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The naively mythical understanding of the place of God in ethical theory, which implies that the morally relevant function of God in the Christian life is to be the source of an infinite series of specific commands whispered down from heaven to the conscience of man, removes from man the responsibility for deciding what is right (or wrong) and attributes this responsibility to God.

To be sure, if Christians have a special way for God to speak to their consciences and tell them what is right every time they confront a moral decision, then the crucial question in Christian ethics is not, “How does one decide what is right ?” but, “How does one do what he knows (because God has told him) is right?”

Not much reflection is needed, however, to see that to make the motivational question of how one does what God has whispered to his conscience primary in Christian ethics leads by default to a sanctioning of the given social status quo in which Christians happen to be living.

The unreflective conscience is a social product. Its moral principles are adapted from the given social order. To disdain rational reflection on moral decisions, therefore, and to claim that a hidden command of God heard in the “moment of decision” tells one’s conscience what is right, is in fact a deceptive way of justifying what one’s given society sanctions as moral.

The naively mythical understanding of the place of God in Christian ethics more naturally contributes to the stability of the given social system than it offers help for critically transforming social systems, because it doesn’t really help one decide what is right or wrong. By explicating the morally relevant nature of God, however, it becomes possible to fill in the theological background of the moral decisions of Christians so that an understanding of God contributes to the rationality of their decisions and provides them with critical principles for evaluating all social systems. Such an understanding of God contributes to the stability of a just social system.

A passage from Norman Perrin’s Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus focuses the problem before us quite poignantly:

“The keynote in the ‘ ethical’ teaching of Jesus, then, is that of response to the reality of God. Since all the teaching is set in the context of the proclamation of the Kingdom, it follows that the ‘ethical’ teaching is not to be considered, and indeed could not exist, apart from the challenge to recognise God eschatologically at work in the experience of men.” Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 151.

The emphasis here is on God as a participator in human experiences, not on God as an observer of human experiences. Rather than hearing about God the “independent, unbiased, impartial, objective, dispassionate observer,” we hear about the reality of a God who promises, challenges, speaks, and acts; a God who is an interested participator in the affairs of men. How can this interested participator be an ideal observer ?

To state the question in this form, however, begins to remove somewhat the sense of discrepancy that at first glance appears to be irreconcilably present between the notion of God as an active person and the ideal observer. For perhaps God is an ideal participant, that is, an ideal actor and an ideal observer in one. This seems clearly to have been Edwards’s conviction. If there are indeed good theological reasons for thinking that God is an ideal participant, then the literature on the ideal observer theory in ethics should be an important resource for clarifying the place of reason in Christian ethics.

Charles Reynolds