Right Reason

As readers will know, I think the moral argument for God’s existence is a good argument. As those same readers will also probably know, I’m very sympathetic to a divine command theory of ethics. One thing that I’ve said from time to time, at the blog, in the podcast and elsewhere, is that sometimes critics of the moral argument or of divine command ethics confuse the ontology (or perhaps metaphysics – the terms sometimes overlap) of morality with the epistemology of morality. If, as I say, some people miss this distinction, what does it boil down to and where is the confusion going on? That’s what this blog post is about.

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Compulsory student association membership is now a thing of the past in New Zealand thanks to the passing of the Education (Freedom of Association) Bill.

One of the things that I’m really passionate about is first generation human rights. These are the kinds of rights that make up the bedrock of social justice. A fair society is unimaginable without them. Among such rights are thing like the right to life, the right to freedom of speech and opinion, the right of all people to be treated as equals before law, you get the idea. In a free society for a public figure to advocate denying people of these rights is – and should be – immediate political suicide. To undermine first generation human rights is to eat away at our basic regard for the dignity of persons. Indeed it is precisely when we see a society with patches of these rights missing that our “dictatorship” sensors start to go off.

For a shockingly long time, University students in New Zealand were denied one of those rights. Article 20 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights reads as follows:

(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
(2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

Likewise, section 17 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 is headed “Freedom of Association,” and it is to the point: “Everyone has the right to freedom of association.”

Up until today, New Zealand students, as a rule, didn’t have freedom of association. They were required – by law – to join a student association, which gathered the millions each year, spent it as it saw fit with little accountability to the student body, had executives who very often thought that speaking on behalf of students simply meant supporting left leaning policies (no matter what students themselves might actually think), with an absolute guarantee that no matter what they said or did, the money would come flowing in next year. It had to – it was the law.

Today that changed. The Education (Freedom of Association) Bill passed its third reading in Parliament and will become law in New Zealand.

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In December 2010 I published a blog post called “Are There Categories of Biblical Law?” This was a chapter from my Master’s thesis on the role of Old Testament Law, and I answered the question in the affirmative: Yes, there are legitimate categories of Old Testament law. One of the ways the Old Testament law can be categorised, I attempted to show, was in terms of laws that applied only to native born Israelites on the one hand, and on the other hand laws that applied to everyone – Jew and gentile alike – living in Israel. This post is another chapter from that thesis. In this post, I look at the scope of the Old Testament law. This article uses the font Hebrew.ttf. If you don’t have it, you can get it here.

As I wrote this thesis back in 2002 and 2003, it’s entirely possible that I no longer agree with some of the things you’ll see here – but nothing springs to mind! Also bear in mind that I was encouraged at the time to write in the first person plural, referring to myself as “we.” This is a convention I prefer not to use, but I have used it here.

Were the standards of the Torah standards that Israel alone was morally required to uphold? Some say yes, such as John Sampey, who argues that “It was to Israel that the Decalogue was primarily addressed, and not to all mankind.”¹ Geisler likewise draws this conclusion because in his view, “Nowhere in the Bible are Gentiles ever condemned for not keeping the law of Moses.”² Or were the standards of Israel’s Law standards that applied to all nations everywhere, with Israel as a chosen example of how the rest should live? Also of interest is the prevalence of the Law as the ethical standard by which Israel is judged throughout the Older Testament, and the basis of Israel’s condemnation. Is it disobedience to the standards revealed in the Law, or condemnation on some other basis? We will treat this topic in three sections – what the law declares about itself, historical outworkings of the law’s authority and the law in prophetic literature.

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As I mentioned at the blog a while back, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Brian Auten over at Apologetics 315 on the topic of God and Morality. Brian has been uploading his recorded interviews to Youtube, so for those who haven’t heard that interview yet, here it is:

Head on over to Apologetics 315 and check out the rest of Brian’s material.

After having this interview I decided I needed to say a bit more about Robert Adams and the social nature of moral obligation, which I then did in the podcast, episode 40: God and the Social Nature of Obligation.

Hat tip to Peter Byron who made this.