The Ten Commandments 1
The Ten Commandments: Yahweh, the Dao and Social Darwinism
“The leaves of the tree of life are for the healing of the nations.”
(Rev. 22.2)
Introduction
As Christians, how should we understand the Ten Commandments? Christian faith requires “placing” the Decalogue in the framework of God’s creative and redemptive mission to God’s whole creation. We arrive at this answer by applying the traditional Christian principle that Christian believers should interpret the First Covenant, witnessed to in the “Old Testament,“ in the light of the Second Covenant, and witnessed to in the “New Testament.” Jesus, as God’s Incarnate Word, is the center from which the First Covenant and its Law should be interpreted. Using the jargon of contemporary theory, Christian understanding recontextualizes the Ten Commandments. The new context is no longer God’s relation to Israel, understood within the framework of the Pentateuch or the Hebrew Scriptures. The witness of the New Testament, whose center is Jesus Christ, sets the horizon for understanding the Decalogue. Christians try to see everything in the light of Christ.
he truest meaning of God’s Torah/Law, whose summary is the Decalogue, is given by God’s purposes as creator, redeemer and perfector of the whole creation and of all the nations. This horizon is present also in the Old Testament, although it does not stand out as brightly as in the New Testament. The New Testament does not introduce a new horizon here but reestablishes or refocuses a horizon already in the Old Testament. Just as Jesus did not abrogate the Law, but refocused and fulfilled the God’s Torah, so the New Testament perspective does not cancel but refocuses an Old Testament perspective. Jesus’ teaching and Christian faith recovers a horizon lying in the deepest texture of Israel’s faith, that God calls Israel to be a blessing for the nations.
This way of “placing” the Decalogue requires revising some typical ways of interpreting the Ten Commandments. Christians may not consider the Decalogue as purely an internal matter of God’s relation to Israel. Christian believers should read the Decalogue as helping define God’s relation to Israel, which includes Israel’s mission or purpose for all the nations. The God of Israel is the God who is and will be Lord of all the nations. Everything God does with Israel, electing, commanding, correcting, supporting, is done in the horizon of God’s Lordship over all the nations. God’s Torah is not just for Israel but also for Israel to the nations.
Jesus is the center of Christian faith. Jesus not only assumed and asserted the validity of the Decalogue by citing specific Commandments and by teaching its summary, the Double Commandment. He clearly taught that he came not to cancel the law but to fulfill it. (Matthew 5: 17) This means the Decalogue belongs in Christian faith and life. The Christian church cannot think of itself simply as a bystander, an onlooker, even if an admiring one, of the Decalogue as a part of Jewish religion, but not part of Christian faith and life. If Jesus is at the center of Christian faith, then Jesus teaching of the Decalogue is also at the center. 1
Second, Christians ought not think of God’s Law as a standard or rule that must be met if humans are to earn God’s love or gracious favor. This way of looking at the Law is common in the First Covenant. The strand of writing which scholars call the “Deuteronomic theology” teaches that meeting the demands of the Law merits God’s favor and support; disobedience earns God’s wrath.2 This view of the Law seems an overwhelming temptation, because it reappears again in both Roman Catholic and Protestant piety at different times, reducing Christianity to a religion of fearful, calculating commerce between humans and a vengeful God. Against this deformation of Christianity Luther and Calvin raised their protest and this deformation has alienated many people from the Christian faith and church. 3
This legalistic way of viewing God’s Law, including the Decalogue, is contradicted by God’s making the Person of Jesus Christ, his life and death, the basis of human righteousness, a becoming right with God that humans can receive by faith. Christ’s Person and teaching set the Decalogue in the context of God’s renewed creative and saving action in relation to all the nations, toward the whole world. Christian faith assumes and builds on the faith of Israel. The New Testament Gospel of Jesus Christ can be stated in the verse from John’s Gospel (John 3:16) “for God so loved the world (kosmos) that he gave his only Son, so that everyone (pas) who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Whatever place the Decalogue, as the epitome of Old Testament moral teaching, has in Christian faith, it is not the standard we must meet in order to be saved.
What is Israel’s relationship to all the other nations of the earth? God’s election of Israel, God’s Covenant with Israel, and God’s giving of the Law in that Covenant, was not just God’s way of separating Israel from the nations. Granted, much,4 though certainly not all,5 of the “Old Testament” views the Covenant and the Law as a means by which Israel should be different from the nations.6 The Deuteronomic theology we just mentioned constantly opposes the Law of God with the moral and cultic practices of the “nations.”
In that perspective, the “nations” play a negative, alien role. As this counter background, the nations tempt Israel to commit idolatry or serving as God’s means to punish Israel for defections in obedience to God’s Law. This view loses from sight that the Mosaic covenant was preceded by the gracious Noachic and Abrahamic covenants, covenants between God and all the nations, indeed, between God and all creation. The view that the Mosaic Covenant is Israel’s private privilege loses from sight that the Mosaic covenant should be interpreted in the light of the Noachic and Abrahamic covenants, not interpreted in isolation from them.
We suggest that if the wider context of the Noachic and Abrahamic covenants is lost from sight, Israel of old and Jews today are tempted to view history as the story of its privileged status in God’s eyes among the nations, its endangerment from contamination by the nations, and its victimization by the nations. Israel’s self- understanding become self-concerned, self-referential, even self-obsessed. Israel loses its vision of itself as God’s light to the nations.7
God elected Israel from among the nations and established a covenant with Israel for the sake of the nations. This means that the Decalogue, as a central element in the Covenant, receives its ultimate meaning in the context of God’s purposes for Israel in relation to the nations. We showed further in the last essay that this wider horizon of all the nations and the whole creation comes again into view in the New Testament. Christ’s ministry and witness to non-Jews, Christ’s Great Commission to teach and preach to the ends of the earth, the Pentecost outpouring of the Spirit for mission in all tongues, St. Paul’s recovery of Abraham as the founding figure for understanding God’s purposes for Israel, and the vision of the healing of and the obedience of the nations in the Revelation of St. John all recover the international, indeed, the cosmic context of the giving of the Law.
This understanding of the “place” of the Decalogue in God’s purposes is the framework for understanding the individual Commandments of the Decalogue. In this essay, we address the “First Commandment.”
What is the First Commandment?
Historically theologians have agreed there are Ten Commandments but they have differed on how they are divided. We identified this problem in the previous essay.8 We meet the problem again now when we want to talk about the First Commandment. The different ways of dividing the Commandments make it necessary to decide what we will consider the First Commandment.
We must challenge 11th century theologian Peter Lombard’s way of dividing the Decalogue, the way followed by both medieval theologians, like St. Bonaventura and by Martin Luther. This method subsumes the precept against creating graven images into what that tradition calls the First Commandment. This decision then requires that tradition to divide the last Commandment into two separate commandments, to create Ten Commandments, a division which is patently artificial. Granted, the prohibition against images is logically related to the Commandment to “have no other gods before me.” However, given that the theme of images is so central to our electronic age, we choose to examine it as a Commandment in itself. Finally, in deciding what the First Commandment is, we agree with John Calvin, that the First of the Ten Words should not be counted as a Commandment, in the sense of a moral precept, at all. Rather the First Word of the Decalogue (deka logos) is a self-introduction by God, a self-identification which “proceeds” each of the Commandments.9 Thus, in this essay, we regard the first “Word” (I am Yahweh, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage) as a self-identifying preface to all the Commandments. Then the First Commandment, in the sense of a precept or moral commandment, is “You shall have no other gods before my face.” Consequently, the focus of this essay will be this first Word, this divine self-identification. In the next essay, the third of this series, we hope to address the second Word of the Decalogue, the first of the Commandments in the proper sense of a moral precept.
God’s Self-Identification
hw”hy> ykinOa’ #r,a,me ^ytiaceAh rv,a] ^yh,l{a/
`~ydIb’[] tyBemi ~yIr;c.m
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. . . . “ (NRSV, Exodus 20.2).
God, in this “first Word” identifies Himself in two ways. The first is by giving a personal name. In the worship of Israel, this name is never spoken, only written. The name is not spoken or read aloud as an act of reverence, not because God is impersonal and is beyond having a personal identity. The word given in the King James Version, “Jehovah, ” is the product of the Hebrew letters in the written text with vowels added. The personal character of God is reinforced by the personal pronoun: “who” (brought you out of Egypt…)
The second way God identifies Himself is by referring to one of God’s acts. This act is one of deliverance and it is an act benefiting the people of Israel. The act is God’s work of regarding Israel’s suffering in slavery in Egypt, calling the Hebrews out from this slavery, and intervening in the lives of the Hebrews and Egypt to make this liberation possible.
Thus God identifies himself in two ways, by a name, which pious Jews to this day believe may be read but not explicitly spoken, and by referring to a helping, indeed, liberating action.
Our leading question in this essay is what significance does this first Word of the Decalogue have for understanding the whole Decalogue in the perspective of God purposes through Israel and the Church to the nations.
A Personal and Transcendent God
The God who commands Israel to obey the two Tables of the Law is a personal God. Here, “personal” means a being with a specific identity, a subject with a center of thinking, awareness and action. Further, to say God is personal means that God transcends those to whom God speaks, as an I stands over against and other than a Thou, yet who can address another, speaking and acting immanently in the world God created. The God who speaks the First Word is neither identical with nor even part of the unreflexive flow of life that we call nature. To recognize that the God of Israel, (and of Christians) is personal implies having an identity, and identity that is disclosed in and through actions. And, it means having radical transcendence that makes God free for radical immanence. 10
The people of western cultures (and of Islamic cultures) are so familiar with the notion of a personal God that they may take for granted that deity has a personal character. We can all benefit from an intellectual experiment of reading the Ten Commandments without the first Word, the Word in which God identifies himself by name and through deeds. How would our moral sensibility be different, if God were not personal in the sense that the God of Israel and the Father of Jesus Christ is personal?
The alternative to a personal God as the source of moral laws is an impersonal force as the source of moral law. Human morality assumes the character of a correspondence of human behaviour and character to a primordial order, way or process in nature and the cosmos. Then, the source of the moral law would be nameless. And the source of the moral order would not intervene in nature and history, because this primordial, nameless reality would be wholly immanent in nature. Such an anonymous force would dwell behind history or within the cosmos, being one with the totality of the cosmos. Being nameless, to name the ground of moral law would be impossible or, if done for practical reasons, inherently false. This speaking would have something inauthentic about it, something untrue about it. Further, humans would be left with two fundamental questions.
One is the metaphysical question of how an impersonal, anonymous force can really have a will and express that will for human behavior. The speech act of commanding assumes a dramatic framework, a context in which one speaks and another hears and responds. It assumes a relation between one who has the right to command and another who has the obligation or the duty to obey. But a dramatic framework is a personal framework. An anonymous, personally unknown lawgiver may be a contradiction in terms. How can we understand a nameless force issuing commands to human beings? An anonymous, impersonal process or way or order could not “give” moral guidance to humans; it could only exist to be conformed to.
A second, fundamental question posed by an impersonal, nameless force, as the origin of moral law, is whether such a morality could plausibly be a basis for a real distinction between good and evil, right and wrong. If the source of the moral law is one with the universe, because not transcending it personally, the “will” of the lawgiver must be identical with all that is in the cosmos. Then, all human distinctions between “good” and “evil,” “right” and “wrong”; “virtue” and “vice” are only relative contrasts, not alternatives grounded in the source of human existence. If the moral law encompasses all that is, if the law-giving principle is identical with all that is, “good” must be able to become “evil” and vice-verse, because at the deepest level of the texture of reality, all is one. Good and evil must be transformations of each other. Moral distinctions are only an epiphenomenal reality; at the deepest level of reality, the two are two sides of the same reality. But, we don’t need to continue this abstract speculation about an impersonal lawgiver.
The next step in this essay is to discuss two worldviews. Common to both is the claim that an impersonal law underlies nature and history and that from this impersonal law derives moral norms for human behavior. One of these is an venerable, deeply wise, Asian philosophy, namely, Daoism. The second is a modern, western philosophy, Social Darwinism. Our purpose is to let these two philosophies serve as contrasts to the personal and transcendent God of the first Word of the Decalogue. This comparison will help us get a better picture of the meaning of the first Word by showing the differences between that Word and another conception of moral foundations.
Daoism11
First we illustrate the contrast to the Decalogue as governed by the first Word, God’s self-introduction, by the Chinese religious classic, Dao De Jing. The following excerpts from this Taoist classic text demonstrate two things. First, the ultimate principle for moral guidance, the Dao, has no name; it is anonymous. The word “Dao” is not a personal name but a helping term to speak about what has no name. Second, this ultimate principle, the Dao, is beyond the distinction between moral right and wrong. Nevertheless, paradoxically, this Chinese classic does teach both a personal and a social ethic.
Our method will be to examine individual but representative statements from this Chinese classic to illustrate an ethic whose basis is impersonal and immanent.
way- virtue/ power- canon
Chapter One
sentence 1.
way can say, not ever way
sentence 2.
name can name, not ever name
sentence 3. ,
nothing , name heaven earth its beginning
sentence 4.
existence, name ten thousand things its mother.
The first two sentences of the first chapter of the Dao De Jing declare the ambiguity inherent in naming the Dao. Three current translations of the first sentence are “Tao can be talked about, but not the Eternal Tao. Names can be named, but not the Eternal Name. “ 12 “The Dao which one can explain is not the unchanging Dao; the name which one can name is not the unchanging name.” 13; “The Tao that can be talked about is not the true Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” 14 The literal translation of the first two sentences is: way/ can/ say, not, ever /way. Name/ can /name; not/ ever /name.
That the Dao is, in itself, nameless or beyond any name or any expressing it in words, obviously makes teaching about the Dao rather difficult. But these first two lines of the first chapter are clear enough: what ever the Dao is, it cannot be properly named and it cannot be properly expressed in words.
The nameless of the Dao is asserted explicitly in Chapter 32. The literal meaning of each Chinese character is given beneath the Chinese text.
Chapter 32
sentence 1.
Dao ever not name; simple although small, under heaven not can control.
The contrast with the first Word of the Decalogue is clear. Although the God of Israel and Christianity transcends human comprehension, and therefore cannot be pictured, as we will see, God nevertheless has a name. In that sense God is personal: God has a self-consciousness; God can address humans; God can be addressed by human beings; and God transcends human beings as an I transcends a Thou. The Dao lacks these characteristics.
Chapter 25. Sentence 3:
I not know its name, must its word call Dao; must for name call great
This citation simply reinforces our first point: the Dao is unnameable, unspeakable. To call it “Dao” is not to name it but is only a means to say something about it.
The second issue we want to raise is the relation of Dao and morality.
Chapter 25 contains a pertinent statement.
sentence 7.
human law earth, earth law heaven, heaven law Dao, Dao law nature.
One current translation of this line is :”mankind takes the earth as its law, the earth takes heaven as its law, heaven takes the dao as its law, and the dao takes nature as its law. “ 15
Another translator offers: “ Man follows the ways of the Earth. The Earth follows the ways of Heaven, Heaven follows the ways of Tao, Tao follows its own ways.” 16
Despite the oracular and abbreviated style of the Dao De Jing, this sentence makes clear that human law (the Chinese word “fa” is a general word for law; it does not , as such, distinguish among individual morality, natural law or civil law. ) is grounded in Dao. Further the statement makes clear that the Dao is immanent in the cosmos, in which “earth,” “heaven” and “nature” are included.
Nevertheless, a sentence in Chapter 38 states that human moral virtue benevolence and righteousness are, in some sense, a departure, a decline from Dao.
Chapter 38
sentence 6.
Cause lose Dao and after virtue; lose virtue and after benevolence; lose benevolence and after righteousness; lost righteousness and after ritual.
Translators agree on the following translation: “After the Dao is lost, virtue remains; after virtue is lost, benevolence remains; after benevolence is lost, righteousness remains; after righteousness is lost, ritual remains.” 17
Thus the succession: Dao- virtue- benevolence- righteousness-ritual is a descent away from reality and truth. In itself, the Dao is not virtuous. Thus, Fairbank and Reischauer can summarize the nature of Dao, saying. “Despite constant flux, the Tao is unitary, having no distinctions of big or little, good or bad, life or death. The relativity of all things and the dependence of any quality on its opposite are constant Taoist themes.” 18
Even though the Dao seems to transcend the distinction between moral right and wrong, virtuous and vicious and good and evil, a genuine moral teaching imbues the Dao De Jing. For example in Chapter 54, we read,
“Cultivate Virtue in your own person, and it becomes a genuine part of you.
his virtue becomes true/ real
And then, further:
“Cultivate it (virtue) in the family, and it will abide. Cultivate it in the community, and it will live and grow. Cultivate it in the state, and it will flourish abundantly. Cultivate it in the world, and it will become universal.”19
This passage makes clear that the Wise, those who let Dao govern their actions, affirm virtue. What exactly that virtue is, in what specific actions it expresses itself, is hard to determine from this classic Daoist text. In fact, the conduct of the Sage , the follower of Dao, is marked less by positive norms than by negative counsels, namely what the Sage should not do.
At the level of individual or personal morality, Daoism counsels “acting by not acting.” This seems to mean that humans are to go about their business, making their daily decisions. But they should avoid investing any ultimate importance in worldly affairs. Here, we are reminded of Hindu and Buddhist teaching of detachment and withholding ultimate commitment to anything worldly (karmayoga). The Sage displays his or her wisdom by a kind of inaction.
Thus, in Chapter 63, the first sentence counsels,
do not do
Thus, in Chapter 77, we read, in the John C.H. Wu translation, “The Sage does his work without setting any store by it.”
is so wise man for the sake of not quality.
Or in the last Chapter, 81, of the Dao De Jing we read:
sage it way, for sake of not strive
John C. H. Wu translates: “The Way of the Sage is to do his duty, not to strive with anyone. “20
Our brief examination of some verses from the Dao De Jing is part of a thought experiment. The purpose is to show that the dramatic, personal framework of Judeo-Christian morality is not the only existing model. Daoism represents a radically different model, one in which the foundation of the way humans should walk is immanent in the cosmos, one in which the foundation is inherently nameless, and one in which that foundation is, in itself, beyond morality, and therefore one in which the morality based on this foundation knows no ultimate difference between virtue and vice, good and evil, right and wrong. 21
Social Darwinism: Herbert Spencer
We continue our thought experiment, turning to a modern western moral conception, Social Darwinism. We select Herbert Spencer as a spokesman for Social Darwinism, because his writings were the fullest theoretical expression of this moral conception. Spencer was born in Derby, England in 1820 and he died in 1903. His written output was prodigious. His wide-ranging theories display remarkable powers of assimilation and organization of many kinds of information. He was a modest person, refusing public honours. He was a self-made scholar, not a trained philosopher or sociologist. He never attempted to read thoroughly and try to master the philosophical systems of others. He earned his living at different times as a watchmaker, a train engineer and bridge builder Nevertheless, in his time; he enjoyed an enormous popularity and intellectual influence.
The notion of development, of transformation of structures through time, had in the second half of the eighteenth century increasingly replaced philosophical thinking in fixed structures. Immanuel Kant, Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Hegel in Germany and August Compte in France had already thought in terms of change and transformation at the levels of nature, history and human consciousness. Thus, development, 22 as a fundamental category for understanding reality, was in the air well before Charles Darwin (1809-1882) applied this category to biological phenomena.23
Spencer stood in the British tradition of empiricism and of Comte’s positivism. Thus, Spencer assumed that all knowledge derives from sense perception, from the data of our sense organs. The mind cannot get behind these phenomena to investigate “causes” or “ultimate realities.” Spencer thus thought that metaphysics in the Greek and western medieval senses is impossible. Spencer concluded also that while theism is intellectually untenable so also was atheism, since atheists assert the absence of any reality or cause behind the world and this assertion goes beyond “the facts ma’am, just the facts.”
Therefore, Spenser held that philosophy and the natural sciences have the same object of study, viz. empirical phenomena. The different sciences organize and draw conclusion from the data of different parts of worldly reality. Philosophy has the job of building on the sciences to find general principles that are generalizations from the different sciences. So, the difference between the natural sciences and philosophy is the level of generalization at which each works.
While Spencer was preoccupied with “facts” and empirical findings, he had the insight to realize that all human philosophy involved assumptions, intuitions and “unavowed data.” For example, Spencer realized that philosophy’s search for ‘first principles’ (in his sense of generalizations from the different sciences) assumed that experience of similarity among bodies of data are a true similarity and not something imposed by the mind. 24
Spencer’s key building blocks for philosophy, his “first principles” were deduced from observing data. The experience of sequence of sense data yields the notion of time; the experience of the concomitance of date yields the notion of space. Matter in motion gives the idea of force; from the perception of force comes the notion of “energy.” Energy is force possessed by matter in motion. The persistence of force is the starting point for science and leads to the corollaries of the uniformity of law, i.e., the persistence of relations between forces. Thus the key terms of Spencer’s philosophical view were derived from sense data.
Spencer arrived at his notion of evolution from these prior concepts of time, space, matter, and motion and especially of force. He defined evolution as “the integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion during which the matter passes from a relatively indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a relatively definite heterogeneity, during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.” 25 Evolution occurred at the inorganic, the organic and the social levels of reality. This process was the great principle upon which Spencer based his value judgments and made his ethical proposals.
Significant in Spencer’s concept of evolution is his notion that the “development” from relative homogeneity to relative heterogeneity is accompanied by an increasing stabilization, stasis and quiescence. Further, he taught that stable unities would begin to disintegrate, resulting in a new relative homogeneity and a new process of organization. As matter in motion evolves and develops, greater unities emerge. At the same time greater heterogeneity (individualism) emerges. Parallel to this dual development of unification and individualism was the dual tendencies to stabilization and dissolution of evolved systems. Spencer, like, for example, ancient Stoics and some forms of Hindu cosmology, believed in a succession of developments and disintegrations of matter in the evolutionary process.
A key conclusion of Spencer’s analysis of evolution was his belief that human societies evolve from the “military type” to the “industrial type.” This development Spencer held to be a progress and improvement in social change, because the industrial type of society contained individuals better fitted for survival.
Spencer described militant societies as having preservation as their chief aim, while the preservation of the individual member was only a means to attain this primary aim. The militant society is one in which the army is the nation mobilized while the nation is the quiescent army, and which, therefore, acquires a structure common to army and nation.” 26 Militant societies where characterized by a high degree of regulation of conduct, and the individuality of each member was so subordinated in life, liberty and property that the individual is de facto owned by the state. Further, Spencer thought that as the militant state sought political autonomy it also sought economic independence. Spencer thought that militant societies where a necessary phase in social development. They were a necessary social form in a social evolution in which only the fittest survive. But he thought that greater social evolution eventually makes war unnecessary and indeed a hindrance for survival.
The new, more advanced or developed form of society, more fit for social survival, Spencer named the industrial society. Industrial society reveals its more advanced and “fit” form in that greater individuality and heterogeneity are found. In contrast to the militant society, where the state controls every aspect of individual life, industrial societies grant the individual greater freedom. Economically, Spencer believed, the industrial society should be characterized by laissez- faire; hence socialist and communist societies would contradict his definition of industrial societies, but capitalist liberalism would. The function of the industrial state is to maintain individual rights and freedoms and to adjudicate, when necessary, between conflicting claims of groups and individuals. He wrote, “ Under the industrial regime the citizen’s individuality, instead of being sacrificed by the society, has to be defended by the society. Defence of his individuality becomes the society’s essential duty.” 27
Spencer, thus, gave little or no role to the state for governing the actions of the individual. In fact, he went so far as to condemn factory legislation, child labour laws, sanitary inspection by government officials, a state run postal system, welfare for the poor or public education. He did not condemn individual service to those in need; what he rejected was the state interfering in the individual’s liberties and behaviour. His moral ideal was a society in which the State was nothing and the individual was everything. Himself, an individualist by nature, he thought social development was threatened by what he called “the coming slavery.” By this he meant the development of increasingly powerful burocracies, which smother the civil freedoms and initiative of citizens. Today, Spencer would probably feel most at home among Republican conservatives.
Spencer was at heart a moralist. He said, in the preface to The Data of Ethics his “ultimate purpose …has been that of finding for the principles of right and wrong in conduct at last, a scientific basis. “ Thus, Spencer clearly thought that “evolution”, the underlying texture of the universe, yielded a morality.
Spencer, logically, characterized all behaviour, including that of lower animals, as directed to ends and goals. The higher one proceeds in the scale of evolution, he said, the clearer is the evidence that purpose is the key to behaviour. Thus, ethically, Spencer, like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, were teleologists.
Human action, individually and collectively, aims at “the good”, which Spencer defined as survival. This, however, leads to conflict, the struggle for existence between different individuals of the same species and between different species. Existence is a war of all against all for survival.
However, the state where the struggle for survival simply results in eliminating those less fit for survival is not the optimal stage of social evolution, he believed. A higher level of social evolution finds competition to the death replaced by cooperation and mutual aid. Perfectly evolved conduct can only occur when societies as a whole have moved from the militant to the industrial stage.
At the fully evolved stage of social evolution, the industrial society, the ideal social conduct can have free expression. At less evolved levels of society, a less that absolute and ideal ethic must be allowed for. This relative ethic is the nearest approximation to the ideal of social cooperation and mutual aid. Thus, Spencer thought that perfectly ideal moral behaviour was impossible. Humans, at least until the perfect society has evolved, never can act for their own good without endangering or actually hurting other individuals. We never find ourselves in the situation where the choice is between the absolutely right and absolutely wrong action.
This leads Spencer to the utilitarian calculus familiar also in the thought of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.28 The individual, in every purposeful action, has to choice that act which is relatively right, i.e., which will probably cause the greatest amount of good and the least amount of pain. This principle is the key idea in moral utilitarianism.
However, Spencer rejected Jeremy Bentham’s notion that the individual should directly pursue his or her own happiness in the form of the greatest possible degree of personal pleasure. He rejected Bentham’s notion of the pleasure principle. Instead, Spencer said there was a place for obligations and norms of right and wrong. Happiness depends on observing certain rules. These rules are the product of long human experience about the kinds of actions that promote and protect human life. They are products of induction, based on experience. Each individual should follow certain rules which, rationally and experientially, are most fitted to produce general welfare. 29
Like Daoism, Spencer built his ethic on the basis of an impersonal reality, or force, immanent in the cosmos. For Spencer that cosmic-immanent force was the force of evolution. Like Daoism, Social Darwinism identifies a personal and social ethic. This ethic is radically conservative; it involves conforming to this impersonal reality. To live morally is to live according to the Dao or to live in accordance with the aims of evolutionary development. In both Daoism and Social Darwinism the distinctions between right and wrong quickly become relative and uncertain. And, like Daoism, Social Darwinism has a hard time demonstrating why ought, moral norms and standards of virtue, issues from what is taken to be the deepest texture of reality.
Spencer certainly believed he could discover an ethical theory and a material ethic on the basis of social evolution. He did not seem aware of the problem of deriving ought from is. Because an action or a kind of behaviour promoted survival of the individual or species, Spencer taught, they were morally right. This follows only if survival is deemed an intrinsic good. Survival of the individual or species as intrinsically good may seem like common sense. But logically to deem it an intrinsic good is an assumption, not a self-evident truth. We don’t hold, for example that the survival of the HIV virus is intrinsically good. Deriving ought from is highly problematic; it cannot be done so simply as Spenser thought.
We move to the next and last step on this essay. We want to set out how two very different theologians, St. Bonaventura and John Calvin, interpret the First Word of the Decalogue. We will see that they find in it God introducing himself personally and establishing Himself as the authority for human morality.
The Witness of St. Bonaventura
St. Bonaventura provides his assessment of the First Commandment in the Second Lecture of his Lectures on the Decalogue. 30 The whole Second Lecture is dedicated to what is, in his enumeration, the First Commandment. Already we have said that for Bonaventura the First Commandment encompasses what we called God’s self-introduction as well as the Commandment against having other gods and the commandment against graven images. In reporting on Bonaventura’s theological witness, we will focus on how he presents the personal and transcendent character of God.
Already Bonaventura’s opening statements in the Second Lecture highlight the personal character of human encounter with God’s Law. Bonaventura refers to Pope Gregory’s practise of invoking God’s help against daemons, whenever Gregory turned to study God’s Law. Gregory was convinced that when he turned to study God’s Law, daemons were anxious to attack and deter him31 Bonaventura says that he, unlike Gregory, cannot command demons. But he can ask God to do so and can ask the reader to ascend the mountain, as Moses did, i.e., to ascend to the highest part of the human mind where God’s light is given to us, so that we can receive God’s Law in God’s light. 32 Whereas the Daoist classics invite the learner to discover the Dao within himself or herself, Bonaventura appeals to God wisdom to make possible the human understanding of God’s law.
Bonaventura addresses these counsels to his listeners and readers. But then he directs his attention to God who gives the divine law. His first point is to remind the reader/listener of the radical distinction between created being, i.e., the world and uncreated being, God. This distinction was clouded in the Dao De Jing, as we saw. Bonaventura writes: Duplex autem est ens, scilicet creatum et increatuum, et secundum hoc duplex est iustitia: una per quam ordinamur ad ens increaturm; alia, per quam ordinamur ad ens creatum. …In prima tabula continentur mandata per quaie ordinamur ad ens increatum, id est Deum. (Being is two-fold: created and uncreated, and accordingly justice is two-old, one by which we are odered to God, the second through which we are ordered to creatures. In the first Table are contained the Laws through which we are ordered to uncreated being, i.e., to God. )33 In the first essay of this series, we have already critically discussed Bonaventura’s appropriation of Aristotle’s concept of justice to distinguish the two Tables of the Decalogue. We will not repeat that here. Now our interest is how Bonaventura presents the nature of God as Law Giver.
In his lecture on the first Commandment, Bonaventura fulfills exactly this task: showing us who commands the Ten Commandments. His major point is that the giver of the Commandments is the Trinity, the One God who is Three Persons. The uncreated one is the cause of all things, the efficient cause, the formal-exemplary cause and the final cause, having power, wisdom and goodness, and this being produces all that exists. These three attributes are appropriated to the three Persons of the Trinity: power or majesty to the Father; wisdom or truth to the Son and goodness or benevolence to the Holy Spirit. God is uncreated, radically distinct from the world, and is the Holy Trinity, and is related to the world as its efficient cause, its exemplary cause and its final cause. 34
God is personal in the distinctively Christian understanding of God’s personhood, i.e., the understanding expressed in the dogma of God as Trinity, One Nature in Three Persons. God’s relates to the world as uncreated being, i.e., as radically distinct from created being. As uncreated being, God is related to the world in a three-fold way: as its efficient cause, spelled out in the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing, absolute origination); as wisdom or exemplary cause, i.e., creatures and creation reflect the wisdom and truth of God; and goodness; i.e., creatures find their fulfillment in relation to God, and their ultimate fulfillment only in relation to God. God in his essence is personally three-fold, and is richly and personally related to the world as its personal cause, exemplar and goal. 35
Because God is this kind of being, uncreated and personal, source, reason and end of creation, a corresponding, personal relation to God is possible and expected of human beings. This personal relationship to God by humans are marked by adoration in all humility, by fidelity in affirming Jesus Christ as the Truth of the world, and by sincere love for God’s goodness in the Holy Spirit. The personal character of God is the basis and foundation for the personal character of human beings and human orientation to God and to the world. 36
Thus, Bonaventura, with the full theological resources of western, medieval scholastic theology, underscores the personhood and the authority of God as giver of the Decalogue. As creator, redeemer and goal of creation, God has the authority (authorship) to command human beings.
John Calvin on the First Word
We said above that we agree with Calvin’s judgment that the first Word of the Decalogue has a special status and its own proper significance. He writes: “Whether you make the first sentence a part of the First Commandment or read it separately makes no difference to me, provided you do not deny to me that it is a sort of preface to the whole law.“37 Calvin thinks that the first Word conditions the meaning of all the rest.
What does Calvin consider is the significance of this first Word? It establishes, he thinks, the authority and legitimacy of the giver of the Commandments. Thus: “First in framing laws, care must be taken that they be not abrogated out of contempt. God therefore especially provides that the majesty of the law he is about to give may not at any time fall into contempt. To secure this he provides a threefold proof.” 38
The threefold proof is first that, by the first Word, God claims for himself of the power and right of authority to be obeyed. The name Jehovah, he says, signifies God’s authority and lawful domination. According to Calvin, the God’s name, “Jehovah” identifies the one, who St. Paul says, from him are all things and in him all things abide. (Rom. 11:36). Therefore it is right that all things should be referred to him. By this word alone, Calvin says, “we are sufficiently brought under the yoke of God’s majesty, because it would be monstrous for us to want to withdraw from his rule when we cannot exist apart from him. 39
The second “proof” God provides is to declare that He is the God of this people: (I am Jehovah your God). “Then,” says Calvin,” in order not to seem to constrain men by necessity alone, he also attracts them with sweetness by declaring himself God of the Church.” 40
God’s third legitimizing ‘proof’ in the first Word is God’s identifying of benefits that God bestows on Israel. This reminder of benefits says Calvin “Ought to move us in the same degree as the crime of ingratitude is more despicable even among men. Indeed, he was then reminding Israel of his recent benefit, a benefit of such marvellous and everlasting memorable greatness as also to remain in force for posterity. For the Lord means that they have been freed from miserable bondage that they may, in obedience and readiness to serve, worship him as the author of their freedom.“41
We see that, like Bonaventura, Calvin highlights the personal character of God. God names Himself, declares a lasting, relationship (I will be your God and you will be my people) and identifies liberation of Israel for the purpose of service.
Thus, for Calvin this first Word is God’s personal speech act by which He establishes His right to Israel’s obedience, commits Himself to Israel as covenant partner, and cites an act of liberation to establish God’s own character and the nature of the relation God will have with Israel.
Calvin highlights the will of God in this first Word, God’s will as legitimate law-giver, God’s will in commitment as covenant partner and God’s will as benevolent and caring. Inherent in volition is choice and in this first Word, God discloses Himself as the One who has chosen Israel and summons Israel into a corresponding choice of fidelity and obedience to God.
When we compare Calvin’s reflections on the first Word with the brief selections from the Daoist classic Dao De Jing, the contrast stands out starkly. Nowhere in this classic do we learn that the Dao has a will or that it chooses. This contrast helps us to perceive that ascribing will to God, indeed a transcendent and sovereign will, implies choice, selection. God chooses one nation out of all the nations. God selects.
This immediately raises the question whether God is fair or unfair, biased and unbiased. Is it fair that God shows partiality to one nation, indeed, at the expense of other nations? Inherent in choice, perhaps especially God’s choosing, is the problem of justice as fairness. 42
We suggest that the problem of divine fairness, or unfairness, inherent in speaking about God’s election of Israel, may best be met by seeing that election of Israel to Covenant partnership is not an end in itself, but is for the sake of the nations. Once God’s mission to all the nations through Israel is lost from sight, God’s electing Israel can only be seen as divine unfairness, and concomitantly, very importantly, as Israel’s false sense of superiority.
Conclusion
Our purpose in this second essay on the Decalogue has been to focus on the First of the Ten Words (Decalogue/deka-logos). We have followed John Calvin and Frank Crueseman’s view that the first Word is God’s self-identification, God’s self-introduction. We have followed also their view, which St. Bonaventura shares, that this First Word has a legitimizing and authorizing function for the rest of the Ten Words. In declaring Himself by name and by reference to His saving action on behalf of Israel, God legitimates Himself as the giver of moral commandments that should shape Israel’s life as God’s Covenant People.
In this First Word God thus presents Himself to Israel as Israel’s ultimate moral reference, a moral foundation behind which Israel cannot go for further moral authority. “Behind” God, so to speak, is no further ground for the moral norms according to which Israel should shape her common life as the People of the Covenant. This is in part what the word “God” means or implies: a final reference point for moral orientation.43
In addition to highlighting this character of the first Word, we also underscored the specific features of God, Israel’s ultimate moral reference point. We identified these features as “personal” and “transcendent.” The framework for the Decalogue, we said, was a dramatic one. One personal being addresses other personal beings; God commands Israel. Israel “hears” or is commanded to “hear” God’s Commandments. One speaks to another and the other answers. This personal, dramatic paradigm has a transcendent and an immanent character: As the One who addresses Israel with commands, God stands beyond and over against Israel. As communicating His personal Word to Israel, God is immanent in their lives, determining and shaping their common life. Thus, the First Word conditions each of the remaining Words.
Of necessity this dramatic paradigm is also an historical paradigm. In this First Word, God presents Himself as the Lord of Israel’s history, calling them out of slavery, identifying Himself to be Israel’s God. This dramatic, historical framework sets the Commandments in the larger history of Israel’s relation to God. Israel does not begin to know Yahweh in the giving of the Commandments. The God who commands Israel is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This means—this was the main point of the first essay in this series—that the Commandments must be read in the context of God’s purpose for all the nations through Israel.
Because God is the ultimate moral reference point, God is intrinsically not comparable. The second Word—no other gods — which we study in the next essay, highlights this. This means that we gain a deeper sense of God as Commander of the first Word of the Decalogue only by a contrasting kind of comparison. We made use of two moral traditions for this comparison.
One was the moral tradition of early Chinese philosophy, Daoism. The second is the western, modern tradition of Social Darwinism. This comparison underscored three insights into the distinctiveness of Israel’s God as giver of the Decalogue.
The first is that Israel’s moral order has a clear and plausible foundation. God has spoken, God has commanded. We saw that the ground of the moral orders in Daoism and Social Darwinism were/are much less certain. We saw in some passages from the great classic Dao De Jing that the Dao lies beyond human concepts of righteousness, virtue and benevolence. And we observed the problem in Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism of deriving ought from is. Daoism and Social Darwinism leave us with the legitimate question whether a world-immanent principle can be the foundation for a human morality.
The comparisons helped us see a second contrast. Israel’s God and moral lawgiver is a personal being addressing personal beings. Granted, of course, God is God, not creature; God commands and Israel should obey; and, granted further, God takes the initiative and Israel is to follow and respond. We saw how Calvin underscores these themes in his discussion of the First Commandment We used St. Bonaventura’s lecture on the First Commandment to show how this personal character of God was given a Trinitarian explanation, setting God’s personal character in the framework of God as Creator, Redeemer and Goal of creation. The personal God speaks to persons.
By contrast, the moral order in Daoism and Social Darwinism is impersonal. The Dao has no name; is beyond name. The Dao, whatever else it is, is an anonymous principle that can only be described obliquely as Way. Spencer’s ethic calls his reader to follow an impersonal process in nature and history: evolution or development toward greater unities with concomitant heterogeneity and a tendency to disintegration. In Spencer’s own terms, human beings are a more developed life form, compared to inorganic beings. Yet, his ethic requires these higher life forms to conform to an impersonal process, evolution. The higher is supposed to obey something lower. In all respect to Spencer’s intellectual achievement, and to the achievement of analogous thinkers like Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, one can and should ask whether their counsel that humans should obey an impersonal force or process is dehumanizing.
Finally, we noted the strain of individualism in the moral orders implied in Daoism and in Spencer’s Social Darwinism. Certainly Daoism has moral counsel for the wise Prince, and Spencer was concerned with the evolution of society as a whole. But at its deepest texture, Daoism counsels only an ambivalent, limited engagement in history and society. At its deepest and most profound level, it calls the individual to seek the Dao in himself/herself. In relation to the world one should practise the profound wisdom of Hinduism, Buddhism and Daoism: “wei wu wei”, do- not- do.44 The Sage should go about his or her worldly business and duties, but never with a full commitment, as if such worldly engagement had any ultimate significance.
The individualism of Social Darwinism’s social order is built into its underlying principles: the struggle for survival and the survival of the species. Spencer did teach that, in contrast to the military type of society, the industrial type of society should display cooperation and mutual help, not war of all against all. But the individualist logic of his Social Darwinism emerges with a vengeance in his laissez-faire economic and social theory. After all, the industrial type of society is superior, in Spencer’s terms, only in that it produces individuals fitter to survive in the struggle of existence.
The First Word of the Decalogue establishes biblical morality on a personal and transcendent basis. It implies a moral paradigm quite distinct from moral paradigms calling humans to conform their behaviour to an impersonal cosmic principle or process. This raises the question of the possible relationship between the Judeo-Christian, biblical ethic and the great ethical paradigms of Asian religion and the western conceptions of ethics based on impersonal biological and social-evolutionary processes. This question beckons us in subsequent essays in this series on the Ten Commandments.
David Scott
Murnau, Germany
July 2005
Footnotes:
1Reinhard Huetter points out that the Decalogue traditionally was at the center of Christian catechesis, preaching and worship. However, he also documents how the Decalogue has increasingly disappeared from Christian preaching, preaching and worship. Children can be socialized in the Christian community today, he shows, without engaging the Ten Commandments in any sustained way. Huetter suggests a relation may exist between this eclipse of the Decalogue and the pervasive antinomianism in the main-line churches and the emphasis on “niceness” as God’s key attribute. Christianity without the Decalogue generates God the heavenly Affirmer. Reinhard Huetter: “The Ten Commandments as a Mirror of Sin (s): Anglican Decline-Lutheran Eclipse” Pro Ecclesia XIV Winter 2005: 46-57.
2Typical expressions of this theology are in Deuteronomy 6, 11, 28. This ‘deuteronomic theology’ is not the only way the Law is seen in the Old Testament. In Psalm 119 breathes a very different point of view toward God’s Law. The First Word of the Decalogue, itself, connects God’s gracious intervention for Israel to the Commandments.
3One of Luther’s clearest statements comes in his Sermon on Good Works, which is a commentary on the Decalogue. See also his commentary on the Decalogue in the Larger and Smaller Catechisms.
4We think here of what scholars call the Deuteronomic theology in the Old Testament.
5We think here especially of the writings identified as those of First Isaiah (Isa. 1-39) and some of the Psalms. The Wisdom literature, e.g., Proverbs, imply a general human horizon, not one limited only to the People of Israel.
6Karl Barth identifies this “defining” Israel in contrast to the nations as the central meaning of the giving of the Decalogue and of God’s Law, generally. We are not satisfied with this interpretation., as we said in the previous essay.
7Isaiah 42:6: “I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations. . .” .In the previous essay we also drew the analogy between this self-centered view by Israel of itself and many Christian ecclesial bodies, congregations, and individual Christians today. Most “mainline” Christians are maintenance oriented not mission oriented; they orient themselves to God as a giver of services for their own benefits and privileges (forgiveness, meaning in life, interpersonal relations, support of family life, national success, peace of mind, solace, healing and good health, full bank accounts, parking places, etc. ) in contrast to nonbelievers. These churches view “ the world” primarily as a temptation, or as benighted, or as an irrelevant environment rather than as the destination of God’s purposes for the church as the New Israel.
8Different ways of dividing the Decalogue cross traditional church divisions. Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, following Peter Lombard’s (Sentences III, xxxiii.1.2), give three precepts to the first Table and seven precepts to the second Table. We saw that St. Bonaventura followed that tradition. John Calvin takes the first Word as the preface to the Decalogue, and then assigns four precepts to the first Table and six to the second Table. See, Calvin Institutes, Book II, Ch. VII. 12. Thomas Aquinas discusses the number and enumeration of the Decalogue in Summa Theologia, Prima Secundae, Q. 100, esp. Articles 3-6. Thomas favored the same enumeration as St. Bonaventura.
9Calvin says: “But I, unless convinced only by the clearest contrary evidence, take the ten words mentioned by Moses to be the Ten Commandments…I shall follow what seems more probable to me, namely, that what they take as the First Commandment should occupy the place of the preface to the whole law. “ Institutes of the Christian Religion Bk. II, ch. 7, 12. Professor Frank Kruesemann, of the Kirchliche Hochschule in Bethel, Germany, emphasizes this role of the First of the Ten Words. See his Lecture “Zehn Vorschriften zur Freiheit,” (Ten Rules for Freedom) delivered at the Deutscher Evangelischer Kirchentag, Hannover, Germany, on May 27, 2005, available in the Internet under the Kirchentag website www.kirchentag.de Document: ZEG_1-761.
10Modern German theologian , Karl Barth , properly and helpfully reminds his readers that God’s radical transcendence over the world does not force God to be aloof and distant from the world but grants God complete freedom to act in and be present in the world.
11According to Asian history and culture experts, Edwin Reischauer and John Fairbank, Daoism, next to Confucianism, is the most important stream in Chinese thought. In contrast to Confucianism, which teaches moral norms governing basic social relationships, Daoism appeals to the individual, especially to those who want to withdraw from the compromises and injustices of public, political life. According to Taoism, the individual should ‘fit into the great pattern of nature.’ In the phenomenology of religious experience, Taoism is a species of mysticism. The great pattern of nature is the Dao, usually translated as “way “ or “road.” The radical for the Chinese character “dao” is the foot radical. Three Chinese texts are considered Taoist classics. The authors and dates of these texts are unknown or doubtful. For example, the most venerated of these texts is the Tao Te Ching, (literal translation is: Way , Power [or Virtue], Classic) “The Way and Power Classic,” usually ascribed to Lao-Tzu. This text probably comes from the same general period as Confucius (ca. 551-479 BCE). Lao-Tzu, however, is not a personal name but, in Chinese, means “Old Master.” The second text is the Chuang-tzu, probably of the third century B.C. The third work, similar to the Chuang-tzu, the Lieh-tzu, is various attributed to the same period or to the third century, A.D. See John K. Fairbank and Edwin O. Reishauer, China- Tradition & Transformation Revised Edition ( Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989): 46-49.
12 Tao The Ching, Trans. John C.H. Hu (New York: St. John’s University Press, 1961) Barnes and Noble edition, 1997.
13Gregor C. Richter, The Gate of All Marvelous Things: A Guide to Reading the Tao Te Ching (San Francisco: CA: Red Mansions Publishing, 1998).
14 Tao Te Ching: A New Translation by Man-Ho Kwok; Martin Palmer; Jay Ramsey (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1993.) Chapter 1.
15Richter, The Gate of All Marvelous Things: A Guide to Reading the Tao Te Ching, p. 49.
16John C. H. Wu translation. See note
17That Daoism is explicitly in contrast to and probably antagonistic to Confucius’ teachings is apparent in these lines, because “” (de/virtue); (ren/ benevolence); (“yi”/righteousness); and “” (li/ ritual) are central, positive concepts in Confucius’ teaching.
18 Fairbank and Rischauer, p. 48.
19Lao Tzu Tao The Ching Translated by John C. H. Wu (New York: Bstnes and Noble, 1961) p. 111. Similar statements are found in chapter 16: “One is capable of doing justice. To be just is to be kingly; to be kingly is to be heavenly; to be heavenly is to be one with the Tao.” Or chapter 7, where of the Sage is said, “Is it not because he is selfless that his self is realized?” And in Chapter 44, “
20Similar statements are: Chapter 44 “Thus, an excessive love for anything will cost you dear in the end.” Or, chapter 43: “Only nothing can enter into no-space; hence I know the advantages of non-do. Few things under heaven are as instructive as the lessons of Silence, or as beneficial as the fruits of non-du () Or , from Chapter 48: The practise of Dao consists in daily diminishing. Keep on diminishing and diminishing, until you reach the state of not do, not do, and yet nothing is left undone. To win the world, one must renounce all. If one still has private ends to serve, one will never be able to win the world. “ Or from Chapter 84, where the similarity to Hindu and Buddhist teaching is striking: “The Sage desires to be desire-less.”
21 Since about the middle of the nineteenth century, i.e., since trade opened again between west and east (the first time, of course, was during the Tang Dynasty (507-711) especially over the Silk Road), Daoist, Hindu and Buddhist teaching have been known and in tensely studied in the west. Since the 1960s of the last century, Hindu, Buddhist and Daoist teachings have deeply appealed to many young people, many academics and other intellectuals often in abbreviated, popularized form and has often been adapted to western world views. From the point of view of the Christian mission, this encounter has been essential. Christian faith can only make its witness through encounter with all peoples and nations to whom the Gospel should be preached. In this encounter, two extremes should be rejected. One is a blanket, categorical denial of truth and value to eastern philosophy and religious teaching. The second is a naïve acceptance of this teaching, as if it were teaching the same as Christianity, but using different symbols and concepts, as if it did not imply a completely different way of seeing and acting in the world from the Judeo Christian tradition. Recently some have asked whether the western acceptance of eastern philosophies, like Daoism, has encouraged a moral relativism, a religious individualism (Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism are fundamentally individualist roads to “salvation.”) and the assimilation of the God of Judaism and Christianity to that of the Benevolent Buddha of some Mahayana traditions. An interesting question, one we cannot pursue in this essay, is whether radical transcendence between God and world, given by a personal conception of God as creator, personal and acting in history, is a precondition for a morality that distinguishes radically between right and wrong, virtue and vide, good and evil. A metaphysics of immanence undermines taking difference seriously.
22The assumption that evolution and development constitute a “progress,” a development to something “higher” and “better” and thus should be affirmed as a moral good mixes claims of fact and claims of value. This weakness of trying to derive ought from is a typical but weak feature of morality without a personal lawgiver. Possibly those, like Compte (1798-1857), who rejected metaphysics and traditional ethics, unknown to themselves, assumed the Aristotelian and medieval notions of entelechy and final causation, which in Christian theology does ground moral value in objective reality.
23Darwin’s The Origin of Species appeared in 1859, well after Spencer began publishing his ideas on social evolution. . Darwin’s theory of evolution builds on the observation of variability of individuals in species. The second key idea was the notion of inherited traits. The third key idea was the overproduction of descendents. Darwin’s theory builds on the hypothesis that the overproduction of descendents leads to a battle for survival among individuals in a species. Those individuals with less useful traits in the battle for survival perish. Those with more useful traits for survival survive and pass those traits on to their descendents. Those more “fit” for survival sustain their race/species. Thus, through long periods of time, traits fitting individuals for survival are selected and retained in the species. Darwin conjectured that through this process of selection, “higher” biological forms develop, where “higher” means “more fit to survive.” Thus human beings evolved from “lower” animals, and are, to our knowledge, the most “developed” of all living beings. Spencer published his essay “The Evolution Hypothesis” and “The Theory of Population” well before Darwin’s The Origin of Species appeared. Spencer conceived and began what became his ten-volume opus, System of Synthetic Philosophy in 1858. His most influential work, First Principles, was published in 1862.
24Spencer had no patience with Kant’s notion that forms of our understanding decisively shaped the content of our knowledge. He stopped reading Kant’s Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, when he came to the section where Kant argued that space and time were not objective realities but forms of our understanding.
25Herbert Spencer, First Principles, 6th edition. p. 367 cited in Copleston, S.J. A History of Philosophy Volume 8 Modern Philosophy: Bentham to Russell, Part I, p. 149. See also Hans Joachim Stoerig, Kleine Weltgeschichte der Philosophie (Stuttgard: Kohlhammer, 1965): 415-424.
26Spencer, the Study of Sociology, I907, Vol. I, p. 577.
27Spencer, Ibid. II, p. 607.
28Episcopalian Christians will recognize the family resemblance between this utilitarian calculus and the “situation ethics” of Joseph Fletcher, popular and influential in the second half of the twentieth century. In his Situation Ethics, Fletcher explicitly acknowledged standing in the tradition of British Utilitarianism. However, Fletcher probably would not have supported Spencer’s laissex faire commitments for state and economy.
29 Spencer, The Data of Ethics, p. 140.
30Obras e San Buenaventura Edicion Bilingue Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, Madrid: 1966. Collationes de decem praeceptis, in Vol. V, 520f. Collatio II begins on page 533.
31See St. Bonaventura, Collatio II, 1. quod quando cogitare voluit in lege Dei, sentiebat daemons semper sibi adversantes.
32Collatio II, 2.
33Bonaveventura Collatio II, 4.
34 To appreciate Bonaventura’s succinctness, we give the Latin original: “ Ens autem increatum est causa omnium rerum, causa, dico efficiens, formalis-exemplaris et finalis, et habet potentiam, sapientiam et benevolentiam et producit omnia in esse. Et istat tria appropriantur tribus personis in Trinitate: potentia sive maiestas appropriator Patri, sapientia sive veritas Filio, benevolentia sive bonitas Spiritui sancto.
35St. Bonaventura’s Trinitarian hermeneutic of the First Word relates God as Creator as well as Redeemer and Goal to creation and human beings. This is important, because a major danger lurks in emphasizing God’s personal nature to the neglect of recognizing God also as Creator. The danger is that only personal and historical categories are used to describe God’s relation to the world. Karl Barth’s theology has been criticized on this point, and it may be a structural problem in Protestant theology, to the degree that neglects God as creator and privileges God as redeemer and perfector. Exclusive use of a personal and historical paradigm for the God-world relationship tends to reduce “nature” to a neutral backdrop, having no theological importance, to simply the state on which God acts in Christ and the Holy Spirit. Is this Protestant bias a cause of the modern, secular scientific approach to nature?
36The significance of a religion’s or philosophy’s conception of God or the ultimate principle for its understanding of human being is always fundamental.
37ohn Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book II, Ch. viii. 13. The Library of Christian Classics, Vol. XX. Edited by John T. McNeill. Translated and Indexed by Ford Lewis Battles. (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960) p. 379. All citations from Calvin will be from this edition.
38Calvin, ibid.
39Calvin, ibid.
40Calvin, Institutes, II, ch. viii. , 14. Calvin apparently can consider Israel and the Church as interchangeable. Calvin also in this context cites Matthew 22:23, where Jesus declares God to be the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, i.e. God of the living, not of the dead. Thus Calvin also recognized that the Church is continuous with God’s covenant with Abraham, and therefore with the purpose of the Abraham covenant.
41Calvin, Institutes Book II, ch. viii, 15.
42Fitting into Calvin’s emphasis on God’s will and choice, even if benevolent, is Calvin’s emphasis on God’s decree regarding salvation. Later Calvinism will develop the doctrine of double predestination. The theological objections posed to this doctrine from within the church (within Calvinism- Arminianism- and other theological tradition) make clear the problem of fairness inherent in the notion of divine choice.
43The personal foundation of the Decalogue and of Israel’s moral life begs the question whether the moral Commandments are “good” because God commands them or because they are intrinsically good, i.e., meeting a standard of intrinsic goodness, in principle seperable from God’s will as such. Plato, in the Euthyphro 9ff , addresses this question. We will return to this important issue when we address the question of the relation ob the Decalogue to the Natural Moral Law. Calvin deals with the issue with the lapidary statement,” …because he [God] can require only what is right…” Institutes Book II, Ch. viii. 2.
44 We refer to this as profound wisdom, for its validity can be given a Christian foundation. Note, for example, the striking similarity between the Daoist principle of wei wu wei (do not do) and Paul’s teaching in I Corinthians 7:29-31 This truth will be a theme when we address the relation between the Ten Commandments and the Natural Moral Law.
commandments and the natural moral law.