The Elusiveness of Goodness

We want to know what is true, but find a landscape filled with landmines. A palatial castle plentiful in paradoxes, as we saw last time.

Along with my desire for truth, I also find a deep desire for goodness. This desire has a few distinct dimensions— like light passing through a prism, this singular desire produces unique beams of light when passing through me, based on the kind of being I am (a human being).

One beam of this light is the desire to know what is good. This seems to be part of my thirst for truth, previously discussed.

A second beam is the desire not just to know what is good, but to be good. To align myself and my life with what I know in the moral domain.

Here I encounter a great difficulty, for at every turn I find myself falling short of my own standards, however imperfect they may be. And so I want to be good— to do what is right and stop doing what is wrong— but I find myself doing what I don’t want and not doing what I do want. Self-help books, careful training and management of willpower avail little.

Benjamin Franklin is instructive here. A man of great genius and determination who set out systematically for moral perfection, complete with charts to monitor progress in each virtue. What he found is that as he improved one, the others diminished. It was like playing a rigged game of whack-a-mole. The house always the winner, the player the loser.

Who will save us from this inevitable, perpetual losing?

A third beam, related to the second, is a desperate desire for absolution. To be forgiven of past wrongs; cleansed of moral guilt. An incredibly stupid idea has been popularized in recent decades which reduces all moral guilt to a psychological state. From this follows that man’s need is to remove not his moral guilt, but his feelings of guilt. There are a handful of ways to do the latter, but what about the former?

A fourth beam is equally universal, but somewhat less personal than those we have discussed. There are few things more obvious to me than the fact there is something wrong with the world. The former rays reveal I am part of that problem, but this ray deals with the fact it is much, much bigger than just me. I don’t just want to be good as an individual, I want those things which are wrong in the world to be made right. I long for justice and peace and love to fill the earth. Why do I have this longing? Could it ever be satisfied? How?

This is by no means a comprehensive treatment, but I trust you see (and I hope you can feel) at least some of the problems.

Still, we are not done. There is a more terrible question lurking when our pursuit of truth and goodness are combined. What if the two are diametrically opposed? What if knowing truth makes one evil? Or what if the truth is that goodness is an illusion? What if being good requires abandoning the truth, or vice versa, so that the two cannot be pursued together.

Which one would you give up? I am not suggesting an affirmative answer to any of these questions, but what is there to prevent them from being so?

Again, here I want to ask: what happens if Jesus steps into the picture? What would it mean for the problems above if Jesus is who he claims to be?

• It would mean that the reason we long to know and to be good is that we were created this way. We are supposed to be good and so we long for it. God is ultimate goodness and so our longing for goodness is a longing to be united to him— made in his likeness, we desire to be like him.

• It would also mean that moral transformation is possible and is not something reserved for those with outstanding will-power or the time to read hundreds of self-help books. Jesus said “I am the way,” to an audience who understood “the way” to mean the path of goodness and right living. He called people to follow him in that Way and promised to help them do so.

• What about our moral failures— past, present and future? Jesus said he came to live a life of moral perfection that we could not so that he could take our moral guilt on himself and give us his moral perfection in the great exchange (“he who was sinless became sin for us, that we would be made righteous before God.”). Jesus didn’t come to help us feel less guilty. He came to remove our moral guilt entirely— to offer complete and lasting forgiveness.

• Yet the world is not the way it ought to be. Jesus moves that “yet” to the other end of the sentence, changing it to: “The world is not the way it ought to be, yet.” He came promising to return and restore all things. To make right every wrong. To make things as they ought to be.

• Lastly, we find in this personal God the unity of truth and goodness because they come from the same being. The person who is the truth, is also the way (moral uprightness; goodness). And so we have every expectation that goodness will lead to truth and truth to goodness and that we will not be forced to choose one over the other.

In my next post, the final one in the 3-part "interlude," we'll look at beauty. Pun intended.