The next two chapters of Revelation are a continuation of the great battle sequence that began in chapter twelve, but their tone is decidedly different. Much in the same way the first chapter of Genesis tells the broad story of creation and chapter two zeros in to tell a more specific part of the story, the pronouncement of the fall of Babylon appears to be a snapshot taken from some point in the earlier narrative. An earlier angel has already declared that Babylon is fallen--part of the eternal gospel of God--and with the pouring out of the seventh bowl of God's wrath, the heavenly host declares "It is done." What this passage does, therefore, is take a closer look at what the collapse of Babylon looks like, and it does so with a poetic flair for the macabre reminiscent of the Old Testament prophets.
Many of the same themes that have persisted thus far are revisited in this passage: the terrible and wonderful nature of God, the consequences of human actions, the contrast between right and wrong worship, and, of course, the inevitability of God's victory over evil. There are, however, new insights which can be gained from looking at this passage independently. It tells us something about the nature of evil in the world. Over the course of the narrative there are numerous distinct groups of "villains," all of whom interact with one another and all of whose interplay has something to teach. There is, figuring prominently, the woman variously referred to as the prostitute or as Babylon and the beast on which she rides. There are the kings of the earth and the nations who have debauched with the prostitute, the merchants of the sea who are dealers in human souls, and the ship builders whose avarice was satisfied by the trade in the ports of Babylon.
The first and most noticeable fact when reading through the poetic tribute to the destruction of the woman is how neatly interwoven all of these evil forces are. They all stand back and wonder at her fate and suffer, either directly or implicitly, from the plagues that are brought upon her. It is clear that evil is a complex enough entity that it is self-sustaining. The sexual licentiousness of the woman satisfies the lechery of the kings of the nations, and the subservience of the nations satisfies the woman's lust for power. The gluttony of Babylon feeds the avarice of the merchants and ship builders, and, of course, greed is always willing to subsidize consumption. Evil is a self-perpetuating cancer in the world. It delights in itself and feeds itself until it grows beyond any individual sin into a web of related villainy.
Yet, even as we watch Babylon suffer with all her sinful subsidiaries suffering vicariously through her, it is interesting to note at the outset precisely what vehicle God uses to prompt the destruction of Babylon. The angel interpreting the vision for John explains, "And the ten horns that you saw, they and the beast will hate the prostitute. They will make her desolate and naked, and devour her flesh and burn her up with fire." It is not a heavenly army or even God (directly) that will instigate the fall of Babylon. It will be the very beast and the ten kings--the ones who will "will make war on the Lamb"--who will turn on the prostitute. They will make her desolate and naked, and they will devour her flesh. It is interesting that the saints, rather than being called on to participate in God's righteous judgment of Babylon are called out of the city before it self-destructs. And there is no better description of what evil does here. It turns on itself. It implodes. Evil is, at its core, self-defeating. In practical terms, how often do we see one evil dictator overthrown not by righteous forces promoting peace and justice but by another, more powerful, evil dictator? It is the nature of evil to take on all comers, including other forces of evil.
The result is the classic image of eternity as a snake eating its own tail. Evil, as depicted here, is a reality which is always simultaneously feeding itself and devouring itself. It makes for an interesting contrast to the goodness of God which is infinitely sustaining without ever consuming. In chapters to come, the promise of God will be depicted in these kinds of inexhaustible terms with a city that never crumbles, a sun which never sets, a garden which never withers, and a life which never ends. With evil, in contrast, we may take comfort in the fact that its very attempts to sustain itself inevitably result in moves to destroy itself. Divine providence is such that it allows evil to persist because, in persisting, it destroys itself. Babylon is fallen, and only she is to blame.
*****
For a full list of "Re-reading Revelation" posts, see Re-reading Revelation: Statement of Purpose.
Showing posts with label problem of evil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label problem of evil. Show all posts
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
The Absurd and Christian Theodicy
I have a proud and profound love for absurdism. I first encountered the movement in a general introduction to philosophy. The system was described to me thus: absurdism is the simultaneous belief that God must exist and that the world as we experience it precludes the existence of God. More even than a positive belief, absurdism is the recognition and acceptance of the absurdity of those two conclusions. It lives in and embraces that absurdity. It allows the absurd to color its thoughts and actions. At times, it even seems to revel in it.
Since that brief introduction, I have come to see the limits in the particular definition of absurdism--favoring instead a definition which focuses on both the necessity and impossibility of there being meaning in the world--but that original explanation has stuck with me nonetheless. In the fundamental contradiction of absurdism can be seen powerful links to an appropriate understanding of Christian theodicy. It is deeply existential in character, recognizing both the deep-seated human desire for God and our experience which defies His existence. Both are rooted in the very nature of human existence which both sees meaning (and with it, God) and knows at the same time that all meaning is illusory. We experience both a true sense of inclusion and even power in the world as both its masters and inhabitants, but we are constantly returned to an unshakable sense of alienation from it in our woeful ignorance and microcosmic insignificance, as if God is speaking to us once again from the storm.
Consider Albert Camus, the father of absurdism, on the paradoxical nearness and separation from the world, even ourselves:
How can the world appear so empty and foreign in one moment and so profoundly meaningful in another? What if anything can resolve the absurdity we experience in a world which refuses to bend to our ideas of justice, goodness, or even order? What can resolve the absurdity of realizing that the meaning we know exists, we also know that we are creating ex nihilo? These are questions on which God may be brought to bear, not logically but existentially as a force which enters into the human experience and ameliorates our experience of the absurdity even if He declines to resolve it.
Just as they can speak to and give philosohpical vitality to Christian theodicy, Camus and absurdism have other points of contact with Christian thought. An examination of quotes from Camus juxtaposed with both classical and modern Christian thought can demonstrate places where both have a common object of critique and other places where there exists substantive tension between them which must be judged either creative or destructive. The next few entries will attempt to explore these points of contact with varying degrees of depth.
Since that brief introduction, I have come to see the limits in the particular definition of absurdism--favoring instead a definition which focuses on both the necessity and impossibility of there being meaning in the world--but that original explanation has stuck with me nonetheless. In the fundamental contradiction of absurdism can be seen powerful links to an appropriate understanding of Christian theodicy. It is deeply existential in character, recognizing both the deep-seated human desire for God and our experience which defies His existence. Both are rooted in the very nature of human existence which both sees meaning (and with it, God) and knows at the same time that all meaning is illusory. We experience both a true sense of inclusion and even power in the world as both its masters and inhabitants, but we are constantly returned to an unshakable sense of alienation from it in our woeful ignorance and microcosmic insignificance, as if God is speaking to us once again from the storm.
Consider Albert Camus, the father of absurdism, on the paradoxical nearness and separation from the world, even ourselves:
A step lower and the strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is ‘dense,’ sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us. Just as there are days when under the familiar face of a woman, we see as a stranger her we had loved months or years ago, perhaps we shall come even to desire what suddenly leaves us so alone. But the time has not yet come. Just one thing: that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.
Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man’s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this ‘nausea,’ as a writer of today calls it, is also absurd. Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our own photographs is also the absurd.
How can the world appear so empty and foreign in one moment and so profoundly meaningful in another? What if anything can resolve the absurdity we experience in a world which refuses to bend to our ideas of justice, goodness, or even order? What can resolve the absurdity of realizing that the meaning we know exists, we also know that we are creating ex nihilo? These are questions on which God may be brought to bear, not logically but existentially as a force which enters into the human experience and ameliorates our experience of the absurdity even if He declines to resolve it.
Just as they can speak to and give philosohpical vitality to Christian theodicy, Camus and absurdism have other points of contact with Christian thought. An examination of quotes from Camus juxtaposed with both classical and modern Christian thought can demonstrate places where both have a common object of critique and other places where there exists substantive tension between them which must be judged either creative or destructive. The next few entries will attempt to explore these points of contact with varying degrees of depth.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Language and the Corruption of Meaning
It is interesting (which is, in this particular context, a euphemistic way of saying “tragic”) the way the dynamic and cultural nature of language can completely transform the meaning of words. Specifically it is “interesting” how Christians have been able to constantly reinterpret the Bible and the rich theology therein—at times under the conscious aegis of contemporary contextualization but more often entirely unconsciously and thus uncritically—with a ceaselessly shifting cultural lexicon. Words which have a very specific meaning have crossed time and language, arriving at the present only semantically equal to the original with the meaning totally lost. The form persists while the function is obscured. There would be little cause for alarm if, as many seem to think, the problem could be solved merely by opening a dictionary of ancient words. In truth, the dictionary only compounds the problem: explaining ancient words with modern glosses or, at best, drawing tenuous parallels to modern concepts.
That is perhaps all too vague to be much of a complaint. An example: Vladimir Lossky has suggested to some acclaim that the formula “one substance in three persons” has been corrupted by the modern understanding of personality. Speaking of the Father, Son, and Spirit as “persons” was filtered (and thus altered) immediately into Latin where the term carried with it a connotation of “mask” that is entirely absent in the Greek. The concept was further altered in the West as culture embraced a radical form of humanism in the Renaissance and, even more dramatically, in the Enlightenment. Western culture (and this embraces the Eastern Church) now understands the person in terms of radical individualism, the thing which makes the “me” actually “me” and not “you.” Contemporary culture lacks not only the appropriate language to speak about the hypostases of God but lacks the appropriate concepts to grasp the personhood in theology. The solution for generally embraced in theological discourse is to abandon the corrupted terms (something that the preceding sentence demonstrates that I am guilty of as well). Instead of the three “persons,” English theology reverts to a transliterated form of the Greek: “hypostasis.” This by no means solves the problem. Simply changing the word to more nearly resemble the original does not automatically attach to it the original concepts. Even as theologians strain to unravel the mystery of the original terminology, how the ancients conceived of hypostases is continually colored by how moderns conceive of personhood. In its extreme form, this tendency produces literature like The Shack where God is depicted as three people with different voices, different senses of humor, different tasks, and different interests, in short, different personalities. This, for Lossky and later for David Bentley Hart, represents a fundamental reversal of the way conceptual transformation ought to work. Christians are constantly allowing the changes in the concepts conveyed by language to alter the original concepts: modern personhood explains theological personhood. Hart suggests that rather than altering the language (i.e. using “hypostasis” instead of “person”), people ought to be rethinking the concept of modern personhood. A true understanding of theological personhood ought to have radical effects on how Christians conceptualize human personhood. In the most basic terms possible, instead of thinking that God is persons in the way humans are persons, people ought to understand how they are persons by thinking about how God is persons.
The problem is not restricted to the esoteric fields of theology proper and anthropology, nor is that my primary concern in arguing this point. In fact, the specific problem which is the catalyst for this thought was actually inspired in part (heaven help me) by the pope and in part by the Jars of Clay song, “Love Song for a Savior.” The pope, several weeks ago, warned a group of children that the “love” which was being peddled on the Internet and in popular culture was not really love at all. I agree, but, while the pope may recognize (at least in speeches) that “love” as expressed in the contemporary idiom is not love in the true sense, in the Christian sense, the secular definition of love has crept into our religious thought and corrupted our understanding of love as God intends it or as the biblical authors mean it. Case and point is the aforementioned Jars of Clay song, the first verse of which describes a girl in a rosy haze thanking Jesus for flowers, running into his arms, and singing over and over: “I want to fall in love with you.” This picture of “true love” is contrasted to those people who sit in church and ignore the sermon. Someday, they too will sing the young girl’s chorus: “I want to fall in love with you…my heart beats for you.”
It could not be more evident (to me at least) that this is a clear permeation of the secular idea of love into what ought to be a truer, more theologically sound conception of love. Jars of Clay is by no means the lone, or even the most egregious, offender. This idea of Christians “loving” Jesus and God “loving” us has seeped into our hymnography, into Christian pop music, into sermons, and into the popular consciousness. The idea is pervasive that the way God loves mirrors in some way the sentimentality of the contemporary understanding of love and that we should, therefore, reciprocate that “love” in kind. The statement “I love Jesus” is more likely to denote nothing more than a positive affection for the Savior than it is to suggest any concrete reality that aligns itself with biblical or historical theological perspectives on love. The affirmation that God loves us is likewise diluted beyond the point of substantial meaning such that God might just as easily be caricatured as our Heavenly Father who carries pictures of all His children in his wallet.
It may be alarmist of me, but I would suggest that the contemporary contextualization (which is, in this particular context, a euphemistic way of saying “rape”) of the meaning of “love” is the root of a number of significant theological problems. I wonder, for example, if the “faith alone” mentality which understands faith as the mere desire of Jesus to “come into my heart” is possible with a more concrete, less romantic view of what it is to love God and be loved by Him. More certainly, this false idea of love stands behind the overwhelming majority of objections to Christianity which begin, “How can a loving God” and end with a description of behavior which we would never permit from our spouses or relatives or friends—as if that were some kind of objective measure of love. Still more troubling are the manifold “loveless” marriages that people are stuck in. Love, rightly considered, is not something that is fallen into our fallen out of so much as it is something which the lover consciously chooses to express to the beloved through certain behaviors and dispositions. If God could fall out of love with humanity, then we would all be quite doomed. For just this reason, I object to the language of Jars of Clay about wanting to “fall in love” with Jesus, not—as with Dr. John Stackhouse—because it gives me the “homoerotic creeps” but because loving Jesus is not something which I fall into anymore than love (properly so-called) is something which I fall into with my wife.
The problem is not, as I said, so much with the words. We have preserved the right language. God should be spoken of as three persons and our basic stance toward Him ought to be described as love. The problem is the direction of meaning transformation for our words. Rather than allowing love rightly understood through divine guidance to determine how we ought to love both God and neighbor, we allow how we love apart from divine guidance to influence what we think is expected of us in the greatest commands. Human personhood ought to be defined relative to divine personhood, and human love ought to be define relative to divine love. In reversing these, our “contemporary contextualization” of meaning has led us into an unbelievably “interesting” modern problem.
That is perhaps all too vague to be much of a complaint. An example: Vladimir Lossky has suggested to some acclaim that the formula “one substance in three persons” has been corrupted by the modern understanding of personality. Speaking of the Father, Son, and Spirit as “persons” was filtered (and thus altered) immediately into Latin where the term carried with it a connotation of “mask” that is entirely absent in the Greek. The concept was further altered in the West as culture embraced a radical form of humanism in the Renaissance and, even more dramatically, in the Enlightenment. Western culture (and this embraces the Eastern Church) now understands the person in terms of radical individualism, the thing which makes the “me” actually “me” and not “you.” Contemporary culture lacks not only the appropriate language to speak about the hypostases of God but lacks the appropriate concepts to grasp the personhood in theology. The solution for generally embraced in theological discourse is to abandon the corrupted terms (something that the preceding sentence demonstrates that I am guilty of as well). Instead of the three “persons,” English theology reverts to a transliterated form of the Greek: “hypostasis.” This by no means solves the problem. Simply changing the word to more nearly resemble the original does not automatically attach to it the original concepts. Even as theologians strain to unravel the mystery of the original terminology, how the ancients conceived of hypostases is continually colored by how moderns conceive of personhood. In its extreme form, this tendency produces literature like The Shack where God is depicted as three people with different voices, different senses of humor, different tasks, and different interests, in short, different personalities. This, for Lossky and later for David Bentley Hart, represents a fundamental reversal of the way conceptual transformation ought to work. Christians are constantly allowing the changes in the concepts conveyed by language to alter the original concepts: modern personhood explains theological personhood. Hart suggests that rather than altering the language (i.e. using “hypostasis” instead of “person”), people ought to be rethinking the concept of modern personhood. A true understanding of theological personhood ought to have radical effects on how Christians conceptualize human personhood. In the most basic terms possible, instead of thinking that God is persons in the way humans are persons, people ought to understand how they are persons by thinking about how God is persons.
The problem is not restricted to the esoteric fields of theology proper and anthropology, nor is that my primary concern in arguing this point. In fact, the specific problem which is the catalyst for this thought was actually inspired in part (heaven help me) by the pope and in part by the Jars of Clay song, “Love Song for a Savior.” The pope, several weeks ago, warned a group of children that the “love” which was being peddled on the Internet and in popular culture was not really love at all. I agree, but, while the pope may recognize (at least in speeches) that “love” as expressed in the contemporary idiom is not love in the true sense, in the Christian sense, the secular definition of love has crept into our religious thought and corrupted our understanding of love as God intends it or as the biblical authors mean it. Case and point is the aforementioned Jars of Clay song, the first verse of which describes a girl in a rosy haze thanking Jesus for flowers, running into his arms, and singing over and over: “I want to fall in love with you.” This picture of “true love” is contrasted to those people who sit in church and ignore the sermon. Someday, they too will sing the young girl’s chorus: “I want to fall in love with you…my heart beats for you.”
It could not be more evident (to me at least) that this is a clear permeation of the secular idea of love into what ought to be a truer, more theologically sound conception of love. Jars of Clay is by no means the lone, or even the most egregious, offender. This idea of Christians “loving” Jesus and God “loving” us has seeped into our hymnography, into Christian pop music, into sermons, and into the popular consciousness. The idea is pervasive that the way God loves mirrors in some way the sentimentality of the contemporary understanding of love and that we should, therefore, reciprocate that “love” in kind. The statement “I love Jesus” is more likely to denote nothing more than a positive affection for the Savior than it is to suggest any concrete reality that aligns itself with biblical or historical theological perspectives on love. The affirmation that God loves us is likewise diluted beyond the point of substantial meaning such that God might just as easily be caricatured as our Heavenly Father who carries pictures of all His children in his wallet.
It may be alarmist of me, but I would suggest that the contemporary contextualization (which is, in this particular context, a euphemistic way of saying “rape”) of the meaning of “love” is the root of a number of significant theological problems. I wonder, for example, if the “faith alone” mentality which understands faith as the mere desire of Jesus to “come into my heart” is possible with a more concrete, less romantic view of what it is to love God and be loved by Him. More certainly, this false idea of love stands behind the overwhelming majority of objections to Christianity which begin, “How can a loving God” and end with a description of behavior which we would never permit from our spouses or relatives or friends—as if that were some kind of objective measure of love. Still more troubling are the manifold “loveless” marriages that people are stuck in. Love, rightly considered, is not something that is fallen into our fallen out of so much as it is something which the lover consciously chooses to express to the beloved through certain behaviors and dispositions. If God could fall out of love with humanity, then we would all be quite doomed. For just this reason, I object to the language of Jars of Clay about wanting to “fall in love” with Jesus, not—as with Dr. John Stackhouse—because it gives me the “homoerotic creeps” but because loving Jesus is not something which I fall into anymore than love (properly so-called) is something which I fall into with my wife.
The problem is not, as I said, so much with the words. We have preserved the right language. God should be spoken of as three persons and our basic stance toward Him ought to be described as love. The problem is the direction of meaning transformation for our words. Rather than allowing love rightly understood through divine guidance to determine how we ought to love both God and neighbor, we allow how we love apart from divine guidance to influence what we think is expected of us in the greatest commands. Human personhood ought to be defined relative to divine personhood, and human love ought to be define relative to divine love. In reversing these, our “contemporary contextualization” of meaning has led us into an unbelievably “interesting” modern problem.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Original Sin and Theodicy
In reading about original sin and the Fall for my course in systematics, I was presented with a number of equally unsatisfactory options for understanding the Genesis narrative, Adam and his role in transmitting sin to humanity. Either Adam was a historical man who represented humanity in the primordial garden federally or naturally (either as the representative human or as the natural father of all mankind) or he is merely a symbol, a narrative device that depicts the existential reality of the origin of sin in all of us. All these interpretations seem to mistreat the text in my view. I certainly am inclined to think of the Genesis narratives, particularly the creation narratives as etiological and so in some sense the story must be about the origin of sin in the world. More critically, however, I read the Fall narrative as primarily theodic.
It is easy for exegetes or even simple readers to pick up in Genesis and read these stories from the implied standpoint of the narrative, to mentally enter into a world that predates the Fall and then to anachronistically read modern questions of origins into the story. That, I believe, is the root of many problems, not the least of which is the young earth reading of the text. In general this is the cause of a great deal of fundamentalist misunderstanding of Genesis. The concern for origins as mere objective facts is undeniably a modern construct.
With this in view, I think it is safe to assert that the origin of sin as objective fact is not the primary concern of the text. This leaves the mystery of what is. To answer this, it is necessary to reverse engineer the question that might give rise the answer given in the text. My first impulse is to offer “Why do we experience suffering?” In reality, however, this question is better answered not by pointing to the original sin itself but to the result of sins. Thus, the curse which is issued as the divine response to sin where the idyllic state is stripped from humanity and it is left to the cold, cruel creation answers that question.
The original sin itself, in my opinion, answers the question which arises from “Why do we experience suffering?” If the answer to the former is “as a result of sin,” then the natural question (with its implicit accusatory tone) arises: “Why did God allow us to sin?” It is as a response to this question that I think that the actual narrative of the original sin – as distinct from the narrative of the results of that sin – finds its true purpose. It declares with certainty that even when God gives it every advantage, even in a state of bliss, if humanity is given the freedom to choose evil it will work out a way to do so. It strips away human excuse for sin. If we try to claim that we live in a dark, dangerous world where survival seems to depend on selfishness, deceit, theft, and violence the biblical authors remind us that we love the simple freedom of choosing so much that we chose evil even in a world that was neither dark nor dangerous.
This interpretation even gives some light to the juxtaposition of Adam and Christ in the New Testament. Adam is the old humanity that sinned even when there was no “need” to. Christ, in contrast, inaugurates the new humanity by refusing to sin even in the fallen world that we feel necessitates ethical compromise. Just as in Adam, who sinned in spite of every advantage, we find a humanity without excuse, in Christ we find a humanity excused and redeemed into a new life that permits freedom from sin.
Those are, at least, my humble thoughts on the matter being by no means a biblical scholar. I would welcome any biblical critique of that understanding, particularly with regard to the Christ-Adam dichotomy which I have never studied in depth.
It is easy for exegetes or even simple readers to pick up in Genesis and read these stories from the implied standpoint of the narrative, to mentally enter into a world that predates the Fall and then to anachronistically read modern questions of origins into the story. That, I believe, is the root of many problems, not the least of which is the young earth reading of the text. In general this is the cause of a great deal of fundamentalist misunderstanding of Genesis. The concern for origins as mere objective facts is undeniably a modern construct.
With this in view, I think it is safe to assert that the origin of sin as objective fact is not the primary concern of the text. This leaves the mystery of what is. To answer this, it is necessary to reverse engineer the question that might give rise the answer given in the text. My first impulse is to offer “Why do we experience suffering?” In reality, however, this question is better answered not by pointing to the original sin itself but to the result of sins. Thus, the curse which is issued as the divine response to sin where the idyllic state is stripped from humanity and it is left to the cold, cruel creation answers that question.
The original sin itself, in my opinion, answers the question which arises from “Why do we experience suffering?” If the answer to the former is “as a result of sin,” then the natural question (with its implicit accusatory tone) arises: “Why did God allow us to sin?” It is as a response to this question that I think that the actual narrative of the original sin – as distinct from the narrative of the results of that sin – finds its true purpose. It declares with certainty that even when God gives it every advantage, even in a state of bliss, if humanity is given the freedom to choose evil it will work out a way to do so. It strips away human excuse for sin. If we try to claim that we live in a dark, dangerous world where survival seems to depend on selfishness, deceit, theft, and violence the biblical authors remind us that we love the simple freedom of choosing so much that we chose evil even in a world that was neither dark nor dangerous.
This interpretation even gives some light to the juxtaposition of Adam and Christ in the New Testament. Adam is the old humanity that sinned even when there was no “need” to. Christ, in contrast, inaugurates the new humanity by refusing to sin even in the fallen world that we feel necessitates ethical compromise. Just as in Adam, who sinned in spite of every advantage, we find a humanity without excuse, in Christ we find a humanity excused and redeemed into a new life that permits freedom from sin.
Those are, at least, my humble thoughts on the matter being by no means a biblical scholar. I would welcome any biblical critique of that understanding, particularly with regard to the Christ-Adam dichotomy which I have never studied in depth.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Why Evil: Formulating the Question
Having completed my readings for my course on the problem of evil, I find myself in very much the same place I began. Most of the authors I have been introduced to in the past month have spilled no small amount of ink either to prove that their theodicy is the correct one or to demonstrate that no theodicy is viable (or sometimes even necessary). Though I do not feel like I have gained any great knowledge or insight, let me see if perhaps I have at least developed the ability to better articulate my thoughts on the problem of evil.
The answer to any question is conditioned by the nature of the question itself, and the conundrum that is suffering is no different. The traditional formulation of the problem, which has been repeated by most authors I have read, is structured thus:
Therein lies the problem. Certainly the logical formulation of the problem of evil is both valid and disturbing, but even those admissions fall short of making it damning. I cannot imagine anyone reclining casually at home on a sofa who contemplates the problem of evil and concludes, “Well that doesn’t add up. God must not exist.” As much as we covet labels like reasonable, enlightened, modern, and logical, no one’s worldview has ever been decimated in a moment by the purely intellectual realization that their beliefs contain a mathematical inconsistency. Anyone who rejects God as the answer to the rational formulation of the problem of evil either never believed in God to begin with (and here, quite clearly, among atheists is where the argument is thought have the most “weight”) or that belief was never more than intellectual assent. Faith, being more than intellectual assent, is undisturbed by mathematical imprecision (or even contradiction).
Perhaps this is why God has never given us the answer key to the problem of evil. Since the problem of evil is not primarily a logical problem, why should He be bothered to furnish us with a logical answer. I have not, by asserting this, done away with the problem of evil. I have merely suggested that when we speculate, the problem is not primarily rational but existential. Put in simpler terms, our interrogative should not be “how” (as in, “how can an omnipotent, omnibeneficent God coexist with evil”) but “where” (as in, where is the omnipotent, omnibeneficent God in my suffering”). It is only when the question of why suffering exists is reframed as an existential rather than a logical conundrum that God condescends to answer it.
The answer to “where” is “here.” An honest theodicy begins with the cross, where God literally entered into human suffering. Surely He was present for the Patriarchs and the Prophets and the people of Israel when they suffered, but in Jesus He was not merely present but a participant. He emptied himself, not merely of power or privilege but of sufferinglessness (if you’ll pardon the made up word). When we suffer and cry out, when our existence has itself become the crippling problem (in a way that our reason never could), we know that we petition, lament to, berate, and praise a God who knows what it is we go through, not merely by virtue of His omniscience but because of His participation in us and our suffering (in order, hallelujah, that we might participate in Him).
When we hear unfortunate stories about people who fall away from faith because of the suffering in the world, it is rarely (if ever) a product of an inability to reconcile reason with evil. Evil is unreasonable whether you believe in God or not. We falter, we fall, we leave because evil has left the realm of mathematics and broached the walls of everyday life. It is the death of our children, our spouses, our parents, our friends that shake our worlds and threaten to undermine their very foundation. It is not the concept that death exists. The problem of evil is a problem of living in evil, and we should formulate the question in this way. Only when we have structured the question properly, can we expect to find a satisfying answer.
The answer to any question is conditioned by the nature of the question itself, and the conundrum that is suffering is no different. The traditional formulation of the problem, which has been repeated by most authors I have read, is structured thus:
- God is all good
- God is all powerful
- Evil exists
Therein lies the problem. Certainly the logical formulation of the problem of evil is both valid and disturbing, but even those admissions fall short of making it damning. I cannot imagine anyone reclining casually at home on a sofa who contemplates the problem of evil and concludes, “Well that doesn’t add up. God must not exist.” As much as we covet labels like reasonable, enlightened, modern, and logical, no one’s worldview has ever been decimated in a moment by the purely intellectual realization that their beliefs contain a mathematical inconsistency. Anyone who rejects God as the answer to the rational formulation of the problem of evil either never believed in God to begin with (and here, quite clearly, among atheists is where the argument is thought have the most “weight”) or that belief was never more than intellectual assent. Faith, being more than intellectual assent, is undisturbed by mathematical imprecision (or even contradiction).
Perhaps this is why God has never given us the answer key to the problem of evil. Since the problem of evil is not primarily a logical problem, why should He be bothered to furnish us with a logical answer. I have not, by asserting this, done away with the problem of evil. I have merely suggested that when we speculate, the problem is not primarily rational but existential. Put in simpler terms, our interrogative should not be “how” (as in, “how can an omnipotent, omnibeneficent God coexist with evil”) but “where” (as in, where is the omnipotent, omnibeneficent God in my suffering”). It is only when the question of why suffering exists is reframed as an existential rather than a logical conundrum that God condescends to answer it.
The answer to “where” is “here.” An honest theodicy begins with the cross, where God literally entered into human suffering. Surely He was present for the Patriarchs and the Prophets and the people of Israel when they suffered, but in Jesus He was not merely present but a participant. He emptied himself, not merely of power or privilege but of sufferinglessness (if you’ll pardon the made up word). When we suffer and cry out, when our existence has itself become the crippling problem (in a way that our reason never could), we know that we petition, lament to, berate, and praise a God who knows what it is we go through, not merely by virtue of His omniscience but because of His participation in us and our suffering (in order, hallelujah, that we might participate in Him).
When we hear unfortunate stories about people who fall away from faith because of the suffering in the world, it is rarely (if ever) a product of an inability to reconcile reason with evil. Evil is unreasonable whether you believe in God or not. We falter, we fall, we leave because evil has left the realm of mathematics and broached the walls of everyday life. It is the death of our children, our spouses, our parents, our friends that shake our worlds and threaten to undermine their very foundation. It is not the concept that death exists. The problem of evil is a problem of living in evil, and we should formulate the question in this way. Only when we have structured the question properly, can we expect to find a satisfying answer.
Monday, May 24, 2010
The Place of Auschwitz in the Problem of Evil
As I near the end of my readings for my course on providence and suffering, I notice that the authors I have been assigned all share a common assumption. They each assert as self-evident that the Holocaust represents a cataclysmic, paradigm-shifting moment in the history of the problem of suffering. Susan Neiman introduced her book Evil in Modern Thought, “What occurred in Nazi death camps was so absolutely evil that, like no other event in human history, it defies human capacity for understanding.” Similarly, Carleen Mandolfo wrote in the journal Interpretation, “There can be no redemption, no understanding in the Holocaust (something the Christians who put up crosses at Auschwitz cannot understand, or simply do not accept).” At first, I accepted this assessment of Auschwitz without question. After all, we live in a society where Hitler’s name has become a byword for evil and invoking the memory of Nazism evokes appropriate disdain from any culturally conscious bystander. The Holocaust does typify depravity in everyday society, and it certainly is unquestionably depraved.
I wonder, nevertheless, whether or not we should afford it the kind of catastrophic significance that these authors do. Of course, I do not dispute that the Holocaust was evil or even that it was tremendously evil. I simply question if it is peculiarly evil, if it truly represents the kind of awful exercise of human will that should shatter every existing theodicy and leave us utterly and specially dumbfounded at the thought of it.
From a purely analytical standpoint, I wonder what it is that makes the Holocaust so much worse than other modern atrocities. It is the number of deaths? Modern technology has given us the capacity to kill in astonishing numbers, and there are abundant examples of massacres which have, if not equal, at least comparably appalling numbers. Consider the successive wars which have plagued this past century particularly but in reality all centuries. Are the lives of those who died in these conflicts somehow ontologically inferior to those of the Holocaust victims? Of course, the majority of these people were soldiers, and, assuming for the sake of argument that this is a valid explanation for the mass extermination of human life, let me propose another possibility.
Was it the innocence of the victims? Ignoring what I would dismiss as a fundamentally invalid moral category relative to taking human life, there have been numberless accounts of the torture and deaths of innocents. Consider the civilian causalities associated with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. Think also of the birth pangs of communist regimes which saw countless innocents slaughtered by their own governments. Conjuring one of the most terrible images possible, Emil Fackenheim (who argues strongly for the sinister peculiarity of the Holocaust) wrote, “In Auschwitz, Jewish babies were thrown into the flames without being killed first. Their screams could be heard in the camp. To find redemption in the suffering of these babies, or of those cursed to hear their screams, is a human impossibility and—so one hopes—a divine one as well.” Whatever the truth in his statement about finding redemption, the suffering of infants is by no means a peculiarity of Auschwitz. In fact, twice in Scripture the systematic mass murder of infants is described. Horrible, tragic, inexcusable, but unfortunately not distinct.
Could it be the attempted extermination of an entire people? The sufferers of various other genocides and racial oppressions are excluded if this is the case. The twentieth century was one plagued with racial, ethnic, and ideological genocides. Some still rage on. Genocides occurred in Asia, Africa, and the Balkans (to name only the few that spring immediately to mind). Meanwhile, the world has regularly seen programmatic racial oppressions which, while not so costly in human life as the death camps, were more prolonged and no less burdensome for those involved. The slave trade from Africa which spanned not years (as did Auschwitz) but centuries saw the torture, exploitation, and incalculable death of Africans. Surely targeting a single group of people for extermination or oppression is neither new nor peculiarly evil.
Could it be the means employed? Certainly we do not believe that the death camps were any less humane than the (often exaggerated) means of the Inquisition. Could it be the apathy of the German people or the world? Human apathy is by no means a new phenomenon, and it has certainly not passed away in the wake of the Holocaust. In spite of the aforementioned culturally appropriate expression of disdain, the horror of the Holocaust does not reach any of us on the kind of level that philosophers and theologians suggest it ought to. Could it be…anything at all? Is there any way to quantify why the Holocaust is radically epoch-making?
My question runs deeper than that. Even if some analytical grounds were presented to me that explained why the Holocaust was somehow radically worse than all expressions of evil previous (and I anticipate that the answer for many would be that no single feature is distinct but the coincidence of all of the above make it peculiarly evil) that would not prove the case for me. Any solution to the question I have posed is inevitably an answer of degree. More people died. People who died were more innocent. The system was more programmatic, more racially motivated. And so on. The reality is, however, that even if Auschwitz represents a new degree of evil it is nevertheless the same old evil out of which man has always made an art form. The annihilation of human life without just cause, without regard for the humaneness of the means, without thought of the character of the victim, and without moral outrage from onlookers.
So I ask again, what justifies this matter-of-fact statement from Mandolfo: “Auschwitz has finally forced theologians and biblical scholars to at least consider that no promised redemption, no good, is worth the price of catastrophic suffering.” If such a conclusion must considered, it must be considered regardless of Auschwitz (and was over the course of the history of thought on the problem of evil). With the possible exception of a shift out of the modernist belief in a progressing society and an imminent utopia, I can see no reason for making the Holocaust a necessarily decisive event in the history of theodicy. The suggestion that all pre-Holocaust theodicy is somehow made obsolete now (as Neiman proposes) requires at the very least serious scrutiny if not outright rejection. It may overturn optimistic modernist theodicy but all theodicy seems to overstate it.
I leave the above without a conclusion on my part, because I certainly do not have the answer, only the suggestion that the assertion of the authors I am tasked to read is by no means self-evident. Instead, I close with a particularly unformed question which has occurred to me: in making Auschwitz an epochal events for the modern world, one that forces us to question God and the traditional theology/theodicy of the church, do we make an idol out of human evil?
I wonder, nevertheless, whether or not we should afford it the kind of catastrophic significance that these authors do. Of course, I do not dispute that the Holocaust was evil or even that it was tremendously evil. I simply question if it is peculiarly evil, if it truly represents the kind of awful exercise of human will that should shatter every existing theodicy and leave us utterly and specially dumbfounded at the thought of it.
From a purely analytical standpoint, I wonder what it is that makes the Holocaust so much worse than other modern atrocities. It is the number of deaths? Modern technology has given us the capacity to kill in astonishing numbers, and there are abundant examples of massacres which have, if not equal, at least comparably appalling numbers. Consider the successive wars which have plagued this past century particularly but in reality all centuries. Are the lives of those who died in these conflicts somehow ontologically inferior to those of the Holocaust victims? Of course, the majority of these people were soldiers, and, assuming for the sake of argument that this is a valid explanation for the mass extermination of human life, let me propose another possibility.
Was it the innocence of the victims? Ignoring what I would dismiss as a fundamentally invalid moral category relative to taking human life, there have been numberless accounts of the torture and deaths of innocents. Consider the civilian causalities associated with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. Think also of the birth pangs of communist regimes which saw countless innocents slaughtered by their own governments. Conjuring one of the most terrible images possible, Emil Fackenheim (who argues strongly for the sinister peculiarity of the Holocaust) wrote, “In Auschwitz, Jewish babies were thrown into the flames without being killed first. Their screams could be heard in the camp. To find redemption in the suffering of these babies, or of those cursed to hear their screams, is a human impossibility and—so one hopes—a divine one as well.” Whatever the truth in his statement about finding redemption, the suffering of infants is by no means a peculiarity of Auschwitz. In fact, twice in Scripture the systematic mass murder of infants is described. Horrible, tragic, inexcusable, but unfortunately not distinct.
Could it be the attempted extermination of an entire people? The sufferers of various other genocides and racial oppressions are excluded if this is the case. The twentieth century was one plagued with racial, ethnic, and ideological genocides. Some still rage on. Genocides occurred in Asia, Africa, and the Balkans (to name only the few that spring immediately to mind). Meanwhile, the world has regularly seen programmatic racial oppressions which, while not so costly in human life as the death camps, were more prolonged and no less burdensome for those involved. The slave trade from Africa which spanned not years (as did Auschwitz) but centuries saw the torture, exploitation, and incalculable death of Africans. Surely targeting a single group of people for extermination or oppression is neither new nor peculiarly evil.
Could it be the means employed? Certainly we do not believe that the death camps were any less humane than the (often exaggerated) means of the Inquisition. Could it be the apathy of the German people or the world? Human apathy is by no means a new phenomenon, and it has certainly not passed away in the wake of the Holocaust. In spite of the aforementioned culturally appropriate expression of disdain, the horror of the Holocaust does not reach any of us on the kind of level that philosophers and theologians suggest it ought to. Could it be…anything at all? Is there any way to quantify why the Holocaust is radically epoch-making?
My question runs deeper than that. Even if some analytical grounds were presented to me that explained why the Holocaust was somehow radically worse than all expressions of evil previous (and I anticipate that the answer for many would be that no single feature is distinct but the coincidence of all of the above make it peculiarly evil) that would not prove the case for me. Any solution to the question I have posed is inevitably an answer of degree. More people died. People who died were more innocent. The system was more programmatic, more racially motivated. And so on. The reality is, however, that even if Auschwitz represents a new degree of evil it is nevertheless the same old evil out of which man has always made an art form. The annihilation of human life without just cause, without regard for the humaneness of the means, without thought of the character of the victim, and without moral outrage from onlookers.
So I ask again, what justifies this matter-of-fact statement from Mandolfo: “Auschwitz has finally forced theologians and biblical scholars to at least consider that no promised redemption, no good, is worth the price of catastrophic suffering.” If such a conclusion must considered, it must be considered regardless of Auschwitz (and was over the course of the history of thought on the problem of evil). With the possible exception of a shift out of the modernist belief in a progressing society and an imminent utopia, I can see no reason for making the Holocaust a necessarily decisive event in the history of theodicy. The suggestion that all pre-Holocaust theodicy is somehow made obsolete now (as Neiman proposes) requires at the very least serious scrutiny if not outright rejection. It may overturn optimistic modernist theodicy but all theodicy seems to overstate it.
I leave the above without a conclusion on my part, because I certainly do not have the answer, only the suggestion that the assertion of the authors I am tasked to read is by no means self-evident. Instead, I close with a particularly unformed question which has occurred to me: in making Auschwitz an epochal events for the modern world, one that forces us to question God and the traditional theology/theodicy of the church, do we make an idol out of human evil?
Saturday, May 15, 2010
"Suffering" as Becoming
Douglas John Hall, in God & Human Suffering: An Exercise in the Theology of the Cross, introduces the idea that God has created with some suffering (though by no means all suffering) built in to the system. He defines this intended suffering broadly with the phrase "suffering as becoming." He suggests that God did not create creatures complete but with the capacity for growth and the ability to change, and with growth and change inevitably comes suffering in some sense. He gives this broad category four specific manifestations which he believes are witnessed in the various creation accounts of the Old Testament: loneliness, the experience of limits, temptation, and anxiety.
I confess that I was quite taken with this proposition at first. At first glance, I could see all those features in the creation story and was more than willing to relegate some suffering to the necessity of the created order (probably out of some naive hope that it would lessen the total burden of the problem of suffering). With a little prodding (particularly from one NihilNominis, to whom I am grateful), however, I came to realize that Hall's proposal did not stand up to scrutiny.
Certainly his position would be defensible if he were to retreat into the bastion of semantic particularity. If he defined suffering in such a way that it stripped it of any reference to pain as such, if he made it in some sense synonymous with imperfection, his case would be not only provable but self-evident. He could argue quite convincingly that humanity is something less than God and something less than the fullness of its own potential, and he could label the pursuit of those two features of creation "suffering," thus proving that suffering is intrinsic to creation. This would seem to be the route suggested when he writes "we may say that suffering belongs to the order of creation insofar as struggle is necessary to the human glory that is God's intention for us."
He oversteps when he suggests that life was never intended to be "painfree." By attaching not only the negative connotation of "suffering" to the "struggle" of becoming but the more definite experience of pain to that struggle, Hall reveals the great flaw in his argument. I propose that Hall has merely reframed the process of becoming which is intrinsic to creation and which is, according to its intention, positive in negative language in order to support his claim that "life without any kind of suffering would be no life at all; it would be a form of death.
When God creates Adam in Genesis 2, it is readily apparent to the Creator that something is amiss. The man is alone, and immediately we have in creation loneliness. (Hall positively refuses to refer to Adam as "man," preferring to neuter him by calling him the "earth creature," raising the question of how this poor gender neutral beast will ever populate the earth with Eve...but that quibble is for another time.) I will set aside the fact that creation is not yet completed in this scene (leaving one to wonder what could be deduced about what is and isn't intrinsic to creation if we stopped on day three and examined the state of things) and address myself to the larger question of whether or not the experience of a need for relationship constitutes suffering. That is, in fact, what Hall is identifying here, that need for relationship which causes it to be "not good" for man to be alone and is the necessary precursor for his joy in finding companionship in Eve.
But is the need for companionship really pain? Certainly it can be productive of pain. Anyone not living a truly privileged life has experienced the pain of isolation, even when companionship of various kinds is available. In these situations, however, it is the isolation that is productive of pain not merely the desire for relationship. In the same sense that the desire for food only becomes painful when food is unnaturally withheld, the natural desire for relationship which is built into the human creature only produces pain when we are left in contranatural isolation from God and from humanity. As God created the world, that need exists but it is constantly fulfilled both with the community of people and, more profoundly, communion with God. Those communions are by no means perfect, and particularly with regard to God the growth in communion is eternal and never complete. Nevertheless, the fact that communion exists makes that need for relationship a joyful reality, a drive toward greater bliss. By calling the need for communion loneliness and ascribing pain to it, Hall presupposes the corruption of sin.
Common to the lot of all humanity is the experience of limits. Hall writes, "we are not big enough, or strong enough or wise enough, old enough or young enough, agile enough, versatile enough." We cannot merely will ourselves to sprout wings and fly. While this last fantastical analogy is rarely productive of suffering in anyone but small children, the general concept nevertheless holds. No small amount of suffering comes from the "frustration" (to borrow from Hall) of not being able to transcend our limits. Yet again the real source of this frustration manifests itself on closer examination. It is not merely the existence of those limits or our knowledge of them that is productive of pain, but our will to transcend them. The inability to sprout wings and fly doesn't bother adults precisely because most of them have shred their childish wish that they might be able to truly soar as the birds do. Other irrational lusts for transcendence replace these childish notions, however, in the form of women who cling desperately to their youth or men thirst for power which is always just one step beyond them. It is the lust for transcendence that is productive of suffering (defined traditionally) not merely the existence of limits. The question then remains, and I should hope that its answer is obvious, is the lust to transcend the limits of our abilities part of what God has ordained for creation?
Not merely the presence of a forbidden tree (the existence of which would be enough to drive so many modern persons to transgression) but also of a tempter who we must confess is one of God's creations in some sense represent the reality of temptation in Eden. Certainly here Hall is at his strongest. It is hard for anyone who has experienced temptation to suggest that it is anything but a cruel form of suffering. The more we try to resist the pull to do what we know we ought not to do, the more excruciating the experience becomes. It would almost seem pleasurable to given in (and certainly that is the reason we always do) if not for that gnawing fact that suffering, in the truest sense, always follows transgression.
Still, I believe that upon closer examination we will see that it is not the mere presence of temptation which produces suffering but our own arrogance in the form of rebellion against God which makes it so. At its most basic level, the temptation in the garden is merely the presentation of contrary choice. Humans have the ability to decide between right and wrong. Certainly the capacity to decide is not itself suffering. What causes the suffering associated with temptation is not the ability to choose but the two wills which war within us. There is the will of God which steers us ultimately toward glory and our own shortsighted will which struggles to understand the difference between immediate gratification and ultimate glorification. It is our refusal to subordinate our will to the will of God which is productive of suffering, not merely the capacity to choose or even the presence of a tempter who would entice us to choose. Hall references Jesus' temptation as a parallel to that in the garden, but I think that the Temptation provides just the picture of painless temptation that validates my point. In submitting his own will to that of the Father, Jesus not only doesn't suffer at the hands of the tempter, he causes the tempter to suffer in humiliating defeat three times over.
Having understood temptation, Hall's final category, anxiety, is much simpler. In fact, I wonder if it should even be considered at all, as I struggle to see its presence related explicitly in the Genesis story. Nevertheless, Hall speaks of the anxiety of dependency as a form of integrative suffering inherent in the world. Certainly humanity is dependent on God not only for basic things like existence and the sustaining of that existence but also for more abstract gifts like direction and access to truth. The feeling of dependency and the absence of direct contact with the Object on which we are dependent certainly produces not only anxiety but pain.
There are two ways, however, that viewing this anxiety of dependency like this is flawed. First, it anachronistically reads the present lack of connection with God into the Eden narrative. There is a sense in which humanity will always be ontologically apart from God, but the original couple still experienced their dependency on God in more direct, more concrete terms than we do. The radical separation presently experienced is undoubtedly less the intention of the Creator and more the perversion of the creature. Second, the pain produced by the anxiety of dependency is rooted not merely in being dependent but in lacking faith in that on which we depend. If we truly trusted fully in the Provider and Sustainer of life, then there would be no anxiety in our dependency. Suggesting that the suffering associated with our ultimate insufficiency is built into creation is tantamount to saying that mistrust of God was ordained by God. That can hardly be the case.
In the end, it appears that Hall, rather than establishing the presence of suffering in the blueprint of creation, has reframed positive aspects of reality in negative terms which in their very expression presupposes the presence of sin. Isolation, mistrust, rebellion, and arrogance are all productive of suffering, truly painful suffering. These are the qualities that Hall actually identifies. The positive notions he has redefined - the desire for communion, the experience of dependence, the knowledge of limits, and the capacity for choice - are not only not productive of suffering but in fact represent some of the greatest joy-producing gifts which God has bestowed on creation. Certainly when corrupted by improper choice and compounded by the isolation which results from sin, all of the above transform into contranatural sources of pain, but to suggest that God has embedded the contranatural in the natural is a contradiction in terms. Ultimately, I am forced to reject Hall's suggestion that any form of suffering was intended in creation.
I confess that I was quite taken with this proposition at first. At first glance, I could see all those features in the creation story and was more than willing to relegate some suffering to the necessity of the created order (probably out of some naive hope that it would lessen the total burden of the problem of suffering). With a little prodding (particularly from one NihilNominis, to whom I am grateful), however, I came to realize that Hall's proposal did not stand up to scrutiny.
Certainly his position would be defensible if he were to retreat into the bastion of semantic particularity. If he defined suffering in such a way that it stripped it of any reference to pain as such, if he made it in some sense synonymous with imperfection, his case would be not only provable but self-evident. He could argue quite convincingly that humanity is something less than God and something less than the fullness of its own potential, and he could label the pursuit of those two features of creation "suffering," thus proving that suffering is intrinsic to creation. This would seem to be the route suggested when he writes "we may say that suffering belongs to the order of creation insofar as struggle is necessary to the human glory that is God's intention for us."
He oversteps when he suggests that life was never intended to be "painfree." By attaching not only the negative connotation of "suffering" to the "struggle" of becoming but the more definite experience of pain to that struggle, Hall reveals the great flaw in his argument. I propose that Hall has merely reframed the process of becoming which is intrinsic to creation and which is, according to its intention, positive in negative language in order to support his claim that "life without any kind of suffering would be no life at all; it would be a form of death.
When God creates Adam in Genesis 2, it is readily apparent to the Creator that something is amiss. The man is alone, and immediately we have in creation loneliness. (Hall positively refuses to refer to Adam as "man," preferring to neuter him by calling him the "earth creature," raising the question of how this poor gender neutral beast will ever populate the earth with Eve...but that quibble is for another time.) I will set aside the fact that creation is not yet completed in this scene (leaving one to wonder what could be deduced about what is and isn't intrinsic to creation if we stopped on day three and examined the state of things) and address myself to the larger question of whether or not the experience of a need for relationship constitutes suffering. That is, in fact, what Hall is identifying here, that need for relationship which causes it to be "not good" for man to be alone and is the necessary precursor for his joy in finding companionship in Eve.
But is the need for companionship really pain? Certainly it can be productive of pain. Anyone not living a truly privileged life has experienced the pain of isolation, even when companionship of various kinds is available. In these situations, however, it is the isolation that is productive of pain not merely the desire for relationship. In the same sense that the desire for food only becomes painful when food is unnaturally withheld, the natural desire for relationship which is built into the human creature only produces pain when we are left in contranatural isolation from God and from humanity. As God created the world, that need exists but it is constantly fulfilled both with the community of people and, more profoundly, communion with God. Those communions are by no means perfect, and particularly with regard to God the growth in communion is eternal and never complete. Nevertheless, the fact that communion exists makes that need for relationship a joyful reality, a drive toward greater bliss. By calling the need for communion loneliness and ascribing pain to it, Hall presupposes the corruption of sin.
Common to the lot of all humanity is the experience of limits. Hall writes, "we are not big enough, or strong enough or wise enough, old enough or young enough, agile enough, versatile enough." We cannot merely will ourselves to sprout wings and fly. While this last fantastical analogy is rarely productive of suffering in anyone but small children, the general concept nevertheless holds. No small amount of suffering comes from the "frustration" (to borrow from Hall) of not being able to transcend our limits. Yet again the real source of this frustration manifests itself on closer examination. It is not merely the existence of those limits or our knowledge of them that is productive of pain, but our will to transcend them. The inability to sprout wings and fly doesn't bother adults precisely because most of them have shred their childish wish that they might be able to truly soar as the birds do. Other irrational lusts for transcendence replace these childish notions, however, in the form of women who cling desperately to their youth or men thirst for power which is always just one step beyond them. It is the lust for transcendence that is productive of suffering (defined traditionally) not merely the existence of limits. The question then remains, and I should hope that its answer is obvious, is the lust to transcend the limits of our abilities part of what God has ordained for creation?
Not merely the presence of a forbidden tree (the existence of which would be enough to drive so many modern persons to transgression) but also of a tempter who we must confess is one of God's creations in some sense represent the reality of temptation in Eden. Certainly here Hall is at his strongest. It is hard for anyone who has experienced temptation to suggest that it is anything but a cruel form of suffering. The more we try to resist the pull to do what we know we ought not to do, the more excruciating the experience becomes. It would almost seem pleasurable to given in (and certainly that is the reason we always do) if not for that gnawing fact that suffering, in the truest sense, always follows transgression.
Still, I believe that upon closer examination we will see that it is not the mere presence of temptation which produces suffering but our own arrogance in the form of rebellion against God which makes it so. At its most basic level, the temptation in the garden is merely the presentation of contrary choice. Humans have the ability to decide between right and wrong. Certainly the capacity to decide is not itself suffering. What causes the suffering associated with temptation is not the ability to choose but the two wills which war within us. There is the will of God which steers us ultimately toward glory and our own shortsighted will which struggles to understand the difference between immediate gratification and ultimate glorification. It is our refusal to subordinate our will to the will of God which is productive of suffering, not merely the capacity to choose or even the presence of a tempter who would entice us to choose. Hall references Jesus' temptation as a parallel to that in the garden, but I think that the Temptation provides just the picture of painless temptation that validates my point. In submitting his own will to that of the Father, Jesus not only doesn't suffer at the hands of the tempter, he causes the tempter to suffer in humiliating defeat three times over.
Having understood temptation, Hall's final category, anxiety, is much simpler. In fact, I wonder if it should even be considered at all, as I struggle to see its presence related explicitly in the Genesis story. Nevertheless, Hall speaks of the anxiety of dependency as a form of integrative suffering inherent in the world. Certainly humanity is dependent on God not only for basic things like existence and the sustaining of that existence but also for more abstract gifts like direction and access to truth. The feeling of dependency and the absence of direct contact with the Object on which we are dependent certainly produces not only anxiety but pain.
There are two ways, however, that viewing this anxiety of dependency like this is flawed. First, it anachronistically reads the present lack of connection with God into the Eden narrative. There is a sense in which humanity will always be ontologically apart from God, but the original couple still experienced their dependency on God in more direct, more concrete terms than we do. The radical separation presently experienced is undoubtedly less the intention of the Creator and more the perversion of the creature. Second, the pain produced by the anxiety of dependency is rooted not merely in being dependent but in lacking faith in that on which we depend. If we truly trusted fully in the Provider and Sustainer of life, then there would be no anxiety in our dependency. Suggesting that the suffering associated with our ultimate insufficiency is built into creation is tantamount to saying that mistrust of God was ordained by God. That can hardly be the case.
In the end, it appears that Hall, rather than establishing the presence of suffering in the blueprint of creation, has reframed positive aspects of reality in negative terms which in their very expression presupposes the presence of sin. Isolation, mistrust, rebellion, and arrogance are all productive of suffering, truly painful suffering. These are the qualities that Hall actually identifies. The positive notions he has redefined - the desire for communion, the experience of dependence, the knowledge of limits, and the capacity for choice - are not only not productive of suffering but in fact represent some of the greatest joy-producing gifts which God has bestowed on creation. Certainly when corrupted by improper choice and compounded by the isolation which results from sin, all of the above transform into contranatural sources of pain, but to suggest that God has embedded the contranatural in the natural is a contradiction in terms. Ultimately, I am forced to reject Hall's suggestion that any form of suffering was intended in creation.
Monday, May 3, 2010
The Problem of Evil: Solution or Apology?
I am taking a course this summer entitled “Providence and Suffering” which deals very generally with the problem of evil: how it has been approached historically, how it might be approached biblically, and in what way it should factor into modern religious thought. Undoubtedly, that means that questions about suffering, free will, sin, natural disaster, death, evil, and providence will all feature more prominently in my thought as a result. Yet, before I even seriously begin preparing for this course, something about the problem of evil strikes me relative to the witness of Scripture.
My sole encounter with the problem of evil up to this point has been its somewhat clumsy application by the occasional atheist who I have encountered. It is generally presented as some great and exhaustive formula by which the concept of an all power, all loving God may be rationally undermined. It is the novel product of rational thought, emancipated as it now is from the ignorance and tyranny characteristic of the fundamentally religious culture of the past. Inevitably, I accept the argument on these grounds as a peculiarly atheistic attempt to undermine God and respond, myself somewhat clumsily, with rather shallow arguments from free will as if the recognition that humanity is responsible for most evil somehow expiates God from any culpability in its existence.
I don’t propose to solve the problem of evil here – though of course I expect to be able to present an entirely novel and thoroughly incontrovertible solution by the time my course is complete. What struck me at the very outskirts of my study is the blind acceptance that the problem of evil is somehow a modern critique of God born of rational thought or atheist “enlightenment.” Certainly, in its modern formulation – (A) God is omnipotent, (B) God is omnibeneficient, (C) Evil exists, therefore either not A or not B – the problem has a decidedly scientific, atheistic tone. When, however, it is rephrased to get at the root of the existential concern – why do bad things happen to good people, and good things to bad people – the question becomes one as old as Scripture and undoubtedly older, one that Christianity has by no means shied away from engaging, though perhaps not explaining as we might like.
It is something of a cliché to mention Job in connection with the problem of suffering, but he certainly represents a clear engagement of the problem. Qoheleth, though less commonly mentioned, is an equally important witness to the way that even early on the Judeo-Christian faith has understood that the world is not the ideal place which perfectly accords with our expectations of or hopes for it. “In this meaningless life of mine I have seen both of these: a righteous man perishing in his righteousness, and a wicked man living long in his wickedness” (Ecc. 7:15). The creation account and the flood account both try to understand why it is that death and toil and disaster enter the world, and the prophets are constantly explaining both natural and political calamity. Still, these only can justify why bad things happen to bad people, something which few if any would object to or even properly include in the problem of evil. What Job and Qoheleth lament is that bad things happen to good people.
The hope for a world which parallels our inherent sense of justice underlies Christian eschatology. Then the righteous are rewarded and the wicked are punished. Ultimate and providential justice are meted out fairly and without hint of corruption. The visions of Micah 4 and Revelation 21 where those who come to God are blessed and those who are distant from Him are destroyed sits well with some primordial expectation we have for sensibility in the world. Whatever the cause of inequity in this world which the faithful have always recognized as deeply flawed, there is always the hope, even the inviolable promise, of a sensible world where inequity is translated into perfect, universal, comprehensible justice.
I am certainly not encouraging metaphysical escapism, and I realize that Christian eschatology does not answer the problem of evil only promises that the problem will be corrected. My point is that the reality of inequity, the problem of evil, is not some great modern, atheist “gotcha;” it is not a philosophical trump card that should catch Christian’s by surprise or cause them some kind of new unease. It is a disquieting reality but one that is recognized as part of our theology which can be dealt with, ignored, or explained away but which should never shock us by its mere existence. That bad things happen to good people is the foundation for our eschatological hope, a great leveling where the room that we have left for God’s wrath is filled with His righteous, reasonable fury. We cannot be surprised when some giddy antitheist discovers the argument and seizes on it like a child with a piece of pyrite. We know that evil exists, in some sense and for some reason in spite of our all-power God of love. Whether or not we should even engage the problem depends largely on the person presenting it and their intention in doing so, but that the problem exists should neither surprise us nor subvert our faith. It has always been there.
In fact, I found particularly interesting the peculiar way that Scripture has us live out our hope for a perfect world in the reality of this imperfect one. It should not go without notice that while we affirm that a perfectly sensible world, ideally in accord with the will of the Maker, is one where bad things happen to bad people and good things to good ones, we are nevertheless never called to actualize such a world in the present. We are not told to dole out justice to the iniquitous nor reserve our praise for those truly virtuous. In fact the Christian, in an almost incomprehensible irony, is called to intensify the inequity of the world. On the one hand, Christians are told to accept willingly, joyfully, with almost reckless abandon suffering which comes on them in spite of and even because of their innocence (Matt 5:11-12; Jas 1:2-3; 1 Pet 2:19-24). On the other hand, they are commanded to treat the wickedest oppressors with the greatest munificence, praying for their enemies, blessing those who curse them, feeding those who hate them, and forgiving those who kill them (Matt 5:38-48; Acts 7:60; Rom 12:17-21; 1 Cor 4:12-13). It is almost as though God has commanded us to spit in the face of this warped, corrupted world. The recognition that we are powerless to truly redeem it (a power which lies inevitably with God, an event which we eagerly await) does not deliver us helplessly into apathy. It calls us to highlight, almost comically, the injustice of it. We proclaim our innocence but do not condemn those who make us suffer on account of it. We decry the wickedness of others but answer that wickedness with even more manifold blessings.
If the problem of evil is truly irresolvable, as I suspect it is, and Christianity does not have the answer to the problem, it at least offers a reaction which is infinitely better than fatalistic despair or self-deluded ethical nihilism. Christ - even if he has not imbued us with the comprehensive, inexhaustible knowledge of the Father - has taught us how to cope in a world which will always be, despite some foolishly optimistic claims of science, fundamentally incomprehensible to us as participators therein. In that way, Christians may offer an apology for the faith without presuming to offer any comprehensive answer to the problem.
My sole encounter with the problem of evil up to this point has been its somewhat clumsy application by the occasional atheist who I have encountered. It is generally presented as some great and exhaustive formula by which the concept of an all power, all loving God may be rationally undermined. It is the novel product of rational thought, emancipated as it now is from the ignorance and tyranny characteristic of the fundamentally religious culture of the past. Inevitably, I accept the argument on these grounds as a peculiarly atheistic attempt to undermine God and respond, myself somewhat clumsily, with rather shallow arguments from free will as if the recognition that humanity is responsible for most evil somehow expiates God from any culpability in its existence.
I don’t propose to solve the problem of evil here – though of course I expect to be able to present an entirely novel and thoroughly incontrovertible solution by the time my course is complete. What struck me at the very outskirts of my study is the blind acceptance that the problem of evil is somehow a modern critique of God born of rational thought or atheist “enlightenment.” Certainly, in its modern formulation – (A) God is omnipotent, (B) God is omnibeneficient, (C) Evil exists, therefore either not A or not B – the problem has a decidedly scientific, atheistic tone. When, however, it is rephrased to get at the root of the existential concern – why do bad things happen to good people, and good things to bad people – the question becomes one as old as Scripture and undoubtedly older, one that Christianity has by no means shied away from engaging, though perhaps not explaining as we might like.
It is something of a cliché to mention Job in connection with the problem of suffering, but he certainly represents a clear engagement of the problem. Qoheleth, though less commonly mentioned, is an equally important witness to the way that even early on the Judeo-Christian faith has understood that the world is not the ideal place which perfectly accords with our expectations of or hopes for it. “In this meaningless life of mine I have seen both of these: a righteous man perishing in his righteousness, and a wicked man living long in his wickedness” (Ecc. 7:15). The creation account and the flood account both try to understand why it is that death and toil and disaster enter the world, and the prophets are constantly explaining both natural and political calamity. Still, these only can justify why bad things happen to bad people, something which few if any would object to or even properly include in the problem of evil. What Job and Qoheleth lament is that bad things happen to good people.
The hope for a world which parallels our inherent sense of justice underlies Christian eschatology. Then the righteous are rewarded and the wicked are punished. Ultimate and providential justice are meted out fairly and without hint of corruption. The visions of Micah 4 and Revelation 21 where those who come to God are blessed and those who are distant from Him are destroyed sits well with some primordial expectation we have for sensibility in the world. Whatever the cause of inequity in this world which the faithful have always recognized as deeply flawed, there is always the hope, even the inviolable promise, of a sensible world where inequity is translated into perfect, universal, comprehensible justice.
I am certainly not encouraging metaphysical escapism, and I realize that Christian eschatology does not answer the problem of evil only promises that the problem will be corrected. My point is that the reality of inequity, the problem of evil, is not some great modern, atheist “gotcha;” it is not a philosophical trump card that should catch Christian’s by surprise or cause them some kind of new unease. It is a disquieting reality but one that is recognized as part of our theology which can be dealt with, ignored, or explained away but which should never shock us by its mere existence. That bad things happen to good people is the foundation for our eschatological hope, a great leveling where the room that we have left for God’s wrath is filled with His righteous, reasonable fury. We cannot be surprised when some giddy antitheist discovers the argument and seizes on it like a child with a piece of pyrite. We know that evil exists, in some sense and for some reason in spite of our all-power God of love. Whether or not we should even engage the problem depends largely on the person presenting it and their intention in doing so, but that the problem exists should neither surprise us nor subvert our faith. It has always been there.
In fact, I found particularly interesting the peculiar way that Scripture has us live out our hope for a perfect world in the reality of this imperfect one. It should not go without notice that while we affirm that a perfectly sensible world, ideally in accord with the will of the Maker, is one where bad things happen to bad people and good things to good ones, we are nevertheless never called to actualize such a world in the present. We are not told to dole out justice to the iniquitous nor reserve our praise for those truly virtuous. In fact the Christian, in an almost incomprehensible irony, is called to intensify the inequity of the world. On the one hand, Christians are told to accept willingly, joyfully, with almost reckless abandon suffering which comes on them in spite of and even because of their innocence (Matt 5:11-12; Jas 1:2-3; 1 Pet 2:19-24). On the other hand, they are commanded to treat the wickedest oppressors with the greatest munificence, praying for their enemies, blessing those who curse them, feeding those who hate them, and forgiving those who kill them (Matt 5:38-48; Acts 7:60; Rom 12:17-21; 1 Cor 4:12-13). It is almost as though God has commanded us to spit in the face of this warped, corrupted world. The recognition that we are powerless to truly redeem it (a power which lies inevitably with God, an event which we eagerly await) does not deliver us helplessly into apathy. It calls us to highlight, almost comically, the injustice of it. We proclaim our innocence but do not condemn those who make us suffer on account of it. We decry the wickedness of others but answer that wickedness with even more manifold blessings.
If the problem of evil is truly irresolvable, as I suspect it is, and Christianity does not have the answer to the problem, it at least offers a reaction which is infinitely better than fatalistic despair or self-deluded ethical nihilism. Christ - even if he has not imbued us with the comprehensive, inexhaustible knowledge of the Father - has taught us how to cope in a world which will always be, despite some foolishly optimistic claims of science, fundamentally incomprehensible to us as participators therein. In that way, Christians may offer an apology for the faith without presuming to offer any comprehensive answer to the problem.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)