It occurred to me after the last post that there might be a subset or version of the first view (God is necessary for us to know the difference between right and wrong) which has a stronger claim than I gave it credit for. That is the idea that moral truth is revealed in the life of Jesus. Christians believe that, in Jesus, God has (among other things) revealed a what a human life completely suffused with love of God and neighbor looks like. Thus we might say that there is–on any Christian view–a kind of revealed moral knowledge.

However, one shouldn’t conclude from this, I think, that Jesus is the only source of moral knowledge. For starters, Jesus himself disclaims this repeatedly, appealing in his teachings not only to his hearers knowledge of the Mosaic law, but also to their common moral sense. Moreover, the picture of Jesus that we have in the gospels, while evocative of a human life that is shaped in a specific way, doesn’t provide us with anything like an answer key to all of our moral questions. Asking that it should is probably to to put more weight on that portrait than it could bear.

Another consideration: Jesus’ life and ministry are not, in general, a “transvaluation” of all previously held values, but something more like their consummation or the horizon point where they converge. Otherwise, it’s hard to see how people could’ve recognized him as good in the first place. That they could presupposes that people who encountered Jesus and responded positively to him had some prior understanding of good and evil, right and wrong, and recognized Jesus as the embodiment of virtues like compassion and self-giving love.

This isn’t to say that Jesus doesn’t add to our previously existing moral knowledge. But maybe what he adds is a vivid concrete actualization of values or norms that would otherwise remain abstract and incomplete. I’m not saying that Jesus is only a moral exemplar, as some liberal theologians seem to say. Christians affirm that his life, death, and resurrection are also the very presence and activity of God with us and for us. But at the same time he is not less than a moral exemplar. We might add that Jesus also shows us the depths of our own sin in that the world’s hostility toward him exemplifies the reaction of sinful humanity to the embodiment of perfect virtue and complete faith.