Does God Command and Punish in the Garden of Eden?

Most interpretations of Gen 2–3 center the motifs of divine command, human obedience, and divine punishment. These ideas, however, are not intrinsic to the narrative. They represent only one possible way of interpreting certain semantic and narrative ambiguities in the story. One can also read Gen 2–3 as a story about a divine warning and a consequential decision. This alternative reading does a better job making sense of the narrative details and better reflects the unique way the J source of the Pentateuch understands how God interacts with humanity.

Self-Defence and a Phronetic Use of Violence: A Christian Response to Muslim-mob Attacks in Northern Nigeria

The sermon on the mount has often been used to support a nonviolent response to any form of injustice and violent attacks against Christians. This article argues that the sermon, understood in its original Old and New Testament contexts, does not necessarily support a wholesale prohibition of the use of violence. It also argues that the implicit ethical theory of the sermon – and the New Testament in general – is a combination of a virtue ethics and a divine command theory. On this premise, one is able to show that a measured use of violence for self-defence is a theologically tenable Christian response to unauthorized attacks. This measured use of violence for self-defence is qualified by a Christian phronesis or practical wisdom, which takes into full account both the teaching of Jesus on love of the enemy and the contextual or existential realities of Christians facing violent attacks in northern Nigeria.

The Psychopath Objection to Divine Command Theory

Recently, Erik Wielenberg has developed a novel objection to divine command meta-ethics (DCM). The objection that DCM "has the implausible implication that psychopaths have no moral obligations and hence their evil acts, no matter how evil, are morally permissible". This article criticizes Wielenberg's argument. Section 1 will expound Wielenberg's new "psychopath" argument in the context of the recent debate over the Promulgation Objection. Section 2 will discuss two ambiguities in the argument; in particular, Wielenberg’s formulation is ambiguous between whether Wielenberg uses the word "obligation" in an objective or subjective sense. Section 3 will argue that this ambiguity undercuts the argument. If Wielenberg is using the word obligation in a subjective sense, his arguments do not show that that psychopaths "have no moral obligations". By contrast, if Wielenberg is using the word obligation in an objective sense, his arguments do not show that Divine command theorists are committed to denying psychopaths have obligations.

Has God Indeed Said? Skeptical Theism and Scriptural Hermeneutics

This paper demonstrates that the skeptical theist’s response to the problem of evil deprives the analytic theologian of theoretical resources necessary to avoid accepting as veridical merely apparent divine commands that endorse cruelty. In particular, I argue that the same skeptical considerations that lead analytic theologians to endorse skeptical theism also lead to what I call “divine command skepticism”—an inability to make certain kinds of judgements about what a good God would or would not command. The danger of divine command skepticism is not that it generates new reasons to think that God has commanded horrors, but, rather, that it undercuts the defeaters we might otherwise have for thinking that God has commanded those horrors. It does so both by rendering illicit certain theological and hermeneutical methodologies employed within liberatory frameworks (i.e., various kinds of liberation theologies) and by depriving the theologian of some of the more “traditional” mechanisms for resolving such apparent conflicts.

Karl Barth’s Theological Ethics

Barth’s theological ethics is a version of divine command ethics. However, it is a highly unusual version. Its premise is that the Word of God—the revelation and work of God’s grace to human beings in Jesus Christ—is also the command of God, that gospel is also law. What God commands, therefore, is that human beings confirm in their conduct what they already are by virtue of God’s grace to them. Human beings confirm grace in their conduct by performing actions that correspond to grace, so that the moral life is lived as a human analogy to divine grace. The problem with Barth’s divine command ethics is that the claim that grace is the norm of human action fails to do justice to human beings as creatures. For Barth, God’s resolution from eternity to be gracious to human beings and God’s realization of this eternal resolution in time determines human beings as creatures, not just as those who have fallen into sin. It follows that the human creature exists for the actualization of grace, not grace for the perfection of the creature.

The Command of God as a Moral Norm

Barth’s divine command ethics claims that God’s grace to human beings in Jesus Christ is the norm of human action. In Jesus Christ, God both poses and answers the question of the good of human action, which is the question of its conformity to grace. Rather than a norm of a distinctively Christian way of acting or form of life, Barth argues that this is a moral norm that pertains to human action as such. When moral philosophy considers the question of conformity to the good that is posed to human action, it implicitly attests the grace of God which poses this question. And when moral philosophy considers the answers to the question of the good that derive from reason or experience, it implicitly attests the grace of God as the answer to the question. In its explicit attestation of the grace of God as the norm of human action, theological ethics makes use of this implicit attestation in moral philosophy. Barth thus endorses the traditional position according to which theology articulates the moral norm with the assistance of philosophy. However, Barth’s claim that the norm of human action is a revealed norm, and not a rational norm that is clarified, specified, and extended by revelation, qualifies the goodness of the human creature, fails to secure the mutual accountability of those who are inside and outside the circle of revelation, and limits the grounds on which Christians and others cooperate with one another in moral endeavors.

The Command of God as a Morally Binding Norm

As a version of divine command ethics, Barth’s theological ethics answers the two fundamental questions posed to every divine command ethics, namely, how is it that God’s command determines the good of human action, and why is it that human beings must accept what God determines as good? Barth’s answer to both question is that in Jesus Christ, God both poses the question of the good to human beings and answers it in their place. In him, God’s goodness both confronts other human beings as the norm of their goodness and fulfills that norm in their place. It therefore determines the good of human action insofar as Jesus Christ is the human being who takes the place of other human beings. And other human beings must accept what God thereby determines as their good because—again, insofar as Jesus Christ has taken their place—their good is already a reality in him, in whom they exist as the human beings they are. The problem is that while the grace of God in Jesus Christ is the genuinely human good of other human beings insofar as they exist in Jesus Christ, it is, precisely as grace, a good that constitutes them from outside and not a good that fulfills them as the kind of creature they are.

Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy Volume 9

Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy annually collects the best current work in the field of medieval philosophy. The various volumes print original essays, reviews, critical discussions, and editions of texts. The aim is to contribute to an understanding of the full range of themes and problems in all aspects of the field, from late antiquity into the Renaissance, and extending over the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian traditions. Volume 9 ranges widely over this terrain, including Mark Kalderon on Augustine’s theory of perception, Alexander Lamprakis on belief in miracles among Baghdad Christian philosophers, Andreas Lammer on Avicenna on time, Ana María Mora-Márquez on logical methodology, Franziska van Buren on Bonaventure’s theory of universals, Eric Hagedorn on Ockham’s divine-command theory, and Dominik Perler on exemplar causes in Suárez.