England - Problem of Evil 8

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67. In the early 90s, the biggest challenge to my faith was not so much theology. I've already mentioned that the resurrection is historically likely if you accept that it is philosophically possible. And having gone through the fires of historical criticism, I believe you come out the other end with an outline of Jesus' earthly life that coheres with the Christ of faith.

The greatest boost and the greatest challenge to faith, in my opinion, is experience. If a person has benchmark experiences of God to which they can refer back, their faith has an asset more powerful than any argument. If a person experiences unfathomable suffering or deafening silence, that is when their faith will likely be most vulnerable.

My sense of apologetics has developed over the years. When I was in my teens, I was totally on board with the "evidence demands a verdict approach." In more recent days, I've integrated my theology of prevenient grace into the mix. Wesleyans technically believe it is only the prevenient grace of God that makes free will possible when it comes to justifying faith.

When you bring that into discussion of apologetics, it becomes clear that apologetics is only a tool. Our minds cannot bring us to faith; only our hearts can. Apologetics can thus remove obstacles to faith but it cannot produce faith. Only a heart of faith can produce an act of faith. Reason is just the messenger.

To quote Blaise Pascal, "God wishes to move the will rather than the mind. Perfect clarity would help the mind and harm the will." To put it in my words, "God has left the evidence for his existence and the truth of Christianity potentially ambiguous. If your heart is inclined to faith, you will see the positive evidence. If your heart is not, you will see the negative."

68. There were two powerful movies that reached Durham in the summer of 1994. It always took a few months for movies that had already shown in the States to get to England. Very annoying! This summer, the two movies of interest were Schindler's List and Shadowlands.

Schindler's List was of course a powerful movie relating to the Holocaust. Why did God allow the Nazis to wreak such havoc on Germany and the world? From 1933 to 1945, Hitler inflicted such great injustice and seemed to go unchecked. When I took my sabbatical in Munich in 2011, I became acquainted with the Munich students who called themselves the "White Rose." They tried to muster public opposition to the Nazis and were executed by guillotine in 1943.

Why didn't God stop their execution? Why didn't people listen to them? Even the assassination attempts on Hitler's life failed, when their success would have saved thousands, maybe even millions of lives.

I spent some time in the summer of 1995 in Tübingen, Germany. I stayed in the home of Frau Ilse Michel, wife of the great conservative German scholar Otto Michel. She lost three sons in World War II, all fighting on the German side. Her husband Otto spent the last half of his life as an ardent supporter of Jewish-Christian relations. He is remembered and honored as a pious man, which I believe he was.

However, it turns out that in the early 1930s, he signed up first for the NSDAP and then for the SA. [1] He resigned from the SA in 1936 because of his health. I strongly suspect that, in those days, he was not unlike many conservative American Christians today in his faith. He simply did not see the contradiction. I would like to think that, as Hitler's dictatorship progressed, Michel came to realize the error of his earlier ways.

But I was not surprised to find this backstory out today. I did a little digging today on a hunch. Michel fit the temperament of a certain kind of American Christian I know very well.

This raises a serious question for faith. Why doesn't God let the truth be known to Christians like this? Surely there were many ardent Christians in Germany who had a zeal for Germany but were deceived. Why didn't God correct them? Why did God let Otto Michel, of all good people, know that he was dead wrong about Hitler's movement? [2]

I suspect there were many conservative Christians in Germany who supported Hitler in his rise. They probably believed he was only punishing bad people and that the Jews were evil people who needed to be stopped. And they didn't believe reports about what Hitler's real intentions and ambitions were. Maybe even Hitler himself didn't fully know at first where his political maneuvering would end up.

In a particular phase of his rise, all it took was for him to say the right thing or do something that fit their values, and their subconscious doubts fled away. Those Christians who objected soon learned that if they continued to be vocal, they would face persecution or even death. For their own safety they watched the Nazis take away the non-German, the immigrant, the homosexual, the communist, the liberal.

69. The second movie of the summer of 1994 was Shadowlands. It was a movie about how C. S. Lewis came to grips with the suffering and death of his own wife. I was annoyed at the movie because I did not know enough about Lewis to know the degree to which the movie might be overly dramatizing the story.

In the movie, Lewis goes from giving glib answers to the problem of suffering to a real personal sense that those answers were inadequate. Lewis' early answer to the problem of suffering and evil, as I understand it, was largely limited to what we might call the "Irenaean theodicy." This is the idea that suffering helps us grow and become more mature moral individuals.

In the movie, the death of his wife makes him feel this answer inadequate. I believe there is truth to this portrayal. At the end of the movie, he does decide for faith, even though he recognizes he doesn't have all the answers. By contrast, his step-son chooses in the opposite direction. [3]

Many who choose the step-son's direction, I believe, don't really mean it. Their anger betrays them. You can't get angry with God if you truly don't believe he exists. While the problem of pain may present a challenge to our sense of God as love, pain would be completely meaningless if God did not exist. This is the desirability of Gods' existence based on our belief that evil is real and not meaningless.

70. Sometime that summer an atheist student asked me why I still believed in God in the face of such questions. I could not explain it. "I just do," was my answer. [4]

Faith is a mystery. I do not agree with Kierkegaard that it is blind or irrational. It is reasonable to have faith.

But it is something deeper than reason. "The heart has reasons that reason doesn't know." (Pascal). There are those who confess faith whose heart shows no sign of it. Is it possible that there are some who confess doubts but whose heart is full of faith?

[1] The NSDAP was the Nazi Party. The SA were the storm troopers, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.

[2] In a slightly different vein, Hannah Arendt wrote about the "banality of evil" as she observed the trial of Adolf Eichmann. He appeared "terribly and terrifyingly normal."

[3] A delightful student named Emma had on her door once at Durham, "If evolution is true, then animals are just as significant as humans. Discuss." I never responded, but my thought was, "If [atheistic] evolution is true, then humans are just as meaningless as animals."

[3] On an occasion at dinner my first term, I sat with another person who would become a friend. Quite innocently, I asked him if he was a Christian. After all, Johns had a Christian foundation. His response was a little strong. "No, I'm an atheist, the thinking kind." :-)