Moral relation itself is part of the fall of man. Fallen man is not what he ought to be. The fact that not one of us is what he ought to be, means that each of us participates in the lapse from God, the fall from God. If man hadn’t fallen from God, then he wouldn’t have this obligation to be other than he is. He would be what he should be. And precisely because man is fallen and the relation between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ has been damaged, the relation between what man is and what he’s made to be is damaged, that there arises this ‘ought.’ A gap has opened out between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought.’

Now it is in that gap that the morally good and the morally evil have their place. So that good and evil as we know them in the fallen world are in one sense correlates of one another just like hills and valleys. In other words, it’s only a fallen man who can be morally good and a fallen man who can be morally bad. But the atonement if it is interpreted within that situation does not really touch the fundamental problem, the gap between man and God and the gap between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought.’ If the atonement is really to take place in any profound way, the whole moral situation needs to be set upon a new basis. And that is what atonement does do. And then even what we call morally good needs to be cleansed by the blood of Christ. So that atonement is here so radical that the whole moral and judicial order is redeemed. Now that does not take place unless the atonement is the act of God penetrating into the ontological depths of human being, ontological depths of creation in order to triumph over the gap between man and God, the gap between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought.’

-From Audio Lectures by Thomas F. Torrance