God, Morality, and the Creator/creature Distinction


This is a discussion I had on Twitter on the topic of God’s relation to morality. I’ll paste the relevant parts of the discussions with my commentary afterwards.


Me: ..so, for example, it may be morally good for God to take a human’s life, that does not mean that humans taking other humans’ lives is morally good.


Person: Then God is not the standard of what is right and wrong for us to do.


Me: I don’t see how that follows.


Person: [pasted a link to a YouTube video]


Me: Watched it but still don’t think what you say follows. It’s not God’s actions that are the standard. Rather, God’s nature is the archetypal Good while we humans deal with ectypal good.

God is the standard and his actions are necessarily good [because] they’re consistent with his nature

...this doesn’t mean that a mere creature who performs the same actions would be morally good. No. Again, there’s a Creator/creature distinction.


Person: If God’s actions/nature aren’t a guide to how we should behave, then God isn’t the standard for how we should behave. It’s virtually a tautology.


Me: Think there’s a confusion of metaphysics and epistemology. God’s nature is the standard of goodness as the Archetype. But there is a metaphysical divide between God and man so man cannot hope to comprehend God’s nature. God’s archetypal goodness is possessed by Him alone....


Person: If we shouldn’t do what the archetype does, then the archetype isn’t the standard for how we should behave. 


Me: I’m trying to explain that that isn’t the case. We *cannot* partake in God’s archetypal goodness. But we can mirror it by following and obeying His revealed moral law and His commands.


[The discussion went on for a short while, then someone else commented]


Person 2: This is hard to understand. It is clearly within God's nature to kill, since there are many examples of him doing this in the Bible. Yet he commands his followers not to kill. Here is a command not consistent with his nature, so how can you reject [Person 1]’s first premise?



This short discussion highlights why the Creator/creature distinction is so important. There are three distinct categories which are relevant to understanding and answering the concerns raised by my interlocutors. They are: (i) God’s nature as the standard of goodness, (ii) God’s actions in history as described in Scripture, and (iii) God’s commands. 


The first person claims that if God’s nature is the standard of goodness, we ought to act like God and that this involves emulating His actions in history. He also claims that if something can be morally good for God, but not for us humans, then it follows that God is not the standard of goodness. 


The second person claims that God’s commands are inconsistent with His nature because He commands us not to kill when there are various instances of God killing in Scripture. 


What, then, is the relationship between God’s nature, His acts in history, and His commands? I briefly answered this question in the above discussion but since Twitter isn’t exactly the best platform for philosophical discussions such as this one, I shall expound upon the answer in this post. To do that, I shall respond to the different claims made by both persons.


The first person’s first claim is that if God is the standard of goodness, then we should do what He does. But is this true? The answer is no. And there are a few reasons why this first claim is false. 


First, it ignores the Creator/creature distinction. It does this by assuming that God does not possess special privileges and prerogatives as Creator. Because of His special and privileged status both as Creator and as the definition of Good, God’s actions are not under the same moral constraints as human actions are. To assume otherwise is just to assume that God is not God. (This point ties into the second claim this person makes, but more on that soon)


Second, it confuses metaphysics and epistemology. Nowhere in Scripture are we told that we should look at God’s actions in history in order to learn what we should and shouldn’t do. We are told to emulate God, sure. But we are never told to emulate His actions in history. Rather, it is God’s commands and His moral law that serve the epistemological function of informing us of how we should behave. God’s nature is the metaphysical standard of morality, but it is His revealed law (not His acts in history) that serve as the epistemological foundation of moral knowledge. In essence, this first claim is predicated on the false assumption that we can only emulate God’s nature by emulating His acts in history. But this is not the case since we can emulate God’s nature by acting according to His commands which are reflections of His nature.


Third, it ignores the context of God’s actions in history. God’s acts in history (for example, Him sending the flood in the time of Noah) are expressions of His nature (wrath, love, forgiveness, etc.). But this nature is both incomprehensible to, and unattainable by, creatures. We can neither comprehend nor emulate God’s nature as God comprehends or expresses it. This is why God’s acts in history are never presented as revelation of how we should act. God’s acts in history are revelation of something depending on the context in which they are performed. 


The second claim the first person makes, which is related to the first, is that God cannot be the standard of goodness if there are things that can be morally good when God does it, but morally wrong when we humans do it. But as I pointed out earlier, God’s actions are not under the same moral constraints as human actions are. There is a Creator/creature distinction. God and man do not play by the same rules, so to speak. This is because God deals with Archetypal Good, while we as creatures only deal with ectypal good. God’s holiness is the Archetypal Good. This Archetypal Goodness is possessed by God alone. It can neither be comprehended nor shared by creatures. This is why God, through voluntary self-disclosure, communicates this Archetypal Goodness in a way us creatures can understand, accommodating His Archetypal goodness to our creaturely faculties. This gives rise to ectypal goodness. This ectypal goodness is merely an analogical reflection of God’s original, incomprehensible Goodness. 


So when we say something is “morally good”, we are comparing it to the standard of ectypal goodness revealed by God. Even though this goodness is not the same as God’s Archetypal goodness, it is grounded in that Archetypal goodness as a mirror reflection of it. 


God’s actions are always in accordance with His nature and therefore they are always good. We cannot, then, use our ectypal standard to judge God’s actions since God transcends our concept/standard of goodness. To do so would be to ignore the immeasurable metaphysical distance that exists between God and man. Does this mean that God is not the standard of goodness? No. Our ectypal goodness is still rooted in God’s Archetypal goodness and can still grant us true, although creaturely, knowledge of that Archetypal goodness.


Moving on to the second person, are God’s commands really inconsistent with His nature? For reasons already stated above, the answer would have to be no. God and man cannot be judged the same standard. God’s command that we should not kill is Him establishing an ectypal moral law. God plays by the laws of Archetypal goodness. But there is no inconsistency since the ectypes depends upon the archetype.

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