As part of the requirements for my ethics course, I’ve been reading Michael Hill’s The How and Why of Love: An Introduction to Evangelical Ethics and re-reading C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity. A synthesis of this week’s reading highlights a central truth concerning the nature of morality. This truth is that morality begins both as an ontological and epistemological issue. A standard by which to live presupposes an authority that created the standard. The standard itself has been revealed and is knowable. Morality is objective and universal – that is, it applies to everyone at all times. All human beings have a sort of experiential, if not verbal, knowledge of what this morality entails. It is there; and it exists external to our subjective selves, though our existence is somehow threaded with its fingerprints. God has revealed its essence through nature and specifically through Scripture. Yet apart from the knowledge that these things reveal is the nature of the one who is its author. As Hill points out, “the moral commands of the Bible fit together because they all issue from the same person.” (20) Thus, the commands of scripture, and the morality by which all human beings generally live, are rooted in the very nature of God himself.
