2 - Moral Experience and God

Summary

This chapter contends that divine self-disclosure to humans is best understood in terms of manifested filial values with a distinctive moral intention aimed at cultivating righteousness. It identifies a neglected problem of guided goodness and its significance for God’s self-disclosure in manifested filial values. It explains how God is related to manifested filial values in terms of God’s active and empowering moral character and will. Its approach illuminates how God can be experienced by humans through divine self-disclosure in manifested filial values, including in morally searching interventions, such as nudges or prods toward goodness, in conscience. The chapter portrays reciprocity of human wills toward God’s moral will as central to human receptivity to divine self-disclosure in manifested filial values. It thus clarifies how evidentially grounded assurance for faith in God can arise from divine self-disclosure when cooperatively received by humans.