this extraordinary sense of obligation come from? Increasingly, people want to relate it to social conditioning. 'Morality?' they say. 'Oh, that's just a social convention. We're taught certain things in our infancy, and we internalize them in the form of a conscience as we grow up.' But the trouble is that once you really believe that that's all morality is, it immediately loses its cogency and has no power over you. If right and wrong are just human inventions, then why shouldn't we disregard them if we want to?
Modern sociological analysis of the word 'ought' doesn't so much explain our sense of moral obligation as explain it away. Increasingly in our western world we are experiencing the anarchy and the permissiveness that irresistibly result from that sort of corrosive scepticism. For the distinctive thing about the word 'ought' is that it has to come from outside us, from some higher authority. And the problem with the humanistic philosophy that has dominated our culture for the last two centuries is that it has no access to such a higher authority. Its followers want a moral law but without a moral law-giver. They want personal values without a personal God. And you can't have them.
Responsibility by definition involves two parties. You have to be able to answer the question, 'Responsibility to whom?' Humanism can't answer that. That's why it's been such a disastrous interlude in our intellectual history.
But Jesus can answer the question. He understands where the word 'ought' comes from. It's from the owner of the vineyard, he says. Our moral nature just reflects the fact that we were put on this earth as tenants, not as owners. We owe something to our Creator. There is an inescapable 'ought' in the very nature of our human existence. The fundamental reason the vineyard is in a mess, he says, is that men and women, Jews, Gentiles or whoever they may be, habitually run away from that accountability. 'You can be a god too,' the devil told Eve.
