What’s ‘Good’? And How Do We Know It?

Jul 11

J.D. Lyonhart

5 min read ⭑

For one of my favorite talks I give, I stay outside the room and wait until it’s a minute or two past starting time, right to the point where everyone’s wondering where I am. Then I stride into class and calmly write on the board, Is sex good?

I stand there waiting and enjoying the awkwardness of our small-town, traditional, polite, Christian university class as their conversational hubbub slowly turns to stunned silence. Some of them glance wide-eyed at each other, as if to say, Isn’t this supposed to be a Bible class? I force my lips to suppress a smile, overly amused with myself.

Eventually, one brave soul ventures an answer. “I’d say no. Sex just makes things more difficult. Like, how many families and marriages are ruined because someone can’t keep it in their pants?” A nod of agreement circles the room. Another student chimes in, “Yeah, totally. God wants us to focus on spiritual stuff, not sex and body stuff. Earth isn’t our true home; heaven is. We aren’t physical beings. We are spiritual beings who happen to be having a physical experience.”

A kid in the back snorts, and I, being the cruel master that I am, call on him to share his thoughts. “Well,” he retorts, “At first, I was gonna say it’s not good, cause I thought that’s what you’d want us to say. But . . . God made the body, right? God made sex. So it can’t be all bad, can it?”

A few heads in the room nod, seemingly won over by his reasoning. So I decide to complicate things a bit with not just one but ten more questions.

I erase the word sex from the board, and insert a new word, entailing a whole new provocation: Is alcohol good?

Some students respond with examples (often personal) about how horrible it is to grow up with an alcoholic parent. Others retort that God made the grapes of the field and that Jesus turned water into wine. Not wanting to argue with Jesus, most of the class ends up on the yes side, admitting that alcohol is good in and of itself when used appropriately.

With consensus nearing, I decide to further gum up the conversation by once again replacing the central word and forging an entirely new question: Is marijuana good?

Groans reverberate through the room. Many are realizing the tension between their knee-jerk dismissal of weed and the logic they just proposed regarding alcohol. If alcohol is inherently good because God made it, then is weed inherently good because God made it?

I then take this opportunity to verbally reiterate to the class that I am not advocating for drugs (you know, because I like having a job) but am just pushing them to think through their beliefs and make them consistent. It’s better for students to wrestle with these things now in the safety of my pedagogical man-bosom rather than out there in the real world.

With that job-saving, legal fine print in place, I then write out the next question on the board: Is eating a spiritual act?

The gut reaction of most of the students is no. They argue that food is not inherently spiritual, even though you can incorporate spiritual things into it. You can pray before eating, or have a dinner conversation about God, or feed a poor person a meal. Food can be put toward a good and holy cause, but it’s not holy in and of itself. Spiritually, they are empty calories. Or as one student put it, “There is nothing holy about a meatball sub.”

Next question: My soul is what makes me me. Yes or no?

Almost the whole class goes to the yes side now. I ask why, and someone invariably responds, “Well, when you die, your soul goes to heaven, right? So your body is gone, but you are still around and still you. So, you are your soul. It’s what makes you you.”

“I usually throw a wrench in there halfway through to see what happens”

This line of thought tends to go on for a while, and I usually throw a wrench in there halfway through to see what happens. I walk over to the board and scrawl this question below the previous one:

Can souls see, hear, touch, taste or smell?

If the students weren’t annoyed already, this Catch-22 of a question usually gets them there. On the one hand, they don’t want to say no and have their souls be eternally blind and deaf in some tasteless, smell-less, dull, dark, sensory abyss for the entire afterlife. On the other hand, if they say yes — souls can see, hear, touch, taste and smell — then the body becomes entirely redundant, and there is no reason God should have made it to begin with. Why do we need a body if the soul can already do everything it does and more?

Next question: Is science good?

I observe that most students don’t know what this question has to do with anything, and I hypothesize that they’re kind of just ready for the discussion to be over by this point.

Final question: Should Christians be pro-environmentalism?

Some of the class grew up watching polar bear puppies die in Disney documentaries and are vehemently pro-environment and anti–whoever isn’t. Other students think global warming is a hoax concocted by satanic reptiles to fund their anarchist bowling league. Most of the class is somewhere in the middle, with a general sense that we shouldn’t be unnecessarily wasteful but that the environment is still not a huge priority for Christians. After all, God is going to rapture us to heaven and destroy the earth, right?

I then erase this question and replace it once again. It may seem like I’m smuggling in yet another final question, but this one doesn’t count, because it’s just meant for rhetorical effect to drive home the overall theme: Does God create bad things?

I then dramatically pull a Bible out from under my arm, and — wielding it like a mace — open it to page one, reading from Genesis 1:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. . . . And God saw that it was good. . . . The land produced vegetation. . . . And God saw that it was good. God set [the stars] in the vault of the sky. . . . And God saw that it was good. God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing. . . . And God saw that it was good. God made the wild animals. . . . And God saw that it was good. . . . God created mankind in his own image; in the image of God he created them; male and female God created them. . . . God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. (Genesis 1:1, 10, 12, 17,18, 21, 25, 27, 31)

I then close the Bible slowly for effect and say, “Nature and the physical universe are so good that the very first chapter of the Bible says it was good seven times in a row. Let’s go back through our questions with that goodness in mind. . . .”

J.D. Lyonhart is a British-Canadian theologian, philosopher, author and ordained minister. He is an associate professor of religion and philosophy at the University of Jamestown, a fellow at the Cambridge Center for the Study of Platonism at Cambridge University and a co-host of the Spiritually Incorrect Podcast.