A modern theodicy will need to combine credibility in the current mental environment with faithfulness to Christian orthodoxy. As such, it will need to be fairly elaborate. This elaborateness, however, raises a potential worry: what do we make of people who in times past got by without elaborate theodices, even though they faced many more evident sufferings than we do today? In the 14th century, for instance, plaque killed a third of Europe's population. Infant mortality in times past was far higher than it is today, touching virtually every family. Yet despite such afflictions and hardships, there was no call then for elaborate theodices. Why, then, do we need them now? Is it because Western intellectuals simply have too much time on their hands and fret about little things our ancestors would have ridiculed?
Perhaps, but just because people didn't feel the need to construct elaborate theodicies in times past doesn't mean that they didn't feel the weight of the problem of evil. More likely, it just means that they thought they had an adequate theodicy. For instance, Augustine's theodicy, in which evil is mitigated by the ultimate good that God brings out of it, has satisfied believers for centuries. But the real need to construct a more elaborate theodicy has arisen because science has raised a new set of issues about the goodness of God in creation. Simply put, we need a more elaborate theodicy because people are asking harder questions about divine benevolence. Answers that may have worked for past mental environments don't seem to work very well any longer. What's needed are answers that make the goodness of God credible in the current mental environment.
Theodicy is fundamentally about the benevolence of ultimate reality -- whether what ultimately underlies the world is benevolent or not. A successful theodicy demonstrates that, despite evil, ultimate reality is benevolent. Many contemporary thinkers have abandoned the task of theodicy. Materialists, who regard ultimate reality as consisting of material entities governed by unbroken natural laws, are a case in point. Take Richard Dawkins: "In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference." Clearly, for Dawkins and his fellow atheistic materialists, rock-bottom reality is not benevolent.
For Christians, however, God is the ultimate reality; and God's benevolence toward His creation is typically taken for granted. But on what basis are Christians entitled to believe that God is benevolent? For centuries men have asserted the concept of Divine Providence as the argument to justify the ways of God to men. Yet some consider that argument as hollow amidst the world's evil and cruelty. This is the challenge ever before us. Life's circumstances do not always go our way. When they go against us, sometimes violently, our confidence in divine benevolence depends less on an argument than on an attitude.
Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher, summarized this attitude as follows: "For everything that happens in the world it is easy to give thanks to Providence if a person has but these two qualities in himself: a habit of viewing broadly what happens to each individual and a grateful temper. Without the first he will not perceive the usefulness of things which happen; and without the second he will not be thankful for them. The apostle Paul displayed this same attitude by noting that God works all things out for the good [Romans 8:28] and that we are to thank God for all things [Ephesians 5:20]. Such an attitude, however, is warranted only if what ultimately underlies the world is benevolent. And how do we know that? It would seem, then, that we would need some argument for divine benevolence after all, if only to justify this attitude. Augustine was one of the first to answer this question when he wrote, "God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist." For Augustine, like Epictetus, theodicy required a broad perspective. The triumph of good over evil cannot be seen from a narrow vantage. Instead, the infinitely broad vantage of God's ultimate purposes for the world is needed.
All of this is sound Christian theodicy as far as it goes. But a Christian theodicy needs to go further. Plus it needs to make peace with three claims: 1) God by wisdom created the world out of nothing. 2) God exercises particular providence in the world. 3) All evil in the world ultimately traces back to human sin. Mainstream academic theology regards the first two of these as problematic and the third as, frankly, preposterous. But I will argue that all three claims are true and can be situated within a coherent Christian theodicy.
Claim 1, creation out of nothing by an all-wise God, has of late fallen on hard times. In the interest of theodicy, many mainline theologians now increasingly adopt a pared-down view of divine wisdom, knowledge and power. We thus get a god who means well but can't quite overcome the evil in the world, a god who is good but in other ways deficient. The goodness of God is preserved, but at the cost of His other attributes. Process theology, in which the world is autonomous and God changes with the world, is a case in point. Evolving gods constrained by natural laws are much the rage these days. Because creation out of nothing suggests a God to whom everything is subject, the diminished gods of these theologies then not to be ultimate but rather depend on still deeper aspects of reality.
Claim 2, concerning particular providence, refers to God's willingness and ability to act for the good of creation at particular places and times. Accordingly, God acts not just on the creation as a whole but on particular parts of it, the most important part being us -- people. God's particular providence includes miracles, answers to prayer, predictive prophecy, and, most significantly for the Christian faith, the redemption of humanity through Christ and His Cross. Particular providence contrasts with general providence, whereby God guides the course of the world as a whole. A god of general but not particular providence may thus ordain a pattern of weather, but he takes no responsibility for the tornado that blew down your barn and pays no attention to your prayers for protection from such tornadoes. A god of particular providence knows your name and the number of hairs on your head; not so a god of general providence.
Claim 3, which ascribes to human sin the entrance of evil into the world, is the most difficult to square with our current mental environment. It is also the key to resolving the problem of a specifically Christian theodicy. If you are going to blame evil on something besides God, you have two choices: conscious rebellion of creatures [as in humans and/or angels disobeying God] or autonomy of the world [as in the world doing its thing and God, though wringing His hands, unable to make a difference]. The current mental environment prefers an autonomous world. It seeks to contract the power of God at every point where God might do something to cast doubt on His goodness. Indeed, contemporary theology's resistance to claims 1 and 2 reflects its desperate need to preserve God's goodness even if that means contracting God's power. But if evil is not a consequence of the world's autonomy, then there is no need to contract God's power. It follows that once claim 3 is shown to be plausible, claims 1 and 2 become plausible as well.
Christian orthodoxy assets that human sin is the immediate or proximate cause of evil in the world. In Genesis 3, humans are tempted by a serpent, who is traditionally understood as Satan, a fallen angel, and thus a creature that is not embodied in the material stuff out of which humans are made. Consequently, the fall of humanity presupposes the fall of angelic beings. And the fall of angelic beings may presuppose some still deeper features of reality that bring about evil.
In any case, the crucial question is not the ultimate origin of evil but whether all evil in world traces back to humanity and its sin. According to this view, humanity is the gatekeeper through which evil passes into the world. In this metaphor, the Fall becomes the failure of the gatekeeper to maintain proper control of the gate. This metaphor works regardless of the ultimate source of evil that lies outside the gate [be it something that crashes the gate or suborns the gatekeeper or both]. At the heart of this type of theodicy is the idea that the effects of the Fall can be both retroactive as well as proactive [much as the saving effects of the Cross stretch not only forward in time but also backward, saving the Old Testament saints].
The view that all evil in the world traces back to human sin used to be part and parcel of a Christian worldview -- standard equipment in our mental environment. We need to reformulate its expression in a way that makes sense to the modern intellectual mind without sacrificing either the power or goodness of God. According to 1 John 5:4, the victory that overcomes the world is our faith. Christian faith -- a living faith whose author and finisher is Christ [Hebrews 12:2] -- is thus described as the essential element for bringing about Christ's ultimate triumph. Thus, we need a new and better understanding of what our faith must become -- in the here and now -- to bring about this ultimate triumph.
The key mark of a faith that overcomes the world is the ability to discern God's goodness in the face of evil. Indeed, faith's role in bringing about Christ's ultimate triumph presupposes faith's ability to discern God's goodness. Just as humanity's Fall and the consequent rise of evil resulted from the faulty belief that divine goodness is imperfect [witness Eve in the Garden of Eden, where she rejected God's will and asserts her own], so humanity's restoration and Christ's ultimate triumph over evil results from the sound belief that divine goodness is perfect [witness Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, where He surrenders His will to His Father's]. In other words, what is needed from our new theodicy is a radical realignment in our thinking so that we can again see God's goodness in creation despite the distorting effects of sin in our hearts and evil in the world. Stay tuned as we try to flesh this out over the coming few weeks.
No comments:
Post a Comment