn’t of more value than someone else’s life.