EPS/ETS 2022 Lecture and Q&A: Is God's Moral Perfection Reducible to His Love?

Dr. Craig lectures on the topic of God's moral goodness at the joint conferences of the Evangelical Philosophical and Theological Societies. The talk is followed by a live audience Q&A session.

DR. CRAIG: Thank you for coming.

Believers in the monotheistic tradition have always held that God is perfectly good, and Christian theologians have thought of God as the fount of all varieties of goodness, whether moral, metaphysical, aesthetic, or any other. Here my primary interest is in God’s moral goodness from a Christian perspective. Obviously, as a being worthy of worship, God possesses moral attributes. A being that is very good but morally imperfect might be worthy of admiration or respect, but only a being that is morally perfect could be worthy of worship.^[1] Indeed, perfect being theology entails by definition that God is morally perfect, since to be morally imperfect or morally flawed is inconsistent with perfection. Hence, God must be perfectly good.

An important question arises in connection with God’s perfect goodness, namely, What is the content of God’s perfect goodness? In order to answer this question, let us look first at the biblical data concerning divine goodness.

Biblical Data concerning Divine Goodness

The Bible ascribes to God a wealth of moral properties, including holiness, righteousness, love, grace, mercy, long-suffering, loving kindness, faithfulness, and so on.^[2] We might think that the goodness of God is a general moral property designating God’s moral perfection and comprising His righteousness, love, grace, mercy, long-suffering, and so on,^[3] but biblically speaking this would be, in fact, incorrect. Rather, as John Feinberg explains, the Hebrew words for goodness ṭôb/ṭûb have, like the English word, a breadth of meanings: (1) practical, economic, or material blessing, (2) abstract properties such as desirability, pleasantness, and beauty, (3) quality or expense, (4) moral goodness, and (5) eudaimonia (the “good life”).^[4] When the biblical authors speak of God’s goodness, what they typically have in mind is not God’s moral goodness but God’s beneficence or generosity. Thus the Psalms are filled with grateful praises for the goodness of the Lord (Ps 34.8a; 100. 5; 106.1; 107.1; 118.1, 29; 135.3; 145.7, 9; cf. I Chron 16.34; II Chron 5.13; 7.3). Feinberg concludes, “When we look at the biblical concept of divine goodness, one major idea stands out. It is that God is concerned about the well-being of his creatures and does things to promote it. Of course, God is interested in doing what is morally good and right, but biblical writers capture that idea by referring to his righteousness and holiness.”^[5] Since our interest is in God’s moral goodness, we are therefore better advised to look more closely at the biblical data concerning God’s righteousness, rather than His goodness.

The Hebrew word ṣedeq (righteousness) and the Greek expression dikaiosynē theou (the righteousness of God) are Janus-faced terms used to denote, among other things, God’s moral character.^[6] That is to say, God’s righteousness in Scripture looks in two directions, as it were, covering both God’s love and His justice.^[7] Feinberg observes that there is a wealth of biblical material concerning the righteousness of God. Words deriving from the root ṣedeq occur 523 times in the Old Testament. The nominal forms fall mainly into three groups: legal righteousness (123 times), ethical righteousness (114 times), and correctness (26 times). The New Testament has 92 examples of the noun dikaiosynē, 39 of the verb dikaioō (to justify or reckon righteous), 81 of the adjective dikaios (just or righteous), ten of the noun dikaiōma (ordinance or sentence of justification), and five of the adverb dikaiōs (justly or righteously).^[8]

In recent decades, a debate about the expression dikaiosynē theou has arisen as a result of the so-called “new perspective on Paul,” some proponents of which construe God’s righteousness to be His covenant faithfulness. This construal is not itself new but goes back to German theologians like Hermann Cremer at the close of the 19^th century.^[9] Cremer believed that the righteousness of God is not a normative concept but rather a relational concept involving persons. He claimed, moreover, that God’s righteousness has only to do with God’s saving activity. Cremer did not deny that God’s salvation of the righteous entails His punishment of the wicked, but he insisted that God’s righteousness finds expression only in His saving action. Proponents of the new perspective have followed Cremer in thinking God’s righteousness to be a relational, not a normative, concept and have identified it with God’s being faithful to His covenant people.

The claim here seems to be implausible on the face of it, for it amounts to nothing less than the claim that teams of English translators, not to mention non-English translators, have for generations actually mistranslated the expression dikaiosynē theou, since the English word “righteousness” just does not mean faithfulness.^[10] Proponents of the new perspective would have us believe that the meaning of New Testament Greek dik- words, under the influence of the Septuagint, has been fundamentally changed so as to introduce covenantal ideas not present in extra-biblical Greek. The Hebrew word ṣedeq (also, in effect, mistranslated by “righteousness”) is also said not to express a normative concept like moral goodness but rather a relational concept like faithful to.

The implausibility of the new perspective’s reductionism is perhaps best seen by asking what the opposite of righteousness, that is, unrighteousness, is said by Paul to be.^[11] It is not unfaithfulness, but wickedness and ungodliness (Rom 1.18) or lawlessness (II Cor 6.14). Faithlessness is but one of the litany of sins listed by Paul which results in God’s just condemnation (Rom 1.29-31). Righteousness is a broad moral property which entails faithfulness, since to break one’s word is wrong, but is not reducible to it. As Mark Seifrid puts it, “All ‘covenant-keeping’ is righteous behavior, but not all righteous behavior is ‘covenant-keeping.’ It is misleading, therefore, to speak of ‘God’s righteousness’ as his ‘covenant-faithfulness.’”^[12] Seifrid points out that righteousness language in the Old Testament has primarily to do with God’s role as Judge and Ruler of creation. As such it is normative, having to do with God’s establishing right moral order in the world. It takes on a positive or salvific sense because the biblical writers expect God to intervene to reinstate right order when it is usurped by evil in the world. It takes on a negative or punitive sense because the biblical writers expect reinstatement of right order to involve the punishment of the wicked. As Seifrid so aptly puts it, “Retribution remains on the ‘backside’ of divine acts of righteousness.”^[13] So while there are 64 instances of God’s saving righteousness in the Old Testament, Seifrid counts as well 15 cases in which God’s righteousness is conceived in retributive or punitive terms (Exod 9.27; Ps 7.10; 7.12; 11.5-7; 50.6; Is 1.27; 5.15-16; 10.22; 28.17; Lam 1.18; II Chron 12.1-6; Neh 9.33; Dan 9.7; 9.14; 9.16). God’s righteousness comprises both aspects.^[14]

Fortunately, proponents of the new perspective have now backed away from the overly simplistic, one-sided conception of God’s righteousness. For example, James D. G. Dunn, in response to his critics, acknowledges that the Hebrew concept of righteousness cannot be reduced to covenant faithfulness or salvation. Righteousness language in the Hebrew Scriptures also involves punitive divine justice, according to which righteousness is “understood as measured by a norm, right order, or that which is morally right,” with the qualification that “the norm is not seen as some abstract ideal. . . , but rather as a norm concretised in relation” between God and creatures.^[15] So when we come to Romans, “That God’s righteousness towards the peoples he has created includes wrath and judgment as well as faithfulness and salvation is clearly implicit in the sequences Rom. 1.16-18 and 3.3-6.”^[16]

The righteousness of God therefore seems to be the relevant biblical concept for God’s moral perfection and comprises both His love and justice. On the one hand, the Scriptures famously assert that “God is love” (I Jn 4.8) and even ascribe relationships of love to the eternal Trinitarian persons (Jn 3.35; 14.31; 17.22-26). At the same time the Scriptures are replete with references to God’s hatred of sin, jealousy, wrath, and vengeance, which are manifestations of His justice.^[17]

The Content of God’s Moral Character

A number of contemporary philosophical theologians have sought to reduce the content of God’s moral character to His agape love. Jordan Wessling has dubbed this claim the Identity Thesis. The thesis is that “God’s love is identical to His moral goodness,” such that “God possesses no moral attribute that is not essentially and most fundamentally a matter of love.”^[18] This superficially appealing thesis seems to be the lingering vestige of classical liberal theology, which eschewed the justice and wrath of God in favor of His love. Despite the eclipse of classical liberal theology in the early twentieth century, it has become almost an axiom among contemporary theologians that God does not need to be reconciled to sinners; the entire obstacle lies on our side. It is said that because the New Testament authors use the word katalassō (reconcile) and its cognates only with respect to human beings, not God, we may infer that God does not need to be reconciled to humanity, but only humanity to a welcoming God, and our hearts need to be changed so that our hostility to God evaporates and we embrace His love. Such an argument from silence, however, overlooks the abundant scriptural testimony to God’s justice and wrath, which may demand satisfaction and propitiation.^[19] In contrast to classical liberal theology, neo-liberal theology, if we may coin a term, affirms God’s wrath but sees it wholly as a manifestation of His love aimed at the reformation of sinners.

Wessling adduces two lines of New Testament evidence in support of the Identity Thesis. First, Jesus as well as various New Testament authors teach that love fulfills the law. Second, Jesus as well as certain biblical authors ground this completed human ethic of love in God’s nature. These considerations, however, do not bear the theological freight that Wessling would lay upon them. The appeal to Jesus’ aphorism about love’s fulfilling the law’s positive demands overlooks what those who break the law are said to deserve, which is punitive justice. That the law reflects God’s loving character most certainly does not imply that God’s righteousness does not comprise justice as well as love or that His justice is reducible to His love.

We have seen that, biblically speaking, justice as well as love belongs to God’s righteousness. But what sort of justice is this? Theories of justice may be broadly classified as either retributive or consequentialist. Retributive theories of justice hold that punishment is justified because the guilty deserve to be punished. Consequentialist theories of justice hold that punishment is justified because of the extrinsic goods that may be realized thereby, such as deterrence of crime, sequestration of dangerous persons, and reformation of wrongdoers. Retributive theories are often said to be retrospective, imposing punishment for crimes already committed, whereas consequentialist theories are prospective, aiming to prevent crimes from being committed.

Retributivism may be further distinguished as either positive or negative. While negative retributivism holds that the innocent should not be punished because they do not deserve it, the essence of retributive justice lies in positive retributivism, which holds that the guilty should be punished because they deserve it. What distinguishes retributivism as a theory of justice is the positive thesis that punishment of the guilty is an intrinsic good because the guilty deserve it. The intrinsic goodness of punishment of the guilty does not preclude that there are also extrinsic goods that might be achieved by giving people their just desert. But what ultimately justifies punishment is that it is the just desert of the guilty.

In the Bible God is clearly described as a positive retributivist “who will by no means clear the guilty” (Ex 34.7). In the biblical view, the wicked deserve punishment (Rom 1.32; Heb 10.29), and the Bible ascribes to God retribution (Heb. gemûl Is 59.18; neqamah Jer 50.15; 51.6; Grk. ekdikēsis Rom 11.9; avtapodoma Rom 12.19) for sins, so that God’s justice must in some significant measure be retributive.^[20] The God of the Bible is not just a benevolent father figure but, as Hugo Grotius emphasized in his critique of Faustus Socinus, God is the impartial Ruler and Judge of creation, responsible for maintaining its moral order.^[21]

Indeed, it is plausible, I think, that retributive justice belongs essentially to God. The more central and prominent an attribute is in the biblical picture of God, the stronger the case for taking it to be an essential attribute of God, rather than accidental to Him. It is hard to think of an attribute more central and prominent in the biblical picture of God than His righteousness, which comprises His justice. “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Gen 18.25). “Is there injustice (adikia) on God’s part? By no means!” (Rom 9.14). It would have been inconceivable to the biblical authors that God might act unjustly.

Kevin Kinghorn, like Socinus, disputes that retributive justice belongs to God’s essence. For God, existing alone sans creation, would not exhibit retributive justice in intra-Trinitarian relationships: “because the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit could never wrong one another, retributive justice would never be operative.”^[22] He concludes, “God’s attribute of justice is not essential to God’s nature in the way that his attribute of love is essential. God’s justice is only needed in the world (such as ours) where there are imperfections and shortages. God’s essential nature is therefore not just.”^[23] But this objection is misconceived. God can have the property of giving every person his due without the existence of created persons. Indeed, since universally quantified statements have no existential implications, God can be essentially such that He punishes every guilty person, whether any such persons exist. Kinghorn is right that in a world sans creation God is not wrathful, just as He is not wrathful in possible worlds in which created persons never sin, so that wrath is not an essential property of God.^[24] But God, though wrathless, is in such circumstances still essentially righteous and perfectly just.

In any case, in relation to created persons the God of the Bible exhibits retributive justice. Wessling notwithstanding, there is no prima facie incompatibility between God’s valuing the flourishing of people and friendship with them, even though He sentences them to their just desert with no expectation of reform. Retributivism is perfectly compatible with God’s ongoing love for those He punishes, even the damned in hell, just as it is possible for a judge personally to love and forgive someone brought before his bar, even as he declares him guilty and sentences him to severe punishment. God can personally will the good of sinners and desire their union with Him without waiving the demands of retributive justice. In short, God’s giving the guilty their just desert does not preclude His loving them.

During the first half of the twentieth century, under the influence of psychologists and social scientists, retributive theories of justice were frowned upon in favor of consequentialist theories. Fortunately, there has been over the past half century or so a renaissance of theories of retributive justice, accompanied by a fading of consequentialist theories,^[25] so that the Christian theologian working within the philosophical mainstream need not be diverted by the need to justify a retributive theory of justice.

It is striking that proponents of the Identity Thesis tend to endorse, explicitly or implicitly, a consequentialist theory of divine justice. For they insist that God’s sole purpose in punishing wrong-doers is reformative, rather than retributive. For example, Kinghorn says that God’s administration of justice will ultimately be for the same reason that we need rules of law in the first place, namely, the “benevolent goal that people flourish.”^[26] In response to Arthur Holmes’ critique of Christian consequentialism, Kinghorn does not address the shortcomings of consequentialist theories of justice but simply doubles down in affirming a sort of Christian utilitarianism.^[27] He appeals to God to direct our efforts to ensure that acts of beneficence are also equitable, which only pushes the problem upstairs, so to speak. Does God direct His acts in accordance with justice? Kinghorn responds, “I find no reason for thinking that justice must be added. . . to God’s love in order to give God’s actions direction.”^[28] Given a consequentialist theory of justice, God’s love suffices to motivate His harsh treatment of sinners aimed at their reformation. Kinghorn declares, “God’s expressions of wrath are not vindictive or emotional outbursts aimed at the punishment of unrighteous people as an ultimate goal.”^[29] This characterization of retributivism is, of course, a straw man, for the retributivist would agree that God’s expressions of wrath are not vindictive or emotional outbursts but may nonetheless be aimed at the punishment of unrighteous people as the ultimate goal. God’s wrath is an affective expression of God’s retributive justice, so that the issue is not ultimately wrath but the nature of God’s justice.^[30] Kinghorn’s endorsement of consequentialism is clearly in view when he affirms, “Expressions of divine wrath must . . . be for the ultimate, benevolent purpose God has of drawing people into relationship with himself, thereby bringing fullness of life to them.”^[31]

Not only is pure consequentialism at odds with the biblical view of divine justice, but consequentialism seems, in any case, ill-suited to serve as the justification for divine punishment because God’s judgement is described in the Bible as ultimately eschatological. The ungodly are “storing up wrath” for themselves for God’s final day of judgement (Rom 2.5). Punishment imposed at that point could seemingly serve no other purpose than retribution.^[32] For all hope of reform is gone. But the damned are punished nonetheless because they deserve it. God, in effect, carries out what Immanuel Kant deemed to be necessary for a just society about to dissolve: to execute any prisoners condemned to death.^[33]

Wessling defends God’s ongoing punishment of the damned aimed at persuading them “to start down the path of spiritual transformation” but only at the admitted expense that one “is willing to allow for post-mortem opportunities for salvation in hell,”^[34] a consoling but unbiblical view (Mt 25.46; II Thess 1.9). Moreover, Wessling’s view either must deny God’s omniscience, so that He continues to pursue a pointless action that only perpetuates suffering, or in effect transforms hell into purgatory and results in apokatastasis, the restoration of all things, a universalistic doctrine that is both unbiblical and condemned by the Church.^[35]

No universalist, Kinghorn struggles to justify God’s punishment of the damned on consequentialist grounds as an act of His benevolence aimed at their reformation. He recognizes that “We can use our God-given freedom to place ourselves eternally under God’s wrath by decisively rejecting his offer to participate in the fellowship of self-giving love.”^[36] Indeed, he says at some point the opportunity for repentance will be passed: “the time for possible repentance will have passed.”^[37] So why does God continue to punish people beyond that point? Kinghorn’s answer seems to be: He does not. “For those in hell, God does not persist in pressing on them the truth about themselves,” which Kinghorn interprets as the essence of divine wrath.^[38] With no consequentialist justification for punishment, God ceases to punish the damned in hell, though they may (mistakenly) think themselves to be under God’s wrath.^[39] Rather God simply leaves them alone. Hell, then, is not a punishment for sin, rather “Hell is just a natural consequence of life apart from God.”^[40] Citing Peter Geach to the effect that “God does allow men to sin; and misery is the natural, not the arbitrarily inflicted, consequence of sin to the sinner,”^[41] Kinghorn claims that “The alternative to Geach’s position is to suggest that there is something of value, something good, about God devising an extra form of punishment for people in hell, over and beyond what they are naturally experiencing apart from him.”^[42] This is a misunderstanding of the retributivist position. The alternative to Geach’s position is that the harsh treatment is not arbitrarily inflicted by God but justly inflicted and therefore something of value, something good. The punishment need not be something over and above the damned’s being eternally separated from God; rather that separation is their just desert.

Wessling calls Geach’s position “the natural consequences view.”^[43] It must not be confused with a consequentialist view of divine justice. On consequentialism God does punish the damned in hell for their sin with a view towards some extrinsic benefit. But on the natural consequences view, hell is not a punishment of sin flowing from divine justice but simply a natural consequence of sin. Curiously, Kinghorn offers no biblical justification for so remarkable a thesis as the claim that hell is not divine punishment for sin. To the contrary, Wessling points out that the natural consequences view “certainly does not sit well” with texts like I Cor 11.27–31; II Pet 2. 1–16; Rev 16), which speak of divine wrath, judgment, condemnation, and punishment.^[44] In any case, on Kinghorn’s natural consequences view, it remains mysterious why God does not simply annihilate the damned and put them out of their misery, rather than allowing them to suffer interminably and undeservedly what Kinghorn calls “the worst possible situation for humans.”^[45]

In general, the natural consequences view of God’s response to sin is biblically inadequate.^[46] Certainly sin is regarded in the Scriptures as self-destructive in its consequences, but God’s response to sin is not reducible to permitting sin’s natural consequences. Rather God imposes justly deserved punishments in response to sin. Already in the story of the Fall in Gen 3, the words to Adam and Eve “you shall surely die” (môt_ tāmût) occur repeatedly in the legal collections of the Pentateuch condemning criminals to death.^[47] Victor Hamilton notes that all of the môt_ tāmût passages in the Old Testament deal with either a punishment for sin or an untimely death as the result of punishment, so that in the story of the Fall the expression clearly conveys the announcement of a death sentence by divine or royal decree.^[48] In the New Testament the forensic language is pervasive, especially in Paul’s treatment of condemnation and justification in Romans. Recall Dunn’s conclusion “that God’s righteousness towards the peoples he has created includes wrath and judgment as well as faithfulness and salvation is clearly implicit in the sequences Rom. 1.16–18 and 3.3–6.”^[49] Those who deny that dikaiosynē is a forensic term pay insufficient attention to Rom 4.4-5, “where the forensic background is clear in the allusion to the legal impropriety of a judge ‘justifying the ungodly’.”^[50]

Conclusion

In sum, it is unbiblical and misguided to try to reduce the entire moral character of God to His love. God’s moral perfection is most adequately conceived as His righteousness, which is a complex attribute comprising both His agape love and His retributive justice, both of which are plausibly essential to God.

QUESTION: A model that's been put out recently of hell by a man named Zachary Armanas – the presence model – he sees it as retributive in function but not retributive in intent. I'm wondering would we need retributive intent to meet the standards of retributive justice.

DR. CRAIG: I've not heard of his view but on the face of it it sounds mad – that something could be functioning in a way that God doesn't intend. It’s functioning as retribution for the sins of the unrighteous and yet God doesn't intend that? That is incompatible with God's omnipotence according to which all of God's intentions are infallibly fulfilled. I would also be interested in knowing what theory of justice underlies this. Is God characterized by retributive justice? If so then it must be involved in his intent and not just sort of a function that happens independent of his nature.

QUESTION: In the last part you mentioned this kind of two views of hell – a difference between hell as punishment inflicted by God against hell as a natural consequence of sin. Are these two views mutually exclusive or is there a way they can work together?

DR. CRAIG: I think the views are mutually exclusive because the natural consequences view says that the fate of the damned is not their just desert. It's just bad things that happen to them. But I do think, as I said, that their just desert could be simply separation from God forever so that the punishment that they deserve and that God inflicts upon them is separation from God. So the punishment can be what the natural consequences view says that it is, but it would be an expression of retributive justice.

QUESTION: I really liked how you said that God has the essence of giving every person his due and so maybe that's a necessary property given the Trinity. Maybe that's the answer to my question but one thing that I learned from you a while ago is that God's omniscience plus his omnipotence plus the creation of space equals his omnipresence. I've always taken that line of taking to lead to the conclusion: God's love plus his intelligence plus his creation of imperfect creatures leads to his perfect wrath and justice that flows from that. So what would be the differences between those two lines of thinking?

DR. CRAIG: If we just have a God who is omniscient and all-loving, I don't see that there would be anything unintelligent in failing to punish the wicked. If he's not just, I don't see why his being omniscient would guarantee that he punishes the wicked. So I don't think just appealing to omniscience and love is going to get you justice.

QUESTION: I think you did a good job explaining why retributive justice is essential to God. I'm curious though. I wonder if there is a way to mix these two together. If we brought in the concept of love enough to where, say the definition of love is to will the good of the creature for his own sake, and you've established that retributive justice, retributive punishment, is an intrinsic good, then couldn’t we say that on a retributive view of justice that God ultimately does his just acts retributively because he loves and because he wants what's good.

DR. CRAIG: I don't think that suffering punishment for evil is aimed at the good of the perpetrator. It is a good in the moral universe governed by God that the wicked receive their just desert. But woe be to the wicked! It doesn't seem to me that we'd want to say that this is good for them. It's really bad for them, and they ought to get out from under it, I think, while there's still time.

QUESTION: You may have covered this in reference to Islam. You've argued in the past as I understand that the Unitarian view of God like Islam makes it impossible for love to be an essential character because love is relational and there's no Trinity, there's no relationship before creation. But now you've just argued that retributive justice can be an essential character even though there's no opportunity to exercise that before creation.

DR. CRAIG: I'm not saying that it's adequate for justice to be merely a dispositional property of God which is what the Unitarian will say about God's love – that even if God is not loving another he has a dispositional property to be loving but just lacks opportunity. But I'm not saying here that God in the absence of sinners simply has a disposition to be just. Rather, he is just. He gives every person his due. So the Son gets his due. The Holy Spirit gets his due. And so on throughout the periparetic relations of the Trinity. So it's not just dispositional. Justice is being exercised.

FOLLOWUP: Just to goodness, not to punishment because the members of the Trinity don't deserve punishment.

DR. CRAIG: Right. They get what they deserve. They get their just desert, which is not punishment because they don't do anything wrong. Indeed, remember negative retributivism is the thesis that the innocent should not be punished. Certainly sans creation God is exercising negative retributive justice.

QUESTION: Out of curiosity, do you think the person who holds to an annihilationist view, given this notion of retributive justice, would they have to modify anything that you've said? Thinking of duration. Hell – on the annihilationist view, they are not there forever.

DR. CRAIG: I think I understand the question. I haven't said anything in this talk about attempting to justify eternal punishment. It would be consistent with the view that maybe the damned only deserve a trillion years of punishment and then they're annihilated. That's just not germane to the concerns of this paper. The question as to what the just desert of the damned is – that's a separate issue.

QUESTION: If I'm understanding you correctly, you’re arguing that righteousness can't simply be a function of love as an attribute of God. Are you then saying that love is a function of righteousness or that they stand side by side as distinct overlapping characteristics?

DR. CRAIG: I want to say that justice and love stand side by side as aspects of divine righteousness or moral goodness.

FOLLOWUP: So divine righteousness or moral goodness would be the controlling . . .

DR. CRAIG: Yes. It's the umbrella term.

FOLLOWUP: Over love?

DR. CRAIG: Yes, love and justice.

All right. Thank you so much.