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Chapter 5 On Revelation, Divine Commands, and Morality One of the central and recurring themes in Campbell’s philosophy of religion is the importance of divine revelation. In fact, his reliance on divine revelation is what most distinguished him from the deists and natural religionists of his day. He argued that divine revelation is what gives us the very idea of God in the first place, and, so he thought, explaining the revealed origin of that idea helps demonstrate God’s existence. Furthermore, he held that we need God’s revelation through Jesus and through the authors of the Bible if we are to mount an adequate case for moving from simple theism to Christian theism in particular. But Campbell also thought that we need divine revelation in order to discover what is right, what is wrong, what is good, and what is bad. As he saw it, moral philosophy is about five basic things: the origin, nature, relations, obligations, and destiny of mankind.1 And for Campbell, we need divine revelation in order to get the truth about these five things. More generally, he believed that “there is no separating true morality from true religion: they stand in the relation of cause and effect.”2 In other words, he had something to say about one of the most salient issues in moral philosophy, namely, how religion bears on morality. Campbell’s views on that issue are the focus of this chapter. Many scholars over the years have discussed Campbell’s views on morality. Typically, though, they have focused on his practical (or, applied) ethics, particularly the stances he took on issues involving slavery, war, capital punishment, and moral education.3 Almost no attention has been given to his moral epistemology (his views about how we come to discover moral truths) or his metaethics (his views about the metaphysical grounding of morality). This chapter is an attempt to fill the gap. I begin by reconstructing Campbell’s moral epistemology (§5.1). Because Campbell argues that we can originally discover moral truths only by means of faith in the testimony of the biblical writers, he needs to explain—among other things—what we should do concerning those issues about which the Bible 120 On Revelation, Divine Commands, and Morality says little or nothing. To show how he might do this, I imagine his response to what I call the problem of biblical silence (§5.2). In addressing Campbell’s metaethics, I think we can ascribe to him a divine command theory of right conduct (§5.3). Finally, I consider one of the most pressing objections to Campbell’s divine command theory—an objection stemming from Plato’s Euthyphro—and I consider two responses he could offer to it (§5.4). 5.1. Campbell’s Moral Epistemology One of the tasks of moral philosophy is to explain how we can come to have an awareness of, or have knowledge about, what is good and evil and what our duties and obligations are. It is easy enough to see why this kind of task is important. Obviously, we need to be able to discover moral truths—assuming there are such things—in order to know whether a particular course of action is morally required, permissible, or forbidden. And were we to have some clear sense of how to discover moral truths in the first place, then we would be one step closer to gaining the insight we need to conduct our lives as we should. So how, in Campbell’s view, can we discover moral truths? He thinks that, unfortunately, moral philosophers throughout history have failed miserably when it comes to answering this sort of question. They have failed, so Campbell thinks, because they have been searching for an answer in all the wrong places, so to speak. Because they have viewed moral philosophy as an inductive science of sorts, they have presumed that by making observations, examining facts, and conducting experiments , we can discover true moral propositions and principles “from the mere light of nature.”4 But, in Campbell’s view, these moral philosophers have mistakenly assumed that humans actually possess all the appropriate cognitive equipment (or have the full range of experience) that we need in order to discover moral truths on our own. Hence, they have mistakenly overlooked the role that divine revelation and religious faith play in this discovery process. Thus, for Campbell, these moral philosophers have failed to successfully explain how we can originally discover moral truths, and...

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