Are All Truths Equal?

I was reminded this weekend of a conundrum Art Lindsley, one of my seminary professors, put to me years ago: is God above the law, or beneath it?

It came to me by way of an old Duke Law Journal article, Arthur Allen Leff’s “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,” written in 1979.¹ Leff taught law at Yale, and the question he set himself was whether a normative morality — some universal law with teeth — can stand without God. He was an agnostic, and he was after a findable law: something that ought to direct human behavior and that we did not simply invent. Is there a human law that points back to a law already there? I have argued with his conclusions for years and never once stopped admiring how he arrived at them. He would not let himself off. He saw the absurdity of a species that makes up a law and then presents it as the Great Ought To, and he refused to look away from it.

So: is God above the law, or beneath it?

Both horns gore you

The question presupposes a God worth the name, but for now “god” can stay generic — a higher power, an intelligent designer, whatever you like. The trouble is that neither answer survives a second look.

If God is above the law, the law is arbitrary. Had the Designer made A right instead of B, then B would have been right. He could change his mind tomorrow and yesterday’s virtue would become today’s sin. Something would be commanded, but nothing would be true — not permanently, not in itself. We would be living under a preference, and a preference backed by infinite power is not a moral order. It is a mood with an army.

If God is beneath the law, then God is subject to it, and the law has become God. The rules would rule the ruler. You could still posit a designer, but his hands would be tied by something over his head — and we would be left with a cosmic truth and a toothless deity, an omnipotent Law with a weak chief executive. Worse, we would have no reason to think the Law was for us. It would be faceless, nameless and cold, and no one would be home behind it.

Notice what both horns concede, though, because in a relativistic age it is not nothing: on either account, something is true. If we grant a supreme being at all, it is hard to imagine one with no view of right and wrong. Above the law, right and wrong might shift — but at his discretion, never at ours. Beneath it, there is an unchanging truth we did not write. To land on no unassailable truth at any point, you have to argue that there is no God at all, in any fashion whatsoever.

Which is exactly what Leff set out to do, and exactly why he is worth reading.

Leff runs it all the way down

Leff’s honesty is the thing. He opens by naming the double bind we all live in: we want to find the right and the good, and we want to make it, and we want both at once. We want to be perfectly ruled and perfectly free in the same breath.

Leff begins his article:

I want to believe —and so do you— in a complete, transcendent, and immanent set of propositions about right and wrong, findable rules that authoritatively and unambiguously direct us how to live righteously. I also want to believe —and so do you —in no such thing, but rather that we are wholly free, not only to choose for ourselves what we ought to do, but to decide for ourselves, individually and as a species, what we ought to be. What we want, Heaven help us, is simultaneously to be perfectly ruled and perfectly free, that is, at the same time to discover the right and good and to create it.¹

Then he does what almost nobody does. He follows it down. No God, no findable law, therefore no standpoint from which anyone can tell anyone else what they ought to do. Not a professor, not a parliament, not a majority. Any claim about the good gets the same two-word reply, the one his essay made famous: the grand sez who.

And here is the part I cannot get past. Having demolished the ground, Leff will not stand where he has landed. He ends his article by asserting, flatly and without support, that there is such a thing as evil in the world — and then puts his own question back to every one of those assertions.

He concludes:

All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves, and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel. Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us “good,” and worse than that, there is no reason why anything should. Only if ethics were something unspeakable by us could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable. As things stand now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless:

Napalming babies is bad.

Starving the poor is wicked.

Buying and selling each other is depraved.

Those who stood up and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin, and Pol Pot —and General Custer too— have earned salvation.

Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.

There is in the world such a thing as evil.

[All together now:] Sez who?

God help us.¹

That is not a lapse. It is the most honest paragraph in the piece. Leff could not construct a floor and he could not make himself believe there wasn’t one. The argument said everything was up for grabs; the man knew better and said so anyway.

I do not think that is weakness. I think it is evidence. When the best mind on a problem cannot live inside his own conclusion, the conclusion is worth re-examining — and what he could not stop believing is a good deal older than his argument against it.

The answer, and the objection to it

The dilemma is older than Leff. Plato has Socrates put it to Euthyphro: is a thing holy because the gods love it, or do they love it because it is holy?² Twenty-four centuries later, in a law review, the two horns are still the same two horns.

The Christian answer is not a third position between them. It is a denial that the two exhaust the field — because both assume the law and the lawgiver are separable in the first place. They are not. God does not consult a standard, and he does not invent one. He is the standard. The Law is not a rule he made and not a rule he obeys; it is an expression of what he is. Truth is unchanging because he is. The Law is good because it is the shape of his character.

Now the objection, which is the one Leff would have raised, and which the Christian answer too often skates past: haven’t you just moved the arbitrariness inside? Why is God’s nature good? Sez who?

It is the right question and it deserves better than a shrug.

To ask why God’s nature is good is to ask for a standard of goodness above God, against which he could be measured and found to pass. But that is just the second horn again — the faceless Law with a deity underneath it — and we have already watched it dissolve. There is nowhere to stand to ask the question. Good is not a property God happens to have, the way a man might happen to be tall. Good is what he is, and our idea of it is downstream of him, not applied to him. Asking why God is good is near to asking why a foot is twelve inches long.

Which means — and I want to be honest about this — the Christian answer terminates. It stops somewhere. Every account does. Leff’s stopped too; he simply did not like where. The question is never whether your explanation bottoms out. The question is what it bottoms out in.

And that is the whole difference, and it is not a small one. Leff’s floor is a brute fact with nobody behind it: sez who, asked into a room where no one is standing. Ours is a person. The buck stops at someone who can be known, who speaks, who has a character with a shape you can learn — and who, on the Christian telling, did not stay silent about any of it.

An instruction book, not a to-do list

If the Law expresses God’s character rather than his preferences, then it works the way the rest of his handiwork works. His actions made a physical universe with physical truths in it: step out of a window and you will hit the ground and it will hurt. His character grounds a moral one with moral truths in it: lie to a friend and you will damage the friendship. God did not make it so by decree. It IS so, because it is consistent with what he is, and he has told us so that we would know.

He is not above the law, having decided one afternoon that we should not lie. It was always wrong to lie, before the dawn of time — and he let us in on it.

Which makes the Law something other than a rod. It is closer to a manual for a world we did not build and do not fully understand: fewer jumps out of windows, if you like. An instruction book, not a to-do list.

Sez who

And then there is the part the argument alone will not reach.

If the Law is the shape of God’s character, then knowing what is true is a way of knowing him, and none of us has come out of that acquaintance well. The trouble with a real standard is that it is a real standard. A findable law is exactly what we asked Leff for, and the moment it is found it is standing over us with a question of its own.

Which is where the story turns, and turns in the only direction that would help. The one who is himself the Law is the one who kept it — and then stood in the place of those who had not. That is not a loophole in the standard. It is the standard paying for us at its own expense, which is the one move a faceless law could never make and a god of mere preference would never need to.

So when the question comes — sez who — the Christian answer is not louder. It is not better argued. It is only that there is somebody there to say it, and that when he finally spoke, it was not the sentence we had earned.

Leff ended his article with two words. I have always thought he was closer than he knew.

Notes & sources

1. Arthur Allen Leff, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,” Duke Law Journal 1979, no. 6 (December 1979): 1229 – 1249, scholarship.law.duke.edu. The post originally rendered the title with a semicolon; Leff’s title uses a comma. ↩
2. Plato, Euthyphro 10a. ↩