Ethical monotheism is a form of exclusive monotheism in which God is believed to be the only god as well as the source for one's standards of morality, guiding humanity through ethical principles.[1]
Ethical monotheism originated—pace any claims of priority on behalf of Zoroastrianism[2]—within Judaism.[1][3][4][5] The concept is present in various other monotheistic religions, such as Zoroastrianism, Christianity, the Baháʼí Faith, Sikhism, and Islam. All of these monotheistic religions include the belief in one Supreme Being as the ultimate authority and creator of the universe.[6] In Christianity, God is worshipped as the Trinity or according to Nontrinitarian conceptions of God.[7] In monotheistic religions, other deities are variously considered to be falseordemonic, and it is believed that any other gods cannot be compared to the one that they respectively regard as the only true God.[8][9][10][11]
Dastur Maneckja N. Dhalla sought to contextualize Zoroastrians in the global history of religions. He presented Zoroastrianism as the peak of the evolutionary ladder, for he argued that Ahura Mazda revealed the world's first ethical monotheism to the prophet Zoroaster.
Post-Enlightenment Jewish thinkers presented modified conceptions of God that attempted to reconcile modern philosophical trends with Jewish tradition. These figures tended to stress human liberty and the ethical aspects of God. Solomon Formstecher (1808-1889) conceived of God as the spirit of the world, a concept derived from Hegel. God is completely free, and as freedom is a precondition for moral activity, God is the perfect ethical being. Leo Baeck (1873-1956) presented Judaism as, essentially, ethical monotheism, suggesting that the belief in one God–Judaism's fundamental innovation–is equivalent to the belief in a single source of moral law.
Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) was also, originally, concerned with the ethical implications of God. In his early rationalistic thought, he presented God as the "idea" that guarantees morality. Cohen's later work, however, was more traditional from a Jewish point of view, and he became more concerned with the reality of God and less concerned with the "idea" of God. Cohen's students, Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1919) and Martin Buber (1878-1965), eschewed Cohen's reliance on reason and rooted their philosophies in the experiential.
Unitarian theology, which developed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, included a critique of the traditional Christian theology of the Trinity, which regarded God as three distinct but unified beings – transcendent Creator God, human Savior God (i.e., Jesus Christ), and immanent Spiritual God (i.e., the Holy Spirit). Unitarians viewed this understanding of God as a later theological corruption, and they embraced a view of God as a singular, unified entity; in most Unitarian theological interpretations, Jesus Christ retains highest respect as a spiritual and moral teacher of unparalleled insight and sensitivity, but he is not regarded as divine, or at least his divine nature is not on the same level as the singular and unique Creator God.
