ABSTRACT
One potential moral objection to Christian theism is that it does a rather poor job accounting for the fate of the “good person.” It seems intuitively obvious that works associated with moral virtue—charity, honesty, sacrifice, and so forth—are laudable. Yet according to Christian theism, on the big question of one’s eternal fate, moral virtue ends up being inconsequential. After all, heavenly reward is said to be meted out on the basis of whether someone has “faith” in God. If Christian theism provides a framework in which the morally virtuous person may be fit for hell, whereas the person who simply has faith in God is fit for heaven, then Christian theism can be dismissed as a rather poor source of moral instruction.
In response to this objection, Kinghorn shows that the objection depends on certain critical assumptions about the nature of faith and of heaven. Contra these assumptions, Kinghorn argues that a proper understanding of “Christian faith” actually accords very well with our best intuitions about the importance of moral virtue. Further, nontheists who act virtuously exhibit important marks of Christian faith, even though they do not describe their own virtuous actions in these terms.
