When Christians make claims to an objective moral standard, are they making a claim that things are good because God has said they are good? Or is the opposite true? Does God issue commands because those things are good in the first place?
This is a classic question/argument that poses a dilemma between two options. The Euthyphro dilemma asks whether something is good because God commands it, or does God commands things because they are good? In other words, is goodness merely the product of the commands of God, or is God aligning his commands to a standard of goodness that exits exterior to God.
By suggesting that moral goodness is the product of either of these two options causes issues for Christians. Either God’s goodness is merely an expression of his will and so the term “good” in this sense has no real meaning for human beings; or goodness is something that exists external to God and thus, God, to be good, must align himself with this external idea.
The issue with the first option is that Christians have no claim to real goodness and it reduces the idea of morality to power and will, making the ideas of good and evil arbitrary to us. Of course, that is not the God that we know nor is it how God is portrayed in Scripture or in Christ.
The problem with the second option is that God’s sovereignty is questioned- because if something is greater than God (moral goodness) then God is not the supreme thing; that other something we call goodness would be supreme in this case. Again, this is not the God we know or that is revealed in Scripture: God is supreme, sovereign, and good.
The solution and response to this issue is a third option that makes this dilemma a false dilemma (there are more than two options). The third option is that goodness is intrinsic to God, it is part of his nature. God’s will doesn’t create goodness, nor is he beholden to a standard outside of himself. Goodness exists, because God is in himself a being that is good. It is an immutable character trait of God. Therefore, anything he wills will be in accordance with who he is. Goodness, as a standard, emanates from the being of God. This eliminates the concern for caprice, and yet remembers God’s sovereignty and uniqueness; it suggests that God is the standard for morality, not through his mysterious will, but through his knowable and revealed nature.
God’s commands flow out of who he is. Morality is best grounded in God’s nature, not merely in his commands.
