This series is drawn from our "Christian Foundations Charter". This charter, which is available on our "Home Church Resources" page, seeks to combat the loss of Christian identity within the western Church by restoring a distinctly Christian ethic.
Core Foundation 1: God is the source of all moral truth and defines “good” and “evil” by his character and revelation.
A Trial in Athens
Around 399 BC, a young Greek man named Εὐθύφρων (Euthyphro) was standing outside the court of the King Archon in Athens, waiting to prosecute a case. The case was controversial because he was prosecuting his own father over the death of a hired laborer, who had, in a drunken fit, killed one of the family’s slaves. Euthyphro’s father had bound the man and thrown him in a ditch to await instructions from the authorities on what to do with him. By the time those instructions arrived, the man had died of exposure and neglect. Euthyphro, believing his father guilty of manslaughter, decided to prosecute him.
Prosecuting your own father was almost unthinkable, so Euthyphro’s relatives were furious with him, insisting he was committing an act of impiety by turning against his own family. Euthyphro was unmoved. He believed that he understood piety better than they did. He knew what the gods loved and what they hated, and he was certain his case was righteous.
Then he ran into Socrates.
Socrates seized on Euthyphro’s confidence and asked him a simple question: what is piety? Euthyphro stumbled his way to this definition: piety is what is loved by the gods, impiety is what is hated by the gods. It seemed reasonable enough. But Socrates would not let it rest there. He pressed further: is the pious thing pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is pious?
That question is the heart of what we now call the Euthyphro dilemma, which has troubled moral philosophers for roughly 2,400 years. But this isn’t just an old philosophical puzzle. It’s the same question a skeptical friend, a philosophy professor, or your own child at fourteen will eventually ask you: is something wrong because God forbids it, or does God forbid it because it’s wrong?
Notice the trap built into both sides of the question: if something is good simply because God loves it or commands it, then goodness seems arbitrary because God could have commanded cruelty instead of kindness, and cruelty would then have been good, but, if God commands something because it is already good, independent of him, then goodness exists as a standard above God, one he discovers and submits to like the rest of us. The former doesn’t sit right with anyone who has read the Prophets, while the latter doesn’t sit right because it means God isn’t actually the Most High if something else is above him.
Euthyphro never resolved this question. By the end of Plato’s dialogue, he makes an excuse and hurries off, leaving Socrates without an answer, and leaving the question hanging in the air for every generation since. It’s a fair question. But it assumes something Scripture never grants: that God is one more being among beings, subject to a rule outside himself, or free to invent one on a whim. The Bible describes something different.
The Rock, Not a Rule-Keeper
Moses closes his life with a song, opening with a profound statement about God:
Deuteronomy 32:4 (CSB) — The Rock — his work is perfect; all his ways are just. A faithful God, without bias, he is righteous and true.
Notice what Moses does not say. He doesn’t say God discovered justice somewhere and decided to practice it. He doesn’t say God’s ways happen to line up with some higher standard. He says God’s ways are just, because they belong to who God is. “The Rock” isn’t just poetic flourish. In Scripture, calling God “the Rock” points to something fixed, dependable, and self-sufficient, the reference point everything else is measured against rather than one more thing being measured.
David says almost the same thing in his own song of deliverance:
Psalm 18:30 (CSB) — God — his way is perfect; the word of the Lord is pure. He is a shield to all who take refuge in him.
Both passages describe God’s perfection as native to him, not conferred on him by meeting some outside test. If you asked Moses or David, “is God’s way good because it matches some prior standard of goodness?” they would not understand the question. There is no standard prior to God because his way is the source of justice and goodness. Put simply, there simply is no measure of goodness outside of God himself.
“Why do you call me good?”
A wealthy young man in Mark’s gospel runs up to Jesus, kneels, and asks him what he must do to inherit eternal life. He opens with a compliment: “Good teacher.” Jesus’ response is unexpected:
Mark 10:18 (CSB) — “Why do you call me good?” Jesus asked him. “No one is good except God alone.”
Jesus’ response has puzzled many people, with some even using it to argue that he is denying his own deity. But look closer at what Jesus is actually doing. He isn’t refusing the label “good,” but is pointing the young man toward the source of it. Goodness, in the fullest sense, is bound so tightly to God’s own identity that only God can rightly be called good without qualification. Jesus is making the same move Euthyphro couldn’t make: he’s locating “good” inside God’s own nature rather than treating it as a free-floating standard that even God has to measure up to.
This matters for us because it means when we call something good, we are, whether we realize it or not, making a claim about God because goodness isn’t simply a free floating category separate from God one that he just happens to fit into, but rather, goodness is what God is.
Why evil isn’t a rival to God
If God himself is the reference point for goodness, a natural question follows: then where does evil come from? Did God make two things, good and evil, side by side, like light and dark switches he flips at will?
This is the very question that Augustine wrestled with at length and answers in Book XII of City of God, where he gives us the answer that has shaped Christian thought ever since. He argues that evil isn’t a rival substance to good and that it has no independent existence of its own. Instead, he said it was merely a corruption, a falling away, and a hollowing out of goodness. A wound is not a second kind of flesh alongside healthy flesh. It’s a breakdown of flesh that was whole. In the same way, evil is not a competing creative force alongside God’s goodness. It’s the absence or distortion of the good that God made.
This matters because it means two things: first, it means that God has no rival, and second, it means that evil is the corruption or absence of good in things. This understanding sets the whole course of Christian understanding of “good and evil” and leads to the conclusion that one’s standing as “good” or “evil” ultimately depends on one’s relationship to the nature and attributes of God.
Why this matters for how we live
Setting our understanding of good and evil in the nature of God matters because it connects how we live life to God himself. If good is simply whatever a culture, a majority, a religion, or a government decides at any given moment, then moral convictions have no more weight than fashion; it shifts with the crowd. But if good is grounded in the unchanging character of God, then our pursuit of what is right is really a pursuit of knowing him. Ethics isn’t a separate subject from theology, it’s actually its practical outworking!
The world around us is constantly shifting. This gives us solid footing to stand on and build solid convictions that can stand the test of time. But we are also not the source of goodness. We are called to conform to a character that is outside our own. So this not only gives us the basis for moral confidence, it also gives us a posture of humility that is sufficient to establish the attributes of love, compassion, and generosity.
In the next post, we’ll follow this same thread into a second foundation: if God is the source of moral truth, what does that mean for truth itself? Is truth something we construct, or something we receive?
A Dedicated Faith 