Divine Love Theory: How the Trinity Is the Source and Foundation of Morality

By Adam Lloyd Johnson

The moral argument is often presented as follows:

1. There are objective moral truths.

2. God provides the best explanation for objective moral truths.

3. Therefore, God exists.[1]

Because relative morality has been so popular, Christians have mostly focused on defending premise one. However, many atheists are now affirming objective morality. In particular, Erik Wielenberg pointed out that “… a brand of moral realism that hearkens back to G. E. Moore has found new life, championed by, among others, Colin McGinn, Russ Shafer-Landau, Michael Huemer, William FitzPatrick, David Enoch, and Derek Parfit.”[2] In the early twentieth century Moore argued that moral goodness was not a natural property, such as human pleasure, like the utilitarians maintained, nor a supernatural property connected somehow with God.[3] Instead, he argued that goodness is a simple non-natural property.

One of these Moorean champions, David Enoch, described his position as the idea that “… there are response-independent …, irreducibly normative truths … objective ones, that when successful in our normative inquiries we discover rather than create or construct.”[4] Theistic philosopher C. Stephen Evans even congratulated Enoch for offering what he considers to be the most comprehensive case for objective morality.[5] Enoch explained that when he first defended this position in 2003, he “… claimed the great philosophical advantage of being in the ridiculed minority, putting forward a view many don’t think is even worth considering ….” However, he went on to explain that this position is “now making an impressive comeback,” and noted how Stephen Finlay “classifies this as the now dominant view.”[6] Thus, Christians need to move beyond merely fighting yesterday’s enemy of relative morality and focus more attention on arguing that God is the best explanation for objective morality.

Though Christians agree that God is the best explanation for objective morality, they disagree about how—by His commands, because of His moral nature, through ideas in His mind, as a moral exemplar, in creating human nature with a certain purpose (telos), etc. I’ve developed what I call a Divine Love Theory which proposes that the love between the members of the Trinity is the source and foundation of morality and argue that this is a better explanation of objective morality than atheistic theories.[7]

To construct my theory, I began with Robert Adams’s model and then added to it God’s triunity to expand upon it in significant ways, shed greater light on the nature of morality, and more clearly show how trinitarian theism provides a better explanation for morality than atheistic theories. Adams proposed that God’s nature provides the ultimate foundation for moral value (what’s good and bad) and His commands generate our moral duties, that is, our moral obligations (what’s right and wrong). Duties have to do with what we should, or ought, to do. In moral theory it’s important to distinguish between moral value, what’s good and bad, and moral duty, what’s right and wrong, because in some situations only one or the other applies. For example, there are actions that would be morally good for me to do, such as building an orphanage, but it’s not necessarily my moral duty to do so.

As for the first part of Adams’s theory, moral value, Adams explained that “[t]he part played by God in my account of the nature of the good is similar to that of the Form of the Beautiful or the Good in Plato’s Symposium and Republic. God is the supreme Good, and the goodness of other things consists in a sort of resemblance to God.”[8] According to Adams, humans are morally good when they resemble God in a morally pertinent way. The Bible affirms this idea in that it often explains moral principles (especially the greatest ones—love God and love others), in terms of imaging, resembling, or reflecting God.

My Divine Love Theory extends this idea by proposing that the inner-trinitarian love provides the ultimate foundation for objective morality and that humans are good when they resemble this divine love in a morally pertinent sense. There are several reasons it’s important to include God’s inner-trinitarian love when it comes to explaining how God serves as the foundation of moral value. For example, because the inner-trinitarian love is a key aspect of God, it should be expected that this love would aid us in understanding how God serves as the foundation of morality. To say morality is only based on His nature doesn’t include the entire picture of all that God is because, by leaving out the inner-trinitarian love, it ignores the important relational aspect of God that’s helpful in understanding the roots of love and morality. Including these divine relationships in a moral theory provides a more complete picture of how God is the source of morality and helps resolve various philosophical problems and puzzles. Thus, my Divine Love Theory brings in important truths regarding God’s triunity and shows how love exists at the highest level of ultimate reality, that is, within God.

Many others agree concerning the importance of God’s triunity. For example, Thomas McCall has strongly advocated for seeing God’s inner-trinitarian relationships as essential to the very being of God. He wrote “… I am convinced that divine love is essential to God. I believe that holy love is of the essence of God. But I think this is accounted for and grounded in the Trinity.”[9] Thomas Torrance has also been a strong proponent of elevating the metaphysical importance of the inner-trinitarian love. He wrote that the three members of the Trinity “… who indwell one another in the Love that God is constitutes the Communion of Love or the movement of reciprocal Loving which is identical with the One Being of God.”[10] Still others have recognized the importance of emphasizing personhood and God’s inner-trinitarian relationships alongside our emphasis on the categories of substance and essence. Eleonore Stump insisted that “… since, on the doctrine of the Trinity, the persons of the Trinity are not reducible to something else in the Godhead, then, persons are an irreducible part of the ultimate foundation of reality….”[11] Alan Torrance went so far as to say that there’s no reason why we should “not conceive of the intra-divine communion of the Trinity as the ground of all that is.”[12] Millard Erickson described this love as “the attractive force of unselfish concern for another” and thus the “most powerful binding force in the universe.”[13] This is more than mere sentiment; if God is the ultimate reality, and if He exists as three divine persons in loving communion, then love is the basic fabric of reality.

The second part of Adams’s model is a theory of moral duties. According to Adams, our moral duties arise out of our relationship with God and are generated by God’s commands. Adams has made a strong case that moral obligations in general arise from a system of relationships.[14] My Divine Love Theory builds upon this idea by adding to it important truths concerning the Trinity. It’s helpful to include the Trinity here as well because, for one, understanding the trinitarian context of ultimate reality helps us understand how and why obligation arises from relationships, as Adams proposed. Since God exists as divine persons in loving communion, there’s a sense in which ultimate reality itself is relational and thus all of reality takes place in a relational context. In other words, relationships were not something new that came about when God created other beings sometime in the finite past but are a necessary part of ultimate reality. This tells us that relationships are part of the fabric of being itself and thus we shouldn’t be surprised that relationships play such a large role in moral obligation. The obligations that arise in our relationship with God are an analogous image of, and flow out of, the relationships within God. It makes sense that creation would reflect important necessary aspects of the Creator.

In addition, the trinitarian communion illumines Jesus’s proclamation that the greatest commandments are to love God and to love others and His explanation that all of God’s other commands rest upon this foundation (Matt. 22:36–40). They rest on this foundation because these two greatest commands instruct us to be like God, that is, like the members of the Trinity who both love God (the other members of the Trinity) and love others (the other members of the Trinity). Love is the basis of morality and it originates from within God’s inner life of three divine members in perfect loving communion with one another.

Notes

[1] Robert M. Adams, Rationality and Religious Belief, ed. C. F. Delaney (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 116–17.

[2] Erik J. Wielenberg, Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), ix. See Michael Huemer, Ethical Intuitionism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Derek Parfit, On What Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); David Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 2; Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Colin McGinn, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1; William FitzPatrick, “Robust Ethical Realism, Non-Naturalism, and Normativity,” in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4.       

[3] G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, ed. Thomas Baldwin, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1.    

[4] David Enoch, Oxford Studies in Metaethics, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21. See also Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously, 17.

[5] C. Stephen Evans, God and Moral Obligation (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2014), 166.

[6] Enoch, Taking Morality Seriously, 6. Stephen Finlay, “Normativity, Necessity, and Tense: A Recipe for Homebaked Normativity,” in Oxford Studies in Metaethics, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 57.

[7] Adam Lloyd Johnson, Divine Love Theory: How the Trinity Is the Source and Foundation of Morality (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel Academic, forthcoming 2023).

[8] Robert Merrihew Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; repr., 2002), 7.

[9] Thomas H. McCall, Which Trinity? Whose Monotheism? Philosophical and Systematic Theologians on the Metaphysics of Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2010), 172.

[10] Thomas F. Torrance, The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being, Three Persons (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1996), 165.

[11] Eleonore Stump, “Francis and Dominic: Persons, Patterns, and Trinity,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 74 (2000): 1.

[12] Alan J. Torrance, Persons in Communion: Trinitarian Description and Human Participation (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1996), 293.

[13] Millard J. Erickson, God in Three Persons: A Contemporary Interpretation of the Trinity (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1995), 221.

[14] Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 233.

— Dr. Adam Lloyd Johnson earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He teaches for the Rhineland School of Theology in Wölmersen, Germany, and Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri. He also serves with Ratio Christi, a university campus ministry. He is the author or editor of several published works including A Debate on God and Morality: What is the Best Account of Objective Moral Values and Duties?, co-authored with William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, Erik Wielenberg, and others. His next book A Divine Love Theory: How the Trinity Is the Source and Foundation of Morality, will be published next spring by Kregel Academic. You can learn more about his work at his website convincingproof.org.

Image by David Mark from Pixabay

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