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240 - The God Who Commands: A Study in Divine Command Ethics |
The God Who Commands: A Study in Divine Command Ethics
By Richard J. Mouw
Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1990. 214 pp. $24.95.
Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, argues that any adequate moral
theory has a threefold structure: (1) “untutored human-nature-as-it happens-to-be,”
(2) “human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realised-its
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242 - The God Who Commands: A Study in Divine Command Ethics |
telos,” and (3) the principles or rules of ethics identifying the means of movement from how we happen to be to our telos, or end, as human beings. MacIntyre, surveying the contemporary intellectual landscape sees but two options: Either embrace “emotivism,” the modern secularist moral theory in which moral beliefs are nothing more than the subjective preferences of individuals, or return to classical, Aristotelian-Thomist thought. Richard Mouw, in The God Who Commands, argues that MacIntyre has presented us with a false dilemma. There is a third alternative-the Calvinist, or Reformed, tradition of “divine command ethics.”
This work, by Fuller Theological Seminary professor and provost Richard Mouw, is, then, an attempt to identify and elucidate the foundations of a divine command morality. It is, as Mouw puts it in his introduction, “an exercise in moral apologetics,” in which the author develops and defends what is essential to divine command theory. Or, to return to MacIntyre's understanding of moral theory, Mouw stands as an advocate of the divine command tradition in ethics, developing that tradition in light of problems that are internal to it as well as engaging and addressing charges of those who stand outside it that the tradition is inadequate.
The stereotype of the Calvinist tradition in ethics is that the moral life is simply a matter of identifying what an all-powerful God arbitrarily commands and, then, obeying the command for fear of God's punishment. Mouw, not surprisingly, rejects this stereotype. He, first of all, contends that it is neither unreasonable nor infantile for Christians to rely upon divine guidance and authority. God, Christians believe, is a moral expert, and a wise person hardly ignores the advice of experts. Furthermore, Mouw elaborates how Calvinists have typically “softened” the apparent arbitrariness of God by pointing to God's covenantal grace, God's law, and Calvinist views of political authority and the worshipping community. The moral life is, fundamentally, a matter of the individual bending her own rebellious will to a sovereign will, but the will of the sovereign is neither arbitrary nor unkind.
But this still would make morality too much a matter of isolated performances, so Mouw takes up the challenges of narrative theory and virtue ethics and argues that divine command ethics can accommodate the insights of each. In order properly to grasp God's commands, we need to understand the “dramatic context” of the commands, the story of “God's dealings with creation.” And acts of obedience to the divine will need not be thought of only as isolated performances, but also as essential aspects of the development of character, as “integral steps in our moral pilgrimages.”
Divine command ethics are quite clearly hierarchical, demanding submission to the will of God. Many feminists contend that this
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language is hopelessly patriarchal and urge its rejection. Mouw's response to this feminist objection is complementarist. Reformed ethics must insist upon divine sovereignty and human surrender; we must, however, think of male and female as “mutually enabling partners under the divine rule.” Mouw, rightly, dismisses as heterodox “immanentistic God-human egalitarianism.” Biblical religion insists upon Creator-creature inequality.
Those who know Richard Mouw's work will be delighted with this book. Many of us expect Mouw to introduce us to unusual partners in the conversation. So he does here; we meet Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Andrew Bonar, Bishop Dinah Hardenbergh and Jean de Labadie, Cornelius Van Til and S.U. Zuidema as well as W.K. Frankena. The book is clearly and carefully written, accessible to any student of theology.
Mouw succeeds admirably in his fundamental task of elucidating the Calvinist tradition of ethics. This work is far more thoroughly theocentric than others that have claimed that title and will be a starting point for those who wish to engage divine command ethics.
One wonders whether Mouw hasn't been a bit too kind and gentle in his engagement with others, too ready to avoid conflict. His discussion of feminism is a case in point. The feminist writings discussed by Mouw are moderate and somewhat dated. Recent feminists have charged that the description of God as sovereign is responsible for a host of ills, our contemporary salvation lying with a rejection of this metaphor. Mouw's willingness to confront this objection and his way of handling it would have been instructive.
Mouw makes no pretense of attempting to address the content of divine command ethics, so he cannot be faulted for a failure to identify the basic principles and/or virtues of Reformed morality. That is work for others, though Mouw is confident of our ability to identify correctly what God commands. Those who are less certain of our access to divine knowledge will not find this book persuasive.
The Reformed tradition, while not reluctant to use the language of human ends, has been reluctant, unlike the Thomist tradition, to spell out in detail what that human end consists of. One might have hoped for a more developed discussion of what our human end is and the relation of divine commands to that end in light of Mouw's wish for rapprochement between divine command and character ethics.
These mild demurrers aside, this is an important book. Those who take the Reformed tradition seriously, or those who wish to understand it, would do well to consult this work.
THOMAS D. KENNEDY
Valparaiso University
Valparaiso, Indiana