Divine command theory in Christianity

The Euthyphro dilemma is the enduring problem at the heart of Christian moral theology: is an act good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good? Pure divine command theory takes the first horn — moral facts simply are God's commands, and God could in principle have made cruelty good. Aquinas and the Thomist tradition take the second — God commands what is good because his nature and the natural order he creates already constitute the standard. Most actual Christian moral theology has lived in the tension between these poles.

The voluntarist tradition — emphasizing God's will as the source of morality — runs from Augustine through Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. Ockham notoriously argued that God could have commanded murder or theft and these would then have been morally obligatory. Reformed theology in particular kept voluntarism alive: Calvin emphasized the inscrutable sovereignty of the divine will, and the Puritans regularly grounded moral obligation in command rather than in created nature. The intellectualist tradition — emphasizing rational moral order — runs through Aquinas, Hooker, and most Catholic moral theology, including the modern natural law revival in figures like John Finnis and Germain Grisez.

Contemporary Christian philosophers have refined the position considerably. Robert Adams's Modified Divine Command Theory (Finite and Infinite Goods, 1999) identifies moral wrongness with contrariety to the commands of a loving God — a constraint that blocks the Ockhamist nightmare while preserving God as the metaphysical ground of morality. William Lane Craig and other apologists deploy a version of this in the moral argument: objective moral values require a transcendent foundation, which theism uniquely provides. Critics from Wes Morriston to Erik Wielenberg argue that Adams's move either smuggles in a prior standard of love (re-opening Euthyphro) or makes God's commands themselves arbitrary at the deepest level.