Back to Theodicy

While I'm sure I'm not done with my semi-permanent digression on race and culture, for at least this brief post I'm back to the more familiar ground of theodicy.

Ben Witherington has a wonderful new post on post-Katrina theodicy, a topic I've wrestled with here more than once. After posting some majestic pictures of the storm looming over Mississippi, he offers a few theological observations. Ultimately, I don't believe that any theodicy can successfully preserve divine omnipotence, but he does make good (and mercifully brief) use of free-will theodicy to argue that what appears to be a natural disaster, an "act of God," can also contain a great deal of human agency and responsibility:

There is another human factor in play as well. The over-heated waters in the gulf of Mexico contributed mightily to the magnitude of this storm. What caused the waters to be overheated? There are a variety of factors and several of them are human in origin: 1) the dumping of massive chemicals in the gulf; 2) the dumping of massive raw sewage in the gulf; 3) global warming which is in part attributable to human pollution.

This, connected with his use of Romans 8 to argue for the fallen state of nature, attributable also to human agency in that (in this view) sin, which enters into creation through human agency, corrupts the entire natural order, speaks powerfully to the kind of theodicy against "natural evil" offered by Augustine. You can see my own thoughts about that kind of argument here.

Witherington's tag stands as a challenge to my take on theodicy:

To what extent has God set nature in motion and allowed it to take its own natural courses, bearing in mind that there are various factors human and otherwise that affect eco-systems and ecological patterns? While I do not believe that God is absent or has simply wound up the world of nature and let it run, unless you believe in absolute divine determinism, you cannot simply assume that everything that happens in nature reflects God's hand or will, especially if you have a theology of the Fall that affects nature.

Implicitly embedded in my critique of the project of theodicy is the notion that, if God is truly all-powerful, then that which happens represents (of necessity) God's will for the world. This notion - despite my Methodist heritage - reflects a more Calvinist understanding of divine will and power, in which part of what it means to be all-powerful is to possess an (at least ultimately) irresistible will.

Here Witherington, like a good Methodist, implicitly preserves the language of divine omnipotence (never employed in the post, but embedded in the concept of God - for Witherington it makes no sense to talk about God as anything other than omnipotent; anything less would fail to be God) but challenges the necessary connection between omnipotence and irresistibility. God may be unlimited in power, but it is obvious that God does not have here a monopoly on agency. Human beings enjoy the freedom to act, even if such action mucks up the natural world, manufacturing a great deal of suffering - even the suffering that seems to be natural.

This is the essence of the free will theodicy. Its philosophic success rests on one's willingness to see freedom, human agency, as a good so great that it offsets any suffering created from it. But success can be measured in other terms, too.

While Witherington's reflections - even carried far beyond his brief post - may not be able to logically reconcile the traditional theistic description of God (omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent) with the fact of evil and suffering; in their emphasis on human agency in, human responsibility for, apparently natural evils, they serve a valuable purpose. Just as humans should not employ theodicies to let God off the hook for suffering, neither should we employ those same kinds of arguments leave God squirming alone on that hook, as though we ourselves bear no responsibility for our hand in apparently natural evil.

Hurricane Katrina was not a natural disaster. Humans made both the hurricane and the impact of that hurricane considerably worse through our sins of both commission and omission, our actions and our failure to act. We should, as Witherington implores us, "Think on these things."

Are Theists Callous?

In a discussion at Debunking Christianity, a commenter wrote, of "theists" (exactly what was meant by the term was left unclear, so I'll assume it simply meant here those who intellectually believe the proposition that there is a God, and that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent):

They are as heartless as their alleged god, and the deaths of children being burned alive, don't trouble their beliefs in the slightest.

As someone who has been very critical of the project of theodicy, I am not entirely unsympathetic to the commenter's position. Theodicies themselves are very poor responses to actual instances of suffering. Those who are suffering are not likely to be comforted by a vigorous philosophical defense of a particular description of God. It is simply not helpful.

But, are theodicies intended to be responses to particular instances of suffering? Are they offered as the best response to this or that tragedy, in the moment of suffering? Despite my past wholesale attack on the ethics of theodicy, I don't think that they are. While - as someone who, though religious, does not believe in the traditional theistic description of God - I don't think theodicies work, in that they fail to reconcile that description of God with the existence of suffering; I also don't think that they are intended as pastoral responses to specific instances of suffering.

It would truly be callous, or, as the commenter put it, "heartless," for a theist to in fact be truly untroubled by "the deaths of children being burned alive." But, though theists maintain their belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent God, I don't think for a moment that they are, in fact, untroubled by specific instances of suffering. They may be quite troubled by children being burned alive in a church in Kenya, but that incident - tragic as it is - does not actually provide us with new information about the universe.

Any theist is already aware that we live in a universe in which it is possible that children could be burned alive in a church in Kenya. Any theist is already aware that such things in fact happen; they have happened, and will presumably continue to happen. This is not new information. As such, their beliefs must already account for the existence of such instances of extreme suffering. That their beliefs do not change after they become aware of yet another instance of acute suffering does not mean that they are not troubled by such instances of suffering. It simply means that such instances have already, presumably, been accounted for in their belief system. While I do not find their accounts for such instances persuasive, neither do I think that they should jettison their beliefs every time tragedy strikes, if in fact they find that their theodicies have sufficiently accounted for suffering in the world, reconciling it to a particular description of God.

At this point I think it would be instructive to note that there are in fact two very different problems of evil (or suffering, as some theodicies deny that suddering is, in fact, evil, or evidence of evil), though we often conflate them, as I think the commenter at Debunking Christianity may have done:

1. The philosophic problem of evil (or suffering), and

2. The existential problem of evil (or, again, suffering).

The philosophic (or, perhaps, logical) problem of evil is just what you might guess from its title, a philosophic/logical problem. It is to this problem that theodicies respond. This problem may be roughly rendered thusly:

The following propositions are logically inconsistent:

i. There is a God
ii. God is omnipotent
iii. God is omniscient
iv. God is benevolent
v. There is suffering/evil in the world.

That is, suffering is logically incompatible with the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good and loving God.

The existential problem of evil is a very different problem. It is a personal one, and may be rendered thusly:

The actual experience of suffering and evil creates conditions in which a person is less likely to believe in God.

New instances of suffering in the world participate in the existential problem of evil, in that they create conditions within which one's faith is challenged. But they are not necessarily relevant for the philosophic problem of evil, because they are simply not needed for it. Any suffering of any kind, at any point in history, already challenges the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God. If someone has then responded philosophically to past instances of suffering, or even to the abstract possibility of suffering, and reconciled it sufficiently for themselves to the existence of the traditional theistic description of God, new instances of suffering do not pose an additional philosophic problem. But they may create an existential one.

This distinction is instructive because it acknowledges that we are not purely rational beings. Our logical/philosophical responses to suffering are not our only responses. And, even those whose theistic beliefs are philosophically untroubled by particular instances of suffering (such as the church fire in Kenya) are not necessarily either heartless or callous. They may have a profound emotional response to such suffering. Their faith may even strengthen that emotional response, and help them shape a powerful practical response. But that doesn't mean that this new concrete instance of suffering provides them with new information that should make them jettison their previous beliefs on the spot.

Initial Response to Play the Ball Where the Monkey Drops It

For my "Evil, Suffering, and Death in the New Testament" class we are required to keep a reading journal. Last week's book was Gregory Knox Jones' Play the Ball Where the Monkey Drops It: Why We Suffer and How We Can Hope. It is essentially a primer in Process Theology's response to the problem of evil, though it is not written as a work of academic theology, and never actually mentions "Process Theology." It is a very pastoral book, written not by a theologian but by a Presbyterian minister responding not to the concerns of the academy but the concerns of the congregation. What follows is my reading journal entry for last week, after reading the book. The entry reads more like a book review than a journal entry, reinforcing perhaps a point that my pastor made last week after hearing me preach in our chapel communion service, when she noticed that for great theological treatises I don't even need notes, but when I'm talking about myself I read verbatum from a manuscript. Be that as it may, here is what I wrote in response to Gregory Knox Jones' Play the Ball Where the Monkey Drops It:

My first response to Gregory Knox Jones’ Play the Ball Where the Monkey Drops It is that it was a delightful read. His stories are lively and engaging, and his concerns are refreshingly pastoral. I also appreciated that he takes the philosophic problem of evil seriously. By that I mean this: he recognizes that there is a fundamental logical contradiction between God’s omnipotence and benevolence and the reality of evil and suffering.

While his book is not as rigorously argued as my favorite work on evil from the perspective of Process Theology, Kenneth Cauthen’s The Many Faces of Evil, and while he does not engage the nature of evil in the way that Cauthen does, it serves as an interesting primer on the way that Process Theology meditates on the nature of divine power in the face of the reality of evil and suffering.

The experience of suffering is a legitimate starting point for theology. It is one of the givens of existence, every bit as much as the experience of the holy, the sacred, the other, that which we call “God.” As such, it is valid, I think, to demand that our concepts of God and our reflections of God be accountable to our experience of suffering. This, at a basic level, is what Process Theology does.

In Chapter Five of his book, titled “Persuasive Power,” Jones reflects on the nature of God’s power in the face of the given-ness of suffering. After laying out the basic problem of evil he says this:

If God is all-powerful and loving, then evil should not exist. Yet evil does exist. And not just a little evil here and there, but widespread evil that causes tremendous suffering throughout the planet.

It is from here, the logical impossibility of reconciling God’s unlimited love and power with the brute fact of evil, that Jones argues for the need to understand God’s power in a new way. He could here follow in the footsteps of Christian philosophers like Richard Swinburne, who cling to the language of divine omnipotence while places some logical boundaries around God’s power. But instead he chooses to boldly and honestly assert what I take to be the most responsible theological response to the reality of evil and suffering: “There are some things that God cannot do.”

This statement is troubling to many Christians – nay, to many theists, not just limited to Christian theists – because it radically denies one of our “givens” (see Jones’ reference to Burton Cooper on p. 56) concerning God. Omnipotence is, in fact, such a given that many are incapable of thinking about the word “God” without also thinking about “omnipotence.” I remember taking a philosophy class at a state university, taught by a professor with no personal religious commitments, in which it was categorically stated that “omnipotence” is an essential part of the definition of “God.”

This is also somewhat pastorally challenging. It can rightly be asked how a limited God, a God who allows suffering to happen not for some mysterious reason that humans can never discern, nor for our own good or for any of the other reasons offered up in our formal and informal theodicies, but because God cannot do all things; it can rightly be asked how such a God who lacks the power to initially prevent suffering, to forcibly restrain the forces that cause suffering, can effectively respond to suffering.

It has been suggested to me (by a former minister turned atheist) that we must choose between an omnipotent God who refuses to prevent suffering and an impotent God who is powerless to act in the face of suffering. This, I suggest, is a false dichotomy, and the sort of false dichotomy at work in the minds of many Christians who feel threatened by the statement that there are some things that God can’t do.

We don’t feel the need to impose on anything in the created order the standard we place on God. Of course, this could be because many of us assert that God is radically different from the created order, wholly other, and so it is impossible to make any analogy between God and something created. While I find that sort of thinking about God quite appealing, I also think we should consider this: we would never consider saying that because there are limits on the power of the president, he is essentially impotent. Such a statement would be absurd. Of course there are limits on presidential power – even if some presidents act as though they are unaware of such limits. And, of course the president, despite such limits, is by no means impotent. Both the person and the office contain a great deal of power.

Jones uses his own examples of this sort of argument, saying:

Some seem to think that if God cannot do everything, then God is a weakling. I disagree. We would never say, “If the professor cannot answer every question, he is a useless professor.” Or, “If the physician cannot diagnose every illness, she is a worthless physician.” Such statements are nonsense. Indeed, the professor may open wonderful new worlds to us through brilliant insights, and the physician may save numerous lives through her expertise. Admittedly these are crude analogies, but I trust they make the point.

That is in fact the case for every power we can conceive of in the natural world. Why can’t it be the case for God? Why must God be either omnipotent (as most theists assert) or impotent? I for one can’t come up with a reason.

Jones asserts that not only is God’s power limited, but that power which God does have is quite unlike we often suppose it to be. Jones is wont to wax poetic on the power of God, saying in one of my favorite lines in the whole book, “God is the most powerful force in the universe, brining order out of chaos and making life possible.” But this power is not the brute power to override other wills and impose particular outcomes on situations. Rather, it is what he calls “the power of persuasion."

Jones sees God at work in the world trying to influence situations and bring about the best outcomes, not trying to override the respective wills of each actor. This view of God’s power is quite compelling, in part because it makes sense of things that many of use experience. Many of us have felt the presence of God in our lives. Many of us have “heard” without hearing the “still small voice” of God. Many of us have felt an inexplicable sense of calling, a calling that often takes us far from where we thought we would go in life. In these Jones sees the power of God working to bring about the best in the created order.

This is also compelling because it preserves human freedom (and, I would argue that this freedom extends beyond the bounds of humanity to include all animals, not just the so-called “rational” ones). In fact, Jones takes freedom as, along with the existence of God and the brute fact of suffering, as one of the givens in the created order. I won’t argue with Jones on the given-ness of freedom, as I too experience freedom (or, the determinist would argue, the illusion of freedom) as a given. But, in light of his offering up freedom as a good in a book meditating on the nature of God in the face of evil and suffering, perhaps a few words on the “goodness” of freedom are in order.

Many theodicies hinge on an appeal to free will, arguing variations on this theme: freedom is a good such that its existence offsets the various evils and sufferings that are produced by its creation. That is, God is justified in creating a world that has suffering, because suffering is inevitable in an order that contains authentic freedom, and freedom is so good that it outweighs the collected sufferings that result from it.

When both freedom and suffering are givens – that is, when the experience of both are basic and essential parts of life – the absurdity of this sort of argument is not obvious. As such, we rarely ask ourselves whether or not we would be willing to exchange our freedom for an existence without suffering. If freedom were such an obviously manifest good that it outweighs all concerns about evil and suffering, then it seems to me obvious that all or at least most reasonable people would be categorically unwilling to exchange freedom for anything, as it is a good so precious and so valuable that it makes up for each instance of suffering.

But in times of crisis we learn that, in fact, the opposite is true. When faced with the threat of suffering, the fear of crisis and death, humans are surprisingly willing to exchange a great many individual freedoms (which participate in freedom itself) for even the tiniest illusion of security.

Any book that makes so much of freedom in the face of suffering – even if it does not attempt to offer up a traditional free-will theodicy – should, I think, wrestle more with our willingness to so readily exchange our individual freedoms for some protection from evil, suffering, and death.

Suffering and Faith

Here is a short paper that I just wrote for my Growing in the Life of Faith class, on Suffering and Faith. It is mostly a rehashing, in a less rigorous and theological way, some of my objections to theodicy. For those looking for a more philosophic engagement with theodicy, you'll have to wait for that. This paper was written for a group of seminary students learning to be pastors, trying to apply the theology they're learning in school to a congregational setting. That said, I think it is a helpful summary of some of my views, and I hope it is useful:

The problem of the relationship between suffering and/or evil and faith is as old as humanity, and has often been presented as a rational one. This presentation of the problem as a rational one happens both in our philosophies/theologies, and in our personal experiences; in other words, in both the abstract and the concrete. In both cases, I think, the presentations of the problem as a rational one participate in the same error.

The problem is posed rationally in the abstract when it is rightly noted that the fact of suffering – which points, to many, to the existence of evil – is logically incompatible with an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God. It the concrete it is posed rationally when, in our prayers or our cries of anguish, we turn to God and as Why?!?, as though some coherent, rational, linguistic answer to that question would satisfy us.

In both cases, to try to answer the problem as it is presented, if it is presented rationally, can be pastorally disastrous. While this may be most obvious when the problem is posed concretely, I think that our tendency to make suffering a rational problem with a rational answer comes from trying to apply the abstract, philosophic approaches to the problem to our concrete situations.

A theodicy is an attempt to rationally solve the problem posed to faith by suffering. It is, in other words, an attempt to prove that the impossible is possible, that suffering and evil can be logically reconciled to a traditionally theistic concept of God as all-powerful, all-seeing/all-knowing, and all-loving; a good and perfect God. That theodicy – which must somehow explain away the problem of suffering – is our most common theological response to suffering has pastoral implications, and can render pastoral care impotent in the face of real crises.

There are many forms that theodicy takes, but ultimately the project of theodicy fails, and fails for several important reasons. First, any theodicy fails morally, because rather than addressing suffering compassionately, it seeks to explain suffering away, to turn a bad into a good, or to at least get God off the hook for suffering. This attempt to get God off the hook sets up the second way that theodicy fails: it presents us with a poor concept of God. The God of theodicy is a God who would rather not be blamed for suffering, rather than enter into and engage suffering wherever it arises. Whenever we have a concept of the divine that is more concerned with God’s reputation than with working to alleviate suffering, we have a truly impoverished deity. The project of theodicy also fails logically, as at the end of the day, no matter how nuanced an argument is constructed, it remains the case that a truly omnipotent God would have the power to end suffering, a truly omniscient God would have seen that in creation which would give rise to suffering, and a truly benevolent God would not desire to impose suffering on creation. Suffering is, in fact, truly incompatible with that understanding of God, and so the problem that suffering poses for faith is a real one that will not simply disappear in a puff of logic.

But the biggest failure of theodicy is found at its very heart: it poses the problem of suffering in exactly the wrong way. Yes, logically speaking, the experience of suffering calls into question a particular – and particularly cherished – concept of God. But, ultimately, suffering is not a rational problem. It is an existential one. And no rational answer can satisfactorily solve an existential problem. The biggest problem, in other words, that suffering poses for faith is not found in the rational questions that arise from our reflection on suffering; the biggest problem, instead, comes from the suffering itself. The work of religion, and as such the work of God, should not be to answer the rational questions asked by those suffering, it should be to alleviate suffering, to salve the wounds of the suffering.

Pastorally, this means recognizing that when those in mourning ask why their loved one had to die, they don’t want an answer. They want their loved one back! This means recognizing that when a tennis player has blown out their knee, and asks why God would allow such a lifestyle-threatening event to happen, they don’t want an answer. They want not to have blown out their knee. This means recognizing that when a cancer patient asks why they have stricken with such a dreadful disease, they don’t want an answer. They want to not have cancer! And it means recognizing that if God has anything meaningful at all to offer these people, it is not an explaining away of their suffering, but an entering in to their suffering.

Theologically this means that our attempts to solve the problems posed by suffering should not be an attempt to get God off the hook for suffering, nor should it be an attempt to explain how suffering can be a part of God’s good and perfect will. Rather, we should look for theological concepts that help relieve suffering, and that provide comfort – but not false hope – to those afflicted by suffering. The most powerful such concept is the doctrine of the Incarnation.

Incarnational theology, unlike theodicy, presents us with an image of a God who rather than running from the responsibility of suffering, enters into the world to take on suffering. Incarnational theology – which does not have to be attached to the traditional doctrine of the divine resting alongside the human in the person of Jesus of Nazareth – presents us with a God who bind the wounds of those suffering, and even to bears those wounds within God’s self. An Incarnational God is a God who suffers with the suffering, and who, in suffering, understands suffering, and works to alleviate all suffering. This is a God who can comfort the afflicted, rather than making their afflictions worse by baptizing them and calling them good.

Augustine's Theodicy Redeemed

This will be a shorter post - perhaps only a fragment of an idea - because I have to get started on a paper for one of my classes. This post, then, is my pre-writing activity, a way to jump start my theological thinking so that it can eventually be applied to something that will get graded.

Most of you know by now my opinion of theodicy. I don't mask it very well. I think that by and large the product of theodicy is a flawed one, seeking to explain suffering away rather than entering into it and responding both compassionately and constructively to it.

Theodicy is an attempt to rationally reconcile an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, perfectly good God to the fact of suffering and evil. As a friend of mine once put it, something's got to give: God, or suffering. Noting this, early attempts at theodicy tried to make suffering give way.

One of Augustine's theodicies - a theodicy so ingrained in our theological heritage that many people who know both it and Augustine still fail to connect the two - was a kind of ontological theodicy. That is, it attacked the ontology, the being, of evil. Augustine argued that evil was not a thing in and of itself, but rather a privation or perversion of being. A wound that fed on the festering flesh of being.

This was an important argument, because it kept a single, good creator God from being directly responsible for the creation of evil. Why? Because evil wasn't created, nor was it, properly speaking, a thing. In fact, ontologically speaking, it didn't exist at all. Yes, evil could be experienced, but only as a kind of contingent thing, existing in and feeding off that which God created to be good.

When I first encountered this theodicy, I was immediately impressed by it. I remember, at 18 or 19 years old, walking through a church parking lot meditating on this concept of evil as a privation of being. Deep in thought, I stared down at my feet and noticed that I was walking past the decaying corpse of a sparrow. Then it hit me that this might just have been what Augustine was talking about.

The evil, the suffering, that up until that point I had pressed hard against, was death. Now, staring into the face of death, I realized that death was not a thing at all, but the absence of a thing, the destruction of a thing. The sparrow was the created good. The sparrow had an existence of its own. Death, while it had overtaken that created good, was not, properly speaking, a thing, and so did not find its origin in God. God wasn't responsible for it, and God hadn't created it. It merely existed - to the extent that one can say it existed at all - in a good thing that had been created.

But that kind of thinking only puts the problem back a step, and doesn't really address our concern at all. While I got an intellectual high from contemplating the mysteries of suffering and death in that moment, that contemplation provided no defense against the deeper existential problem. You see, whether or not God gets off on a technicality because we declare evil to be a privation of being rather than an instance of being, we still experience evil, we still experience suffering. In my case, the suffering caused in me by the loss of loved ones, and the existential suffering buried deep inside me by the anxiety of my own anticipated death, did not go away just because some clever theologian "proved" that such suffering wasn't really God's fault.

Theodicy, then, could be a distraction from rather than a solution for the problem posed by evil.

But, it turns out, that doesn't mean that we can't make some constructive use of Augustine's concept of evil as a privation or perversion of being. In my Resistance and Reconciliation class I just read a marvelous essay in Stone and Stivers' text, Resistance and Theological Ethics. Mark Douglas' "Resistance, Affirmation, and the Sovereignty of God" looks at resistance from a Reform perspective. That perspective is heavily influenced by Augustine - so much so that Douglas presents Augustine's concept of evil as though it were the Reform position, without even referencing Augustine. He writes:

If God has created all things and all that God has created is good, it follows that the Reform tradition takes a radically anti-dualistic view of the universe and all that inhabits it. Evil has no separate, alternative existence over against that which God has created but can only exist as a perversion or privation of what God has created.

That view is Augustinian, through and through. But, where Douglas goes next redeems the Augustinian view of evil for, rather than using it to explain evil away, he employs this concept of evil as a way to enter into and engage evil, with both compassion and humility:

It follows not only that we ought to treat what we are resisting as somehow related to God - even if that relationship has been significantly warped - and capable of being redeemed by the same God that created it, but that no person or group is ever in the position of declaring its opponent either wholly evil or, for that matter, wholly wrong. Reformed resistance is tempered by the humility that comes from thinking of one's opponents as created by God, no matter how far from their creator they mat appear.

The rest of the essay is about engaging suffering, and using our shared experience of suffering as a tool for engaging the problems we see in this world. Here, then, the notion that evil exists only contingently, and as such does not find its origin in God, is not used as a way to explain how evil came to be in some abstract sense. Rather, it is used to engage evil where it exists, in created beings who were made good and can, thus, be remade good.

Theodicy in the Priestly Creation Myth?

One of the ideas I've been kicking around for my eventual MA Thesis is a continuation of some of my ideas here about theodicy. That is, perhaps my Thesis would look at the moral and religious implications of theodicy, while also perhaps expanding the concept of theodicy to include other kinds of religious attempts to wrestle with the problem of evil. Evil, suffering, pain, and the like are, after all, not just philosophic, theological, and especially logical problems for a particular brand of theism that asserts God's unlimited perfection and goodness. They are experiential problems for all persons.

For my Intro to Judaism class I'm currently reading The Divine Symphony: The Bible's Many Voices, by Israel Knohl, a professor of Bible at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In it he notes the problem that evil poses for all forms of monotheistic religion, not just the philosophic theism that sticks to a strict concept of divine omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence:

The most crucial problem facing monotheistic religion is the source of evil. In polytheistic religions, evil can be blamed on wicked divinities. But if there is only one God and God is perceived as good and merciful, how can we explain the existence of evil in the world?

This question, Knohl asserts, was burning in the minds of the Priestly editors of the Torah. It can even be seen beneath the text of the first Creation Myth of Ancient Israel, found in Genesis 1:1-2:4a. That myth, in Source Theory, is traditionally attributed to the Priestly Source, a source that is seen by many scholars as a later voice from the post-exhilic period, but is seen by Knohl as a pre-exhilic voice. In fact, Knohl argues quite convincingly that the what he calls the "Priestly Torah" can best be dated to "the period between the building of Solomon's Temple (tenth century B.C.E.) and the time of King Hezekiah and the prophet Isaiah (second half of the eight century B.C.E.)."

This is important for him, because he argues that the Priestly Torah was a response on the part of the "elite priests in Jerusalem" to a crisis in the social and religious climate of Ancient Israel - a crisis spoken to by the great prophets of that time.

That there was a socio-religious crisis in Ancient Israel at that time is beyond dispute: the texts of Amos, Isaiah and Micah all speak to it. Knohl succinctly describes the crisis in a single sentence:

People thought that they might acquire sanctity by meticulous performance of the cultic laws, ignoring at the same time the social-moral commandments.

In response to the attack on the Temple cult that followed the prophetic articulation of this crisis, Knohl argues that the priests made public stories and traditions that they had long guarded, and the result was the formation of the Torah text. This, of course, was an ongoing process - they didn't just publish a single, definitive manuscript. But, at its heart, according to Knohl, the Priestly Torah - that is, the parts of the Torah that are attributable to the Priestly Source - are a response by the priests to this socio-religious crisis.

Anyway, the first creation myth in Genesis is part of what Knohl calls the Priestly Torah. In addition to responding to the contemporary crisis that Knohl sees as responsible for the Priestly Torah, Knohl argues that this myth is also in part a response to the problem of evil as it might have been understood at the time.

The problem of evil is, after all, not exactly a new problem. In previous posts we have discussed this a little, when looking at one of Augustine's theodicies from the 4th century CE. However, it wasn't a new problem in Augustine's day, some 1650 or so years ago. In fact, it was an ancient problem even in antiquity; perhaps as old as monotheism, or even old. Human beings have, as best as we can tell, been wrestling with the experience of pain and suffering for as long as there have been both human beings and pain and suffering. And, at some point, every religion must account for the origins of this experience, which we label "evil."

So it should come as no surprise that the Priestly Torah, in its creation myth, struggles with the nature of evil; particularly since, as Knohl notes, in Judaism as with all other monotheistic religions, there is no evil deity for the problem to fall back on.

After providing us with a reading of Genesis 1:1-3, and a brief discussion of the syntax, Knohl writes:

The most striking conclusion that follows from this observation of syntax is that before the formation of light, which was the first act of God as Creator, there were already entities that predated God's creation. These primordial materials consisted of unformed and void earth (tohu v'vohu), darkness (hoshekh), and deep waters (tehom). Thus we do not have in Genesis 1 a claim for creation out of nothing (creatio ex nihlo).

Before we go any further I should note, for those of you who may feel threatened by the idea that there is no Biblical support for creation ex nihlo, that Knohl is an Orthodox Jewish rabbi who takes the Biblical text very, very seriously. In other words, he is not some radical like me who seeks to overturn the religious apple cart. His work is his attempt to come to terms with the text of his Bible, a text in which he sees the Word of God. This reading, then, is one that comes out of the Biblical text itself, and not a radical reading that somehow manipulates the text. In fact, this reading is much, much more faithful to the Biblical text than any reading that would see creation ex nihlo in this story. Creation ex nihlo is an extra-Biblical concept that has been read back into the Bible by those who sought to see the Greek philosopher's God in the God of Ancient Israel. That it has become "orthodox" in the Christian tradition demonstrates that even the most "orthodox" of Christians have sought to re-interpret their scriptures in light of their cultural setting, just like we "liberals" do today.

But, the question before us is not one of "orthodoxy" v. "heresy" in the contemporary Christian context. Rather, it is one of what Knohl makes of these three pre-existing primordial entities, and how they relate to the problem of evil as understood by the priestly editors of the Torah.

We cannot interpret tohu v'vohu as a designation for formless matter, as it is often interpreted; rather, it is a reference to some primordial entity that preceded divine creation and that was used in that process. Elsewhere in the Bible, the word tohu means "desert," "waste," "devastation," and this is also the meaning here. God begins Creation assuming the presence of this primordial tohu. On the first day, God created light as a contrast to the preexisting darkness. On the second day, God separated the preexisting water by forming the expanse of heaven. On the third day, God gathered the original waters that were left under the expanse, and distinguished the earth from the seas.

We see here a progressing process of ordering, making distinctions, and building up from preexisting substances. This movement from chaos to order in the myth is important, because it presents us with a both progressive and ongoing picture of Creation. Creation is not a one time event in the past, in which God made everything ex nihlo. Rather, it is an ongoing story that takes place in time, in which God shapes that which already existed, while adding to it, ordering it, and making important distinctions between "light" and "darkness," water "above" and water "below," and between "sea" and "land." These distinctions correspond to the three primordial materials that Knohl translates as "darkness," "deep waters," and "unformed and void earth."

In positing these primordial substances, in overtly saying that "some elements of the universe were not created by God," Knohl sees the priestly editors as both attempting to explain the existence of evil and as placing "limits" on "God's force and authority as Creator." He argues, in fact, that this aspect of the creation myth is an overt attempt to solve the fundamental problem of evil:

The primeval elements tohu, hoshekh, and tehom all belong to the evil sphere. Hence, the Priestly claim that these entities predated God's Creation is really a claim about primordial evil. The three elements comprising the preexistant cosmic substance are the roots (put another way, the substance) of evil in the world. At the conclusion of the Priestly account of Creation, it is written: "And God saw all that He had made, and found it very good" (Gen. 1:31). All that God had made was very good. Evil was not made by God. It predated Creation in Genesis 1!

This reading presents us with a much more religiously and morally satisfying kind of theodicy. In it God, rather than explaining evil away, takes the preexistant substance of evil and shapes it into something good.

This is very similar to the way in which Process Theology in the Christian tradition looks at the relationship between God and evil. In both accounts God is somewhat limited, in that there are things beyond God's creative power. And, in both cases God actively works, in an ongoing process, to address the problem of evil. This divine activity demands our participation, calling us to co-create with God; that is, to work with God to help alleviate suffering by shaping evil into good.

An Unnatural Evil

"Natural evil" as a part of the broader problem of evil has posed a problem for theists for almost as long as there have been theists. It can be seen as suffering that is embedded in nature, not the product of any volitional action. That suffering seems to be built into the fabric of our universe poses a real problem for those who claim that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent - perhaps a greater problem than any other aspect of the broader problem of evil.

Theodicy - as we've seen before - is the attempt to logically reconcile the apparent contradiction between an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving good and perfect God, and the fact of suffering, the fact of evil. The most persuasive theodicies, in my opinion, all involve some appeal to human freedom. They argue that suffering is a necessary product of human freedom, and that such freedom is a greater good than the experience of suffering and evil is a bad. As such, the freedom that produces suffering, the freedom that produces evil, offsets the evil, the suffering, that it produces.

While I am not persuaded by such an account, I can see how many people would believe it. Those of us who believe that the freedom of action and the freedom of will that we experience is more than illusory cling to that freedom as one of our most cherished possessions. We resent any intrusion on our freedom, any manipulation, any coercion. We fight off and rebel against those who would subvert our wills. This shows that at least some of us - those of us who do not so readily exchange our freedom for the illusion of security - do in fact see freedom as a kind of supreme good.

This implicit understanding of the value of freedom is at the heart of the most persuasive theodicies. These theodicies tell us that, if, in fact, we must have either freedom or a life without suffering and evil, we would choose to live freely. My only problem with them is that they, in supposing that we must have either one or the other but not both, in fact place limitations of a supposedly unlimited God. In doing so they implicitly contradict what they overtly propose - that suffering is not incompatible with an unlimited and perfectly good God.

"Natural evil," though, is not so easily attributable to human freedom. After all, what role does our activity have in producing hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, cancer and the like? These forms of suffering, these natural instances of apparent evil, have throughout human history seemed to exist outside the realm of volitional action. This fact, however, has not stopped some from attempting to connect natural evil to human activity.

Augustine of Hippo gave the first theodicy against natural evil that I am aware of. In it he connects natural evil both to the Fall of Adam and Eve, and the justice of God. He argues that no form of natural evil - no naturally occurring instances of suffering - existed in the Garden of Eden. In Eden there could have been no hurricanes, no tornadoes, no earthquakes, no disease, no death. However, the Fall of humanity through the actions of Adam and Eve in the Garden, somehow disrupted the very fabric of the universe. When humanity fell, the whole Earth fell with us.

As such, at least indirectly, natural evil is no natural phenomenon. It is the product of the subversion of the human will, the end result of the corruption of our nature, a corruption which in turn corrupted the whole world.

I suspect that he arrives at this position through a reading of the creation myths of Ancient Israel found in Genesis - and yes, there are two distinct myths. The first myth is found in Genesis 1:1 - 2:4a, and the second myth comes immediately after. While the first myth is primarily about

a.) an ongoing creation process that constantly moves from chaos to order, and

b.) the establishment of Shabbot, the Sabbath, a sacred day of rest,

it also asserts a natural connection between humanity and the natural environment. The activity of creation ends on the sixth day, when God transfers dominion of all the Earth and everything in it to humanity. While that transfer has often been seen as almost a transfer of power - we now have dominion over nature and are justified in dominating it and using it for our purposes - it can also be seen as a transfer of responsibility. However it is seen, it connects the well-being of the world with human activity.

The second creation myth is the story of Adam and Eve, a story that also speaks to the relationship between humans and the natural environment. Genesis 2:5 reads

...when no shrub of the field was yet on earth and no grasses of the field had yet sprouted, because the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth and there was no man to till the soil...

This verse - and its surrounding context - connects all vegetative life to the existence of humans, who are charged with stewarding natural resources and tending to the well being of the ecosystem. This charge - found in both creation myths - is at the heart of Stewardship Theology, a kind of ecologically conscious approach to the Judeo-Christian tradition. This connection may also be the sort of thing that Augustine had in mind when he attempted to connect natural evil to the Fall of Adam and Eve. When the caretakers of the Earth were corrupted, the Earth they were charged to care for was also corrupted.

Augustine also had in mind the justice of God - a reflection of his androcentrism. Natural evil is, for him, only a problem because it causes humans to suffer. Yet such suffering, seen after the Fall, is for Augustine the prerogative of God. We - cosmically speaking - earned it. Perhaps it is used to drive us toward repentance, or perhaps it is used merely to balance the scales of justice. In any event, when a hurricane, a tornado, an earthquake, or cancer or some other horrible disease strikes, we cannot ask God why. We know why. Like all other forms of suffer, the why is answered with the Fall.

I have never had much use for this kind of thinking. By now my philosophic and religious objections to theodicy should be clear. In my view, they don't work, and they don't help. They are neither philosophically or emotionally satisfying. Additionally, in this particular case it has always seemed to me to be the height of arrogance to somehow connect human activity to natural disasters. How, after all, could Adam and Eve - who I don't believe were ever intended to be understood as historical figures - eating an apple cause tornadoes and the like? On a literal level it didn't make sense to me, and on a metaphorical level it didn't speak to me.

But, last night I finally watched (I can't believe I get to use this phrase) Al Gore's Academy Award nominated film An Inconvenient Truth. As I watched it, I remembered Augustine's theodicy concerning natural evil. And while I don't think Augustine was right - he was, after all, writing long before human activity could dramatically impact the natural environment - I do think that he was inadvertently on to something. That is, his notion that human activity plays a role in what we call natural evil turns out to be correct, even if not in the way that he understood it.

Natural evil is - in the way that we experience it today - not exactly natural at all, if by natural we mean something like "the opposite of contrived"; or something like "beyond the influence of volitional action." This is because human activity is drastically altering the natural environment in ways that reap a great deal of suffering.

This was not news to me when I watched the movie - in college I did an independent study comparing and contrasting Buddhist and Christian approaches to environmental ethics because I was already convinced that the ecological crisis was the most pressing moral issue facing us today. However, watching the movie brought the point home to me in a concrete way. This is not a matter of abstract thought, of moral theory. This is a concrete issue, a pressing issue, a live issue, a pertinent issue, an urgent issue. An issue that demands immediate action.

The good news is that we already have concrete proof that humans cannot only negatively impact the natural environment, but can also undo our own damage. Of all the various ecological crises noted by the environmental movement that began in the 1960s, global warming is the only one that is still trending negative. So many "unsolvable" problems have already either been solved, or are at least trending toward a solution.

We now have to - simply have to - use our collective political wills to enact changes that will bring the production and release of greenhouse gasses under control. For more information, visit www.climatecrisis.net and stopglobalwarming.org

Looking for God in the Shadow of Auschwitz

I don't have much time or energy to write right now, but after my afternoon reading I simply had to post something. There have been two basic themes in my reading and writing for the last month or so: the problem of pain, and Judaism. While I am not Jewish I must say that I have from time to time thought about converting to Judaism. Their strict monotheism appeals to the part of me that, while still affirming that Jesus is the Christ, the anointed of God who reveals the nature of God, rejects the Trinity, and as such the divinity of Christ.

I have also long been fascinated with Jewish culture, with the sense of identity that transcends even faith and race. I admire the most observant Jews, even if I find them often too strict or too literal, for seeking to integrate their faith into their lives to the point where the two form a seamless garment. And, as a vegetarian for moral and even theological reasons, I admire kosher households, whose faith dictates diet.

But what impresses me most about the Jewish people as a people is their ability to survive the kinds of dehumanizing systematic oppression which would have robbed me long ago of both my faith and my will to live. Both of those - faith and the will to breath in and out each moment - are too often fleeting for me. I have long struggled with a disease (in the most literal sense of the word) which I have not overtly written about here. I have no intention of wallowing in the filth and pity of that disease now, spinning some story for sympathy. Suffice it to say, as someone too easily discouraged in my own life, I have only respect for those who truly suffer and yet retain their faith, their hope, and yes, their love.

When I read I usually read at least two books at the same time: one a rigorous, challenging academic work, the other (at least in terms of literary style, if not always in terms of content) a "lighter" work. I'm still slowly picking my way through Heschel's philosophy of Judaism, God in Search of Man, which I may still be reading whenever I finally start taking classes again. The other book I'm reading at the moment is Elie Wiesel's famous memoir Night, the story of his experiences in a concentration camp. Put simply, this book is slowly ripping my soul out.

When I was 14 or 15 my family went to Washington, D.C. for Spring Break. While we were there I insisted on visiting the then brand new United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. There, for the first time, I stared at images of pure evil, unable to deny their place in history. I saw pictures of children my age, emaciated and disfigured. I read stories of unspeakable brutality, and stories of despicable complicity. I learned of the silence of a world that did not want to admit that this could happen, that a whole people could be exterminated, that children could be fed to the fires.

Now, 13 or so years later, I am reading the words, the memories, of one who survived. Once again, the problem of pain, the problem of evil, the problem of suffering is made too concrete. Yes it is an interesting philosophic and theological problem. But, as I've said before, the problem is not really one of reconciling our concepts of God to a world which includes suffering. The problem, ultimately, is that we experience suffering at all. And such suffering that the very fiber of our being protests, rages against it.

Francois Mauriac's foreword to the book ends with a meditation on the relationship between faith and such suffering. After relaying the story of how he met Wiesel and heard his story, the story that he would eventually help publish, he writes:

And I, who believe that God is love, what answer was there to give my young interlocutor whose dark eyes still held the reflection of the angelic sadness that had appeared one day on the face of a hanged child? What did I say to him> Did I perhaps speak to him of that other Jew, this crucified brother who perhaps resembled him and whose cross conquered the world? Did I explain to him that what had been a stumbling block for his faith had become a cornerstone for mine? And that the connection between the cross and human suffering remains, in my view, the key to the unfathomable mystery in the faith of his childhood was lost? And yet, Zion has risen up again out of the crematoria and slaughterhouses. The Jewish nation has been resurrected from among its thousands of dead. It is they who have given it new life. We do not know the worth of one single drop of blood, one single tear. All is grace. If the Almighty is the Almighty, the last word for each of us belongs to Him. That is what I should have said to the Jewish child. But all I could do was embrace him and weep.

"All I could do was embrace him and weep." That is the only truly human response to such overwhelming suffering. Words of encouragement, whether the come from our theologies or our psychologies or our philosophies of life, no matter how deep they may appear on paper or in the ears of those who have not just lost everything they've ever had, even their very selves, seem in the face of such suffering empty, hollow and weak. There is a reason why Rachel, while weeping for her children, refused to be comforted.

The cross tells us that sometimes the only way through pain is to embrace pain, to share pain, to take on pain. And the only way to comfort this wounded Jewish child, whose soul and whose God died on the same day, at the same moment, might be to enter into that moment, to share that moment, and to risk the death of one's own soul, one's own God.

But the foreword, however gripping, however devastating, should be read as a warning. It, after all, comes from the other side of the pain, a product of time, of space, of physical, psychological and especially spiritual difference. The book itself is raw emotion, a challenge to the God who allowed such pain. There are many passages which confront the reader with the death of faith, the death of the soul, and the death of God. There are many passages which, if you open yourself up to them, will force you to redefine your faith in light of them, to account for this story of unrestrained evil and a complicit, silent world.

Here is the last story I read today before I simply had to stop, to process, to write:

Akiba Drumer has left us, a victim of the selection. Lately he had been wandering among us, his eyes glazed, telling everyone how weak he was: "I can't go on... It's over..." We tried to raise his spirits, but he wouldn't listen to anything we said. He just kept repeating that it was all over for him, that he could no longer fight, he had no more strength, no more faith. His eyes would suddenly go blank, leaving two gaping wounds, two wells of terror.

He was not alone in having lost his faith during those days of selection. I knew a rabbi, from a small town in Poland. He was old and bent, his lips constantly trembling. He was always praying, in the block, at work, in the ranks. He recited entire pages from the Talmud, arguing with himself, asking and answering himself endless questions. One day he said to me:

"It is over. God is no longer with us."

And as though he regretted having uttered such words so coldly, so dryly, he added in his broken voice, "I know. No one has the right to say things like that. I know that very well. Man is too insignificant, too limited, to even try to comprehend God's mysterious ways. But what can someone like myself do? I'm neither a sage nor a just man. I am not a saint. I'm a simple creature of flesh and bone. I suffer hell in my soul and my flesh. I also have eyes and I see what is being done here. Where is God's mercy? Where's God? How can I believe, how can anyone believe in this God of Mercy?

Poor Akiba Drumer, if only he could have kept his faith in God, if only he could have considered his suffering a divine test, he would not have been swept away by the selection. But as soon as he felt the first chinks in his faith, he lost all incentive to fight and opened the door to death.

When the selection came, he was doomed from the start, offering his neck to the executioner, as it were. All he asked of us was:

"In three days, I'll be gone... Say Kaddish for me."

We promised: in three days, when we would see the smoke rising from the chimney, we would think of him. We would gather ten men and hold a special service. All his friends would say Kaddish.

Then he left, in the direction of the hospital. His step was almost steady, and he never looked back. An ambulance was waiting to take him to Birkenau.

There followed terrible days. We received more blows than food. The work was crushing. And three days after he left, we forgot to say Kaddish.

In the face of this story, and the thousands of other stories just like it, we must ask with the rabbi whose faith and God deserted him, "Where is God's mercy? Where's God? How can I believe, how can anyone believe in this God of Mercy?"

Where is God, in the shadow of Auschwitz? Such questions have no answers; at least no rational answers. They are existential questions every bit as powerful as the existential questions which lead us to God, to faith, to religion. They are questions which we must embrace, questions which we must take into our very selves, questions which we must make a part of us until they no longer terrify us. Faith can survive doubt only if faith embraces doubt rather than illusion.

But at the moment I am in a strange place. My son is next to me, exploring ever corner of my basement office, his joyous music filling the air as the childish voice of Brian Wilson asks us about our favorite vegetable. Elie Wiesel's Night is in front of me, with stories of parents and children with dreams similar to mine, whose hopes were shattered by pure evil. My son holds a toy horse and looks at it, meditating for a moment on just what he wants to do with as Brian Wilson serenades us with pieces of children's music mixed into his pop overtures from Smile. And I want to believe that the world is safe, that the world is good, and that God is looking out for me as I look out for my son. All the while I remember the shattered faiths of people more devout than I have ever been or ever will be, just before their bodies are tossed into the flames which have already consumed their children. And my son is blissfully unaware of the war in my soul as I try to reconcile my own faith to a world with such horrors in it.

Perhaps this is why even Jesus cried out from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!?" But I am not Jesus, nor am I Elie Wiesel, and my God has nor forsaken me yet. My son grabs my leg as Brian Wilson moves into "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow," originally titled "Fire," saying "Uh oh!"

Speaking of Suffering

One of my closest friends is a United Methodist minister named Aaron. I met him while he was a graduate student studying Medieval literature at the University of Kentucky, living an a rat-hole apartment behind my home church in Lexington. That stately building, home to "First Church," one of the oldest and most prestigious congregations in the Kentucky Conference, stood in such contrast to the humble neighborhood surrounding it. The wealthy suburbanites who drove across town to fill its still-proud pews had no points of intersection with the desperate poverty that surrounds every downtown church since white-flight bled our cities dry.

When I met Aaron he looked homeless. Sporting an old Russian beard (like a ZZ Top beard, only it hadn't yet turned white) adorned with denim and flanel, he cared not one whit for his appearance. His stark looks complimented his uncompromising personality. He had fire, both personally and intellectually. He helped me learn to love the quirks of the English language, even before he helped me learn to more deeply love the Lord, and the Word.

He was quite possibly the most unlikely member of our church, having ventured in one Sunday shortly after he'd had a conversion experience. But he quickly made himself indisposable, helping out with the Youth Group and even going on a mission trip to Estonia (he has a love of all things Eastern European, especially if they involve language or culture). As he grew in his faith, and as his involvement with the church expanded, he began to realize a calling to pastoral ministry, dropped out of his PhD program, and entered seminary.

He is the rare minister who defies all labels, a theological and political conservative who often shares the social concerns of liberals. He has no trouble breaking from the party line, if he will even acknowledge that such a line exists. I could spend thousands of words praising him for the depth of his faith and his service, not to mention the compassion with which he reaches out to the least and the lost, including the teenage Strappy, wandering in his own wilderness.

A couple of years ago Aaron's wife was diagnosed with cancer. Recently he started a blog, Grace Under Pressure, to help share the spiritual journey of fighting that cancer, and the bitterness and discouragement which so often accompanies such a fight. His most recent post is one of the most powerful meditations on suffering I've ever read. Since we've been discussing theodicies here, I thought that some of you should check out what Aaron has to say. For him, as for us sometimes, suffering is not some abstract subject, but simply a fact of life, to be overcome by the grace of the God who turns bad into good.

"Mincemeat"

Some theodicies, rather than focusing on the nature of God or the nature of the world - and as such arguing that suffering is a necessary consequence of the interaction between those natures - focus instead on the nature of suffering itself. More pastoral in tone, these theodicies seek to find some redeeming good in suffering. While they may not outright say that suffering is better than not suffering, they do at least say that suffering is not unambiguously bad.

It seems to me that while these may be the least philosophically powerful theodicies, if their tone is carefully monitored they may be the ones which come closest to solving the problem of pain. That is, if they are truly and sensitively pastoral in tone, they can do what any Christian or even human approach to the problem of pain must do: help alleviate suffering.

One of my favorite bands as an evangelical Christian teenager was a group called Luxury. Listening back to them now, I can see them as - in their first incarnation - a kind of sillier Radiohead. They had a limited appeal, and so traveled across the country from dump to dive, in a van, unable to afford the luxuries that they so wittily mocked in "rock stars."

In the summer of either 1995 or 1996, I can't remember, on the road after playing at a Christian rock festival, they flipped their van. Each member of the group suffered many serious injuries, including broken backs, broken necks, and extreme blood loss. They were in grave condition, but all four of them eventually survived.

In 1999, to everyone's surprise, they released their third album. Scarred physically and emotionally from their collective near-death experience, this self-titled album had the lyrical depth which was so painfully absent from their first two effort. Their previous albums were witty and clever, sure, but juvenile and immature - which in rock isn't always a bad thing. But this third album, emerging from the ashes of the wreck which wracked their bodies and souls with pain, was a true work of art.

The last song on the album, "To You Who Gave Me Hope and Were My Light," most overtly deals with the emotional and physical residue of the wreck. The lyrics read:

I would that I were made new
These scars on my belly undo
And the blood that I have in my veins
Could be mine and not stranger unnamed

'Cos I once was perfect as you
Pink-skinned and full flaming youth
as the wind on a terrible sea
as a pillar of ivory

With six angels at my back
Two to sing
Two to pray
Two to bear my soul away

I would that I were made new
I would that I were made new
These scars on my belly undo
I would that I were made new

Hearing that song for the first time, I realized how pain can make one a little deeper, a little wiser. This band that had once nearly revered their own youth, and the perceived immortality which accompanied it, could now write a song that almost laments the passing of that youth. Time is precious, life is precious. Neither are to be wasted or taken for granted.

Just before noon today I headed out to pick Adam up from preschool. On the way out the door I grabbed this cd and stuck it in the car. Listening to it on the other side of my own life-changing wreck, I could see that while the final song may have been most overtly about the wreck, the entire album was colored by that innocence shattering experience.

I started this blog, though I didn't admit it at the time, as a kind of self-therapy. Having just resigned my pastorate, and with it having given up my life-long dream of being a United Methodist minister, I had a great deal to process. While I voluntarily left ministry, the circumstances surrounding the loss of my vocation were anything but voluntary. I was stuck between several wills, nearly unable to insert my own will into the conversation. My congregation was rejecting me and my ministry, rendering me unable to do my job. My wife was miserable both with that church, and with her broader role as a preacher's wife. I was just trying to hang on to my dignity and my sense of self-identity.

On the way to pick Adam up from preschool, for perhaps the first time, I really listened to the song "Mincemeat." Sure, I'd heard the song before, in the sense that I had been by the speakers when it was playing, having the sounds emitted from those speakers resonate in my ear-drums, and go through the usual process of being processed and interpreted in my brain. I even thought that I liked the song. I, for instanced, loved the interplay between the percussive guitar part and the string quartet - a first for Luxury. I was most impressed with the combination of acoustic and digital percussion, giving what began as a sparse bit of emo-rock a nearly symphonic feel as it raced toward the climactic crescendo. But I'd never really listen to it.

When you listen intently, intentionally, you are able to hear the things that you didn't expect to hear. You are able to be surprised, and even transformed. You are willing to consider a new perspective. Having heard the song without really listening to it, I was unable, until today, to hear in it the voice I never expected to hear. I was never able to hear it as a prayer, uttered in a moment of desperation, from someone struggling with the same sort of brokenness I have struggled with since my pastoral career ended.

So you thought
I looked a little unhealthy
A little weak in the knees
Well, why not?
Since you made mincemeat out of me

I,
I thought I knew you
You were clean and cold
You did just what you were told

I,
I thought I made you
Easy to behold
Easy to let go

Then you speak to me
That voice that made the seas
Those words never heard
That light never seen

All the times I was in the same room as this song, thinking that I understood it, that I liked it, it somehow escaped me that the song was directed at the God who had literally reduced the author's body to mincemeat. But while there is some bitterness hear, ultimately the voice of this prayer is not the voice of one who has rejected God. It is, instead, the voice of one who has come to understand that God transcends all of our thoughts about God.

We are the authors of theology, of concepts of God. But if there is truly a God, while we might craft a description of that God (a description which is doomed to be inaccurate and almost idolatrous) it is God who is continually making us, rather than the other way around.

The author/s here looks back to his childish understand of the God that he created in his own mind, and contrasts it with the incomprehensible majesty of the voice which made the seas. In that contrast, the suffering for which he/they blamed begins to make sense. The brokenness which followed that hellish moment becomes the lens through which God can be more clearly seen.

Finally listening to this song, hearing what I didn't expect to hear, was very inconvenient for me. I was driving, on my way to see the people who care for my son four mornings a week. I want them, for some strange reason, to like me, to admire me. I almost need them to approve of the job I've done so far in raising him. But driving there, with this song filling my car, the pure sound of it pushing down the walls that I construct to protect my precious bitterness and resentment like the trumpet blasts which felled the mythic walls of Jericho, tears welled in my eyes. I could no longer deny how broken I am. How directionless I've been since I left ministry.

As I pulled into the preschool parking lot, forcing back the tears which almost never come, I must have looked like a mess. And then, as quickly as that vulnerable moment arose, it subsided. I remember who I was, and where I was. I remembered that I need to pretend to have it all together. I remembered that adult life consists primarily of bluffing. And so I bluffed a well adjusted adult, pretending to be whole, all the while knowing just how broken I've been since I laid aside my vocational dreams.

Under my breath I muttered the closest thing to a real prayer I've been able to come up with in a long time: Fuck you! I admitted what I've been keeping to myself the whole time. I blame God for the state I'm in - a state which I don't often even admit to myself. But being able to admit that blame is perhaps the first step to recovery. Being able to - even if it is ultimately only directing curses to a steering wheel - admit how much I hate God, how much I blame God for the direction of my life, may be the beginning of being able to authentically worship God again. And they may be the beginning of reclaiming my life.

Teilhard's Limitation on Omnipotence

In my last two original posts I discussed part of the theology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and a theodicy that limits God's powers while still holding to the description of God as omniscient and omnipotent. As luck, or fate, or providence would have it, the very next essay I read by Teilhard concerns something very much like that theodicy advanced by Swinburne discussed in my last original post.

Like the essay discussed here, today's essay, "Note on the Modes of Divine Action in the Universe," was written in January of 1920, but not published in Teilhard's lifetime. It is divided into two related sections, the first concerning how we experience the activity of God in the universe, and the second concerning, as Teilhard puts it, "the true extension (in the logical sense) of his [God's] omnipotence."

Teilhard, as both a scientist and a theologian, is concerned with balancing a semi-traditional view of God's activity in the world (especially a notion of God as a First Cause, the Aristotelian Prime Mover so influential on the scholastics which shaped the Catholic theology that Teilhard responds to) with the understandings of the science of his day. Perhaps his most controversial and influential work concerned the theological implications of Darwinian evolution. His allegiance to evolution by natural selection is clear here.

He immediately rejects a notion of God as "[a] dominant causality among [italics his] the other causalities," as "a force interpolated into the series of experiential forces." To speak of God's activity is not the same as to speak of any natural activity. To speak of God's influence is not the same as to speak of the influence of the wind, or of the sun, or even of human or animal activity; nor is it the same as to speak of the influence of natural forces such as gravity, or natural laws such as inertia. God, as the First Cause, is not to Teilhard one of many causes. God is categorically different than any other cause, and God's activity is categorically different than any other activity.

Having established what God's activity is not, Teilhard then turns to the question of what God's activity is. He sees God's activity in two ways. "A first, and peculiarly divine, way by which the First Cause can affect lower natures consists in its ability to act simultaneously on their whole body [italics his]." That is, viewing the world as a system, God is outside the system, working on the entire system simultaneously. Because God is outside the system, and because God works on everything in the system simultaneously, God's activity is, from inside the system, undetectable.

But, just as the theistic tradition balances a view of God out there with a view of God in here, and just as Christianity attempts to juxtapose an external Creator God with the incarnation, for Teilhard God's activity is not just that of an agent outside the system working on the system as a whole. As such, he says, "in addition to the faculty of acting upon the whole at once [italic his], the First Cause must also be able to make itself felt at the core of each element in the world individually." God, then, is not only immanent, God is also transcendent. God not only works on the entire system from the outside, but on each individual entity within the system, taking "a hold on their innermost life."

But the transcendant activity of God is just, to us, as undetectable as the immanent activity of God. "By reason of its extreme interiority it becomes inapprehensible." God activity, then, can never really be detected by humans. Either it is far too external, or far too internal. Either it works from outside the system on the system as a whole, or it works deeply inside of each of us, so internal to us that it is essentially a part of us, God inside us. "Thus, sometimes by excess of extension [italics his], sometimes by excess of depth [italics his], the point at which the divine force is applied is essentially extra-phenomenal."

As such, Teilhard, the scientist and theologian, says with confidence

[W]e shall never be enabled scientifically to see God, because there will never be any discontinuity between the divine operation and the physical and physiological laws which are science's sole concern. Since the chains of antecedents are never broken (but simply bent or extended) by divine action, an analytical observation of phenomena is powerless to enable us to attain God, even as Prime Mover. We shall never escape scientifically from the circle of natural explanations. This is something which we shall simply have to accept.

While this may at first seem like a more modern deism, like a precursor to the "Natural Religion" of the Enlightenment resurrected as the "New Christianity" of John Shelby Spong, there are a few of important points of deviation between Teilhard's view of God here and the "Watchmaker God" of deism. First, while Teilhard does posit a Creator God, outside the natural order, his God is also, as noted above, deeply inside the created order, working within each created thing. Second, while both views of God see God's activity as indistinguishable from nature, the deistic God created once upon a time, while Teilhard's God is constantly creating. This is a natural extension of his acceptance of evolution. Creation was not some event in the past, finished and done. Rather, the universe and all that is in it is constantly being created anew.

But perhaps the most important difference between Teilhard's theology and deism, at least as far as it relates to the life of faith, is found in his approach to miracles. While, again, both deism and Teilhard find God's activity so connected to nature that one cannot distinguish between the two, Teilhard, unlike the deists, does not deny accounts of the miraculous. God does not, to be sure, break the laws of nature, which Teilhard says are the sole concern of science. But God does bend them. Miracles, then, are "vital forces that have been remarkably augmented in their own direction [italics his]." Stories of miracles, then, even if the miracles involved are "found to be extensions of biology," are important both for apologetics (defense of the faith) and for the joy they bring to the religious life.

The second section of Teilhard's essay takes this view of the nature and activity of God, and uses it to apply logical limits on the omnipotence of God. To open this section Teilhard takes on one of the assumptions of the Scholastics: that God creates or can create individual beings, "from scratch," logically speaking "completely alone" with the possibility of being "completely sanctified" like Adam before the fall. Teilhard says that "[t]he question of becoming and of the whole do not exist for such thinkers," who consider the universe and everything in it "in isolation and fully formed."

But Teilhard, as I noted in an earlier post, sees the world as an interconnected and interdependent organic whole, which is constantly being created. As such, "God's power has not been so free a field of action as we assume." There are certain limits on God's creative power, by virtue of the nature of the universe which God is creating. "[I]t is always obliged, in the course of its creative effort, to pass through a whole series of intermediaries and to overcome a whole succession of inevitable risks." This is because, as Teilhard noted earlier in the essay, of the way in which God has chosen to create/ "Properly speaking," he says, "God does not make [italics his]: He makes things make themselves."

Creation, then, is not only an ongoing process, it is also a cooperative process, involving the mingling of all of the wills in the universe, subordinated to but not silenced by the will of the God who is constantly creating in conjunction with those wills that have been willed to create. This places limits on the creative power of God, which is because of this "unable to act in discontinuity with individual natures or out of harmony with the advance of the whole."

This limitation leads Teilhard to note two more limitations, which arise from this one. The first emerging limitation has to do with the interconnected and interdependent nature of the universe, a universe that God must work with even as God continually creates. No individual entity in this organically whole universe can exist in isolation - logically speaking, Teilhard reserve such a solitary nature for God alone, "Ens a se (Being which exists only in itself)." Everything else, the great sea of beings in the process of becoming, "is essentially multitude - multitude organized in itself, and multitude organizing around itself." The limit this places on God, then, is that God cannot create a single, solitary individual. God cannot create only one thing, by itself. "If God... is to make a soul [italics his]" God must "create a world."

This limitation, the inability of God to create an individualized instance of being in isolation from other beings, leads to the second limitation which Teilhard derives from the way in which God chooses to create, a limitation which he explicitly connects to the problem of evil, and which as such serves as a theodicy. Because God creates in cooperation with created wills, and because those wills are not isolated from each other, God cannot create anything without that creation necessarily involving "a struggle with some evil."

This fact seems obvious to Teilhard, who calls the notion of a God who is "able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers - a world in which there is no damage, no breakage" a "conceptual fantasy." But, alas, he does not tell us why evil is necessary. By noting this I am not asking for the usual theodicy, which tells us that evil serves some necessary purpose and so is really not evil at all, at least in a sense which would make it incompatible with the will of a good God. This is because, as Teilhard presents it, evil is not necessary morally or spiritually, but rather, logically. Evil, in his presentation, is the inevitable consequence of God's creating anything, by virtue of the above limitations on God's created powers.

And this is where I begin to leave him. He, while placing some limitations on God's creative powers, still describes God as being by nature omnipotent, all powerful. As such, he has to hold that the limitations placed on God's creative powers are logical limitations, akin to the Scholastic limitation of God being unable to make something which contradicts its own existence. But, while I see Teilhard's description of the created order as very much like how the created order actually is (we do, in fact, exist in an interconnected and interdependent world, which is, in fact, being constantly and progressively made); it is not clear to me that because the world exists in this way that this is the only logical possibility.

While it is true that a world without pain, without suffering, without moral and natural evil, is in fact a conceptual fantasy; does it follow from that that a perfect God, a God imbued with all of the powers given to God by the traditional theism, could not have made such a world?

Teilhard is skating a fine line between process theology, which like Teilhard's theology sees a world being progressively made by a God whose creative powers are somewhat limited, and traditional theism. In this delicate balancing act he describes the God of process theology in the terms of theism, arguing that the limitations on the power of God are merely logical ones which in no way detract from God's omnipotence.

Whether or not he ultimately succeeds in doing this, he has correctly noted that the conceptual fantasy of a perfect world without any struggle or pain, does nothing "to solve the problem of evil." This is because, ultimately, the problem of evil is an existential fact. Pain and suffering are not helped by envisioning a hypothetical world in which they do not exist. As such, when we craft our theologies, we should be mindful of the fact of suffering.

Theology - human concepts of God which help explain the divine-human encounter - is not a purely rational exercise. Our concepts of God do not come just from observing the world and seeing that some being, which we call "God," is necessary for explaining the world. Sure, some, like Swinburne, get a great deal of mileage from the argument that God is the hypothesis which best explains all that is. But ultimately, if God is an experiential reality, God is certainly not reducible to an operational hypothesis which explains a set of data.

Our concepts of God, ultimately, are our attempts to rationally explain the phenomena of "religious experience" - those times when, as Borg says, the distance between the secular and the sacred grows "thin." God, then, is not just some sort of metaphysical explanation used to makes sense of the physical order. God is instead something which we experience as a presence which helps. Whether that experiential presence can be best described in theistic terms as being omnipotent, omniscient and the like; or, instead, described in the more limited terms given by Teilhard or the still more limited terms of process theology; is less important than whether or not the experience of the God who lies beyond all possible descriptions helps with the living of our lives.

This does not mean that we should abandon our theologies, our attempts to rationally describe a God who conceptually helps make sense of what we see in the universe. But it does mean that we should not get so attached to our concepts of God that we cling to them in the face of the evidence that the physical realm gives us. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin has here, as elsewhere, crafted a vision of God which, while still connected to his Catholic tradition, does not deny the vision of the world provided to him by the science of his day.

If evolution is a fact, the creation must be ongoing, whether or not that is the only logical or conceptual possibility. If creation is ongoing, then God's will must cooperate with the multitude of wills in the evolving universe, whether or not that is the only logically or conceptually possible world. As such, God is, in fact, limited, whether or not we can reasonably conceive of an unlimited God. And a God whose creative powers are limited, but whose creation is progressive and ongoing, and whose concern is with all creatures, is much more useful in solving the problem of evil than a "perfect" God who allows suffering anyway.

The Problem With Pain is That There is Pain (The Koan of Faith and Suffering)

The problem of pain, or evil, or suffering (depending on who is presenting the problem and how they phrase it - it is all the same problem) has long plagued theists. It can basically be rendered thus:

These premises cannot all be true:

I. There is a being, called God, who is:

1. omnipotent (all powerful, able to do anything)
2. omniscient (all seeing, all knowing, able to see and to know, to perceive anything), and
3. benevolent (all loving, compassionate, willing the best for everything).

II. There is pain, or evil, or suffering in the world.

This problem is presented as a logical problem, a rational problem. A rational or logical criticism of the forms of theism which, in the face of suffering, in the face of pain, in the face of evil, still assert that there is a God who is unlimited and unchallenged in knowledge and power, and who wills the best for the created order.

In the face of such a presentation, theists fight a logical, rational problem with cold logic, pure reason. They craft theodicies, rational, logical, philosophic attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable. These theodicies, these attempts to explain how God can know everything, do anything, and love unconditionally while still permitting if not outright mandating pain, suffering and evil. This charge, that either God does not exist at all, or is not omniscient and/or omnipotent, or that God is not benevolent in any way that we can relate to benevolence, is difficult to get around.

After all, if God is, in fact, all knowing, then nothing escapes God's attention. If God is all powerful, then nothing is beyond the limits of God's ability to act. As such, if God is both omniscient and omnipotent, then God's will would be, as Augustine and later Calvin assert, irresistible. Nothing could happen outside of the will of God. As such, if the traditional theist description of God's abilities is correct, then God is ultimately responsible for pain, suffering, evil. God must, in some way, will evil, which would keep God from being perfectly good or benevolent.

There have been many good theodicies advanced through the years, starting with the first theists. Some more recent ones, like those advanced by Richard Swinburne, the Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford and author of, among other books, Is There a God?, help shift the ground of the problem a little bit. Swinburne holds to a theistic description of God, while eating away bit by bit at what is generally meant by words like "omnipotent" and "omniscient."

Swinburne stands with the vast majority of Christian history in saying that God's omnipotence should not be in question just because God cannot, for instance, do contradictory things like "make a universe exist and not exist at the same time, make 2 + 2 to equal 5, make a shape square and round at the same time, or change the past." This is not, Swinburne argues, "because God is weak, but because the words - for example, 'make a shape square and round at the same time' - do not describe anything which makes sense." As such, Swinburne, standing well within the Christian and theistic tradition, argues, God can simultaneously be omnipotent and yet still be unable to do certain things, because those things are contradictory and are not even theoretically possible.

Where Swinburne begins to deviate from Christian theological tradition, and get particularly interesting, is when he applies that same mode of limiting God while still affirming God's fundamentally unlimited nature, to the question of omniscience:

Just as God cannot be required to do what is logically impossible to do, so God cannot be required to know what is logically impossible to know. It seems to me that it is logically impossible to know (without the possibility of mistake) what someone will do freely tomorrow. If I am really free to choose tomorrow whether I will go to London or stay at home, then if anyone today has some belief about what I will do (e.g. that I will go to London), I have it in my power tomorrow to make that belief false (e.g. by staying at home). So no one (not even God) can know today (without the possibility of mistake) what I will choose to do tomorrow.

This sets up what has often been called the "Free Will" theodicy. That is, much pain in the world is caused by human freedom, and it is logically impossible that even God should be able to predict the result of human freedom or to limit human freedom while simultaneously willing humans to be free. This theodicy rests on the assumption that:

a. human beings, and perhaps other creatures (though that is not necessary), are, in fact, free agents, and

b. human freedom (and free will in general) is a good which outweighs the pain which results from it.

It is not my purpose here to say whether or not this theodicy succeeds. That is ultimately a decision for each person to make for themselves. Free will may appear to be a self-evident good, but how willing are humans to limit their own freedom in order to obtain some measure of limited security in times of trouble? If freedom were obviously a good so great that it outweighs pain and suffering, then we would not be so willing to hand over civil liberties to our militant government in the wake of terrorist attacks.

My purpose here is to state that, whether or not any theodicy works, it answers the wrong question. While pain, suffering and evil are presented to theists as logical, rational, theoretical problems, the real problem which arises from pain, suffering and evil is a very concrete existential one. The real problem with pain, suffering and evil is one which cannot be addressed by any theodicy. The real problem is that we experience suffering.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've been reading through Jacques Maritain's 1942 lecture to the Aristotelean Society of Marquette University, later published as Saint Thomas and the Problem of Evil. When I first read it I was stunned by the clear thinking which Aquinas and Maritain brought to this great theological/philosophic riddle. But, of course, when I first read it I was a 19 year old boy, clinging to a way of experiencing God which has long since stopped working for me. Reading it again, these eight years later, I expected to be almost offended by such a rigid and dogmatic approach to a deeply human problem. After all, that is the nature of theodicies.

Maritain begins his lecture with some metaphysical notes, relaying that Thomas borrowed from Augustine the notion that "evil is neither an essence nor a nature nor a form nor an act of being - evil is an absence of being; it is not a mere negation, but a privation: the privation of the good that should be in a thing."

This is a way of saying that while evil does exist in things, it does not have an independent existence, and so does not need to have been created, and as such does not need to have been created by God, who created all that is. Of course, while this may or may not work on paper, it would be cold comfort to anyone who reaches out to God for help removing the evil which exists in them, creating so much suffering as it robs them of their very being.

Maritain's lecture is filled with many other rational ways of arguing that evil ultimately represents a kind of good, the best possible arrangement of things. He employs both the "Free Will" theodicy and the Medieval hierarchy of goods ("Without fallible freedom" [note: that is, freedom with the possibility of error, of sin] "there can be no created freedom; without created freedom there can be no love in mutual friendship between God and creature; without love in mutual friendship between God and creature, there can be no supernatural transformation of the creature into God, no entering of the creature into the joy of his Lord. Sin, - evil, - is the price of glory.") to argue that the permitted bad in the world leads to a good even greater than the good of a world without anything bad.

But even he and his beloved St. Thomas are aware of the pastoral limitations of this. He places Thomas as diametrically opposed to Leibnitz, anticipating the objections that some readers will have to the apparent callousness of all theodicies:

In the optimism of Leibnitz we are bound to see a rationalistic deterioration of Christian truths: the author of the Theodicy justifies God as Job's friends did, and the Scriptures warn us that God holds such advocates in horror.

A philosopher like Leibnitz adopts the truths contained in the text from St. Thomas... in a merely philosophical sense, and as a satisfactory answer given by pure philosophy; this philosopher, then, will tell us it is a good thing for a mother to bewail the death of her child, because the machine of the world required it in order to be more perfect.

That is exactly what I hear every time I read a theodicy. In reconciling the evil, the pain, the suffering in the world to the perfect goodness of God, theodicies cannot help but say that which is obviously false (that there is, in fact, no suffering) or that which, worse, is patently absurd (that bad is really good, if you understand it properly).

This is what I felt as I read the recent posts by JE Holman and Matthew at Debunking Christianity. They both wrestle with the existential crisis of being in some way unable to believe what they wish they could believe. Making the inner turmoil of their painful divorce from faith public, rather than being greeting with the compassion that any decent human being would feel for someone who has suffered so, they were greeted with the cold, rational theodicy of Scholastic and even Modern Christian theology. Many of the Christians who commented on their posts did not follow the example of Christ and enter into their suffering. Instead they followed the example of far too many theistic philosophers, and stood outside of their suffering, looking down with cold, rational judgment, trying to explain how their experiences could not have really been as they experienced them.

Perhaps we look at the Problem of Pain all wrong. Perhaps, instead of treating it like a logical puzzle to be solved with the "right" rational answer, we should treat it more like a koan, a mystery to be lived with and meditated upon existentially rather than rationally. Such a treatment would not, of course, persuade the many atheists, agnostics and skeptics who see Christianity in particular and theism in general as being unable to come up with a satisfactory answer to their very rational question. But it would be a more human, compassionate, and ultimately Christian response to a problem which is less rational and more existential.

Ultimately, if you ask someone who is suffering, the problem of pain is that we feel pain, the problem of suffering is that we suffer, the problem of evil is that there is, in fact, evil all around us and inside us. The answer, then, is not to say that down is up and bad is good. The answer is, instead, to address the problem, not by answering it, but by working to solve it. To end suffering. Of course that is idealistic and impossible. But if we all vow to work to alleviate suffering, taking perhaps a kind of Christian version of the Bodhisattva vow, we could at the very least make the world a much better place to live in.