Can ethics serve as apologetics? The question is not one that many are asking, but it is appropriate given society’s need today to recover a grounding for both truth and morality.
Perhaps the most popular example of the intersection between the two among Christian apologists is C. S. Lewis’s concept of the Tao, which he described in his 1943 book, The Abolition of Man. For Lewis, the Tao reflected the understanding that there exists an order of morality and truth that transcends the specifics of any one philosophical school or religion. In an April 2024 article entitled, “The Fierce Urgency of the Tao,” Jonah Goldberg argued that rediscovering the concept of the Tao would help restore much-needed civility in our highly politicized age because it would foster both a sense of accountability to a higher power outside ourselves for right ethical behavior and an accompanying humility about our own commitments. In a rejoinder, Hunter Baker and Andrew Walker argued we need to go further and encourage the current revival of natural law and natural theology, which ultimately point to Christianity. Yet, Baker and Walker themselves may not be going far enough. There is a tendency today among advocates of natural law and natural theology to speak in generic terms of values and virtues that would be compatible with Christianity but not necessarily specific to Christianity. In his writings, Cornelius Van Til criticized this kind of “blockhouse” method of apologetics, in which one posits a foundation autonomous from revelation and then brings in Christianity to complete the structure. Van Til recognized that such an approach is fundamentally unsound because the assumptions underpinning Christianity are inconsistent with the rationalistic and autonomous foundation. Thus, if we are to challenge the worldview of our day, we need a more holistic approach, since how we are to act follows from our understanding of what constitutes reality and how we know that reality; to put it more precisely, our ethics follows from our metaphysics and epistemology. Van Til himself actually provides such a holistic approach, not just in his apologetics, but in his teaching on ethics as well, and he can be useful for us as we confront the moral chaos of our day.
Ethics Apologetically Formulated
When Van Til joined Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929 as one of the founding faculty, he developed courses in Christian Ethics and the Ten Commandments, in addition to those in apologetics and systematic theology. He first taught the ethics course—which he later relabeled Christian Theistic Ethics—in 1930 and would continue to teach it for the better part of the next thirty years. Even a cursory look at his 1930 syllabus shows he had apologetic interests in mind from the outset, as he not only engaged a wide range of idealist and pragmatist philosophical thinkers, but also popular liberal churchmen of the day. Van Til self-consciously articulated an understanding of ethics directly contrary to the dominant Protestant liberalism, which had reduced the entirety of the Christian faith to just ethics and which saw Christ Jesus merely as a good moral teacher.
Understanding that God is the summum bonum of Christian ethics establishes man’s telos or purpose in existence.
Van Til’s subsequent changes to the Christian Theistic Ethics syllabus also reflected his apologetic concerns. In 1940, he thoroughly revised the syllabus, expanding it to more than two and a half times its original length to strengthen his argumentation against Protestant liberalism. In several book reviews of mainline Protestant books on ethics during the 1930s, he highlighted how modernism and liberalism veered toward moralism but lacked any real metaphysical or epistemological foundation. His ethics syllabus, by contrast, aimed to supply exactly such a foundation. In 1947, he made a second significant, though smaller, revision to the syllabus. These changes had a similar impetus to his earlier apologetics against Protestant liberalism. In the 1940s, the Neo-Orthodoxy of Karl Barth and Emil Brunner began to gain ground among American Protestants, and Van Til sought to show how Barthianism and modernism shared ground in rejecting the absoluteness of God’s law for ethics. Also, in his syllabus revisions he added apologetic language against Roman Catholic and Arminian evangelical views—drawing more explicit distinctions against the views of Thomas Aquinas—and in several places showed how evangelical Arminianism, like that of C. S. Lewis, shared the same deficiencies as Roman Catholicism. These additions probably were made because of the greater public prominence of Roman Catholics after the Second World War and the beginnings of Neo-Evangelicalism.
A Holistic Approach
Although Van Til modified his Christian Theistic Ethics syllabus to address some of the apologetic challenges of the day, the focus of the syllabus naturally was still on ethics. So, what expectations should we have for the apologetic use of ethics? He did not try to argue that the moral sensibility that men exhibit across cultures and time periods is an argument for the existence of God, since he presupposed, rather than tried to prove, the existence of the self-contained, triune God of the Bible. Van Til consistently held that we must defend the system of Christian doctrine as a whole—a much more expansive goal. A practical effect of this is that Van Til’s goal opens up opportunities for dialogue with non-Christians across the whole spectrum of Christian teaching, not just on the existence of God. Indeed, one must remember that apologetics is not simply rebutting objections from non-Christians but includes correcting misunderstandings and articulating the truth for Christians and non-Christians alike. This necessitates a decidedly theological approach that is both holistic and integrated. Van Til laid this out explicitly in his Defense of the Faith, with specific chapters on metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.
The kind of holistic approach exhibited by Van Til has particular relevance for our day because it gets to the foundations underpinning one’s worldview. Our age is characterized by people who are passionate about any number of issues and whose rhetoric often veers toward moralism, but who have no real foundation for their moral views. Since the Enlightenment, there has been a deliberate effort to sever ethics from any kind of revelational foundationalism, and most works on ethics today will talk about various “sources” of ethics—reason, conscience, religious texts—but end up focusing on principles, values, and virtues in an abstracted sense that does not adequately constitute any kind of systematic foundation. By pressing on the lack of foundations for people’s ethics, we can also present an alternative that has solid conceptual foundations.
Indeed, such a holistic approach may be even more important today—especially because of ethics—than in Van Til’s day. In Van Til’s lifetime, the West still operated within the general framework of Christian assumptions about the nature of reality, even with the inroads made by Protestant liberalism and secularism. In the “Negative World” of our day (to use Aaron Renn’s term), these assumptions about the nature of the world around us have largely disappeared and are in the process of being replaced outright. This helps explain why we now see such hostility to Christianity. Christians today not only have to make an apologetic case for God and for salvation through Christ Jesus, but they also have to make a case for a radically different understanding of the nature of reality such that this salvation is even seen as necessary. That case is intertwined with ethics, both in terms of recognizing that the natural order is inherently moral, and that man’s core problem is essentially ethical, not a matter of his finitude. The doctrine of God is at the center of this task.
The Summum Bonum
If people are to pursue the “good” in ethics, then what constitutes man’s highest good (summum bonum)? Much modern writing on ethics does little to define man’s highest good, and insofar as it is given any attention, man’s highest good is defined in terms of abstract concepts like human flourishing or abstract virtues like love. The emphasis and attention given to the summum bonum, however, is a key distinctive in Van Til’s approach to ethics. For Van Til, man’s summum bonum is God himself. In the 1930 version of his ethics syllabus, Van Til put the discussion of the summum bonum at the end, but in the 1940 revision, he moved it closer to the front and devoted about sixty percent of the syllabus to it. This emphasis has philosophical, theological, and practical implications.
Philosophically, by seeing God himself as the highest good, Van Til addressed the Euthyphro dilemma posed by Plato in the dialogue of the same name. As Plato phrased the question, is the good good because God declares it to be so or because the good transcends even God? If the former, then good and evil are simply arbitrarily determined by God; if the latter, then the good is something greater than even God. The historical Christian answer is that good is good because it is rooted in the nature and character of God himself. Thus, it is not arbitrarily determined, nor does it transcend God. Because God is absolute and unchanging, the ethics established by him are the same. Defending God as man’s summum bonum answers the question as to what the ultimate foundation for ethics is, but the apologetic import of this does not stop there.
Theologically, Van Til’s commitment to a whole-of-theology approach means he is not content merely to assert God as the Absolute, but is committed to presenting a robust, biblical understanding of who God is. The Absolute God is also the Creator God, who is separate from his creation. It is this Creator-creature distinction that is the foundation of a proper Christian understanding of both reality (metaphysics) and knowledge (epistemology). The Absolute Creator God is also a (tri-)Personal God, so the natural order he has created refers back to him and is infused with personal moral significance. Moreover, because God is separate from his creation, the Christian worldview avoids pantheism. Modern thinking invariably tends towards pantheism, and pantheism obviates all sense of individual moral agency, since everything collapses into an abstract oneness. Thus, our ethics is not simply legalistic conformity to abstract values, principles, or virtues, but our actions, good or bad, affect our relationship to this Creator God, and that imbues them with inherent, meaningful significance. There is a notable hunger for that kind of significance among people today.
Practically, one implication of positing God as the summum bonum is how it rightly recognizes the problem of conscience. Historic Reformed theology recognizes that with the Fall, man’s conscience has been thoroughly corrupted, but much modern writing on ethics does not really address the problem this creates for ethics—indeed, to the contrary, conscience is often treated as an independent source of ethics. However, if man’s conscience has been corrupted, then it makes sense that God’s revelation of himself, his ethical standard for mankind, and the salvation that he extends to man would necessarily need to come from outside of man. Hence, the need for special revelation. Ethically speaking, man needs to be regenerated for his conscience to really begin to work correctly, and even then, man’s conscience is only as good insofar as he is sanctified. Thus, true Christian ethics must necessarily be methodologically Scriptural.
True significance, true justice, true mercy, true beauty can only be intelligible and even possible from within the worldview centered on the God of the Bible.
Second, and more importantly, understanding that God is the summum bonum of Christian ethics establishes man’s telos or purpose in existence. In the words of the Westminster Larger and Shorter Catechisms, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” Or, to put it another way, man’s telos is communion with God, not some vague notion of “human flourishing.” Such a telos means that one can be fulfilling one’s essential purpose even in the midst of suffering. Apologetically, the question can be posed to non-Christians and Christians alike in terms of what the purpose or goal of their lives is and, with that, what the basis for those views are. Christianity posits a genuine purpose. For example, a Christian going through a period of suffering with a debilitating disease or a difficult job can see this as a period of being refined according to the image of Christ and prepared for works of service to God; for the non-Christian, suffering is merely to be endured, and there is no inherent purpose in it.
Lastly, understanding that God is the summum bonum of ethics provides coherence to the Christian life. Often, discussions of ethics get reduced to abstract principles and virtues that are loosely connected with or even disconnected from other aspects of the Christian faith. It is easy for ethics to devolve into moralism that loses sight of the gospel and amounts to just trying harder to do better. Yet the truth of the Christian life is that the God who gave us his law for our good and his glory is the same God whom we worship and delight in, as the psalmist declares in Psalm 119. Our ethics in a public sense are not separated from our personal sanctification, nor is that separate from our worship and devotion. Recognizing God as our summum bonum, as Van Til does, means that there is an organic integration and integrity between all aspects of our life, rather than the compartmentation that modern life imposes upon us and that we have become accustomed to. This carries apologetic weight as well, as people are hungry for coherence, consistency, and meaning in their lives, as they see fewer and fewer examples of that in today’s society.
Characteristics of the Ethical Ideal
In Christian Theistic Ethics, Van Til distinguishes the biblical summum bonum as having four characteristics. He says,
We can sum up the differences between Old and New Testament ethics, in opposition to all other ethical theories, by mentioning four characteristics. First, the whole Scripture says that the ethical ideal is as absolute as we have spoken of it when discussing the ideal summum bonum. Secondly, the kingdom of God, as the summum bonum of man, is presented in the whole Scripture as a gift of God. Thirdly, a part of the work in reaching the summum bonum is taken up with the negative task of destroying the works of the evil one. Fourthly, because the works of the evil one continue till the end of time, the ideal or absolute summum bonum will never be reached on earth. Hence biblical ethics is always an ethics of hope for what lies beyond history.
After this quote, Van Til proceeds to provide an extensive biblical and theological development (spanning three chapters and fifty pages) explicating these four themes. A brief examination of these four characteristics highlights some of the apologetic angles inherent in them.
On the ethical ideal, Van Til concluded it must be absolute and unchanging because God himself is that way, and God made the moral order unchanging. This directly challenges the relativism that is all too pervasive in our age, and it is necessary for this ideal to be unchanging because the salvation God extends to people in his Son applies to all peoples in all generations. Were God’s ethical ideal changeable, then both the necessity and the security of salvation would be thrown into question. Positing an absolute ethical ideal, however, does raise the question as to why God allows for different moral behaviors in the Old Testament than in the New Testament, for example, on the matter of divorce. The issue is complicated, regarding continuity and change between the testaments and biblical law. For Van Til, the apologetic take is that God’s moral law has not changed, but God works with his people in history through the unfolding of revelation and redemption culminating in Christ Jesus. He uses the analogy of a sick child who needs to focus on some things immediately over others to be healed.
The other three characteristics reflect an eschatological understanding of ethics. The Kingdom is not some kind of heaven on earth or even a golden age of Christianity, but it is God’s redeemed coming into full communion with him, after the final defeat and judgment of all evil. It is a gift in the sense that man does not bring this about by his ethical actions, but it is by God’s work alone.
For Van Til, man’s summum bonum is God himself.
It is an ethics of hope in that it is not completed in this life. Apologetically, these two characteristics run counter to optimistic liberal postmillennialism in Van Til’s day and transformationalist views in our own day, which envision the Kingdom in a more material sense, either as the general improvement of mankind or a golden age. It therefore gives the understanding of a more spiritual kingdom, or as Christ described it, a kingdom not of this world. This runs contrary to a separate, eschatological ethics as proposed by some theologians. The ethics of the Kingdom is continuous with the ethics of God’s people from Sinai onward. It also puts into proper balance Van Til’s understanding that the ethical ideal involves destroying the works of the evil one. As God’s people are subordinated to their Lord and called to reflect his image, they are not to be passive, waiting only for the return of the Lord. They are to work for justice and practice mercy now. The work they do in sanctification in terms of putting to death sin is paralleled by the good works they are to do in opposing the evil one in this life. Historically, Christianity has been a force for social change, and given the widespread agreement across the contemporary political and religious spectrum that things are on the wrong track, this characteristic of the ethical ideal is likely to find resonance.
Living the Narrative
One of the challenges posed by an ethics that is focused on abstract principles, values, and virtues is that it becomes difficult to discern which ones to prioritize over others and even how to define them. The task becomes extremely subjective, and it is for this reason that there are almost as many different approaches to ethics as there are writers on ethics. Such abstraction dissolves the coherence of any approach to ethics and undermines the motivation behind ethical obligation. What provides coherence and motivation, by contrast, is a narrative that sets both a context for these values and defines the relationship between them. Human beings live by narratives, whether the epic poems of Homer, the Enlightenment narrative of liberty, the Marxist narrative of oppressed versus oppressors, or other such accounts. With the doctrine of God defining for Van Til both a metaphysical view of reality and the telos of man, and the view of history inherent in the eschatology described above, he in effect is tapping into the biblical narrative as part of the grounding for his ethics. To be sure, he is not labeling his ethics as “narrative ethics,” and the term would indeed have been anachronistic to him, since it did not really come in vogue in the academy until the 1980s, whereas he preceded it by fifty years. Nevertheless, the term fits. By doing this, he shows that we are not witnessing merely to the truth of certain propositions; we are witnessing to a vision of the Christian life. This is apologetically significant because it is a fundamental problem for non-Christians (and even for many non-Reformed Christians). In short, what is the broader vision of the good life? For many, it is at best just getting along and is thus empty. True significance, true justice, true mercy, true beauty can only be intelligible and even possible from within the worldview centered on the God of the Bible; any other system has to borrow capital from the Christian worldview to even make a claim for these things. Getting the unbeliever to see this should be a key apologetic priority.
Conclusion
What Van Til shows both theologically and practically regarding ethics as apologetics is that a whole-of-theology approach is needed; it is not enough to simply appeal to a natural moral sense in all men or an imitation of Jesus. For Christians, reducing ethics to abstract principles and values that are severed from the redemptive-historical narrative of Scripture can only lead to contradicting affirmations of Christian doctrine. The Christian ethic only makes sense in the context of a Christian worldview. At the center of that approach is the doctrine of God, biblically understood and summarized by the Reformed creeds, confessions, and catechisms. Ethics involves so many assumptions about the nature of God, reality, and man, that abandoning a confessional approach will weaken our apologetic effort. For Van Til, the absolute and unchanging God created a world that is suffused with moral significance, established an ethical ideal that like himself is absolute and unchanging, and directs men to the highest good of all existence, that is, God himself. Starting with that allows us to apologetically and evangelistically challenge not only the ethical foundations of non-believers, but also motivations for their actions, the cogency of their worldviews, and the aspirations of their very lives. This can indeed be a powerful witness for the Christian faith in a world that desperately needs to hear it.