Markos Reviews: A Personal God and a Good World: The Coherence of the Christian Moral Vision
A Personal God and a Good World: The Coherence of the Christian Moral Vision
by Ronnie P. Campell Jr. and David Baggett
B&H Academic, 2024
256 pages, paper, $34.99
I recently discovered a linguistic quirk of the Spanish language that has fascinating repercussions for the way we should think of ourselves as human beings created in the image of God. Whereas English uses the word “consciousness” to describe the uniquely human trait of being aware of our own identity and the word “conscience” to describe the equally unique human trait of possessing an inbuilt sense of right and wrong, Spanish has a single word to describe both facets of the human person: consciencia.
That the Spanish language continues to use one word to connote both consciousness (head) and conscience (heart) points to a deep reality about our ontological status: our moral sense and our sense of our own existence are inextricably linked together. Our ability to mentally and spiritually step outside of ourselves and nature carries with it certain ethical duties and moral obligations as to how we treat ourselves, our fellow man, and the created order. To be is to be a moral agent. Despite the boundaries of time and space that define and confine us, we transcend those boundaries by our twin capacities for mental self-awareness and moral self-regulation.
Although the word consciencia does not appear in Ronnie P. Campell Jr. and David Baggett’s A Personal God and a Good World: The Coherence of the Christian Moral Vision, our twin possession of consciousness and conscience is held up as proof that we were made in the image of a God who is both personal and good. Campbell, professor of theology and apologetics and director of doctoral programs at John W. Rawlings School of Divinity at Liberty University, and Baggett, professor of philosophy and director of the Center for the Foundations of
Ethics at Houston Christian University, argue persuasively for a modified version of classical theism that takes seriously the implications of the imago Dei for how we view the nature of God.
At the core of A Personal God and a Good World lies the simple, common-sense fact that our consciousness and our conscience tell us the same, seemingly paradoxical truth about ourselves: “human beings are valuable, perhaps infinitely valuable; at the same time, we are not intrinsically good; there is something morally broken about us; and some things are just flat wrong, even evil” (146). Despite the evil that exists and is practiced in our world, there is “an inherent dignity to persons that . . . cannot be quantified or reduced to a dollar amount . . . something . . . that is intangible, literally priceless” (147).
Campbell and Baggett hold up our deeply-engraved mental and moral sense of the intrinsic and infinite value of people as an exciting “piece of moral evidence,” one “that many of our unbelieving friends themselves intuitively recognize . . . They may not know why—just as they may not know why we have moral obligations, or that people are of equal moral worth, or that basic human rights obtain—but they can recognize the truths themselves. God has made all of us as human beings able to apprehend such truths” (147). Indeed, they go on to argue, the only way evil regimes have been able to justify to themselves their crimes against humanity has been “to deny the humanity of the victims” (147), as the Nazis did to the Jews and the Soviets the kulaks.
Combining this strong moral evidence with the equally strong psychological fact that all people harbor feelings of guilt and even shame, Campbell and Baggett make a case, not only for classical theism, but for the Christian gospel. “We are each of us uniquely made in God's image and loved infinitely by God, but we are also sinners in need of grace. We are guilty: we both feel guilty for our wrongdoing, and we are objectively guilty. This is obviously a perfect prelude to proclaiming the gospel. A hopeful reminder in the face of our sinful state is this: Our having been made in God's image is essential to us, whereas our sinful state is merely contingent. In other words, more central to our identity is that we have been created by God in his image for reasons and purposes, than that we have fallen into sin and are in need of forgiveness. We can be forgiven and saved through and through so our sins need not define us; but we cannot help but be partially defined by having been made in God's image” (155).
Here, as they do throughout the book, Campbell and Baggett draw equally on general revelation (reason and observation) and special revelation (the inspired testimony of the scriptures). Their adeptness at doing so is revealed in the first chapter, where they draw a cogent parallel between the apology that Plato records Socrates having given before the Athenian jury and Paul’s sermon at the Areopagus recorded by Luke in Acts 17. Both Socrates and Paul “saw themselves as on a divine mission; both questioned prevailing theological assumptions; both insisted on attentiveness to the evidence” (19). In addition, both expressed skepticism toward the gods of Homer and warned of “a coming reckoning of some sort” (19).
So much for the similarities, all of which point to Socrates and Paul sharing a common moral conscience and a common mental consciousness of their calling and mission in their respective communities. The major difference, however, between their defenses of a divine authority and morality that transcended the political and religious assemblies of Athens is just as striking. “Whereas Socrates claimed to be largely ignorant of the answers to the ultimate questions, Paul said that the hour of ignorance was over because of the resurrection (anastasis) of Jesus” (19).
n keeping with their commitment to balance general and special revelation, Campbell and Baggett offer a vision of God’s nature that stays true to the philosophical tradition of Socrates, his pupil Plato, and his pupil’s pupil Aristotle, while yet arguing for a modified classical theism that takes the Bible as its final authority. The best of natural and biblical theology tends to agree that God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, immaterial, and self-existing (aseity). Campbell and Baggett affirm all these points, adding to them a belief in theistic conceptualization that agrees with Plato and Aristotle on the real existence of universals but that follows Augustine’s lead in placing those universals in the mind of a personal and good God.
Where Campbell and Baggett part company (slightly) with classical theism is in their (partial) rejection, on biblical grounds, of what they call eternalism: “the God presented in Scripture is not the God of eternalism, a God who is timelessly eternal, immutable, impassable, and simple, as those perfections are often defined by classical theists” (113). In contrast to this heavily Platonic and Aristotelian view of God, Campbell and Baggett argue “that there is good reason to take God to be temporal (at least in some sense), immutable with respect to God's nature and character, and simple in the sense that God is not a composite being. We take it that God is really related to his creatures and that any suffering that God partakes in is of his own volition” (113). Let us look at each of these divine qualities in turn.
Disagreeing, slightly, with Augustine (and C. S. Lewis!), Campbell and Baggett suggest, along with William Lane Craig, that God partly exists in time. Even if, they concede, “God was timeless before creation, at the moment of creation, God is drawn into time by his relationship to sustaining the world” (87). Furthermore, “divine timelessness is hard to square with the doctrine of the incarnation” (87), by which God entered directly into the stream of past, present, and future that defines our temporal lives on earth. Although some theologians would see this as putting an unacceptable limit upon God, the Bible testifies to a God who not only limits himself by creation and incarnation, but by making binding covenants with his people.
As for divine immutability and impassibility, Campbell and Baggett take a cue from process theologians, who “argue that though he is the greatest conceivable being, God is not ‘absolute’ or unchanging. Rather, God, who is in process, is deeply affected by creatures. They reject Aquinas’s position that God isn't really related to the world. Instead, relatedness to the world is central to their understanding of God. According to process theists, the God of classical theism is more akin to the Greek philosophers’ understanding than that of the Bible” (78). Just as God participates, through creation, incarnation, and covenants, in temporality, so he allows himself to be moved by the creatures with whose lives he put himself in an intimate relationship.
All of this is not to say that Campbell and Baggett are process theologians; they are not. Neither is it to say that they are fellow travelers on the fashionable, blame-the-Greeks-for-all-that-is-wrong-with-Christian-theology bandwagon. On that point, they make their position quite clear. “We've seen again and again the charge that the God of eternalism is not the God of the Bible and that such a view is more influenced by Greek than Hebrew thought. There may be some truth to that, but as emphasized in chapter 1, just because something is ‘Greek’ doesn't make it wrong. God has revealed himself through special and general revelation” (84).
Still, Campbell and Baggett show themselves more than willing to part company with Greek thought when it fails to account for what we know of God through the biblical record. Thus, while conceding that the patristic fathers were correct to emphasize God’s steadfast, non-fickle impassibility as a way of distinguishing “between the God of Christian theism and the pagan gods of the pantheon” (90), they insist that the Bible “is replete with depictions of God as having emotions and responsive to the actions of his creatures” (91). Likewise, though they accord high respect to Aristotle, they make it clear that a rigid view of divine simplicity (that God is pure act) both collapses the Persons of the Trinity and “makes God dependent upon creation,” since if “his actions are identical with his being,” he would have had no choice but to create the world (85).
Equipped with their modified classical theism, Campbell and Baggett devote the rest of their book to rethinking the relationship between providence and freedom, the nature of human dignity, the existence of hell and suffering, and the future hope of heaven. Though time and space prevent me from assessing their incisive and challenging views on these topics, they do offer an intriguing suggestion in their final chapter that combines their thoughts on all four topics. Reflecting on the at once Platonic/Aristotelian and Thomistic teaching that the highest goal (telos) of man is to achieve the beatific (blessed) state of meditating directly on God, they propose: “Perhaps the nature of the beatific vision varies from one person to the next, depending, among other things, on the nature of the sufferings endured in this life. Certain particularly horrific sufferings might enable a different, perhaps deeper, insight into who God is—at least for those open to God's grace to transform the suffering into something blessed” (205).
A Personal God and a Good World is a well-conceived, accessible book that invites its readers, as Socrates did his fellow Athenians, to follow the evidence wherever it leads. And that evidence, both from reason and revelation, leads to a good and personal God who endowed his creatures with the twin gifts of consciousness and conscience.
Louis Markos, Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Christian University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities; his 26 books include The Myth Made Fact, From Plato to Christ, From Achilles to Christ, Apologetics for the 21st Century, and Atheism on Trial. His Passing the Torch: An Apology for Classical Christian Education and From Aristotle to Christ are due out from IVP Academic in 2025.
