The Misuse of Divine Command Theory in White Evangelicalism

This post will partly be a case of "how did I stay in those circles for so long?!" since my views on DCT have remained mostly stable since my first encounter with it at an academic level back in 2011.

To begin with, then: Divine Command Theory is the view that what is good is good because God says so (rather than, say, God saying that they are good because he looks and sees that they are). Usually this gets tweaked a bit, to say that it is because a loving God says so.

The worry is that, if we grant DCT, then God could have decreed anything--child sacrifice could have been good, if God had decreed it. That is why the tweak to a loving God. That shift does a lot, though. Once we have said that things are good because a loving God says so, there are worldly facts involved in the goodness of things. Depending on how we understand God's love, in fact, we will have managed to essentially say that things are all-but good because a loving being would command (or endorse) them, but morality requires commands of God in line with such, and we have a loving God to get morality in motion for us.

Now, I reject DCT. My view winds up pretty close but has ramifications for how we understand what God can command. On my view, God could command anything, but in so doing he would be decreeing the world to be such that doing what he had commanded would be good.

Both my account and the loving God account require the world to be compatible with the claim that God commands what is, even without him, wise. That is, DCT doesn't excuse us from looking for how what God commands is good for us, glorifying to him, and conducive to shalom.


Carry this around with you long enough and you will start to notice "God commands it, so it is good" floating around in a way that is intended to deflect from accusations of harm. God commands gender roles, therefore, our claims that it harms people must be wrong (rather than reason to re-evaluate our interpretation of Scripture). similar with gay marriage, transitioning, serving in ministries selflessly, and so on.

"God commands it, therefore it is good, therefore do it" is not, in fact, how we are to live. It is not the gospel. It is not even good law. Rather, we are freed to love God and one another. Because God has loved us, we can love one another. Because f how God has freed us. we are enabled to love one another. The nuances of how God has related to us--sacrificially giving of himself, loving us when we hated him, etc.--we are transformed by his love to love one another. When the biblical authors wish to motivate us, they return, again and again, to the facts of the Gospel. Pursuing "goodness" from any other motive than what Christ has already accomplished is legalism.

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