Why I Am No Longer an Evangelical (Part 5c)

Metaethical Consequentialism and the Telos of Ethics

God is a metaethical consequentialist. The ethical good is expressly purposed to achieve the ontological good (a.k.a. “blessing”). The first stated purpose of the Mosaic Covenant was to fashion the “Good (Terrestrial) Society,” such that even neighbouring peoples would recognize it as such and inquire into the God of the Hebrews, despite lacking access to the Hebrew holy writ.

See, I have taught you statutes and ordinances just as the LORD my God has commanded me, so that you may follow them in the land that you are about to enter and possess. Observe them carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding in the sight of the peoples, who will hear of all these statutes and say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.” For what nation is great enough to have a god as near to them as the LORD our God is to us whenever we call on Him? And what nation is great enough to have righteous statutes and ordinances like this entire law I set before you today?¹

In similar fashion, the ethical good is likewise purposed to achieve an ontological good, albeit in the context of the New Covenant for a Kingdom not of this world.² Different purposes, different set of ethical injunctions (or procedures) and ethos are required in order to achieve those different teloi.

For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith virtue; and to virtue, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. For if you possess these qualities and continue to grow in them, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.³

This notion of an integral relationship between the ethical good and the ontological good pervades Hebrew Scriptures. This notion is not absent in Christian Scriptures.

These are the commandments and statutes and ordinances that the LORD your God has instructed me to teach you to follow in the land that you are about to enter and possess, so that you and your children and grandchildren may fear the LORD your God all the days of your lives by keeping all His statutes and commandments that I give you, and so that your days may be prolonged. Hear, O Israel, and be careful to observe them, so that you may prosper and multiply greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the LORD, the God of your fathers, has promised you.⁴

While some of those blessings may come about by direct intervention of God, most will be achieved through, and not apart from, implementing the various counsels. Herein, God acts as parent and teacher, who wishes His children and disciples to trust Him more for His genius and wisdom than for His power and direct blessings.

This understanding of the natural cause-and-effect relationship between the ethical and the ontological good can be found among secularists, even atheists like Sam Harris⁵ and Tim Whitmarsh.⁶

Scriptures likewise asserts that deleterious ontological consequences shall naturally ensue the violation of these ethical counsels. Such consequences may be divinely imparted. However, in that the violations of some of those counsels have wrought similar deleterious consequences in other societies which were beyond eyeshot and earshot of the Law, it is reasonable to conclude that such consequences are natural, as instrumental means by which deleterious outcomes are divinely imparted. Ethical laws, like physical laws, are written into Creation itself (not directly into the minds of common humanity).

The complexity of existence disabuses the concept of metaethical consequentialism in terms of simple-minded morality plays.⁷ Metaethical consequentialism in the hands of God is holistic. The multiplicity of ethical and psychosocial laws governing human existence, let alone other factors, complicate the tracing of ethical causes to their ontological outcomes. A violation of an ethical law may naturally result in deleterious consequences. But the manner, by which those deleterious consequences manifest themselves, may vary due to factors extraneous to the natural effects of the violation itself.

The ontological consequences of the virtues and vices of one generation often require several generations to come to full fruition.⁸ Ethically decadent generations may avoid the full and evident ontological brunt of their own sins, perhaps through the depletion of the economic and social capital accumulated by their ancestors, while their own descendants may have reason to later complain that “our fathers sinned and are no more, but we bear their punishment.”⁹

As a lifelong student of world history, with a particular interest in the rise and fall of civilizations, the tracing of ethical cause to natural ontological consequence becomes easier to detect. It is a seminal lesson from the history of the ancient Hebrews.

Seminarian Opposition to Consequentialism

However, Christendom, under the corruptive infusion of Stoicism, Kantianism, and Divine Command Ethics, often regards such beneficial ontological purposes as lacking in highest holiness and virtue. Some holier-than-God zealots consider actions and decisions, whose underlying intentions give fair regard for the rights and interests of the practitioner, as too pragmatic and venal, even morally repugnant.¹⁰ (They say, “Keep to yourself; do not come near Me, for I am holier than You!”¹¹)

Do you ask what it is that I seek in virtue? Only herself. For she offers nothing better—she herself is her own reward.¹²

Virtue is its own reward, and brings with it the truest and highest pleasure; but if we cultivate it only for pleasure's sake, we are selfish, not religious, and will never gain the pleasure, because we can never have the virtue.¹³

Alternatively, ethical means are exalted over ontological ends or are conceived as the end-in-of-itself purpose. Exalting virtue as an end in of itself is akin to asserting that the manufacturing process, which produces the end products, is the primary purpose of the creation of the manufacturing process.

What, then, is marriage for? It is for helping each other to become our future glory-selves, the new creations that God will eventually make us. The common horizon husband and wife look toward is the Throne, and the holy, spotless, and blameless nature we will have.¹⁴

It is not that virtue is not a worthy, even necessary, pursuit for Christians.¹⁵ But it is the good society, the good marriage, or the Kingdom of God, which are the ultimate telos, to which ethics are essential and contributive, and from which sin detracts, mars, and destroys. Moreover, under Stoicism, the pursuit of virtue becomes egoistic and atomistic.¹⁶

Another source of the severance of ethical means from ontological ends results from Divine Command Ethics (DCE) to which much of contemporary Evangelical Christendom subscribes. Like the ancient Greeks, the validity of moral law rests solely upon the power and hierarchical authority of the Sovereign who promulgates that law. To assert that there also exists an intrinsic merit to ethics, independent of God (etsi Deus non daretur), suggests, at least to such minds, that God is not the ultimate entity, but that there exists something greater than He.

A critic of substitutionary atonement deploys such DCE argumentation to dispute the need for God to satisfy justice in order to extend grace and forgiveness. 

. . . it wasn’t God, but rather justice, that demanded the crucifixion of Jesus. But this begs the question of who is really in charge? Is God merely a penultimate deity subordinate to the goddess Justice? Are we to imagine God saying, “Look, I’d really like to forgive you, but I’ve got to pay off Lady Justice first, and she’s a cruel goddess who demands the blood of an innocent victim through a torturous death”?¹⁷

DCE facilitates, even in the minds of orthodox Evangelicals, a license for the Sovereign of the cosmos to set aside His ethical and juridical principles whenever such are inconvenient to the purposes of that Sovereign. For instance, according to contemporary Reformed theology, the culpability of Adam’s sin has been charged to all of Adam’s descendants, even though Mosaic Law, let alone reason and common intuitions, repudiates such juridical travesty.¹⁸

There is a way to resolve this etsi Deus non daretur concern, (and also pass through Euthyphro’s horns and overcome Hume’s sophistry (re: the “is” and the “ought”). All are complex philosophical endeavours and thus go beyond the scope of this discourse. But in short, the ethical/juridical good proceeds ontologically from God, but has genuine epistemological meaning, distinct and apart from Him? Law and Lawgiver.

But we know that the judgment of God is [down from] truth (to krima tou Theou estin kata alētheian) upon those practicing such things.¹⁹

As it is written: “That You may be justified in Your words, and may overcome when You are judged.”²⁰

It is through this biblical understanding, which contrasts with the seminarian-induced corruption (the “Great Tradition”), that we can comprehend the conditional terms of Salvation.

1. Deuteronomy 4:5–8. While Protestant thought has recognized a negative civic purpose to the Law, the positive social/civic purpose has been neglected. (See Nathan W. Bingham, “The Threefold Use of the Law,” Ligonier, August 22, 2012, https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/threefold-use-law).

2. John 18:36

3. 2 Peter 1:5–8 (emphasis added)

4. Deuteronomy 6:1–3 (emphasis added)

5. Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape, New York: Free Press, 2010.

6. Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods, New York: Vintage Books, 2015.

7. i.e., Psalm 73

8. Exodus 20:5; Deuteronomy 5:9; Matthew 7:16a, 20, 12:33b

9. Lamentations 5:7. Cf. Ezekiel 18:2; Jeremiah 31:29.

10. This contrasts with Philippians 4:2 – “Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.”

11. Isaiah 65:5

12. Seneca the Younger, “De Vita Beata,” 58 AD, translated by John W. Basore in Seneca, Moral Essays, Vol. II, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: W. Heinemann, 1932, vii, 9, 4 (pp. 122–3). (Interrogas, quid petam ex virtute? Ipsam. Nihil enim habet melius, ipsa pretium sui.)

13. John Henry Newman, “Sermon 17. Sanctity the Token of the Christian Empire,” in Sermons Bearing on Subjects of the Day, London: Gilbert & Rivington, 1844, p. 276; [WEB] The National Institute for Newman Studies (a.k.a. Newman Reader), https://www.newmanreader.org/works/subjects/sermon17.html.

14. Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage, New York: Dutton, 2011, p.120.

15. Hebrews 12:14

16. Considering the historical context in which Stoicism came to prevail among elite Roman circles, Stoicism may have supplied a motivational basis to pursue virtue in an era when the surrounding society did not. In the more moralistic Republican era, the motivational basis, undergirding the pursuit of virtue, was the good of the Commonweal by which all Roman citizens benefitted in varying degrees.

17. Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2017, p. 102.

18. Ezekiel 18:20, Deuteronomy 24:16

19. Romans 2:2

20. Romans 3:4 (NKJV). Cf. Psalm 51:4b