What Does the Bible Say?

God <—?—> good

Does God dictate the good? Or does God instruct us in the good because it is good? Which is the mainstream view of the Bible on this question we have been pursuing?

In all frankness, both views are present in the Bible. Precisely because the writers and editors of the Bible were not philosophers, and did not leave anything out of their compendium, they did not see as clearly as a philosopher would to the core of this question or present a clearly unified view on it. But they did have strong intuitions on it, which they expressed through the literary means at their disposal—narrative, poetry, and exhortation. These intuitions cut in both directions, as we have seen. Had they been philosophically aware, they might have declared the problem to be an “antinomy”—a dilemma between two opposing views, in which equally cogent arguments can be brought for each side.

The terms “autonomous” and “heteronomous” were introduced into this discussion by the German idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant, and also pervade the discussion of Isaac Heinemann in The Reasons for the Commandments to which I have already referred. “Autonomous” refers to the view that human beings can perceive the good through their own reason, precisely because the good is an independent quality. “Heteronomous” refers to the view that we need to rely on an external authority—such as God, a parent, or a political ruler—to tell us what is good.

Some people have a negative stereotype of the Bible that it is thoroughly heteronomous in its presentation of the good and why we should obey it. Following Heinemann, we shall here portray Jewish thought on the subject—from the Bible through the rabbis and the medieval and modern thinkers—as a dialectic of the autonomous and heteronomous. We shall go further and ask, what different forms did this dialectic take through the ages, and what options does this history offer us for our own understanding of the problem?

We review the examples we have already cited. Abraham challenging God before Sodom “Shall not the judge of all the earth do justice?” was clearly expressing the autonomous perspective. God, warning Cain “Sin crouches at the door, its urge is toward you but you may master it,” was encouraging Cain to act on his autonomous moral insight, without having to be told specifically “Do not murder.” But God commanding Adam and Eve “Do not eat of it,” and demanding that Abraham present Isaac as a sacrifice, was taking the heteronomous stance, laying down commands without justifying them by reasons.

The early 20th century Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen detected a difference in tone in the two presentations of the Ten Commandments — in Exodus Chapters 19–20 and 24, and in Deuteronomy Chapters 4–5. In Exodus, God stuns the people with the impressive spectacle of a desert thunderstorm; they are overwhelmed by God’s show of power and accept without reservation anything God will say to them. But in Deuteronomy, Moses stresses the rational aspect of the commandments: “What nation has such righteous laws and judgments as all this Torah that I give you today?” The nations, on hearing it, will say, “Surely this is a wise and understanding nation!”

Indeed, at least one modern Orthodox Jewish thinker has asserted that from a traditional Jewish point of view, even the ethical dictates of the Torah should be accepted in a spirit of passive obedience, as if they were hukkim (divine dictates without reasons). This is heteronomy with a vengeance. If this were Judaism, it would not be a teaching that I could accept. I also maintain (with Heinemann) that this betrays the spirit of the tradition itself, which is far more complex and nuanced in its approach.

The World As God’s Creative Project

The editor of the Biblical narrative in Genesis and Exodus presents us with a view that is neither precisely autonomous nor heteronomous in its implications. The term “theonomous” which David Novak has proposed is useful in indicating this dialectical synthesis, but we must go further. An “ethic of creation” (a term Lawrence Troster proposes) is here combined with the familiar “ethic of revelation.”

The historical narrative is framed by the creation narrative of the opening chapters. God creates. God declares in various stages of creation, “Let there be…” and it was so. And at each stage God examines the result, “and it was good.”

What means “and God saw that it was good”? Does it mean God declared it to be good, and thus legislated it to be good? Or did God, knowing what “good” was, judge that this product conformed to the outside criterion of good? If we adopt either of these views, we are back at our original problem. But I do not think either is satisfactory, and wish to propose a third view.

God (as portrayed in Genesis—admittedly anthropomorphically) is an artist. God has a creative intention, but cannot express it except through the act of creation itself. When an artist creates, s/he does not know in advance what will eventuate, but feels intuitively an impulse to arrive at a certain X. The artist produces something, then stands back and appraises it. Does the product (still half-formed) measure up to the inarticulate creative intention? Sometimes yes, sometimes not at all, and most often yes in part, but still needs improvement.

“God saw that it was good” expresses: God judged, yes, this fulfills my creative intention, at least up to this point. “God saw that it was very good” expresses: Now I have it! Now it is a complete and adequate expression of what I intended, or nearly so—needs just a crowning touch (maybe a Sabbath, to put the icing on the cake).

What does this imply in terms of human knowledge of the good? We do not need God to tell us in words “Do this, don’t do that”—or do we? It depends how good we are at intuiting God’s intention from experiencing God’s work. God apparently wanted humanity to read His mind, so He left them alone without explicit instructions for ten generations. The result was a disaster. People were clueless. They didn’t know which way to turn, and so they turned on each other. God gave in to despair for the first and last time, and wiped the slate clean, to start over. After the Flood, He gave Noah’s family a basic operating guide to living decently in the world. When that wasn’t enough, He gave the Israelites, fourteen generations later, more detailed instructions at Sinai.

But the instructions were not constitutive of the good. The good is constituted by God’s creative act. It is implicit in the world God made. The explicit instructions are a commentary on creation, to help those of us who cannot “get it” otherwise.

God gave us reason, to figure out the meaning of creation by contemplating it. God also (to anticipate Saadia Gaon’s view) gave us revelation, to inform us of the answers in case we could not figure them out for ourselves. Ultimately, the truths arrived at by reason and those offered by revelation should be in agreement. That would be the mature Jewish view, expressed by the leading Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides.

What, then, is good? Good is a dynamic function of the world created by God. Good can be intuited from contemplating the world itself. But the most profound understanding of the good comes from viewing the world as the ongoing expression of God’s will. Embracing the good is thus guided by reason, but it aims at compliance with God’s will as apprehended by reason (and hopefully confirmed by the purported account of God’s revelation of God’s will).

From this point of view, the dilemma of the Euthyphro (is good perceived by reason? Or is it compliance with God’s will?) is overcome in mature Jewish thought.