Is Christianity Good?

“Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:18). This was Jesus’s response when the rich young ruler, kneeling before him, asked, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (v. 17). As a fellow Jew, the earnest young man before Jesus would have agreed that the God revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures is the dictionary definition of “good.” But many in our culture have the opposite response.

In his 2006 bestseller The God Delusion, New Atheist author Richard Dawkins assessed “the God of the Old Testament” and declared him “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

By contrast, Dawkins recognizes Jesus as a good moral teacher. He doesn’t credit Jesus with divinity. In fact, he thinks Jesus would have been a fellow atheist if he had lived today. But Jesus’s ethical commands, such as loving your neighbor as yourself, caring for the poor, and showing love even to those most hostile to you, strike Dawkins as quite good.

Most of our neighbors would agree. If we could transport them back 2,000 years and place them before Jesus, however, they may have been confronted with the same question as the rich young ruler: “Why do you call me good?” And as we’ll see in this essay, if our neighbors did their homework before answering Jesus’s question, they would find that Jesus gave us our most basic ethical beliefs––regardless of how we identify religiously. What’s more, they would discover that without the God revealed in the Bible, the moral measuring stick we’re all wielding crumbles into dust and ashes in our hands.

Why Do We Call Jesus Good?

The Jews of Jesus’s day were living as a trampled racial and religious group within the mighty Roman Empire. They clung to ancient texts that claimed their God made the heavens and the earth, that he made all humans in his image, and that he alone is worthy of worship. These same texts called the Jews to care for the poor and the oppressed; to provide for widows, orphans, and refugees; and to love their neighbors as themselves. The contrast with the ethics of the Roman deities couldn’t have been starker.

As British historian Tom Holland explains in Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, the Greek and Roman gods “cared nothing for the poor.” Nor did the classical philosophers. “The starving deserved no sympathy,” Holland reports. “Beggars were best rounded up and deported. Pity risked undermining a wise man’s self-control.” Most of the accusations Dawkins makes against “the God of the Old Testament” wouldn’t have been a problem from a Roman man’s point of view. Infanticide was commonplace and not seen as wrong. Unwanted babies were routinely left outside to die––or to be picked up by people who would raise them as slaves or prostitutes. Most Roman emperors were nothing if not megalomaniacs. Slaughtering their enemies was all in a day’s work.

Most of the accusations Richard Dawkins makes against ‘the God of the Old Testament’ wouldn’t have been a problem from a Roman man’s point of view.

What’s more, if we could go back and accuse a Roman man of misogyny, he would have been bemused. It was obvious to him that women were inferior to men, so naturally he acted on that basis. If we called him homophobic, he would also not have understood. For him, the question wasn’t whether you were sleeping with someone of the same sex or the opposite but whether you were in the active role. For a Roman man to submit sexually was extremely shameful. But a Roman man wouldn’t think twice before he penetrated any of his male or female slaves. We worry about consent and the abuse of power. But as Holland puts it,

Sex, in Rome, was above all an exercise of power. As captured cities were to the swords of the legions, so the bodies of those used sexually were to the Roman man. To be penetrated, male or female, was to be branded as inferior: to be marked as womanish, barbarian, servile. While the bodies of free-born Romans were sacrosanct, those of others were fair game. . . . Men no more hesitated to use slaves and prostitutes to relieve themselves of their sexual needs than they did to use the side of a road as a toilet.

So why are we today appalled by many things the Romans saw as ethically fine? Holland has the answer: Jesus.

This answer came as a surprise to Holland himself. He started research for his history of Christianity in the West as an agnostic. But over time, he realized the moral truths he held to be self-evident––like universal human value, equality of men and women, care for the poor, the inherent worth of children and infants, even the need for sexual consent––aren’t self-evident at all. Rather, they’re Christian beliefs that have been mainstreamed in the Western world because of Christianity’s ascent.

So why do we call Jesus good? Not because his teachings measure up to our beliefs in human equality, care for the poor and weak, and the virtue of sacrificing even for those least like us, but because he’s the source of those convictions. What’s more, if Jesus isn’t God incarnate, then the ethics we’ve learned from him are only subjective, arbitrary preferences. We need Jesus not just as the origin of our beliefs but as their firm foundation.

No One Is Good but Jesus Alone

At first glance, Jesus’s response to the young ruler—“Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone”—looks like it fits with Dawkins’s view that we can separate Jesus the good moral teacher from Christianity’s wild claim that he is God made flesh. In isolation, these words look like Jesus claiming he isn’t God. Of course, if we read on, we’ll find that Jesus isn’t actually denying his divinity at all. But even in these words alone, we see the hopelessness of Dawkins’s desire to rescue Jesus from “the God of the Old Testament.” This is the God who Jesus points to as uniquely good.

So how can we reconcile Jesus’s teaching on loving enemies with the times in the Old Testament when God commands his people to wipe out whole cities of their enemies? Or the times when he wipes out those of his people who rebel against him? How do these acts of violence square with Jesus’s apparent ethics of nonviolence? The answer is the cross.

In the Old Testament, we see the ravages of human sin, and we see two responses from the one true Creator: judgment and mercy. God alone has the right to punish human sin because he made us humans in the first place. But this same God “so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

In Jesus’s death, we see the final resolution of God’s love and his just judgment against sin. God takes our sin on himself in Jesus, who is fully God and fully man, and Jesus dies on a cross to offer up the one true sacrifice for sin. This is the ultimate solution to the problem posed in the Old Testament: How can a perfectly good God live with us sinful humans?

This is the ultimate solution to the problem posed in the Old Testament: How can a perfectly good God live with us sinful humans?

If our non-Christian friends and neighbors turn to Jesus, they’ll find he’s the first and best foundation for their deep beliefs in universal human rights, equality, and justice. If they turn to atheism, agnosticism, pantheism, or a spiritual-but-not-religious worldview, they must wave goodbye to any rational foundation for their ethical beliefs.

Perhaps the best answer to Jesus’s question “Why do you call me good?” is Peter’s response when Jesus asks his first disciples if they were going to stop following him: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).