Chapter 2 - 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 the dilemma of man. 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 what 1 have called 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 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 and yet the cruelty of man.
So man stands with all his wonder and nobility, and yet also with his horrible, 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 me 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 no answers because there are no 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 as we consider his cruelty, it would seem certainly 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 cruelty has always been considered as distinct from his finiteness. In other words, the problem of man's being finite is not the same as the problem of his being cruel. 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 modem scientist with his energy particles, or the 'paneverythingism' of the East or neo-orthodox theology, eventually these two things merge. Cruelty and finiteness merge into one problem rather than two. With an impersonal beginning, morals really do not exist as morals. If you start with an impersonal beginning, the answer to morals eventually always turns out to be, the assertion that there are no morals (in however sophisticated a way this may be expressed). Beginning with the impersonal, whether it is the Eastern pantheism or the new theology's pantheism, Or whether it is modem man's beginning with an energy particle, always leads down to the fact that eventually morals disappear, at least in terms of what has always been meant by the word morals. With an impersonal beginning, everything is finally equal in the area of morals.
Or we may put it another way. With an impersonal beginning eventually morals is just another form of metaphysics, of being. Morals disappear, and you only have one philosophic area rather' than two. Morals only become a problem of metaphysics. This is true in every form of beginning on the side of the impersonal.
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 beginning with the impersonal, 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, that 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, namely, impersonal.
By chance, man has become a being with aspirations, including moral motions for which there is no ultimate fulfilment in the universe as it is, assuming the beginning was impersonal. 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 for 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 the universe, it is completely out of line with what is there.
You might ask why I use the term moral motions. I choose the term simply because 1 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. You do not find anywhere back in antiquity man without them. You do not find the little girl prostitute upon the street without some feeling of moral motions. You do not find the determinist, the behaviourist 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 today leads only to a complete cosmic alienation for the simple reason that if you begin with the impersonal, in the universe as it is there is no place for morals as morals. In such a situation, there is no standard in the universe which gives final meaning to such words as right and wrong. The universe, if you begin with the impersonal, 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 take those places in the East where pantheism has worked itself out more consistently than in our modem, liberal theology, or the hippie kind of pantheism, you will find that the final wrong in 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. this result that there is no ultimate difference between cruelty and non cruelty is highly developed. 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 that is 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 of god 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 pictured as having great fangs, 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. In the paneverythingism of the East where it has been developed to its logical conclusion cruelty is seen as intrinsically just as much a part of all that there is, as non cruelty.
Why is the cruel part always feminine? Nobody knows, but 1 would hazard a guess that it is a perverted memory concerning Eve. Myth usually says something - it goes back to something, but it is also usually perverted.
But eventually, as you examine the new theology as well as the pantheism of the East, you come finally 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, to retain a distinction between cruelty -and non cruelty. They try to hold off eventually coming to the place where they have to acknowledge that there is no basic meaning to the words 'right' and 'wrong'. But it cannot be done. It is like starting a stone down hill. Once one begins with an impersonal beginning, though one may use religious terms and even Christian terms, eventually one comes to the place where the words 'right' and 'wrong' have no real meaning. Beginning with the impersonal there is no final absolute and there are no final categories. If you begin with the impersonal there axe no final categories in what has always been 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 to be right is just as meaningless as to be wrong in this kind of setting. Morals as morals disappear and what we are left with is just metaphysics. All we are is the little against the big and nothing that has meaning in right and wrong.
We are rapidly coming to this in our modern culture. One can think of Marshall McLuhan in his 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 a given moment will be what is right and wrong. You may say that is far-fetched. Not so, because you must understand that that is exactly what Kinsey set forth as statistical sexual ethics. It is the way Sweden runs its sexual ethics at the moment. It is not theoretical. We have come to this place in our Western culture because man sees himself as beginning from the impersonal, the energy particle and nothing else. We are left with only statistical ethics. In that setting, there is simply no such thing as morals.
If we use religious language, instead of secular language, it seems 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. We may try to stave off the inevitable conclusion by religious connotation words, but eventually if you go behind the words and insist on meanings rather than connotation, you find the same thing applies as we have found in the secular world. The concept of morals as morals eventually just disappears. The man who has expressed this better than anybody else is the Marquis de Sade with his chemical determinism, who simply made the statement, 'What is, is right.' Nobody can argue against this if you begin with an impersonal beginning.
In summary, beginning with the impersonal, there is no explanation for the complexity of the universe or the personality of man. As I pointed out 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 an answer to the metaphysical questions at all. The same thing is true in the area of morals. If you begin with an impersonal, no matter how you phrase that impersonal, there is no meaning for morals.
Now let us turn to the opposite answer - the personal beginning. In this answer, morals and metaphysics have the possibility of being kept separate. That is the first thing to notice; a profound thing, though it may sound very simple. If we begin with an impersonal, as we have seen, eventually there can be no real distinction between morals and metaphysics. The two merge. But if you begin with the personal, there is the possibility of morals and metaphysics being kept 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 you 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? If man is cruel, how are we going to explain this if we begin with a personal beginning?
There are two possibilities. The first is that man as he now is 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 you cannot separate the symbol man from his cruelty because that is what he has always intrinsically been. In his view, man has always been cruel. But if this is so, we are faced with two problems.
The first 1 want to deal with 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 also himself bad and cruel? This is where the French thinkers Charles Baudelaire and Albert Camus come on to 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 hearing this sentence might react negatively. But in fact after 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. As Christians, we would definitely differ from Baudelaire, but not in his conclusion if you begin with his premise, that is, that man in his cruelty is what man has always been in an unbroken line. He would be right if this were the situation.
Now Camus approached this problem from a slightly different viewpoint, but dealing with the same problem. He argued that if there is a God, then we cannot fight social evil, for if we did we would be fighting God who made the world as it is. What Baudelaire and Camus say is, I think irrefutable on the basis of the premise that man stands where he always has stood, that there has been an intrinsic continuity of cruelty.
At this point, there is often entered a selective answer in the area of irrationality. The first class of answer we dealt with in Chapter 1 was the class of answer that says there are no answers, everything is finally chaotic, everything is finally irrational. Much that is religious, and specifically the Western liberal theology today, 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 say that God is good against all reason and all reasonableness 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 always 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 in choosing where they will become irrational. That is certainly true of this area. Suddenly men who have been saying they are arguing with great reason become irrationalists at this point and say that there is only an irrational answer for the question of how God is good. Liberal modern theology is firmly fixed in this classification.
Let us look at this with a little more care. 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 always be a motion back towards reason. As people argued that God is a good God against all reason and all 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. As soon as you step back into the area of reason, you 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 you give this answer is to spin off in the opposite direction, towards making everything irrational. Some people are spun off towards rationality, and then God becomes the Devil. Some people are spun off towards irrationality, but then ask, where do 1 stop? They tend to say perhaps one should just accept the whole irrational, chaotic situation, and decide that there is no meaning in the use of religious Godard's at all. Irrationalism cannot be restricted to saying God is good against all reason. These are the two tensions that are set up immediately as soon as one tries to bring the answer of irrationality in 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 qualitative change in man? You can have quantitative change, but you can never have qualitative change. That is, there is no hope of real change in man, beyond his becoming just a little less cruel. If man has always been intrinsically cruel, one might hope to alleviate the cruelty on a small scale, but one can never hope for a really qualitative change. If God has made man as man now is, then this is what man is, and there is no hope of finding any place from which real qualitative change could come. So we are left with pessimism in regard to man and his actions. These are the two problems that arise as soon as you select the side that man is made by a personal God, has a personal beginning rather than an impersonal beginning, and that man has always been what he is.
Let us go back, however. Let us say that we are on the side of a personal rather than an impersonal beginning, that man has been made by that which is personal rather than merely being a part of a total, final and 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. Or, to put it another way, man is now abnormal.
We now come to another choice, that God changed him, or made him abnormal. But if God made him abnormal then He is still a bad God. We have not solved anything up to this point. But there is yet another possibility, and that is, that man created God as personal has changed himself, that he stands as the point of discontinuity rather than continuity not because God changed him but because he changed himself. Man as he now is by 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. If man made personal by God has changed himself, we can look at man and his present cruelty without saying that God is a bad God. This is precisely the Judaeo-Christian position.
We have taken all the philosophical possibilities and we have seen what is wrong, and where they lead in every case. Now we have come to the other possibility, the Judaeo-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, by choice turned 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 becomes a true moral problem rather than merely a metaphysical one. Man at a certain point of history changed himself, and hence stands in discontinuity in his cruelty with what he was, and we have a true moral situation: morals suddenly exist. This turns upon the fact that man in contrast to what he was originally, is abnormal now. Everything hangs on this point.
The difference between Christian thinking and the non-Christian philosopher 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. As a parenthesis: curiously enough, the later Heidegger saw that you could not come up with final answers if you said 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 the position that man being 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 proceed.
First, we now can explain what is, namely that man is now cruel, without God being a bad God. Secondly, 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 as an intrinsic thing, 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 Godard's or simply an upper storey, existential thing. In this setting, it has absolutely solid meaning. The second point then is that we can have the hope of a solution concerning man if man is abnormal rather than the present situation being what man always intrinsically has been.
The third point that flows from this is that on this basis we can have a real ground for fighting evil, including social evil and social injustice. The modern man has no real basis for fighting evil. The person who 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 being reduced, including man, to only the energy particle - has no real basis for fighting evil. But the Christian has. We can fight evil evil without fighting God. We have the solution for Camus' problem. We can fight evil without fighting God, because God did not make things as they are now and as man in 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 as such we can fight the evil without fighting God.
I have used in another setting in one of my books the account of Jesus before the tomb of Lazarus. To me it sets the world on fire at this place. It becomes a great flaming cry 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 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 twentieth century. When I look at evil, the cruelty that is abnormal and not the thing as God made it, my reaction should be the same. 1 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 the thing. I have a basis to fight the thing which 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 angry at what is normal to what God has made.
The fourth result is that we can have real morals and moral absolutes, for God now is absolutely good, with the total exclusion of evil from God. God's character is the moral absolute of the universe. We must understand at this point that Plato was absolutely right. He held that unless you have absolutes you have no morals. 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 binds man and binds God, because that which is farthest back is always God finally. So it is not that there is a moral, absolute behind God, but it is God Himself and His character which is the moral absolute of the universe.
Now as in the area of metaphysics, we must understand again 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 being there, the God of the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures), there is no answer 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. They slip over without knowing it 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 for the factual revelation we do have of God in Christ. But 1 hear very little thanks from the lips of evangelicals today for the propositional revelation in verbalized form that we have in the Scriptures. He indeed must not only be there, but He must have spoken. And He must have spoken in a way which is more than simply a quarry for emotional, upper storey 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.
Let us notice that it is not improper for men to ask these questions concerning metaphysics and morals, and we as Christians should point out that there is no answer to these questions except that He is there and He is not silent. Students and young people should not be told to keep quiet when they ask these questions. They are right to ask them, but we should make 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 1 have said, it is here that the substitutionary propitiatory (and it has to be substitutionary, propitiatory, or the whole thing has no meaning) death of Christ is needed and fits in. There is nothing wrong with man 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.(1)
Finally, as in the area of metaphysics, we must stress that the answer can never lie in the word God; that will never do. Modem men are trying to find answers just in the word 'God', in Godard's. This is true of the new theology, the hippie cult and some of the 'Jesus people'. But the answer is not just in the use of the word 'God', but in the 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 and in the area of man and his dilemma, is gone.
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Note:
(1) In Christianity there is here in the area of morals, as in existence, a sufficient answer concerning an original monism but present dualism. This rests on God being good and creating everything good, but that the non programmed creature revolted and thus brought into existence the present dualism of good and evil. Yet these are not equal for the evil is contrary to the character of God, which was the original moral monism. Thus, as in existence there is an answer both for the present dualism yet needed monism.
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