Editorial March 20, 1909 Issue

A QUESTION OF RIGHT

John B. Willis

In the remarkable colloquy between God and Abraham, as narrated in the 18th chapter of Genesis, the plea of the patriarch is grounded in an interrogatory assumption respecting the divine conduct which is of profound significance. He said, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" and the convictions of Christian men certainly support the assumption. To make this affirmation, however, is practically to say that an enlightened man may legitimately pass upon the ethical nature of the divine activity, and the question arises whether Christian men may be sure that an infinitely righteous and just Being would not do that which is condemned by the moral sense He has implanted.

In the presence of the universal recognition of the palpable wrong of many of the things which are customarily attributed to the determinations of Providence, two courses are possible. We may say that God is not responsible for the conditions and events which are condemned as an outrage by our moral sense, or we may adjust our ethical judgment to the reputed conduct of God whether or no, and hold that given acts must be right regardless of the protest they awaken, for the simple reason that they are the acts of God. We can either question the legitimacy of our moral judgment or the correctness of the traditional assumption as to God's responsibility. At this juncture we shall find a new significance in St. Luke's story of how on a Sabbath day Jesus came upon a poor woman who for eighteen years had suffered from a grievous infirmity, and graciously healed her; how, when a Pharisaical devotee of Talmudic law called him to account, he referred to the human compassion which led an ox to water, and added, "Ought not this woman ... be loosed from this bond?" In this saying Jesus certainly recognized the authority of that prevailing moral sense which instinctively passes upon the justice or injustice of given conditions and conduct. He practically said that if the husbandman would save his cattle from unmerited suffering, he ought to presume that God would certainly do as much.

Jesus' argument here is very pertinent to the fact that the great body of Christian believers have been taught they have no right to subject the so-called "inscrutable acts of Providence" to the same standard of ethical criticism which obtains in determining the merit or demerit of human conduct. The whole theory of the atonement as generally accepted assumes that God's wrath toward sinful man has been placated by the suffering of an innocent person, and yet if an earthly father were to declare that he would forgive a child only out of consideration for the fact that another innocent child received a whipping, these same Christian people would promptly pronounce upon this position as an offense to common justice and common sense. When long-continued pain is brought upon the innocent by human selfishness and cruelty, swift condemnation is heard; but when, through the ignorance of human belief, it is attributed to the government of God, the Christian world bows before it as the inscrutable act of an all-wise God!

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