Friday, March 7, 2003
Feast of Perpetua, Felicity & their Companions, Martyrs at Carthage, 203

There were in the eighteenth century terrible theologians who held that “God did not command certain things because they are right, but certain things are right because God commanded them.” To make the position perfectly clear, one of them even said that though God has, as it happens, commanded us to love Him and one another, He might equally well have commanded us to hate Him and one another, and hatred would then have been right. It was apparently a mere toss-up which He decided on. Such a view of course makes God a mere arbitrary tyrant. It would be better and less irreligious to believe in no God and to have no ethics than to have such an ethics and such a theology as this.

... C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), Reflections on the Psalms, Edinburgh: James Thin, 1958; G. Bles, 1958, p. 61 (see the book; see also Deut. 6:5; 7:9; 10:12-16,19; 30:6; Mark 12:30-31; John 15:12-13; 1 Thess. 3:12; 4:9; Heb. 13:1; 1 John 4:16; 2 John 5; more at Belief, Commandment, God, Hatred, Historical, Love, Theology, Tyranny)

 
Compilation Copyright, 1996-2024, by Robert McAnally Adams,
        Curator, Christian Quotation of the Day,
        with Robert Douglas, principal contributor
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Last updated: 04/14/16

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