The Trinity Is Absolutely Not The Source And Foundation Of Morality

Review: *Divine Love Theory* By Adam Lloyd Johnson

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PATIENT: Doctor, doctor! I think I’m the source of morality!

DOCTOR: Oh dear. *checks notes* Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear…

PATIENT: *frightened* What is it, doc?

DOCTOR: It looks like you’re… you’re… *gulps* the loving relationship between three co-equal, co-eternal, and consubstantial divine persons, or hypostases, sharing one divine essence, or ousia, the essence undivided and the persons unconfused.

PATIENT: *bursts into uncontrollable sobs*

Like the patient here, I am literally sobbing. By ‘literally’, of course, I mean figuratively, and by ‘sobbing’ I mean I’m both intrigued and tickled as I leaf through Adam Lloyd Johnson’s Divine Love Theory in a local café. (Your local café. I live inside your walls.)

If you’re familiar with the Christian apologetics world, you’ll know there’s a multi-media cottage industry of books, articles, and YouTube videos promoting ‘moral apologetics’. In moral apologetics, the aim is to argue for God’s existence from some feature or features of morality.

The best known moral argument is William Lane Craig’s, which says:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.

2. Objective moral values and duties do exist!

3. Therefore, God exists.

Craig’s is the easiest one to fit on a napkin, but there’s a smorgasbord of other moral arguments with the same general thrust: moral realism — the thought goes — is in some way tied up with theism. God is either necessary for, or the best explanation of, stance-independent moral truths.

Recently — in a twist that nobody could’ve predicted — moral apologetics has taken on an explicitly Christian flavour. According to some Christian philosophers, not only is theism the best explanation for objective morality (or some feature of it), but Christian theism, in particular, stands metaethically supreme.

In a 2021 doctoral dissertation, Bobby Conway argues that certain features of moral guilt are best explained by Christian theism, and that we should update our credence in Christianity accordingly. (I had a very brief debate with Conway on YouTube about this, so watch that if you were fiening for my take on Conway’s scholarship.)

Divine Love Theory is a book along these lines. According to Johnson, moral realism — what he calls ‘objective morality’ — is best accounted for in terms of resemblance to the divine nature. Specifically, moral realism is best accounted for in terms of resemblance to the loving relationships within the Trinity! As Johnson expresses the thought:

As for objective moral value, I agree with [the late Robert Adams, author of Finite and Infinite Goods] that the ultimate good is God and that humans are morally good if they resemble God in a morally pertinent way. However, my divine love theory goes one step further by proposing that the specific thing being resembled is God’s trinitarian nature as found in, and expressed among, the loving relationship between persons of the Trinity. Therefore, I propose that God’s inner-trinitarian relationships provide the ultimate foundation for objective morality and that humans are good when they resemble these loving relationships in a morally pertinent sense.¹

There are a lot of things I took issue with in Johnson’s book (I almost phoned the issue police). But if I wrote a paragraph on every little thing I’d end up with, like, a lot of paragraphs. (If

Lance S. Bush

ever gets his hands on Johnson’s book, I fear, the internet will run out of storage.)

To save us all some time, and because I’m driving a bus, I’ll just say quickly why I don’t think X is good if and only if, and because, it resembles the loving relationship between persons of the Trinity. I have a zillion objections to theistic metaethics more generally — this post by

Emerson Green

hits on some of them, so read that if you nasty — but here I’ll home in on what I think goes wrong with the Trinity suggestion, specifically.

So, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all love each other. Got it. But in virtue of what do they love each other? Love, after all, has its reasons. Why does the Father love the Son, the Spirit love the Father, and so on?

In Johnson’s view, the persons of the Trinity love each other essentially — by the necessity of their own nature². But we still want to know why the persons of the Trinity love each other. Even if they must love each other, what is it about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that compels this love, or makes it fitting?

Here is a plausible answer: the reason the Father loves the Son — or at least, part of the reason the Father loves the Son — is that the Son is in some respects good. That is, the Son has various features — wisdom, virtue, a good personality (?) — that make loving him stance-independently rational, appropriate, or fitting, in a way that it would not be rational, appropriate, or fitting to love a Malicious and Tricksy Vortex of Pure Carnage and Evil™.

Yet if that’s the case (and that’s what I would say if I were a trinitarian with a commitment to divine rationality), the explanation of normative value, whatever it is/if there could be one, runs deeper than the love between persons of the Trinity, since, plausibly, we want normative reasons to explain why the persons of the Trinity love each other, and why it’s rational for them to do so.

(Update: I crashed the bus :p)

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Speaking of lerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrve, my stunningly beautiful girlfriend has a Substack. Check it out!

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1. Johnson, Adam Lloyd. 2023. Divine Love Theory: How The Trinity Is The Source And Foundation Of Morality. Michigan: Kregel Academic: pp. 50-51.

2. Ibid., p. 155.