Gordon Clark: Responsibility (Baker's Dictionary of Christian Ethics)

1973. In Baker's Dictionary of Christian Ethics. Carl F.H. Henry, ed. Washington D.C.: Canon Press. [Reprinted in 1988 by Baker Book House.] Responsibility

RESPONSIBILITY. See also Duty; Rights. Responsibility and morality are inseparable. The one cannot exist without the other. A mechanistic or behavioristic philosophy has no place for either. Other philosophers differ among themselves concerning the basis or nature of obligation.

Plato found responsibility in a supra-sensory, supratemporal World of Ideas; Aristotle, in the nature of man; Kant (q.v.), in the force of logic. Fichte made obligation an original datum. Christianity, of course, bases responsibility on the imposition of the Creator's commands.

Ethical writers usually spend more time on the extent of responsibility. Probably there is universal agreement that a man is not responsible for involuntary actions: if a man is knocked down by an auto, he is not responsible for falling. Trivial? Not so trivial when a man is knocked down by insanity, sets fire to his house and kills his children.

The Stoics put great stress on volition; but it was Aristotle who best enumerated the details. He examines actions done through fear. What, then, about actions done under the "compulsion" of pleasure? How about drunkenness? Some other actions are done in ignorance. There are various kinds of ignorance. A man may be ignorant of who he himself is (he thinks he is Napoleon of Christ); he may not know what he is doing ("Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do"); he may not know the person on whom his act terminates (mistaking a friend for an enemy); he may not know the instrument (the gun that "wasn't loaded"); he may not know the manner of his doing the act )he intended to shake your hand cordially and nearly breaks your joints). Ignorance in any one of these particulars relieves on of responsibility. Aristotle continues with other details.

The Bible does not give any systematic account of these matters, but both in the Mosaic Law (e.g., the cities of refuge) and in the NT examples occur. I Timothy 1:13 says, "I was before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious, but I obtained mercy because I did it ignorantly in unbelief." In addition to particular cases, general statements occur in Luke 12:45-48 and John 15:22; but particularly in Romans 1:32, "Knowing the ordinance of God, that they who do such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but approve of those that do them."

This last reference meets the objection that the heathen are not responsible because they have never heard the gospel. They are responsible because they know the law. "When the Gentiles, who do not have the [Mosaic] law, act lawfully by nature, they are, without the [Mosaic] law, a law to [or, for] themselves: they show the work of the law written in their hearts" (Rom. 2:14-15). Thus responsibility is both established and limited by knowledge.

Theologians and popular preachers who do not care to emphasize knowledge sometimes try to base responsibility on free will. But, aside from the fact that the Scripture does not so teach, a will free from and independent of knowledge, of one's own character, and of God furnishes a poor foundation for morality.

Archibald Alexander, Theories of the Will, New York, Scribner, 1898.

Gordon H. Clark