Can We Be Good Without God?

THE fallen individual is not someone other than the exalted individual.
Every human being is fallen and exalted both. This paradox is familiar to
all informed Christians. Yet it is continually forgotten—partly, perhaps,
because it so greatly complicates the task of dealing with evil in the
world, and no doubt partly because we hate to apply it to ourselves;
although glad to recall our exaltation, we are reluctant to remember our
fallenness. It is vital to political understanding, however, to do both.
If the concept of the exalted individual defines the highest value under
God, the concept of the fallen individual defines the situation in which
that value must be sought and defended.

The principle that a human being is sacred yet morally degraded is hard
for common sense to grasp. It is apparent to most of us that some people
are morally degraded. It is ordinarily assumed, however, that other people
are morally upright and that these alone possess dignity. From this point
of view all is simple and logical. The human race is divided roughly
between good people, who possess the infinite worth we attribute to
individuals, and bad people, who do not. The basic problem of life is for
the good people to gain supremacy over, and perhaps eradicate, the bad
people. This view appears in varied forms: in Marxism, where the human
race is divided between a world-redeeming class and a class that is
exploitative and condemned; in some expressions of American nationalism,
where the division—at least, until recently—has been between "the free
world" and demonic communism; in Western films, where virtuous heroes kill
bandits and lawless Indians.

This common model of life's meaning is drastically irreligious, because it
places reliance on good human beings and not on God. It has no room for
the double insight that the evil are not beyond the reach of divine mercy
nor the good beyond the need for it. It is thus antithetical to
Christianity which maintains that human beings are justified by God alone,
and that all are sacred and none are good.

The proposition that none are good does not mean merely that none are
perfect. It means that all are persistently and deeply inclined toward
evil. All are sinful. In a few sin is so effectively suppressed that it
seems to have been destroyed. But this is owing to God's grace, Christian
principles imply, not to human goodness, and those in whom it has happened
testify emphatically that this is so. Saints claim little credit for
themselves.

Nothing in Christian doctrine so offends people today as the stress on
sin. It is morbid and self-destructive, supposedly, to depreciate
ourselves in this way. Yet the Christian view is not implausible. The
twentieth century not to speak of earlier ages (often assumed to be more
barbaric), has displayed human evil in extravagant forms. Wars and
massacres, systematic torture and internment in concentration camps, have
become everyday occurrences in the decades since 1914. Even in the most
civilized societies subtle forms of callousness and cruelty prevail
through capitalist and bureaucratic institutions. Thus our own experience
indicates that we should not casually dismiss the Christian concept of
sin.

According to that concept, the inclination toward evil is primarily an
inclination to exalt ourselves rather than allowing ourselves to be
exalted by God. We exalt ourselves in a variety of ways: for example, by
power, trying to control all the things and people around us; by greed,
accumulating an inequitable portion of the material goods of the world; by
self-righteousness, claiming to be wholly virtuous; and so forth. Self
exaltation is carried out sometimes by individuals, sometimes by groups.
It is often referred to, in all of its various forms, as "pride."