OK. I’ll bite. Yes, non-Christians do charitable things and often times better than Christian people. They perform what Confucious called the Tao or what Aristotle and Plato called the “Good.” Aquinas discussed the ethical in terms of the summum bonum. Buddha referred to the Good as the “Middle Way,” the way of moderation. Jesus even says that Gentiles treat their children good and are good to one another.
However, I’m talking about the presuppositions behind the assumption of the meaning or transcendental import of the idea of goodness–period. Jesus says that there is none good but God (Mk. 10.18); Paul says in Romans 3:10-12 (ESV) : “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.” Further, he says in Romans 8:7-8 (ESV): “For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.”
Do non-Christians do good things? Yes, in one sense and no on the other. They perform acts that may be considered charitable or good but they in themselves are not so. However, telling them to be good without why (the Christian frame of reference, e.g. “God commands . . .”) is training a generation of moralists (kids who grow up thinking that they are good people because afterall, they obey the rules and don’t kill people) and libertines who don’t care about not-killing after all that is just one more rule to break and they bring guns to school (or drugs or whatever) and do whatever. After all, what is good to one person may be bad for another–aren’t we all just the products of primevil sludge anyway? No heaven to gain or hell to shudder ?!? Off with her head!!
Without the Christ worldview giving the students the framework for a moral compass, we are training them to be pragmatists or utilitarians, both of which are self-motivated and self-oriented. Why should they be good? Because the teacher told me too? Because my hypocritcal parents told me too??
I’ll explore this more, but I have observed without the Christian frame of reference, public civility is going down the tubes . . . and I thorougly believe in the Biblical doctrine of total depravity, that all of man’s faculties have been corrupted by sin, which brings me back to my premise, there is no doing without Christ. So much so that Paul says in Philip. 2:13 (ESV)L ” . . . for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” So event he good that we seem to do, even believers cannot take the credit. There is a difference gentle reader in the formally or “materially” good and the ontologically good or the goodness of a thing, but alas, Christ be driven from the halls and canons of reason and this will prove to be madness . . .
