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Is God Really Good? That is the Pressing Question

Many discussions these days seem in one way or another to lead to this bigger question: Is God Really Good? Job was severely tested on this question. It’s not a new, but a pressing one today. The answer has huge consequences. If we discovered that God was indeed good, what difference would it make? Definitions often cause confusion, so let me begin with what we mean by the language of goodness. Brilliant Oxford Ethicist Iris Murdoch mused about this idea of the good man in one of her essays (Murdoch, I. (1997). On ‘God’ and the ‘Good’. In P. Conradi (Ed.) Iris Murdoch on Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on philosophy and literature. London: Chatto & Windus). Charles Taylor, who learned much from Murdoch during his D.Phil. in Philosophy, has made much of the recovery of the language of the good for moral philosophy (Sources of the Self). But at the end of the day, are we not most concerned about whether there is a good God? It strikes us that this could be one of the most important questions to settle in university discourse and debate, even though it is often seen to be irrelevant to many academics.

The gods of the Greeks and Romans were often capricious, petty, manipulative and sometimes malevolent. It seems appropriate, for the sake of the argument, to provide a preliminary definition of transcendent trinitarian divine goodness before discussing its implications for moral self-constitution or human identity. Definitions are important for any discussion. This provides the broader moral horizon for self-constitution that seems urgent, but often lacking (Chad Meister, Paul Copan). First, it will be helpful for clarity to begin by explaining this horizon on the negative side: what goodness does not mean as a character trait of God. Goodness is not an absolute principle like the rationally structured Good of Plato’s divine Idea, or Iris Murdoch’s concept of the cosmic Good, an impersonal good, devoid of a personal God—a transcendent absolute value, or abstract norm.  Charles Taylor’s definition of the transcendent turn to a transcendent good in Sources of the Self is more fully developed in A Secular Age. A Taylor admirer theologian D. Stephen Long provides helpful characterization of the divine good.

No being is co-eternal with God, not even a being we might designate as nothing. Only God is. Good, then, cannot be a function of a category called being more encompassing than God. Ethics cannot be the province of a philosophical discourse that brackets out theological consideration, unless philosophers assume a being greater than God giving access to goodness…. We realize that any discourse about the good must also entail discourse about God. (D. Stephen Long, The Goodness of God, p. 300)

The good, under these conditions, is not an independent criterion by which one judges God. God is goodness at its highest, infinite, most intense and purest, the highest possible standard of the good. Long continues:  “God is good in the most excellent way.” (Long, Ibid., p. 21); He is the ultimate standard of all goodness, and the ultimate position of critique for human claims to goodness. There exists no more transcendent, no more secure standard of pure goodness. Otherwise that would be God.