The God Who Commands by Richard J. Mouw

First published: Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Didactic treatise; spiritual treatise; theology

Core issue(s): Calvinism; ethics; morality; Protestants and Protestantism; Puritans and Puritanism; religion

Overview

How do we know what God wants of us? This is a question that has accompanied Christian belief since its beginnings and still divides modern Christians today. In The God Who Commands, Richard J. Mouw writes, for some Christians, the way to truth lies in simple transposition of biblical literalities into everyday life. The Decalogue and the Gospels are for them the highways that cut through even the most challenging moral debates. For others, divine revelation is thought to pierce only the hearts of God’s chosen. Through highly personal inward communication, God’s “elect” become vessels of his will and its only accurate communicators. Still for even more Christians—Calvinists like Mouw and members of much of Reformed Christianity—the path to biblical truth and divine revelation is necessarily much more complex. It weaves through an intricate architecture of internal understanding and outward preconception. Before it can lead each believer to a clear, personal reception of God’s commands, it must be fully and properly navigated through the cracks in the Christian debate.

That there are hazards invoked by Christians’ attempts to live, make decisions, and form society in accordance with divine commands, Mouw does not deny. He admits divine commands—as revealed through Scripture, broad biblical themes, and Christians’ personal lives—have been, arguably, empirically impalpable. Nevertheless, he still refutes many of the claims that critique Christians’ ethical “posture of obedience” in total. Some have painted Christians as psychologically “infantile.” They claim Christians obey when they should be autonomous, and submit when they should approach others as equals. To Mouw, such categorizations elide the greater truth that Christians submit not because they feel inferior to other men but because men are not God. Christians fundamentally believe God exists and they perceive him to be their telos-desiring creator and personal redeemer. Thus, Mouw claims their admission of inferiority to God and their assent to his command is, from this perspective, the most rational thing they could do.

Christians also necessarily desire to heed God’s commands, because ethics are far more than merely philosophical. They are highly practical. They touch every aspect of our “worldview” and all decisions we make. Like all people, Christians need moral justification for their choices, so they look to previous example and expertise. Again, by acting on the precept that God exists and that no creature could ascend to God’s wisdom, Mouw believes Christians demonstrate rationality, rather than immaturity, by turning to God for guidance. Yet the difficulty for Christians in deciphering the appropriate method for acting on God’s commands is constant. To surmount this, Mouw argues that Christians must constantly surrender their preconceived notions about good, pleasure, and even the nature of their selves if they are to cultivate a more “adult acceptance of divine authority.” They must always be “tentative” and open-minded “about the contours of the moral landscape,” for “[t]here is too much about the road ahead—to say nothing of the divine Guide who points the way—that is not yet known.”

Mouw sticks to Calvinist apologetics, for reasons of both personal familiarity and appropriateness. He claims Calvinism has been a prime example of divine-command orientation and has also been one Reformed Christian denomination to bear many of its critiques. The Reformists have been appraised as highly “individualistic” and, ultimately, the source of modern emotivism and secularism. Mouw counters this by saying that too many critics ignore that Christianity has always been a community of individuals with rights and relationships that must be guarded and affirmed. Nevertheless, he wholeheartedly presses that the Reformation’s concept of the “naked self” was not the necessary forerunner of modern secularism. It was, rather, misjudged and appropriated in history. In its true form the concept stripped away the pretensions that robbed men of true awareness and presentation before God. When restored to their stripped status, men became far more able to decipher God’s commands and their personal import.

Approaching the close of his book, Mouw traces the parallels between various versions of philosophical thought and Christianity. He contrasts modern narrativist ethics with a command-oriented perspective and says the two are actually presenting the same view. It is a cumulative portrait of personal reactions to divine commands that builds a life narrative, just as it is a cohesive narrative of moral choices that is appealed to when divine commands must be analyzed. In much the same way, he claims First Person and Second Person denominational focuses are similar. The eternal principles emphasized in “God-as-Creator” themes occur within the same narrative constructs as stories of “Christ-as-King.” All this builds, finally, into a hopeful anticipation of dialog, where those who disagree with each other’s versions of Christianity, or Christianity as a whole, can come to accord. It is Mouw’s hope that Christianity can build bridges across itself, to better confront criticism from the outside. He hopes that by striving for the “rapprochement” he stresses, and by emphasizing the positive points of unity between all perspectives, Christians can attain a communication that works in the modern world while staying true to the principles they hold dear.

Christian Themes

It is important for Christians hoping to live by God’s will to be aware of the delicate maneuver of such a choice. As critiques claim, Christianity is a “heteronymous” theology, but Mouw argues this is not bad or dangerous, if approached wisely. Christians, he says, are called to refer to the “credentials of the would-be-commander” as he appears in the Scriptures, so they can accurately discern who God is and why he commands what he does. Then, this analytic process should be carried forward with even more intensity when attempting to judge whether worldly authority truly aligns with divine will.

The Reformists thought Christians were called to engage God as free individuals. Calvin believed it is only when human beings gained freedom from the protection and hindrances of their social roles that they could receive awareness of their true selves before God. This understanding is not meant to don people with a sense of Nietzschian utter-autonomy. Rather, it is meant to provide people with new clarity about their correct communal obligations. The “naked will-to-will character of the central divine-human encounter” was stressed in Calvin’s thought in order to escape the existing conception of a compulsively “hierarchical” world, in which divine authority was seated in worldly, all-powerful monarchs. Against this, Calvin dreamed of a political formation that retained monarchy, but a monarchy as presented in Romans 13, where authority truly resides with legislators who sit somewhere “between monarch and the individual citizen.”

This, Calvin’s view of God’s desired order, reflected a God “whose imperatives aim at the creation of new possibilities for cultivating those virtues that God intended in creating human beings.” Mouw believes it is still critically important for Christians to engage life and God with this continual openness to new possibility. They should be receptive to the features, themes, and concerns of divergent philosophical dialogues—even, when necessary, the most remote patterns of emotivism—when they can clarify and improve the Christian mission. Without urging for an “accommodationist settlement,” Christians should engage in a “tribunal.” Rather than seeking to answer each other’s questions, Christians and secularists ought to follow the similarities between the questions being asked. They should create “links,” and in this way, Mouw believes, Christians can foster an interphilosophical dialogue that ceases to be “characterized by unrelieved hostility.”

Sources for Further Study

Adams, Robert Merrihew. Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. In this book, Adams connects his extensive, expert theories on divine command to modern, pragmatic ethics of politics and epistemology.

Anscombe, G. Elisabeth M. “Modern Moral Philosophy.” Philosophy 33 (1958): 1-19. Anscombe’s opinions here are cited as some of the most influential arguments against the reason and efficacy of divine-command theory.

Aquinas, Saint Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics, 1981. In the second section of the Summa on ethics, Aquinas lays out the classic Catholic Christian argument for the authority of divine command.

Copper, John M., and D. S. Hutchinson, eds. Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. Plato’s Euthyphro initiated the “divine command” ethical debate by asking if it is God’s commanding that makes his commands good, or their innate goodness.

Evans, Stephen C. Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Kierkegaard’s significant existentialist Christianity is here argued to be another functional and beneficial reformulation of divine-command theory for the modern world.

Kennedy, Thomas D. Review of The God Who Commands. Theology Today 48, no. 2 (July, 1991): 240-243. Concludes that Mouw’s is an “important book. Those who take the Reformed tradition seriously, or those who wish to understand it, would do well to consult this work.”

Quinn, Philip L. Divine Commands and Moral Requirements. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1978. Quinn’s long, logical, and prominent defense of divine-command theory refutes charges of irrationality and unworkability.

Reynolds, Terrence. Review of The God Who Commands. Christian Century 108, no. 4 (January 30, 1991): 118-119. Notes that Mouw offers “a sophisticated interpretation and defense of the ethics of John Calvin” and that Mouw “has reintroduced divine-command morality to contemporary Christian ethics, and his work should be central in the dialogue he encourages.”

Schuurman, Douglas J. Review of The God Who Commands. Journal of Religion 73, no. 1 (January, 1993): 120. A professor of religion at St. Olaf College reviews Mouw’s work on divine-command morality.