Where Was God?

Kuvatekstinä toimikoon osan I tiivistelmä

[K-mafian perustavan tärkeä tarkennus ja lisäys 'kuvatekstiin' - klo:12.05]

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David B. Hart on the Problem of Evil

Hart is reacting to this apologetic: Evil is permitted, yes, even designed by God so that those who suffer under it can benefit from character transformation. - Hart rejects this explanation and others like it as ultimately describing a God unworthy of worship and a world in which he’d rather not inhabit. He sees this world rather as a place where God has allowed Satan and his powers to run rampant and dominate us (for a time). Thus, there is no “grand purpose” behind suffering – no eternal scheme – and therefore looking for “reasons” and asking “Why?” are pointless. This world is under the control of an evil power and that’s that. Until Satan’s dominion is overthrown, this is what we are going to experience.

Apologetics Review'n [Christian/Atheist] tylyhkön lakoninen mutta ehkä sittenkin osuva tiivistelmä Hart'in teologisesta suhtautumisesta kärsimyksen ja pahan ongelmaan. Olennainen pähkinänkuoressa joskin yksipuolisesti korostettuna [Kyseessä ei ole kattava referaatti linkin videosta (eikä Hartin teologisesta mentaliteetista yleensäkään) vaan yleisempi linjaus]. 

Hart'in teologian ytimessä ovat hyvin yleisesti ottaen luonnon ja ylipäätään luomisen perimmäinen hyvyys/positiivisuus sekä modernin maailman vieraantuneisuus luonnosta jopa antiikin pakanallista kulttuuria [josta löytyy myös hyvät puolensa] nihilistisempään tilaan, jossa ihminen palvoo vain omaa - loppumatonta ja tarkoituksetonta vapauttaan valita vapaasti mitä vain.

Toisin sanoen: 'ihminen tahtoo mieluummin ei-mitään kuin on tahtomatta' [Nietzsche]. Mutta juuri tämä on se nihilistinen katastrofi, jonka modernismi nominalistisen voluntarismin pohjalta legitimoi: ihmisen tahto palvomassa pelkästään omaa itseään - oman, luodusta 'olemuksestaan' irtautuneen, loputtoman vapautensa ahdistavaa tyhjyyttä [vrt. lacanin reaalinen ja joussaince/nautinto].

Ei ihme, että tällaisessa addiktio-maailmassa kukaan ei löydä eikä tule koskaan löytämään minkäänlaista rauhaa tai tyydytystä mielelleen. Sitäpatsi paluu pakanallisten jumalien pariin on tekopyhää ja teennäistä pinnallisuutta [kuten koko lattea, pornoistunut ja väkivaltainen populaarikulttuuri] jo senkin vuoksi, että kristinusko tuhosi niiden uskottavuuden lopullisesti - [tässä mielessä kristinusko toimi epäsuorasti ja paradoksaalisesti, siihen tietoisesti pyrkimättä, nihilismin synnyn yhtenä peruslähtökohtana (palaan ko. perustavaan teemaan myöhemmin)] 
*
'Nature is good, I readily affirm, and is itself the first gift of grace. But [...]: modernity is profoundly unnatural' [In the Aftermath, Christ and Nothing (No other God)]. 
*
http://www.apologeticsreview.com/2010/05/07/david-bentley-hart-on-the-problem-of-evil-one-perspective/ 

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Kaikesta kärsimyksestä huolimatta saattaa olla lohduttavaa ajatella, että elämä olemassaolona annetaan ihmiselle lahjaksi [eikä vain taakaksi, jonka painona on kuolema] äärettömän ja ikuisen luomisprosessin moninaisuudessa, joten kuolema ei ole kaiken loppu [ikäänkuin ihmis-materia olisi kaikki] vaan elämän jatkumista ikuisuudessa, jota voimme kutsua Jumalaksi - joka on Actus Purus - olemassa olevan olemisen puhdasta liikettä - josta me kaikki olemme osallisia - [tämä oli RR:n melko 'itämainen' ellei peräti 'hereettinen' tulkinta rajoitetusti lukemiensa Hart'in tekstien pohjalta].

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Tässä tekstissä Hart tiivistää monta oleellista ajatustaan lyhyesti ja selkeästi [hän osaa myös tiivistyksen taidon suvereenisti niin tahtoessaan] kuten haastatteluissa pitääkin. - Esimerkiksi kannanotto kalvinismiin puhuu karua kieltä tämän 'lahkon' hereettisestä kristillisyydestä [sadistiseen jumalaan uskovat ovat tietysti itsekin perimmältään sadisteja/rr].

Kysymyksen siitä, mahtaako universaalin pelastuksen idea olla ikäänkuin korollaari hänen vankkumattomaan asenteeseensa jonka mukaan, paha on jotain absurdia, Hart tavallaan ovelastí väistää joskin Gregorios Nyssalaisella aihetta vahvasti sivuten: helvetti on rakkauden kieltämistä itseltään ja muilta.

Tiivistyksistä huolimatta Hart ei kuitenkaan malta lopuksi olla heittämästä peliin nerokkuutta hipovaa retorista taitoaan vastatessaan viimeiseen kysymykseen So where was God in the tsunami? - Kyyneleet kihosivat silmiin lukiessani kahta viimeistä kappaletta - niin vaikuttavaa on Hart'in grand style-pateettisuus - sekä retorisesti että itse esimerkin osuvuuden ja elävyyden suhteen.

Luulenpa, että vain kaikkein kaavamaisimmin ja/tai tunteettomimmin ajattelevat eivät pysty ainakin hetkellisesti tajuamaan, mitä Hart - keskellä äärimmäistä kurjuutta ryysyissään tanssivaan, esimerkkikuvansa iloiseen ja onnelliseen pikkutyttöön viitaten - tarkoittaa kirjoittaessaan:

To me that was a heartbreaking picture, of course, but it was also an image of something amazing and glorious: the sheer ecstasy of innocence, the happiness of a child who can dance amid despair and desolation because her joy came with her into the world and prompts her to dance as if she were in the midst of paradise. - - - That child’s dance is nothing less than the eternal dance of divine Wisdom before God’s throne, the dance of David and the angels and saints before his glory; it is the true face of creation, which God came to restore and which he will not suffer to see corruption.

Hart ei romantisoi, vaikka joku näin saattaakin nenäänsä nyrpistäen tuhahtaa. Hän kuvaa meille sitä kaikkein perimmäisintä elämisen iloa, jota me kristillisen uskon sisäistäneinä saatamme viattoman lapsen tavoin kokea ikuisen luomisen tapahtumisessa jopa keskellä Saatanan vallassa olevaa langennutta maailmaa, jonka Jumala on kuitenkin luvannut palauttaa ennalleen: ... [J]a hän on pyyhkivä pois kaikki kyyneleet heidän silmistänsä, eikä kuolemaa ole enää oleva, eikä murhetta eikä parkua eikä kipua ole enää oleva, sillä kaikki entinen on mennyt.- Ja valtaistuimella istuva sanoi: "Katso, uudeksi minä teen kaikki". Ja hän sanoi: "Kirjoita, sillä nämä sanat ovat vakaat ja todet' [Ilm. 21.4-5].

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David Hart’s reflections are expanded in a book: The Doors of the Sea: Where was God in the Tsunami? In 2007 he will be visiting professor at Providence College. This article appeared in The Christian Century, (January 10, 2006, pp. 26-29.) Copyright by The Christian Century Foundation: used by permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found at http://www.christiancentury.org/. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

David Hart’s 2003 book The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Eerdmans) was widely touted as a theological tour de force. He offers in that book a powerful and deeply learned statement of Christian truth that draws on the Eastern Orthodox tradition while engaging modern and postmodern critics of Christianity. After the tsunami in 2004 he wrote several commentaries in response to what he regarded as unhelpful attempts to understand that catastrophe theologically. His reflections were expanded in a book, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Eerdmans). Hart, who next year will be a visiting professor at Providence College, spoke with us about evil and its place in the world that God created and loves.

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Where Was God? [The Christian Century: An Interview with David Bentley Hart]

It’s often said that three claims of the Christian tradition -- "God is omnipotent," "God is love" and "Evil exists" -- present a logical contradiction. One of the claims has to be revised. Do you agree?

If by "evil exists" you mean that evil possesses a real substance of its own, and that it therefore exists in the way goodness exists (or, for that matter, a tree, a rabbit, an idea or a dream exists), in point of fact Christian tradition has usually denied this quite forcibly. Patristic and medieval thought (drawing, admittedly, on Platonic precedent) defined evil as a privation of the good: a purely parasitic and shadowy reality, a contamination or disease or absence, but not a real thing in itself. This, incidentally, is a logically necessary claim if one understands goodness and being as flowing alike from the very nature of God and coinciding in him as one infinite life.

That said, there surely is no contradiction between God’s omnipotent goodness and the reality of evil. It may seem somewhat trite to invoke the freedom of creation as part of the works and ends of divine love, or to argue that the highest good of the creature -- divinizing union with God in love -- requires a realm of "secondary causality" in which the rational wills of God’s creatures are at liberty; nonetheless, whether the traditional explanations of how sin and death have been set loose in the world satisfy one or not, they certainly render the claim that an omnipotent and good God would never allow unjust suffering simply vacuous. By what criterion could one render such a judgment? For Christians, one must look to the cross of Christ to take the measure of God’s love, and of its worth in comparison to the sufferings of a fallen world. And one must look to the risen Christ to grasp the glory for which we are intended, and take one’s understanding of the majesty and tragedy of creation’s freedom from that.

In Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov famously points to the brutal killing of children and proclaims that he refuses to believe in any God who has arranged the world in such a way that it entails such suffering -- regardless of what "meaning" can be attached to it. What does a Christian say to Karamazov’s protest?

Actually, what Ivan ultimately refuses is not belief but consent: he will not acknowledge that there is any justice, any glory, any truth that is worth the suffering of a child. If he were merely a truculent atheist, he would he a boring figure. Instead, he is a rebel against the divine order, and intends to remain a rebel even if that order should -- in some way transcending his finite understanding -- prove to be perfectly just. One might very well read his protest not as a brief for atheism, but as a kind of demythologized Gnostic manifesto, an accusation flung in the face of the demiurge.

Still, the pathos of his protest is, to my mind, exquisitely Christian -- though he himself seems not to be aware of this: a rage against explanation, a refusal to grant that the cruelty or brute natural misfortune or evil of any variety can ever be justified by some "happy ending" that makes sense of all our misery and mischance.

In a sense the whole of The Doors of the Sea was a response to Ivan’s "rebellion" -- and indeed a kind of endorsement of it. What I would say here is that it is important to understand the terms of the argument clearly: Ivan assumes -- in good late-l9th-century fashion -- that the eschatological horizon of history and nature is, in a very direct way, the consummation of a process wherein all the apparent contingencies of history and nature have an indispensable part to play. For him, the Christian promise of the kingdom of God is the promise, as well, of a final justification not only of those who have suffered, hut of their suffering, and of the part suffering plays in bringing the final kingdom of love and knowledge to pass. This is what he finds intolerable: the notion that the suffering of children will prove to have been meaningful, to have had a purpose, to have been in some sense a good and necessary thing; for him, the suffering of children is an infinite scandal, and his conscience could never allow it to sink to the level of some provisional passage through darkness on the way to some radiant future.

My contention is that this places Ivan’s sensibility much nearer to the authentic vision of the New Testament than are many of the more pious and conventional forms of Christian conviction today The gospel of the ancient church was always one of rebellion against those principalities and powers -- death chief among them -- that enslave and torment creation; nowhere does the New Testament rationalize evil or accord it necessity or treat it as part of the necessary fabric of God’s world. All that Christian scripture asserts is that evil cannot defeat God’s purposes or thwart the coming of his kingdom. Divine providence, of course, will always bring about God’s good ends despite -- and in a sense through -- the evils of this world; but that is not the same thing as saying that evil has a necessary part to play in God’s plans, and that God required evil to bring about the kingdom. As the empty tomb of Christ above all reveals, the verdict of God that rescues and redeems creation also overturns the order of the fallen world, and shatters the powers of historical and natural necessity that the fallen world comprises.

Christians often try to distinguish between what God wills and what God permits or allows. But does this distinction really help? If God allows something, or creates a world in which evil is allowed, then in some sense isn’t it part of God’s will?

Unless one thinks that God’s act of creation is purely arbitrary -- and it would be incoherent to attribute arbitrariness of any kind to a God of infinite goodness (an argument for another time) -- then one must understand creation as a direct expression of God’s own Logos. God does not create like an omnipotent consumer choosing one world out of an infinity of possibilities that somehow stand outside of and apart from his own nature. Here’s one without cancer, there’s one without Bach, over there’s one with a higher infant mortality rate, and so on; this is the worst sort of anthropomorphism.

God creates the world of Jesus, the world conformed to his infinite love for his Son in the joy and light of the Spirit; he thereby also wills his goodness in all his creatures infinitely, which is to say he wills this world for eternal union with him in love, and he wills that we should become partakers of the divine nature.

There is no other world that God might have created, not because he is bound by necessity, but because he is infinitely free, and so nothing can hinder him from expressing his essential and infinite goodness perfectly, in and through the freedom of creatures created to be the fellows of his eternal Son.

That may seem obscurely phrased -- it is, I know -- but if one thinks through what it means to understand God as the transcendent source of all being, one must abandon the notion that God chooses to create in the way that I choose to buy blue drapes rather than red. God creates a realm of rational freedom that allows for a union between Creator and creature that is properly analogous to the Trinity’s eternal union of love; or, stated otherwise, God creates his own image in his creatures, with all that that may entail.

Followers of Calvin have been particularly concerned to defend God’s sovereignty. Do you think that tradition presents a particular problem for Christian thinking today?

Yes -- and not only today. I quite explicitly admit in my writing that I think the traditional Calvinist understanding of divine sovereignty to be deeply defective, and destructively so. One cannot, as with Luther, trace out a direct genealogy from late medieval voluntarism to the Calvinist understanding of divine freedom; nevertheless, the way in which Calvin himself describes divine sovereignty is profoundly modern: it frequently seems to require an element of pure arbitrariness, of pure spontaneity, and this alone separates it from more traditional (and I would say more coherent) understandings of freedom, whether divine or human.

This idea of a God who can be called omnipotent only if his will is the direct efficient cause of every aspect of created reality immediately makes all the inept cavils of the village atheist seem profound: one still should not ask if God could create a stone he could not lift, perhaps, but one might legitimately ask if a God of infinite voluntaristic sovereignty and power could create a creature free to resist the divine will. The question is no cruder than the conception of God it is meant to mock, and the paradox thus produced merely reflects the deficiencies of that conception.

Frankly, any understanding of divine sovereignty so unsubtle that it requires the theologian to assert (as Calvin did) that God foreordained the fall of humanity so that his glory might be revealed in the predestined damnation of the derelict is obviously problematic, and probably far more blasphemous than anything represented by the heresies that the ancient ecumenical councils confronted.

Is universal salvation a corollary of your view of the absurdity of evil?

Probably not; but Gregory of Nyssa would say otherwise. The preferred Eastern Orthodox understanding of hell, one with profound patristic pedigrees, defines hell as something self-imposed, a condition of the soul that freely refuses to open itself in love to God and neighbor, and that thereby seals itself against the deifying love of God, thereby experiencing divine glory as an external chastisement. That hell I believe in, inasmuch as all of us from time to time have tasted it in this world. The refusal of love makes love a torment to us.

Does your understanding of evil have implications for pastoral practice in the face of evil?

I honestly don’t know. I haven’t a pastoral bone in my body. But I would implore pastors never to utter banal consolations concerning God’s "greater plan" or the mystery of his will. The first proclamation of the gospel is that death is God’s ancient enemy, whom God has defeated and will ultimately destroy. I would hope that no Christian pastor would fail to recognize that that completely shameless triumphalism -- and with it an utterly sincere and unrestrained hatred of suffering and death -- is the surest foundation of Christian hope, and the proper Christian response to grief.

So where was God in the tsunami?

Where was God? In and beyond all things, nearer to the essence of every creature than that creature itself, and infinitely outside the grasp of all finite things.

Almost all the reviews of The Doors of the Sea that I have read have recognized that, at the heart of the book, is a resolute insistence upon and adoration of the imperishable goodness of creation, an almost willfully naive assertion that it is the beauty and peace of the created world that truly reveal its original and ultimate nature, while the suffering and alienation and horror of mortal existence are, in an ultimate sense, fictions of fallen time, chains and veils and shadows and distortions, but no part of God’s will for his creatures. This is why, at one point in the book, I grant the Gnostics of old the validity of their questions, though I go on to revile the answers at which they arrived.

To see the world in the Christian way -- which, as I say in the book, requires the eye of charity and a faith in Easter -- is in some sense to venture everything upon an absurd impracticality (I almost sound Kierkegaardian when I say it that way). But, as I was writing the book, I found myself thinking again and again of a photograph I had seen in the Baltimore Sun. The story concerned the Akhdam, the lowest social caste in Yemen, supposedly descended from Ethiopians left behind when the ancient Ethiopian empire was driven out of Arabia in the sixth century, who live in the most unimaginable squalor. In the background of the photo was a scattering of huts constructed from crates and shreds of canvas, and on all sides barren earth; but in the foreground was a little girl, extremely pretty, dressed in tatters, but with her arms outspread, a look of delight upon her face, dancing. To me that was a heartbreaking picture, of course, but it was also an image of something amazing and glorious: the sheer ecstasy of innocence, the happiness of a child who can dance amid despair and desolation because her joy came with her into the world and prompts her to dance as if she were in the midst of paradise.

She became for me the perfect image of the deep indwelling truth of creation, the divine Wisdom or Sophia who resides in the very heart of the world, the stainless image of God, the unfallen. I’m waxing quite Eastern here, I know, But that, I would say, is the nature of God’s presence in the fallen world: his image, his bride, the deep joy and longing of creation, called from nothingness to be joined to him. That child’s dance is nothing less than the eternal dance of divine Wisdom before God’s throne, the dance of David and the angels and saints before his glory; it is the true face of creation, which God came to restore and which he will not suffer to see corruption.
*
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3301
http://www.apologeticsreview.com/2010/05/07/david-bentley-hart-on-the-problem-of-evil-one-perspective/
http://smgallthingsnew.wordpress.com/category/uncategorized/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bentley_Hart
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actus_purus
http://jariiivanainen.net/vaikeudet7.html

Miten puolustaa Jumalan hyvyyttä pahan olemassaolosta huolimatta?

Tästä kaavakuvasta puuttuu yksi ja kakkein olennaisin 'kaava' [ja sen mukana kaikki muu], joka ilmaisee, mitä D.B Hart tarkoittaa kristillisen näkemyksen perustalla kirjoittaessaan: The Christian vision of the world, however, is not some rational deduction from empirical experience, but it is a moral and spiritual aptitude – or, rather, a moral and spiritual labor. The Christian eyes see (or should see) a deeper truth in the world than mere “nature”, and it is a truth that gives rise not to optimism but to joy. - - Hmm. - - Kyseessä taitaakin olla jotain, mitä ei noin vain kaavalla pystytä ilmaisemaan - ei ainakaan kadottamatta sitä, mitä haluttiin kuvata ja määrittää [tämä on deskription, logiikan ja matematiikan paradoksi suhteessa subjektiiviseen luottamuksen kokemukseen uskona, toivona ja rakkautena].

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Miksi perinteisen teodikean ongelman ratkaisuyritykset puhuvat kristinuskon kannalta ikäänkuin ongelman vierestä eivätkä siten kosketa itse evankeliumin sanoman ydintä. Lainaus on David Bentley Hart'in kirjasta: The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?

'A sound ‘natural theology’ is by definition sober and (ideally) mildly depressing: since it cannot assert anything more about the world than that it possesses a marvelous complexity of design, nor anything more about God than that he is an immersurably wise and powerful engineer, it has far more room in its arguments for the economy of life and death (in all its brutality) than it has for “paradise.” In fact, the principal task of theodicy is to explain why paradise is not a logical possibility. The Christian vision of the world, however, is not some rational deduction from empirical experience, but it is a moral and spiritual aptitude – or, rather, a moral and spiritual labor. The Christian eyes see (or should see) a deeper truth in the world than mere “nature”, and it is a truth that gives rise not to optimism but to joy' (pp. 57-58).

http://www.amazon.com/Doors-Sea-Where-Was-Tsunami/dp/0802829767#_

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Lukija voi nyt varsin konkreettisesti pohtia, miten ja miksi D.B.Hart'in patristiikasta ammentavat näkemykset kristillisen uskonnonfilosofian ehkä tärkeimmässä kysymyksessä: miksi kaikkivaltias ja hyvä Jumala sallii viattomien kärsimyksen, eroavat reformatorisen perinteen, etenkin kalvinismin laki-skolastisista saivarteluista, jotka tekevät Jumalasta hirviön, jolla on syynsä ja oikeutuksensa sallia paha ja jopa aiheuttaa sitä.

Tällainen - ihmisen syntisyyden [ja kaiken muunkin] ennalta määrännyt sekä harvojen pelastettujen että lukemattomien kadotukseen tuomittujen kanssa kissa-hiiri-leikkiä pelaava sadisti-Jumala toimii tietenkin myös kalvinistisen soteriologian perverssinä mallina, jonka piilo-pelagiolainen ihmiskäsitys oikeuttaa asettumisen muiden ihmisten yläpuolelle esimerkiksi älykkyysosammäärän ['parempien' geenien], taloudellisen menestyksen tai ylipäätään [sosiaali-]darwinistis-memeettisen [pseudo-normatiivisen] paremmuuden nimissä.

Poleeminen mutta hienostunutta kieltä käyttävä Hart ei kirjoita sentään aivan niin karkeasti kuin minä, mutta me jaamme yhteisen inhon kalvinismin egoistista moraali-nihilismiä kohtaan, joka implikoi mm. erään seikan, josta olen itsekin kirjoittanut: kalvinismi ja karman kerääminen ovat pelastusopillisesti ja moraaliperiaatteena hyvin samantyyppisiä asenteita.

Toistan, että Hart ei kirjoita juuri näin [vaan minä], mutta luvusta II 2 löytyvän sitaatin kolme esimerkki-'kristittyä' ovat mielestäni kaikki saman kalvinistis-reformatoris-sadistisen Jumalan/ihmisen edustaman pelastusoikeuden ilmentymiä.

Olen täysin vakuuttunut, että Hartin edustama kristillisyys sen sijaan näkee pahuuden ongelman juutalaistyyppiseen laki-kalvinismiin verrattuna paljon aidomman kristillisen perinteen pohjalta, jonka ytimessä on armo, toivo ja ilo eikä abstrakti argumentein oikeutettu tekopyhä optimismi suhteessa Jumalaan, joka kuitenkin [oikeutetusti?] käyttää pahaa saavuttaakseen omat [hyvät?] päämääränsä, juridinen [joskin ennalta määrätty] tuomio sekä episteemis-antropomorfistinen moraali-saivartelu, joka mielestäni ilmentää pohjimmiltaan 'uskovan' narsistisen ylemmyydentunteen oikeutukseen/legitimointiin pyrkivää fundamentalismia - eikä siis lopulta kristillisyyttä lainkaan - paitsi ehkä lahkolaisena harhaoppina.

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'Mildly instructive to me were some remarks sent to Christian websites discussing a Wall Street Journal column of mine from the Friday following the earthquake. A stern if somewhat excitable Calvinist, intoxicated with God’s sovereignty, asserted that in the—let us grant this chimera a moment’s life—“Augustinian-Thomistic-Calvinist tradition,” and particularly in Reformed thought, suffering and death possess “epistemic significance” insofar as they manifest divine attributes that “might not otherwise be displayed.” A scholar whose work I admire contributed an eloquent expostulation invoking the Holy Innocents, praising our glorious privilege (not shared by the angels) of bearing scars like those of Christ, and advancing the venerable heresy that our salvation from sin will result in a greater good than could have evolved from an innocence untouched by death. A man manifestly good and devout, but unable to distuingish providence from karma, argued that all are guilty through original sin but some more than others, that our “sense of justice” requires us to believe that “punishments and rewards [are] distributed according to our just desserts,” that God is the “balancer of accounts,” and that we must suppose that the suffering of these innocents will bear “spiritual fruit for themselves and for all mankind.'[tekstin muokkaus/rr]

[Kappaleeseen on tehty pieniä sanamuutoksia In the Aftermath-essee-kokoelmassa 2008 ilmestyneen viimeisimmän version mukaan. Muuten teksti on kopioitu The D.B. Hart Appreciation Blog'ista].

III
Tsunami and Theodicy [David B. Hart]

This is the companion piece to the Wall Street editorial 'Tremors of Doubt' and the book 'The Doors of the Sea.'

No one, no matter how great the scope of his imagination, should be able easily to absorb the immensity of the catastrophe that struck the Asian rim of the Indian Ocean and the coast of Somalia on the second day of Christmas this past year; nor would it be quite human to fail, in its wake, to feel some measure of spontaneous resentment towards God, fate, natura naturans, or whatever other force one imagines governs the intricate web of cosmic causality. But, once one’s indignation at the callousness of the universe begins to subside, it is worth recalling that nothing that occurred that day or in the days that followed told us anything about the nature of finite existence of which we were not already entirely aware.

Not that one should be cavalier in the face of misery on so gigantic a scale, or should dismiss the spiritual perplexity it occasions. But, at least for those of us who are Christians, it is prudent to prepare ourselves as quickly and decorously as we may for the mixed choir of secular moralists whose clamor will soon—inevitably—swell about our ears, gravely informing us that here at last our faith must surely founder upon the rocks of empirical horrors too vast to be reconciled with any system of belief in a God of justice or mercy. It is of course somewhat petty to care overly much about captious atheists at such a time, but it is difficult not to be annoyed when a zealous skeptic, eager to be the first to deliver God His long overdue coup de grâce, begins confidently to speak as if believers have never until this moment considered the problem of evil or confronted despair or suffering or death. Perhaps we did not notice the Black Death, the Great War, the Holocaust, or every instance of famine, pestilence, flood, fire, or earthquake in the whole of the human past; perhaps every Christian who has ever had to bury a child has somehow remained insensible to the depth of his own bereavement.

For sheer fatuity, on this score, it would be difficult to surpass Martin Kettle’s pompous and platitudinous reflections in the Guardian, appearing two days after the earthquake: certainly, he argues, the arbitrariness of the destruction visited upon so many and such diverse victims must pose an insoluble conundrum for “creationists” everywhere—although he wonders, in concluding, whether his contemporaries are “too cowed” even to ask “if the God can exist that can do such things” (as if a public avowal of unbelief required any great reserves of fortitude in modern Britain). It would have at least been courteous, one would think, if he had made more than a perfunctory effort to ascertain what religious persons actually do believe before presuming to instruct them on what they cannot believe.

In truth, though, confronted by such enormous suffering, Christians have less to fear from the piercing dialectic of the village atheist than they do from the earnestness of certain believers, and from the clouds of cloying incense wafting upward from the open thuribles of their hearts. As irksome as Kettle’s argument is, it is merely insipid; more troubling are the attempts of some Christians to rationalize this catastrophe in ways that, however inadvertently, make that argument all at once seem profound. And these attempts can span almost the entire spectrum of religious sensibility: they can be cold with Stoical austerity, moist with lachrymose piety, wanly roseate with sickly metaphysical optimism.

Mildly instructive to me were some remarks sent to Christian websites discussing a Wall Street Journal column of mine from the Friday following the earthquake. A stern if somewhat excitable Calvinist, intoxicated with God’s sovereignty, asserted that in the—let us grant this chimera a moment’s life—“Augustinian-Thomistic-Calvinist tradition,” and particularly in Reformed thought, suffering and death possess “epistemic significance” insofar as they manifest divine attributes that “might not otherwise be displayed.” A scholar whose work I admire contributed an eloquent expostulation invoking the Holy Innocents, praising our glorious privilege (not shared by the angels) of bearing scars like those of Christ, and advancing the venerable heresy that our salvation from sin will result in a greater good than could have evolved from an innocence untouched by death. A man manifestly good and devout, but unable to distuingish providence from karma, argued that all are guilty through original sin but some more than others, that our “sense of justice” requires us to believe that “punishments and rewards [are] distributed according to our just desserts,” that God is the “balancer of accounts,” and that we must suppose that the suffering of these innocents will bear “spiritual fruit for themselves and for all mankind.”

All three wished to justify the ways of God to man, to affirm God’s benevolence, to see meaning in the seemingly monstrous randomness of nature’s violence, and to find solace in God’s guiding hand. None seemed to worry that others might think him to be making a fine case for a rejection of God, or of faith in divine goodness. Simply said, there is no more liberating knowledge given us by the gospel—and none in which we should find more comfort—than the knowledge that suffering and death, considered in themselves, have no ultimate meaning at all.

The locus classicus of modern disenchantment with “nature’s God” is probably Voltaire’s Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne, written in response to the great earthquake that—on All Saints’ Day, 1755—struck just offshore of what was then the resplendent capital of the Portuguese empire. Lisbon was home to a quarter million, at least 60,000 of whom perished, both from the initial tremor (reckoned now, like the Sumatran earthquake, at a Richter force of around 9.0) and from the tsunami that it cast up on shore half an hour later (especially murderous to those who had retreated to boats in the mouth of the river Tagus to escape the destruction on land). An enormous fire soon began to consume the ruined city. Tens of thousands were drowned along the coasts of the Algarve, southern Spain, and Morocco.

For Voltaire, a catastrophe of such indiscriminate vastness was incontrovertible evidence against the bland optimism of popular theodicy. His poem—for all the mellifluousness of its alexandrines—was a lacerating attack upon the proposition that “tout est bien.” Would you dare argue, he asks, that you see the necessary effect of eternal laws decreed by a God both free and just as you contemplate

Ces femmes, ces enfants l’un sur l’autre entassés,
Sous ces marbres rompus ces membres dispersés

“These women, these infants heaped one upon the other, these limbs scattered beneath shattered marbles”? Or would you argue that all of this is but God’s just vengeance upon human iniquity?

Quel crime, quelle faute ont commis ces enfants
Sur le sein maternel écrasés et sanglants?

“What crime and what sin have been committed by these infants crushed and bleeding on their mothers’ breasts?” Or would you comfort those dying in torment on desolate shores by assuring them that others will profit from their demise and that they are discharging the parts assigned them by universal law? Do not, says Voltaire, speak of the great chain of being, for that chain is held in the hand of a God who is Himself enchained by nothing.

For all its power, however, Voltaire’s poem is a very feeble thing compared to the case for “rebellion” against “the will of God” in human suffering placed in the mouth of Ivan Karamazov by that fervently Christian novelist Dostoevsky; for, while the evils Ivan recounts to his brother Alexey are acts not of impersonal nature but of men, Dostoevsky’s treatment of innocent suffering possesses a profundity of which Voltaire was never even remotely capable. Famously, Dostoevsky supplied Ivan with true accounts of children tortured and murdered: Turks tearing babies from their mothers’ wombs, impaling infants on bayonets, firing pistols into their mouths; parents savagely flogging their children; a five-year- old-girl tortured by her mother and father, her mouth filled with excrement, locked at night in an outhouse, weeping her supplications to “dear kind God” in the darkness; an eight-year-old serf child torn to pieces by his master’s dogs for a small accidental transgression.

But what makes Ivan’s argument so disturbing is not that he accuses God of failing to save the innocent; rather, he rejects salvation itself, insofar as he understands it, and on moral grounds. He grants that one day there may be an eternal harmony established, one that we will discover somehow necessitated the suffering of children, and perhaps mothers will forgive the murderers of their babies, and all will praise God’s justice; but Ivan wants neither harmony—“for love of man I reject it,” “it is not worth the tears of that one tortured child”—nor forgiveness; and so, not denying there is a God, he simply chooses to return his ticket of entrance to God’s Kingdom. After all, Ivan asks, if you could bring about a universal and final beatitude for all beings by torturing one small child to death, would you think the price acceptable?

Voltaire’s poem is not a challenge to Christian faith; it inveighs against a variant of the “deist” God, one who has simply ordered the world exactly as it now is, and who balances out all its eventualities in a precise equilibrium between felicity and morality. Nowhere does it address the Christian belief in an ancient alienation from God that has wounded creation in its uttermost depths, and reduced cosmic time to a shadowy remnant of the world God intends, and enslaved creation to spiritual and terrestrial powers hostile to God. But Ivan’s rebellion is something altogether different. Voltaire sees only the terrible truth that the actual history of suffering and death is not morally intelligible. Dostoevsky sees—and this bespeaks both his moral genius and his Christian view of reality—that it would be far more terrible if it were.

Christians often find it hard to adopt the spiritual idiom of the New Testament—to think in terms, that is, of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, of Christ’s triumph over the principalities of this world, of the overthrow of hell. All Christians know, of course, that it is through God’s self-outpouring upon the cross that we are saved, and that we are made able by grace to participate in Christ’s suffering; but this should not obscure that other truth revealed at Easter: that the incarnate God enters “this cosmos” not simply to disclose its immanent rationality, but to break the boundaries of fallen nature asunder, and to refashion creation after its ancient beauty—wherein neither sin nor death had any place. Christian thought has traditionally, of necessity, defined evil as a privation of the good, possessing no essence or nature of its own, a purely parasitic corruption of reality; hence it can have no positive role to play in God’s determination of Himself or purpose for His creatures (even if by economy God can bring good from evil); it can in no way supply any imagined deficiency in God’s or creation’s goodness. Being infinitely sufficient in Himself, God had no need of a passage through sin and death to manifest His glory in His creatures or to join them perfectly to Himself. This is why it is misleading (however soothing it may be) to say that the drama of fall and redemption will make the final state of things more glorious than it might otherwise have been. No less metaphysically incoherent—though immeasurably more vile—is the suggestion that God requires suffering and death to reveal certain of his attributes (capricious cruelty, perhaps? morbid indifference? a twisted sense of humor?). It is precisely sin, suffering, and death that blind us to God’s true nature.

There is, of course, some comfort to be derived from the thought that everything that occurs at the level of what Aquinas calls secondary causality—in nature or history—is governed not only by a transcendent providence, but by a universal teleology that makes every instance of pain and loss an indispensable moment in a grand scheme whose ultimate synthesis will justify all things. But consider the price at which that comfort is purchased: it requires us to believe in and love a God whose good ends will be realized not only in spite of—but entirely by way of—every cruelty, every fortuitous misery, every catastrophe, every betrayal, every sin the world has ever known; it requires us to believe in the eternal spiritual necessity of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines. It seems a strange thing to find peace in a universe rendered morally intelligible at the cost of a God rendered morally loathsome. Better, it seems to me, the view of the ancient Gnostics: however ludicrous their beliefs, they at least, when they concluded that suffering and death were essential aspects of the creator’s design, had the good sense to yearn to know a higher God.

I do not believe we Christians are obliged—or even allowed—to look upon the devastation visited upon the coasts of the Indian Ocean and to console ourselves with vacuous cant about the mysterious course taken by God’s goodness in this world, or to assure others that some ultimate meaning or purpose resides in so much misery. Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. For while Christ takes the suffering of his creatures up into his own, it is not because he or they had need of suffering, but because he would not abandon his creatures to the grave. And while we know that the victory over evil and death has been won, we know also that it is a victory yet to come, and that creation therefore, as Paul says, groans in expectation of the glory that will one day be revealed. Until then, the world remains a place of struggle between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and death; and, in such a world, our portion is charity.

As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy. It is not a faith that would necessarily satisfy Ivan Karamazov, but neither is it one that his arguments can defeat: for it has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes—and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, 'Behold, I make all things new'.

IV
Responses to 'Tsunami and Theodicy'

Here is a letter in response to 'Tsunami and Theodicy', followed by David B. Hart's response.

http://davidbhart.blogspot.com/2006/03/responses-to-tsunami-and-theodicy.html
*
http://davidbhart.blogspot.com/2006/03/david-b-harts-tsunami-and-theodicy.html
http://pentecostalworker.wordpress.com/2010/04/22/book-review-d-b-hart-the-doors-of-the-sea/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bentley_Hart
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahan_ongelma
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy
http://www.ortodoksi.net/index.php/Teodikea
http://www.deeperstudy.com/link/issue009.html