The following is an excerpt of a paper I recently wrote on "modern" and "postmodern" views of truth... my basic thesis is that we must properly differentiate between "objective" truth and "absolute" truth if we are to understand the postmodern critique of modern claims to truth and, indeed, further develop our understanding of truth as a whole (especially with regard to faith in God, etc.). Hope you enjoy it!
In his book Overcoming Ontotheology Merold Westphal describes the process by which philosophy has placed faith “in the human capacity to achieve… Truth (i.e. absolute truth).” The "unaided intellect" described in Plato's Phaedo eventually morphs into the rationalist and empiricist views of Descartes and Locke, respectively. Like the Christian apologists who oppose postmodernism, these philosophers did not claim to have absolute knowledge of all Truth. But, they did believe some absolute knowledge was possible (through their own particular system, of course), and whenever they discovered such knowledge, they claimed to know the Truth. For those who hold to the view that the “ideals of correspondence” can be achieved, explains Westphal, “Not even God could know it any better.”
There are good reasons why we should be suspicious of such claims to absolute truth. While we can indeed claim to have knowledge of objective truth, we cannot claim to have knowledge of absolute truth. They are not the same. Drawing on Kant, Westphal reminds us that humans are stuck in time and space, which means our access to the absolute is automatically limited. Additionally, it seems obvious that we will never have the mind of God (unless one believes that we will eventually become God). But, the objector responds, moderns do not claim to know everything, as God does, but simply that what they do know, they know both objectively and absolutely. Postmodernism, however, rejects the claim to absolute knowledge, since to know a thing absolutely would require knowing every aspect of that thing.
Human beings do not have the rational capacity to know every aspect of anything. This has long been a central theme within philosophy, from Hume to Kant to Kierkegaard to Heidegger and now in the postmoderns. Whereas Hegel and the idealists posited achieving knowledge of the absolute through the process of rational thought, and the empiricists asserted that whatever truth can be discovered is only found by examining the sensible world, the philosophies that birthed postmodernism examined both projects and found them wanting.
Let's use the apparently simple example of "grass being green." We quickly realize that what seems absolutely true is, in fact, far from absolute. Is grass green? That depends, first, on whether it is living or dead grass. But aside from this somewhat facetious statement, we now understand, from the study of optics, that what we call "green" is really the result of certain wavelengths of light being reflected to our eyes by the material we call "grass." The reflected wavelengths are what we perceive as the color "green." So, is grass really green? If this simple question becomes so complex, how can we expect anything less from the metaphysical?
The further we develop our science, our technology, and our rational formulae, the more we realize how finite and unknowledgeable we really are. The closer we get to what seems like an absolute truth, the farther that truth seems to slip away from us. It is like the end of the rainbow that is always beyond our field of vision, or the magnet with an opposite charge that darts away from our hand just as we approach and try and grab it. The hubris of humanity is that we are forever assuming that we are closer now to the absolute than we were prior to our latest discovery. But how does one "get closer" to the infinite?
But surely the laws of reason are absolute truths; inescapable facts, like the law of gravity. But even the law of gravity has vastly different effects, depending upon where we are positioned in the universe. Can we be sure that the laws of reason do not operate within the same shifting paradigm? But the laws themselves, surely they do not change! We know that 2+2=4, and A cannot be non-A. Granted. But do these abstract concepts really provide knowledge of the absolute truth about anything? Do they not rather give us varying degrees of certainty about the objective truths we discern? It seems that we confuse our concepts when we claim that absolute and objective truth can be rationally equated. As Westphal says, “We can call our beliefs true when we apprehend the world as we should; but they are not True, since that would require us to apprehend the world as we can’t.”
Postmoderns, affirms Westphal, do not “abandon the distinction between truth and falsity… they are only denying the metaclaim that our truths are Truth.” Postmoderns also take the linguistic turn to mean that “every language is a perspective, and… all our insights are relative to some frame of reference which is itself anything but absolute.” This simply means that “Because we cannot transcend the limited perspective of our location in time and in cultural history, knowledge can never be Truth.”
The common retort here is that such statements amount to a relativization of all knowledge. But in actuality, the result is far more benign. Postmoderns are simply pointing out that objective truth and absolute truth are not synonymous. As Westphal explains, this is the primary confusion in any discussion of truth between those who appropriate and those who oppose postmodernism. The latter believe that “The Truth is that there is Truth, and they assume that to disagree is to say, The Truth is there is no Truth. But… the postmodern claim is different, namely, the truth is that there is no Truth.” In other words, objective truth cannot claim to know absolute truth, no matter how rational it seems or how much evidence there is to support it.
Westphal responds directly to those who would seek to affirm that our knowledge of God (and truth) can be “on a par with God’s own self-knowledge.” Of course, as we have seen, they do not claim to have the same amount of knowledge as God, but access to the same level of knowledge regarding the facts that they can ascertain. They claim to be, according to Westphal, “entirely free from prejudice or perspective, wholly unconditioned by interests and desires, and relative to no human condition.”
What does Westphal say in response? He calls upon “a theologically motivated appropriation of postmodernism [to] challenge this move in all its forms, blatant and subtle.” But why do we need to challenge such a view? Because no matter how rigorous our methodology may be, no matter how disciplined our exegesis, we will never get our theology right, in the sense that our beliefs will “simply correspond to the object they intend…” In other words, even when we discern, believe and rationalize rightly, we still have not understood the mind of God. Again, this does not mean that we are left with "anything-goes" relativism. The postmodern theologian continues to struggle with interpretation, methodology, logic, etc. in order to defend what she believes to be true. But the postmodern theologian does so with the recognition that what we have is always, at best, only objective truth and never absolute.
Westphal uses the metaphor of trying to explain bacteria to a three-year-old child who has scraped her knee, as a way of describing the type of understanding we have about God. Telling the child that "invisible bugs" will make her sick doesn't come close to capturing the Truth of bacteria, but in a way, it is enough truth for the child to properly understand. In the same way, as philosophers, scientists, and - yes - theologians, even when we grasp the truth, we really haven’t discovered the Truth. Like Westphal, I find the postmodern distinction between objective and absolute truth most helpful in describing reality, especially given human finitude and my adherence to the Christian concept of the Fall. But Westphal makes it quite clear that there is still plenty of room for reasonable thinking, even with our limited access to absolute truth. For, as he points out, just because we do not have access to Truth, “does not entail that the Truth has no access to us, or that we should abandon the attempt to determine how best to think about what there is.” His arguments do not support the contention that there is no God, but merely that we are not God!
Clearly, we should not assume that postmodern thinkers are, on the whole, friendly to Christianity. But the effect of many of their arguments has been, as John Caputo has bluntly stated, “to gain a hearing for – God help us – religion and theology, a point that discomforts secularizing postmodernists every bit as much as it discomforts modernist critics…”
This, it seems to me, is one reason why postmodern thought presents Christians with a unique opportunity: It is a philosophical perspective that contains within itself a certain unavoidable angst, regardless of one’s system of belief. As one who deeply appreciates Kierkegaard, I find myself responding in the hope that, like Kierkegaard’s "anxiety," postmodern angst creates the possibility of a genuine step toward faith.
The post-modern critique is meant to be simply that: a critique. Its strength lies in its ability to remind thinkers in all fields of the potential downfall of any claim to certainty; namely, that being certain is not within the realm of human possibility, we only ever achieve an approximation of certainty. Granted, some certainties are more approximate than others, but postmodernism, when kept in check, serves not to disprove objective realities (like gravity and the law of non-contradiction) but merely as a reminder that our understanding of those realities should never become a type of rational certitude which creates within the individual an unbending refusal to examine other options. This attitude should be present in all facets of human life: religion, science, history, politics, psychology, and - yes - even postmodernism itself. That is an important first step, as we begin to traverse our objective, but not absolute, world.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
cool new music...
Here are some of the new CDs I've been enjoying lately...
Interpol - Our Love To Admire
Maps - We Can Create
Battles - Mirrored
Also, the other day I put in an old Snapcase CD... man, I forgot how good they are. If you like 90's-era NY hardcore and haven't heard this CD (is that even possible?), well, go get it. That's all I can say. Production quality may not be "nu-rock" pristine, but when music has this much power, who cares?
Interpol - Our Love To Admire
Maps - We Can Create
Battles - Mirrored
Also, the other day I put in an old Snapcase CD... man, I forgot how good they are. If you like 90's-era NY hardcore and haven't heard this CD (is that even possible?), well, go get it. That's all I can say. Production quality may not be "nu-rock" pristine, but when music has this much power, who cares?
Thursday, August 9, 2007
thoughts on Kierkegaard and faith...
The more I study Kierkegaard, the more I am convinced he has captured something of the true essence of Christianity, which is, at least in today’s American churches, desperately lacking. It is, quite simply, the nature of faith. Most modern Christians seem to have a rather one-dimensional view of faith: it is understood to be the decision one makes in response to Christ’s offer of salvation. So we make pronouncements, complete with “altar calls” - if anyone will pray the “sinner’s prayer,” Christ will save them. But minimizing faith to “accepting Jesus as my savior” reduces the depth and richness, as well as the challenge, of the continual surrender to Christ and appropriation of God’s "life" within our lives. What's more, we usually offer those who respond to our altar calls little explanation as to what a life of faith really entails.
Worse, some make faith into a kind of spiritual “Aladdin’s lamp,” with God as its genie. They believe material blessings flow from a robust faith, and suffering is the sign of weak faith. If we only had more faith, we are told, our problems would be solved and our questions would be answered. But Kierkegaard would have none of this! As he so aptly states in Fear and Trembling, “No one has the right to… let others suppose that faith is… an easy matter, when in fact it is the greatest and most difficult of all.” Faith is not a simple one-time decision; faith is a life-changing, life-long, event. Moreover, faith is not some mathematical formula that we plug in to get the right spiritual answer. Faith is an act of trust made “on the strength of the absurd,” and, grounded in absurdity, “is unshakeable even when it sees the impossibility.”
If Abraham is a true example of faith, then surely we must never tread lightly in matters of faith. Faith is a matter of life and death! Faith, in Abraham’s case, meant giving up everything: not just his son, but his future (because the legacy of the father is dependent upon future generations), his ethic, and his hope in everything other than God. Abraham is, in effect, being asked to lose himself for the sake of a God who is apparently going back on the promise He made to Abraham and taking away the very means through which Abraham, and indeed the world, would be blessed. This test is more than just a test of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac; it is a test of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice himself for a God that appears unethical to the rational mind.
Abraham’s decision to sacrifice Isaac involves rejecting the ethical in order to fulfill an even greater purpose. But this decision goes against the ethical categories which are held by all rational people. Faith, in its truest form, appears insane! The “knight of faith” offers no justification for his or her actions; he or she simply acts in faith. We must do the same, if we are to be genuine people of faith. We must take a leap into the unknown, because we believe with all our hearts, and contrary to all sense, that God’s hand will be there to catch us. This view of faith should fill Christians with holy fear, because it immediately becomes clear that we do not live this way. We have not relinquished hope in our ideal categories; we do not step out beyond our comfortable, rational lives. And even when we do, it is often an orchestrated effort designed to benefit ourselves. But faith defies gravity and runs toward the edge, certain that, though it may freefall, it will not hit the ground. Altar calls and personal “genies” pale in comparison.
And so it is (at least I know this is true in my life) that our view of faith is quite often much too small. Our view of God’s grace and mercy is also much too small. Kierkegaard calls us as believers to remember how far we are from the life of faith, and in so doing reminds us to be humble and grateful to the God who both gives us the gift of faith, and remains faithful to us, even when we are so often nothing more than faithless.
Worse, some make faith into a kind of spiritual “Aladdin’s lamp,” with God as its genie. They believe material blessings flow from a robust faith, and suffering is the sign of weak faith. If we only had more faith, we are told, our problems would be solved and our questions would be answered. But Kierkegaard would have none of this! As he so aptly states in Fear and Trembling, “No one has the right to… let others suppose that faith is… an easy matter, when in fact it is the greatest and most difficult of all.” Faith is not a simple one-time decision; faith is a life-changing, life-long, event. Moreover, faith is not some mathematical formula that we plug in to get the right spiritual answer. Faith is an act of trust made “on the strength of the absurd,” and, grounded in absurdity, “is unshakeable even when it sees the impossibility.”
If Abraham is a true example of faith, then surely we must never tread lightly in matters of faith. Faith is a matter of life and death! Faith, in Abraham’s case, meant giving up everything: not just his son, but his future (because the legacy of the father is dependent upon future generations), his ethic, and his hope in everything other than God. Abraham is, in effect, being asked to lose himself for the sake of a God who is apparently going back on the promise He made to Abraham and taking away the very means through which Abraham, and indeed the world, would be blessed. This test is more than just a test of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac; it is a test of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice himself for a God that appears unethical to the rational mind.
Abraham’s decision to sacrifice Isaac involves rejecting the ethical in order to fulfill an even greater purpose. But this decision goes against the ethical categories which are held by all rational people. Faith, in its truest form, appears insane! The “knight of faith” offers no justification for his or her actions; he or she simply acts in faith. We must do the same, if we are to be genuine people of faith. We must take a leap into the unknown, because we believe with all our hearts, and contrary to all sense, that God’s hand will be there to catch us. This view of faith should fill Christians with holy fear, because it immediately becomes clear that we do not live this way. We have not relinquished hope in our ideal categories; we do not step out beyond our comfortable, rational lives. And even when we do, it is often an orchestrated effort designed to benefit ourselves. But faith defies gravity and runs toward the edge, certain that, though it may freefall, it will not hit the ground. Altar calls and personal “genies” pale in comparison.
And so it is (at least I know this is true in my life) that our view of faith is quite often much too small. Our view of God’s grace and mercy is also much too small. Kierkegaard calls us as believers to remember how far we are from the life of faith, and in so doing reminds us to be humble and grateful to the God who both gives us the gift of faith, and remains faithful to us, even when we are so often nothing more than faithless.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
the human dignity of faith...
"To receive from God in faith is the height of human dignity. 'Human Dignity!?' someone may ask, raising eyebrows in puzzlement or even protest. 'It feels like faith diminishes us! It seems to underscore our inability rather than our power.' But that feeling of diminishment and humiliation comes from wrongly conceiving our relationship to God... Our power to be and to act comes from God. Faith merely recognizes this.
Hence faith doesn't tell us how little we are and what we can't do. On the contrary, it celebrates what we most properly are - God's empowered creatures - and it frees us to our greatest accomplishments... Faith is an expression of the fact that we exist so that the infinite God can dwell in us and work through us for the well-being of the whole creation. If faith denies anything, it denies that we are tiny, self-obsessed specks of matter who are reaching for the stars but remain hopelessly nailed to the earth..." - Miroslav Volf
Hence faith doesn't tell us how little we are and what we can't do. On the contrary, it celebrates what we most properly are - God's empowered creatures - and it frees us to our greatest accomplishments... Faith is an expression of the fact that we exist so that the infinite God can dwell in us and work through us for the well-being of the whole creation. If faith denies anything, it denies that we are tiny, self-obsessed specks of matter who are reaching for the stars but remain hopelessly nailed to the earth..." - Miroslav Volf
Saturday, July 28, 2007
the veil of self-sin, pt. 2...
"Self is the opaque veil that hides the face of God from us. It can be removed only in spiritual experience, never by mere instruction. We may as well try to instruct leprosy out of our system... We must bring our self-sins to the cross for judgment. We must prepare ourselves for an ordeal of suffering in some measure...
Let us remember that when we talk of the rending of the veil we are speaking in a figure, and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant, but in actuality there is nothing pleasant about it. In human experience that veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed.
It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful. Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus and it is what the cross would do to every man to set him free... God must do everything for us. Our part is to yield and trust... We dare not rest content with a neat doctrine of self-crucifixion. Insist that the work be done in very truth and it will be done.
The cross is rough and it is deadly, but it is effective. It does not keep its victim hanging there forever. There comes a moment when its work is finished and the suffering victim dies. After that is resurrection glory and power, and the pain is forgotten for joy that the veil is taken away and we have entered, in actual spiritual experience, the presence of the living God." - A. W. Tozer
Let us remember that when we talk of the rending of the veil we are speaking in a figure, and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant, but in actuality there is nothing pleasant about it. In human experience that veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed.
It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear and tender stuff of which life is made can never be anything but deeply painful. Yet that is what the cross did to Jesus and it is what the cross would do to every man to set him free... God must do everything for us. Our part is to yield and trust... We dare not rest content with a neat doctrine of self-crucifixion. Insist that the work be done in very truth and it will be done.
The cross is rough and it is deadly, but it is effective. It does not keep its victim hanging there forever. There comes a moment when its work is finished and the suffering victim dies. After that is resurrection glory and power, and the pain is forgotten for joy that the veil is taken away and we have entered, in actual spiritual experience, the presence of the living God." - A. W. Tozer
Thursday, July 26, 2007
the veil of self-sin...
"This veil is not a beautiful thing and it is not a thing about which we commonly care to talk... the self-sins are self-righteousness, self-pity, self-sufficiency, self-admiration... and a host of others like them. They dwell too deep within us and are too much a part of our natures to come to our attention till the light of God is focused upon them. The grosser manifestations of these sins - egotism, exhibitionism, self-promotion - are strangely tolerated in Christian leaders, even in circles of impeccable orthodoxy. I trust it is not a cynical observation to say that they appear these days to be a requisite for popularity in some sections of the church... Promoting self under the guise of promoting Christ is currently so common as to excite little notice." - A.W. Tozer
Sunday, July 15, 2007
sketching a theodicy...
In my Philosophical Theology II class (which just ended), we spent a considerable amount of time discussing various theological approaches to the problem of evil. One of the things our prof. asked us to do was to sketch out a preliminary theodicy of our own. I am going to post mine here (edited a bit for space) in order to hopefully get some feedback. So, here we go... it's a bit long, so bear with me... :-)
As I begin to think through my own theodicy, I find that I have the most in common with the “free will defense.”
It is important, as Barth was fond of saying, “to begin at the beginning.” Therefore, I will begin my theodicy with a brief description of the problem of evil. God, as traditionally understood, is both all-powerful, and totally good. And yet, evil exists. While some have opted to respond to this problem by denying God’s omnipotence or God’s goodness (or God's existence!), I believe that both of these can continue to be affirmed without making God culpable for the existence of evil.
First, we must examine the traditional Christian understanding of God. God, in order to be God, must contain all God’s attributes in their totality. To be sure, we should, as Bloesch implores, always remember that God is not contained in attributes, nor captured by any human terminology. (Bloesch, Donald. God The Almighty, p. 34-35) Any sentence that begins with “God is…” necessitates a predicate that cannot be adequately expressed in human terms, because of God’s infinite and inscrutable nature. However, when we do attempt to speak of God, Christian faith must guard against dualism, which means we are caught in a contradiction: We cannot say, for example, that God is both “good” and “evil” because we do not believe in a God who appropriates those terms haphazardly. God is ultimately good.
So then, how can we describe God? We can say that “evil,” rather than being an attribute in opposition to “good,” is instead the absence of good. Without resorting to monism, I believe that it is possible to develop a Christian understanding of evil as the absence of goodness. This, I suggest, is the case with every Godly attribute – its inverse is not an equal but opposite attribute, it is a lack; the absence of what could have been. Of course, this begs the questions of how evil got here and who is responsible for it. If we say that God contains the totality of God’s attributes, then if God causes or permits evil, God seems to lack total goodness, which means that we have to come up with an entirely different definition of God.
Is it possible to maintain the traditional Christian concept of God without attributing evil to God? Yes; we need not assume that God is to blame for evil. This is, in my view, because of the nature of the universe. If the Christian view of God is correct, one very interesting question is, how can anything at all in the universe exist? Christians believe that God created ex nihilo a distinct universe which is contingent upon God, and that God did so as an outpouring of God’s love. But if God is all in all, wouldn't everything that exists somehow be an extension of God-self, making it impossible for a distinct universe to exist at all? The response is that somehow God has chosen to limit God-self, in order to create a universe that is distinct from God.
The downside to this is that creation is necessarily limited, finite, less than total. Creation can thereby be described as a divine “withdrawal” in which “perfection allows something other than itself to exist.” (Davis
Applying this to theodicy, what can we say? That the universe exists in such a way that it is “out to get us?” Is God to blame for creating this finite reality? Before we go down that road, it is worthwhile to remember that “natural evil” involves no inherent ill will towards humanity. In fact, without the existence of sentient beings, there would be no reason to classify the world as "evil," as the word would contain no significance. What we call natural evil is the inherent tendency of a finite creation to decay and return to chaos.
Here, I take an Irenaean, rather than an Augustinian, approach. The Genesis narratives are not literal accounts of creation; instead, they are allegorical sagas, which, though rooted in historical (and pre-historical) reality, should not be taken as word-for-word fact. While I do not abandon the concept of “original sin” entirely, I believe that it should be viewed primarily as an existential event resulting from our finitude and our human inability to respond properly to that finitude. I concede that some sort of spiritual “fallen-ness” afflicts humanity, but I do not presume it is the cause of the world in which we live.
Still, we must face the fact that evil does happen in our world. How is God not to blame? In order for creation to have a meaningful or genuine existence, that universe must be “other” than God. As such, it will be, in some way, a finite universe which will necessarily allow for the possibility of evil. So the question of why God would allow such a world is based upon the false assumption that there can be any existent universe which does not include the possibility of natural evil. It is pointless to ask why God didn't create a “perfect world.” Could I be "Geoff" in a universe that was already perfect and complete? I would, it seems, only exist as a feature of God, without any ontological capacity to respond to anything, including God. We might as well say that the universe shouldn’t have been created at all. Such a response is a non-answer, because how can we, as creatures, say with any consistency that it would be better if we did not exist?
But, it might be argued; surely God could have made a world with less natural evil? Perhaps, but this assumes a world requiring an incredible amount of cosmological “fine-tuning,” given that the world in which we live is already one of astounding distinction. And, it should be mentioned, one of astounding beauty. Our world is already better suited to life than any world known to us (as opposed to “the best possible world”). This also raises the additional question of just what kind of a world would satisfy us. At what point do we agree that there is “the right amount” of natural evil? How is this not simply an infinite regress to the “perfect world?” And, how would we be able to make any decisions necessary to moral, or even rational, growth if there was not some type of natural evil? Would a world without the law of gravity, for example, make any sense?
Even if such a world were possible, how can we be sure that our actions would not influence it in such a way that further natural evil would be the result? But now we are moving from natural evil to moral evil. How much of our exposure to natural evil is entirely unrelated to our decisions? It is impossible to say with any amount of precision, of course, but we must not avoid the question. Was hurricane Katrina primarily to blame for the deaths inNew Orleans
It is here that I findDavis
Humanity, in its finitude, has succumbed to its own potential for evil. Christians do accept a spiritual element of reality which has been affecting the creation since its inception. To what extent those “powers and principalities” are responsible for natural or moral evil we can only speculate. What cannot be denied is that human beings made, and continue to make, bad choices, based upon our inherent sinful attitudes. These attitudes, I would suggest, are both individual and collective, and may be properly classified as a “fall.” But Christian thought insists that it didn’t have to be this way.
It is important to carefully parse out what is meant here. On the one hand, the reality of finitude made it extremely unlikely that human beings would not sin. On the other, Scripture indicates that there was, and is, an intimate connection between God and people – a connection centered in the event of Jesus Christ – which provided, at least initially, the promise of a world in which humanity would not succumb to temptation. Should we call it “innocence?” I am not certain, but what seems clear is that, very early on, humanity failed. But this was not a failure for which God was unprepared. In fact, God knew the inevitability of human failure and planned, before the creation, for the salvation of humanity and the restoration of all creation.
The free decision of humanity to reject God’s offer of intimacy and live on their own terms has resulted in thousands of years of ever-increasing moral evil. This is not simply a matter of personal evil; the moral evil of humanity long ago reached a level at which it might easily be called cultural or national evil. Evil now permeates our existence as humans to such an extent that it is difficult to say where good ends and evil begins. The “knowledge of good and evil” has turned on us and is now showing its true nature: Such knowledge cannot be contended with by anything short of that which already contains complete knowledge, that is, God. Since we are not God, we are trapped in a reality in which we cannot avoid doing some evil, no matter how hard we try.
So, if we say, “God created humanity, so isn’t God responsible for their actions?” we are minimizing our own freedom in an effort to shift the blame. But shifting the blame for moral evil onto God provides little consolation, because this means that either God is evil or impotent, or human beings have no genuine freedom. In either scenario, we lose. However, by accepting our freedom, and the responsibility that goes along with genuine freedom, we actually find ourselves inhabiting a world where there is an actual possibility of a positive outcome. All of this is, of course, contingent upon God’s ultimate redemption of creation, and God’s deliverance and restoration of all that has been affected by evil. If we do not believe that Scripture is correct when it says that God is going to reconcile everything in Christ (which is not to be necessarily equated with universalism), then any attempt at a theodicy is an exercise in futility.
Much of what I have said here may seem of little value to someone who asks about the suffering of even one innocent child. What can be said in response to the gratuitous evil which falls upon those who least deserve it? To this I can only say that any response to the vast expanse of the experience of suffering in our world must be treated with the utmost care, recognizing that, in Christ, God apparently experiences suffering equal to if not greater than human suffering. The flaw in Karamazov’s claim is that it equates any suffering with torture. But torture is moral evil caused by humans, and should not be simply equated with evil in a cosmic sense. If so, we can only say that God is torturing us in simply giving us life in a less-than-perfect world. Such an anthropomorphized view of God inevitably leads to nihilism (any anthropomorphizing of God is a grave error!).
As Christians, we can offer compassion and shared sorrow in relationship with others, as well as the hope of God’s final restoration of what has been lost through evil. No, this does not change the fact that evil happens, but it does mean that we believe evil does not have the last word. No matter how difficult it may seem, we can continue to believe that God is both almighty and good, because to do otherwise is to settle for a God that is, in the end, no God at all.
As I begin to think through my own theodicy, I find that I have the most in common with the “free will defense.”
It is important, as Barth was fond of saying, “to begin at the beginning.” Therefore, I will begin my theodicy with a brief description of the problem of evil. God, as traditionally understood, is both all-powerful, and totally good. And yet, evil exists. While some have opted to respond to this problem by denying God’s omnipotence or God’s goodness (or God's existence!), I believe that both of these can continue to be affirmed without making God culpable for the existence of evil.
First, we must examine the traditional Christian understanding of God. God, in order to be God, must contain all God’s attributes in their totality. To be sure, we should, as Bloesch implores, always remember that God is not contained in attributes, nor captured by any human terminology. (Bloesch, Donald. God The Almighty, p. 34-35) Any sentence that begins with “God is…” necessitates a predicate that cannot be adequately expressed in human terms, because of God’s infinite and inscrutable nature. However, when we do attempt to speak of God, Christian faith must guard against dualism, which means we are caught in a contradiction: We cannot say, for example, that God is both “good” and “evil” because we do not believe in a God who appropriates those terms haphazardly. God is ultimately good.
So then, how can we describe God? We can say that “evil,” rather than being an attribute in opposition to “good,” is instead the absence of good. Without resorting to monism, I believe that it is possible to develop a Christian understanding of evil as the absence of goodness. This, I suggest, is the case with every Godly attribute – its inverse is not an equal but opposite attribute, it is a lack; the absence of what could have been. Of course, this begs the questions of how evil got here and who is responsible for it. If we say that God contains the totality of God’s attributes, then if God causes or permits evil, God seems to lack total goodness, which means that we have to come up with an entirely different definition of God.
Is it possible to maintain the traditional Christian concept of God without attributing evil to God? Yes; we need not assume that God is to blame for evil. This is, in my view, because of the nature of the universe. If the Christian view of God is correct, one very interesting question is, how can anything at all in the universe exist? Christians believe that God created ex nihilo a distinct universe which is contingent upon God, and that God did so as an outpouring of God’s love. But if God is all in all, wouldn't everything that exists somehow be an extension of God-self, making it impossible for a distinct universe to exist at all? The response is that somehow God has chosen to limit God-self, in order to create a universe that is distinct from God.
The downside to this is that creation is necessarily limited, finite, less than total. Creation can thereby be described as a divine “withdrawal” in which “perfection allows something other than itself to exist.” (
Applying this to theodicy, what can we say? That the universe exists in such a way that it is “out to get us?” Is God to blame for creating this finite reality? Before we go down that road, it is worthwhile to remember that “natural evil” involves no inherent ill will towards humanity. In fact, without the existence of sentient beings, there would be no reason to classify the world as "evil," as the word would contain no significance. What we call natural evil is the inherent tendency of a finite creation to decay and return to chaos.
Here, I take an Irenaean, rather than an Augustinian, approach. The Genesis narratives are not literal accounts of creation; instead, they are allegorical sagas, which, though rooted in historical (and pre-historical) reality, should not be taken as word-for-word fact. While I do not abandon the concept of “original sin” entirely, I believe that it should be viewed primarily as an existential event resulting from our finitude and our human inability to respond properly to that finitude. I concede that some sort of spiritual “fallen-ness” afflicts humanity, but I do not presume it is the cause of the world in which we live.
Still, we must face the fact that evil does happen in our world. How is God not to blame? In order for creation to have a meaningful or genuine existence, that universe must be “other” than God. As such, it will be, in some way, a finite universe which will necessarily allow for the possibility of evil. So the question of why God would allow such a world is based upon the false assumption that there can be any existent universe which does not include the possibility of natural evil. It is pointless to ask why God didn't create a “perfect world.” Could I be "Geoff" in a universe that was already perfect and complete? I would, it seems, only exist as a feature of God, without any ontological capacity to respond to anything, including God. We might as well say that the universe shouldn’t have been created at all. Such a response is a non-answer, because how can we, as creatures, say with any consistency that it would be better if we did not exist?
But, it might be argued; surely God could have made a world with less natural evil? Perhaps, but this assumes a world requiring an incredible amount of cosmological “fine-tuning,” given that the world in which we live is already one of astounding distinction. And, it should be mentioned, one of astounding beauty. Our world is already better suited to life than any world known to us (as opposed to “the best possible world”). This also raises the additional question of just what kind of a world would satisfy us. At what point do we agree that there is “the right amount” of natural evil? How is this not simply an infinite regress to the “perfect world?” And, how would we be able to make any decisions necessary to moral, or even rational, growth if there was not some type of natural evil? Would a world without the law of gravity, for example, make any sense?
Even if such a world were possible, how can we be sure that our actions would not influence it in such a way that further natural evil would be the result? But now we are moving from natural evil to moral evil. How much of our exposure to natural evil is entirely unrelated to our decisions? It is impossible to say with any amount of precision, of course, but we must not avoid the question. Was hurricane Katrina primarily to blame for the deaths in
It is here that I find
Humanity, in its finitude, has succumbed to its own potential for evil. Christians do accept a spiritual element of reality which has been affecting the creation since its inception. To what extent those “powers and principalities” are responsible for natural or moral evil we can only speculate. What cannot be denied is that human beings made, and continue to make, bad choices, based upon our inherent sinful attitudes. These attitudes, I would suggest, are both individual and collective, and may be properly classified as a “fall.” But Christian thought insists that it didn’t have to be this way.
It is important to carefully parse out what is meant here. On the one hand, the reality of finitude made it extremely unlikely that human beings would not sin. On the other, Scripture indicates that there was, and is, an intimate connection between God and people – a connection centered in the event of Jesus Christ – which provided, at least initially, the promise of a world in which humanity would not succumb to temptation. Should we call it “innocence?” I am not certain, but what seems clear is that, very early on, humanity failed. But this was not a failure for which God was unprepared. In fact, God knew the inevitability of human failure and planned, before the creation, for the salvation of humanity and the restoration of all creation.
The free decision of humanity to reject God’s offer of intimacy and live on their own terms has resulted in thousands of years of ever-increasing moral evil. This is not simply a matter of personal evil; the moral evil of humanity long ago reached a level at which it might easily be called cultural or national evil. Evil now permeates our existence as humans to such an extent that it is difficult to say where good ends and evil begins. The “knowledge of good and evil” has turned on us and is now showing its true nature: Such knowledge cannot be contended with by anything short of that which already contains complete knowledge, that is, God. Since we are not God, we are trapped in a reality in which we cannot avoid doing some evil, no matter how hard we try.
So, if we say, “God created humanity, so isn’t God responsible for their actions?” we are minimizing our own freedom in an effort to shift the blame. But shifting the blame for moral evil onto God provides little consolation, because this means that either God is evil or impotent, or human beings have no genuine freedom. In either scenario, we lose. However, by accepting our freedom, and the responsibility that goes along with genuine freedom, we actually find ourselves inhabiting a world where there is an actual possibility of a positive outcome. All of this is, of course, contingent upon God’s ultimate redemption of creation, and God’s deliverance and restoration of all that has been affected by evil. If we do not believe that Scripture is correct when it says that God is going to reconcile everything in Christ (which is not to be necessarily equated with universalism), then any attempt at a theodicy is an exercise in futility.
Much of what I have said here may seem of little value to someone who asks about the suffering of even one innocent child. What can be said in response to the gratuitous evil which falls upon those who least deserve it? To this I can only say that any response to the vast expanse of the experience of suffering in our world must be treated with the utmost care, recognizing that, in Christ, God apparently experiences suffering equal to if not greater than human suffering. The flaw in Karamazov’s claim is that it equates any suffering with torture. But torture is moral evil caused by humans, and should not be simply equated with evil in a cosmic sense. If so, we can only say that God is torturing us in simply giving us life in a less-than-perfect world. Such an anthropomorphized view of God inevitably leads to nihilism (any anthropomorphizing of God is a grave error!).
As Christians, we can offer compassion and shared sorrow in relationship with others, as well as the hope of God’s final restoration of what has been lost through evil. No, this does not change the fact that evil happens, but it does mean that we believe evil does not have the last word. No matter how difficult it may seem, we can continue to believe that God is both almighty and good, because to do otherwise is to settle for a God that is, in the end, no God at all.
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