(i.) The Christian conception of God on its ethical side was dominated by the idea of the forgiveness of sins. God was a Sovereign who had issued commands: He was a Householder who had entrusted His servants with powers to be used in His service. As Sovereign, He could, at His pleasure, forgive a breach of His orders: as Householder, He could remit a debt which was due to Him from His servants. The special message of the Gospel was, that God was willing to forgive men their transgressions, and to remit their debts, for the sake of Jesus Christ. The corresponding Greek conception had come to be dominated by the idea of order. The order was rational and beneficent, but it was universal. It could not be violated with impunity. The punishment of its violation came by a self-acting law. There was a possibility of amendment, but there was none of remission. Each of these conceptions is consistent with itself: each by itself furnishes the basis of a rational theology. But the two conceptions are apparently irreconcilable with each other; and the history of a large part of early Christian theology is the history of endeavours to reconcile them. The one conception belonged to a moral world, controlled by a Personality who set forces in motion; the other to a physical world, controlled by a force which was also conceived as a Personality. Stated in Christian terms, the one resolved itself into the proposition, God is good; the other into the proposition, God is just. The two propositions seemed at first to be inconsistent with each other: on the one hand, the infinite love of God excluding the idea of punishment; on the other hand, His immutable righteousness excluding the idea of forgiveness.[421] The difficulty seemed insoluble, except upon the hypothesis of the existence of two Gods. The ditheism was sometimes veiled by the conception that the second God had been created by the first, and was ultimately subordinate to Him. In the theology of Marcion, which filled a large place in the Christianity of both the second and the third centuries, ditheism was presented as the only solution of this and all the other contrasts of which the world is full, and of which that of Law and Grace is the most typical example.[422] The New Testament was the revelation of the good God, the God of love; the Old Testament was that of the just God, the God of wrath. Redemption was the victory of forgiveness over punishment, of the God who was revealed by Jesus Christ over the God who was manifested in the Law.
The ditheistic hypothesis was itself more difficult than the difficulties which it explained. The writers who opposed it were helped, not only by the whole current of evangelical tradition, but also by the dominant tendencies of both philosophy and popular religion. They insisted that justice and goodness were not only compatible but necessarily co-existent in the Divine nature. Goodness meant not indiscriminating beneficence; justice meant not inexorable wrath: goodness and justice were combined in the power of God to deal with every man according to his deserts, including in the idea of deserts that of repentance.
The solution is found in Irenæus, who argues that in the absence of either of the two attributes, God would cease to be God:
“If the God who judges be not also good, so as to bestow favours on those on whom He ought, and to reprove those whom He should, He will be as a Judge neither wise nor just. On the other hand, if the good God be only good, and not also able to test those on whom He shall bestow His goodness, He will be outside goodness as well as outside justice, and His goodness will seem imperfect, inasmuch as it does not save all, as it should do if it be not accompanied with judgment. Marcion, therefore, by dividing God into two, the one a God who judges, and the other a God who is good, on both sides puts an end to God.”[423]
It is found in Tertullian, who, after arguing on à priori grounds that the one attribute implies the other, passes by an almost unconscious transition from physical to moral law: just as the “justice” of God in its physical operation controlled His goodness in the making of an orderly world, so in its moral operation it has, since the Fall, regulated His dealings with mankind.
“Nothing is good which is unjust; all that is just is good.... The good is where the just is. From the beginning of the world the Creator has been at once good and just. The two qualities came forth together. His goodness formed the world, His justice harmonized it. It is the work of justice that there is a separation between light and darkness, between day and night, between heaven and earth, between the greater and the lesser lights.... As goodness brought all things into being, so did justice distinguish them. The whole universe has been disposed and ordered by the decision of His justice. Every position and mode of the elements, the movement and the rest, the rising and the setting of each one of them, are judicial decisions of the Creator.... When evil broke out, and the goodness of God came henceforward to have an opponent to contend with, the justice also of God acquired another function, that of regulating the operation of His goodness according to the opposition to it: the result is that His goodness, instead of being absolutely free, is dispensed according to men’s deserts; it is offered to the worthy, it is denied to the unworthy, it is taken away from the unthankful, it is avenged on all its adversaries. In this way this whole function of justice is an agency for goodness: in condemning, in punishing, in raging with wrath, as you Marcionites express it, it does good and not evil.”[424]
It is found in the Clementines,[425] the “Recognitions” going so far as to make the acceptance of it an element in “saving knowledge:” “it is not enough for salvation to know that God is good; we must know also that He is just.”[426] It is elaborated by both Clement of Alexandria[427] and Origen; but in the latter it is linked closely with other problems, and his view will be best considered in relation to them.[428] The Christian world in his time was settling down into a general acceptance of the belief that goodness and justice co-existed, each limiting the other in the mind of God: the general effect of the controversy was to emphasize in Christianity the conception of God as a Moral Governor, administering the world by laws which were at once beneficent and just.
(ii.) But this problem of the relation of goodness to justice passed, as the corresponding problem in Greek philosophy passed, into the problem of the relation of a good God to moral evil. The difficulties of the problem were increased in its Christian form by the conception of moral evil as guilt rather than as misery, and by the emphasis which was laid on the idea of the Divine foreknowledge.
The problem was stated in its plainest form by Marcion: