IS IT ENOUGH TO LIVE A GOOD, MORAL LIFE?€¦ · to live a good, moral life. Or that living a good,...

IS IT ENOUGH TO LIVE A GOOD, MORAL LIFE? | UNCOVER.ORG.AU/MORALITY

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IS IT ENOUGH TO LIVE A GOOD, MORAL LIFE?

UNCOVER.ORG.AU/MORALITY

“To suggest that one can't be good without belief in God is not just an opinion, a mere curious musing — it is a prejudice” (Greg Epstein, Humanist Chaplain to Harvard University, Good Without God: What a Billion Non-religious People Do Believe). “The point of Christianity is not that it produces virtue.” (Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense).

Introduction Many people find it outrageous to even suggest that belief in God is required to live a good, moral life. Or that living a good, moral life might not be enough to please God — assuming he exists. Surely God would be more than satisfied with people treating each other well, taking care of the planet, and otherwise minding their own business! Why does



he have to demand that we believe in him — or, more offensively, trust in Jesus? Isn’t that just narrow and egotistical? The controversial Christian pastor, Rob Bell, poses this objection very strongly (Love Wins, page 6): “So is it true that the kind of person you are doesn’t ultimately matter, as long as you’ve said or prayed or believed the right things?” I certainly wouldn’t want to suggest that non-believers often live lives that are at least as good as believers (if not better). A little bit of observation is all that is required to tell us that it is entirely possible for unbelievers to live consistently good and moral lives. Francis Spufford (Unapologetic, pages 213-14) puts it well:

“I suppose from a philosophical point of view Christians tend to believe that all successful goodness is a remote reflection of God’s. But where motive is concerned, where adherence to a view of the world is concerned, there’s obviously no necessary connection at all between belief in God and virtue. The place is stuffed with atheists and agnostics doing devotedly benign things, acting on ideals of compassion and dignity and mutual aid, relieving suffering, working to save or improve the planet. There are a lot of paths to virtue, mercifully, and absolutely no way there could be a religious or Christian monopoly on it.”

Christians definitely don’t have a monopoly on moral living. In fact, they often fail to consistently live out their moral convictions. Sometimes this is catastrophic — as we periodically see in a high-profile cases in the media or the courts. Often, it is far more mundane. As neither angels (who are above hypocrisy) nor animals (who are beneath it), Christians are as susceptible as an other human being to garden-variety hypocrisy. None of which is to deny that being good and moral is a positive thing — and worth pursuing! I can say this without qualification. The way God is presented in the Bible is as the God of justice and righteousness. He hates hypocrisy, injustice and exploitation — especially among his own people. Amos, one of the prophets God sent to warn his straying people in the Eighth Century BCE, makes this point forcefully: “Hear this word that the LORD has spoken against you, O people of Israel, against the whole family that I brought up out of the land of Egypt: ‘You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities’ ” (Amos 3:1-2). God clearly cares deeply about the way people behave. So much so that he holds his people to the highest standard. There is no room for exceptionalism in this special relationship!



What Must I Do? All this is well and good. But one particular incident in the life of Jesus speaks very clearly and directly to the question of being good enough. This is how it is reported in Luke’s Gospel (Luke 18:18-27):

And a ruler asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, Do not murder, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honour your father and mother.’ ” And he said, “All these I have kept from my youth.” When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich. Jesus, seeing that he had become sad, said, “How difficult it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” Those who heard it said, “Then who can be saved?” But he said, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.” And Peter said, “See, we have left our homes and followed you.” And he said to them, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life.”

It is worth noticing four things about this encounter: 1. Jesus doesn’t deny or minimise this man’s relative goodness. Jesus and the man clearly agree on what behaviour constitutes a good, moral life — ‘Do not commit adultery, Do not murder, Do not steal, Do not bear false



witness, Honour your father and mother’. After Jesus list these five of the Ten Commandments, the man claims to have kept all of these from his youth. And Jesus doesn’t call it into question. Jesus has no stake in denying that compared with many people — even many of the people Jesus met and mixed with — this man was exceptionally good and moral. Even if this isn’t the end of the conversation, Jesus takes this man’s word for it. And I think it is fair to say (by extension) that Christians should acknowledge that non-Christians can live good, moral lives with logical consistency — even when following through their own convictions (and even if and when those convictions are at odds with Christian convictions). Christian theologians have traditionally discussed this under the heading of ‘common grace’ — maintaining that God is so good that he graciously (ie. generously) enables people who don’t even know him to live more or less good, moral and successful lives This is ultimately why good, moral teaching and wise advice from outside God’s people is freely echoed, affirmed, incorporated at various points in the Bible. For example, the biblical book of Proverbs — an ancient primer in the art of practical discernment that makes for successful living — contains at least one entire chapter that appears to have been lifted from an ancient Egyptian source (Proverbs 22:17-23:11, borrowed from the Egyptian Book of Amenemope). To be sure, the book of Proverbs incorporates and freely adapts this borrowed wisdom into its own framework in which ‘the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom’ (Proverbs 1:7). However, in doing so, it does not deny the validity of its conclusions and intuitions about the good life — even where these conclusions are underwritten by religious commitments that are finally incompatible with the Bible’s framework. Goodness is goodness. There is no point in denying it. Nor is there any need, biblically. 2. But Jesus is not content with relative goodness. To begin with, upon being addressed by as “Good Teacher”, Jesus immediately corrects the man: “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.” Far from being falsely humble or dissembling, Jesus is establishing an objective measure at the beginning of this conversation about what must be done to please God and inherit eternal life. This cuts the legs off a relativistic approach to morality. What matters to Jesus is not a comparative goodness, established (horizontally) with respect to other



people. Rather, what matters is goodness evaluated (vertically) by the absolute standard of God’s perfect goodness. It’s far too easy to compare ourselves with others. Usually we compare ourselves favourably, falsifying our record of moral achievement to accentuate the positives and cover over, excuse or explain away the negatives. Although, sometimes we compare ourselves unfavourably. This way we find ourselves increasingly fearful, weighed down and ultimately crushed by our failure to live up to (what we think) others have achieved. Either way, the dynamic of constant comparison is exhausting and morally atrophying. It installs the virus of competition at the heart of our moral life. As Timothy Keller notes (‘Common Morality vs True Virtue’, adapted from How To Change Through Gospel Renewal Dynamics, Gospel and the Heart, 2007), “there is a profound tension at the heart of common morality. It not only does nothing to root out the fundamental cause of evil in the world, the radical self-centeredness of the human heart. In fact, it actually nurtures and increases it.” In fact, the man may have realised this if he was alert to which commandments Jesus refrained from citing along with the five he did cite. The first four commandments all operate with a vertical understanding of the standard of morality required of God’s people — how we love, trust, worship and obey him establishes the framework and initial evidence for what counts as a good, moral life. The Bible is relentless in tracing back all ‘horizontal’ failures of goodness to prior, underlying ‘vertical’ failures of trust and worship. For instance, the catalogue of sinful, anti-social behaviours in Romans 1:24-32 is presented as the fruit of a more fundamental idolatrous failure to worship and serve the Creator. It’s in losing sight of God the Giver that we fixate on one or other of his good gifts in creation and love them too much (or demonise them) — unleashing a flood of misery and pain as we twist and distort good things into god-things a result. As an added bonus, the way the Bible thus counters moral relativism refrains from putting fallible humans like you or me in the power seat, deciding for other what is right and wrong. 3. Jesus exposes what rules this man’s heart in order to take its place. Not content to displace this man’s horizontal, comparative approach to moral goodness (and replace it with a vertical, objective approach), Jesus goes on to identify the one thing this man lacks: “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” The function of this is ultimately diagnostic. The man cannot bear to do as Jesus



asks: when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich. This exposes the way material possessions rule this man’s heart. He has substituted them for God. They are reality that looms largest in his life, the thing he cannot give up or contemplate living without. Alluding to the last of the Ten Commandments — the command against ‘coveting’ (desiring and lusting after what belongs to other people) — Jesus leads this man to see the failure at the heart of his goodness. For all his good, moral behaviour, this man doesn’t have room in his heart to love, trust, worship and obey God above all. Money and possessions already occupy the highest place in his life. They are his primary allegiance. He is imprisoned by his inordinate love for things. The things he owns, actually own him — preventing him from doing what he would need to do to answer his own question about inheriting eternal life. This is not only imprisoning. It is damnable. For it hurls this man (as it does each and every one of us) into a collision course with the God who made us — and who alone deserves the first place in our hearts. But Jesus doesn’t merely expose this ugly truth about the man in order to make him feel bad and recognise that he is not as good as he thinks he is. Jesus is not interested in inflicting pain for its own sake. Rather, he wants to free this man from his diminishing imprisonment to his possessions — and to invite him to find something fuller and more satisfying in following him. As he says to his followers after the man has walked away sad, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life.” 4. What Jesus calls us to is humanly impossible, but made possible by God. Not only the man but Jesus’ own disciples are appalled at how this encounter turns out. If this man — with his relatively excellent moral track record (as well all his obvious material means) — can’t lay hold of eternal life, surely this is a cause for despair. Especially for us mere mortals! Jesus, seeing that he had become sad, said, “How difficult it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” Those who heard it said, “Then who can be saved?” What is so shocking about this is that even though Jesus’ particular challenge to this man is unique (and uniquely tailored to the way wealth and possessions



have wrapped their tendrils around his heart in order to rule and dominate his life), the radical call to humanly impossible action is a theme in Jesus’ moral teaching. Francis Spufford is not wrong when he observes (Unapologetic, page 153): “The striking thing about the advice on behaviour [Jesus] gives is how catastrophically impractical most of it is as a guide to the good life, if by good life you mean something reasonably self-protecting, and concerned with next year, and with living in some kind of viable community.” Fascinatingly, Jesus doesn’t see this human impossibility as bad news; instead, it is the occasion for God to do something amazing and liberating: “What is impossible with man is possible with God.” The heart of the Christian story — and the great gift offered to the world on the basis of what Jesus achieved on the cross — is that instead of basing our acceptance with God on what we can achieve Jesus invites us to look to his truly perfect record of absolutely good behaviour and say, “I’m accepted, and so I strive to obey”. In Jesus, God deals with our damnable substitution of other things (and ultimately of ourselves) for God. He does this by substituting himself for us — absorbing in himself the cost of forgiving us for pushing him out of our life. And in doing so, he frees us from the need to point to our own doctored record of relatively good behaviour (in which we’ve applied some judicious white-out to conceal our all-too-frequent failures). We no longer need to say, “If I behave well enough, I should be accepted”. For God in Christ has shattered the deadly nexus between our moral performance and our acceptance. What this means is that we no longer have to either pretend and conceal our failures or puff ourselves up and proudly make more of our successes than we should. It allows us to begin to recover from the virus of competitive morality. On top of this, we no longer need to be paralysed by the notion that goodness and morality are all or nothing. Without erasing the scandal of hypocrisy, we no longer have to convince ourselves and each other that we’re all perfect angels — or else excuse ourselves as base animals, who can’t be held responsible for anything we do. Instead, we’re free to begin to take a few steps towards better behaviour, and to stumble, trip and pick ourselves up again. Francis Spufford explains part of how this might work to enable Christians to live better (Unapologetic, page 214): “[Christianity] does … have one advantage when it comes to doing good, in that your advance certainty, as a Christian, that you’re going to fail at goodness provides a kind of assurance that goodness is worth trying independently of results. It helps a little, therefore, with being good in circumstances where doing good can do no good as far as making progress is concerned. Where things just won’t get better, in measurable terms, for all the devotion you pour in.”



More positively even than this, the humanly impossible feat God has done in Jesus — securing our acceptance quite apart from anything to do with our moral performance or failure — liberates us to love, trust, worship and obey God in all those areas of our life where we may have formerly been tempted to (idolatrously) look to other things. So where we once sought pleasure and relief from boredom in pornography (or retail therapy or comfort eating) — confusing some good aspect of God’s creation with God as the Giver of life — we now can trust Jesus when he calls us to find wholeness and satisfaction elsewhere, because he has categorically proven how committed he is to our good. Or where we once indulged our fantasies of control by domineering or manipulating others — or, at the other extreme, by avoiding situations in which we might conceivably risk being out of control — we can now trust Jesus when he invites us to live, love and forgive without anxiously attempting to ensure our own security. Ultimately in doing for us in Jesus what we cannot possibly do for ourselves, God enables us to freely live ‘with the grain’ of reality — for it nurtures both hope and honesty. On the one hand, the humanly impossible achievement of God in Jesus for us gives us hope that the worst tangles in human life and history are not irretrievable. That fact that God loves us enough that he chose to do for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves tells that that even if our life and history cannot be resolved on their own terms, forgiveness, peace, beauty and joy can be more than temporary distractions, papering over the yawning cracks in reality. And on the other hand, the very human impossibility of it cannot be evaded. The fact that God had to do for us what we could’t do for ourselves means that we know ahead of time that we aren’t perfect, that we fail and fall, that tragedy is the order of the day in our workaday lives, and that we all invariably need forgiving.

IS IT ENOUGH TO LIVE A GOOD, MORAL LIFE?€¦ · to live a good, moral life. Or that living a good,...

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