Notes Along the Way: Durham 2.2 -- The Summer of Schindler's List

Continued from the previous post
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6. The summer of 1994 featured two movies that related to the problem of evil and suffering. I'm sure you know the drill. If God is all powerful, then he is able to stop evil and suffering. If God is all good, you'd think he'd want to stop evil and suffering. Then why does evil and suffering continue to exist?

This question had really begun to trouble me in my final years in Wilmore. It's not that I faced either great suffering or evil. I never have thus far. My mother and father both lived long lives and both passed as peacefully as I would want to. Have I had struggles and disappointments? Of course, but none beyond what is fairly normal for a mortal on this earth.

I have mentioned my struggle with the seeming silence of God. I've mentioned my decade of torture from about the age of 10 to the age of 20. I cried out to God repeatedly for a sense of peace and forgiveness, but most of the time did not sense any clear answer.

In my last couple years in Wilmore, my study of Scripture kept revealing how little my church circles really understood about the Bible. If you have been reading this series, you'll have a sense of that journey. And so, perhaps it is no surprise that I began to long for some sort of direct sign from God of his presence.

7. My final year in Kentucky, I was the facilitator for a small Sunday school class at Stonewall Wesleyan Church in Lexington, where I attended. The two daughters of Gary Cockerill of Wesley Biblical/Hebrews fame were in the small group. Because I had the subject on my mind, we read Philip Yancey's Where Is God When It Hurts. 

To be honest, it just didn't satisfy. Frankly, I have never heard an explanation that entirely satisfies. The two main explanations are the free will theodicy (God gives us freedom, which means some are going to freely do the wrong thing) and the soul making theodicy (suffering gives us the opportunity to grow). They both are helpful but still not entirely satisfying.

Over the years, I've engaged a few books on this topic (even took a shot at writing one). At IWU, our Monday reading group read Satan and the Problem of Evil by Greg Boyd. Steve Horst really likes this book. Its biggest move is to give substantial blame to Satan. In Boyd's view, Satan provides a bigger context for the evil and suffering of the world than just the two main explanations.

I actually found The Shack to be somewhat helpful. However, I've never been able to bring myself to be a universalist. I would say it is the free will theodicy on steroids.

This past year, a reading group I'm in with the Horsts and the Varadmans read Tim Keller's, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering. Again, I didn't find any silver bullets in the book. There was a line that I resonated strongly with. He suggests that all the different explanations taken together help quite a bit, but there is no one explanation that seems to fully satisfy nor do they all add up to a comprehensive explanation.

That final year in Kentucky, I would shout out to God (silently) during prayer. During the pastoral prayers at Stonewall, I was silently screaming to God, begging for some sort of word that was definitively him. I even asked him to punish me somehow just so I would know he was there. I bought Hans Kung's huge book Does God Exist? As usual of course, it didn't hold my attention.

8. So the summer of 1994 seemed like a gut punch. First, there was Schindler's List. As Keller has pointed out, the real challenge is not your run of the mill suffering. Yes, that absolutely can keep us from becoming morally flabby--no pain no gain. It builds character. It shapes our moral muscles

But the Holocaust was "over the top" evil. It is "gratuitous suffering" that is the challenge. Six million Jews--how much character does that build? Yes, Hitler was defeated. But how many times in history were the Hitlers not defeated? How many times--so many times, maybe most of the time--did the "Hitler" in question win?

If that wasn't enough, Shadowlands came out later in the summer. This is the story of C. S. Lewis' struggle with the cancer and death of his wife. That story in itself wasn't so difficult to handle. It was that story as a follow up to Schindler's List that was forceful. It was a one-two punch.

Lewis looks foolish in the movie when he presents the problem of pain. The movie means to portray him that way. I love the look of complete puzzlement on one lady after he talks about suffering as God's chisel whose blows hurt so bad but make a fine sculpture out of us.

In the movie, Lewis is on a journey to knowledge. At the end of the movie, he still has faith, but he is much wiser than when he gave his lectures. He's sure God has his reasons, but he's still the vivisectionist. He shouts at a priest giving him the kinds of responses he himself has given in the past. The son, meanwhile, decides not to believe in God.

"Pain is the megaphone God uses to rouse a deaf world." I'm not sure I like that. Lewis, who accepted evolution most of the time and didn't necessarily see Adam as a literal human, mostly relied on the soul making argument to answer the problem of evil. Like most explanations, it helps a little but still leaves one wanting more.

9. I remember having some friends over to dinner in my flat that summer. One of the friends was an atheist, a PhD student in philosophy. "You know the best answer to the problem of evil and suffering is that God just doesn't exist to stop it." I told him I understood all his arguments. 

"Then why do you still believe," he asked.

"I don't know," I responded. "I just do."

10. To me, most of the core questions about God have fairly easy, rational answers. The cosmological argument, the fine tuning argument--these make a lot of rational sense to me. The resurrection of Christ can be argued for on the basis of historical evidence.

To me, the problem of evil and suffering require more faith. God gave us a choice, so some are going to make the wrong choice. Makes sense. Makes a whole lot more sense than hyper-Calvinism, which makes God responsible for every last evil thing that has ever happened in the world.

Suffering gives us an opportunity to grow and express moral character. Yes, makes sense.

But there is a point where the suffering and evil are so great, that these explanations do not seem satisfying. That's when I have to press the mystery button. We have to believe God is in control. We have to believe that God loves us and is good. As the priest in Shadowlands says, "We see so little here."

We don't see the whole picture. That's the best we can do to fill in the gap between the explanations that make sense and what is left to mystery.

11. After decades of reflection on the question, two insights seem likely to me, although I welcome the Lord or someone else to show me otherwise. One is that death and suffering in themselves don't have any moral significance. Death is not bad. Suffering is not bad. Pain is not bad. The agents that cause them are what can make those events evil.

One of the biggest realizations I've had in the last five years is that not only in Genesis but likely in Paul as well, death was part of God's creation. It wasn't meant to be the end game, but it was the beginning. Eternal life was always a modification, an addition, to our natural state. The tree of life adds eternal life. 

Death was not the intention for humanity, but it was our created state. That suggests that death is not bad in itself.

A second insight is that, while we can see God at work everywhere if we orient ourselves that way, it is highly unusual to receive direct and unambiguous words from him. Again, it is not that we cannot see and hear him continuously. It is that all of these moments could be taken differently. They are a matter of interpretation most of the time. 

If you believe that God is speaking, you will hear him. But rarely will you have a speaking that is direct in an indisputable way. Faith is always involved in hearing God.

I can see God constantly at work in my life. Am I absolutely certain in each case that it is God? No. And that's ok. I'm thankful all the same.

The Origins of Evil

I've been working in the "innards" of a micro-course for Kingswood Learn featuring Chris Bounds: "Basic Christian Beliefs." This site with free resources for the church is going to be spectacular, by the way! Look it up. Working on the course made me think of a book I published.

It's been a few years since I self-published The Problem of Evil and Suffering: Why Does God Allow It? in 2012. I don't know that my thoughts have particularly changed much in the last 11 years. My presentation has likely improved and sharpened.

Some of my thoughts are just the same old same old:

• Augustine, blah, blah, blah -- Free will is better than being robots. But if you give an Adam a free will, he might just use it. Bam. Evil.
• Irenaeus, blah, blah, blah -- Without suffering and resistance, we would get morally flabby. C. S. Lewis and the problem of pain (not sure if I mention Lewis much)

So the book didn't have "Wow, all my questions are finally answered!" dynamic. Frankly, I'm not sure if I've ever sold a single copy!

So none of that material is new. Where I am unusual is in what I might call a contextualist approach to evil. Augustine and Lewis are still Platonists. They tend to treat good as a thing.

For me, good is an adjective, not a noun. It describes certain intentions and the actions that follow. I thus disagree with Augustine both in his thinking that evil is a "privation" of the good or a twisting of the good. Both assume that good is a thing.

Here's the Table of Contents:

1. Where Was God?

2. Questionable Explanations

3. What Is Evil?

4. Pain Is Not Evil.

5. What Is Sin?

6. Does God Tempt?

7. God and Catastrophes

8. What Did God Create Evil?

9. Why Does God Allow It?

Back to work...

Another Chapter 7 Excerpt -- Good

Excerpts so far from God with Ten Words:

• Mystery
• Love
• Power (excerpt 1)
• Power (excerpt 2)
• Knowledge (excerpt 1)
• Knowledge (excerpt 2)
• Presence (excerpt 1)
• Presence (excerpt 2)
• Immanuel (excerpt 1)
• Immanuel (excerpt 2)
• Good (excerpt 1)

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What we can say for certain is that God is good. We can say for certain that God is love. We do not know exactly why God allows such things to happen. But we believe that God has a reason and that the reasons are good. We just don’t see the big picture.

You’ll notice that I said God “allows” such things to happen. There is an important distinction here. There are some Christians who believe that God directs everything that happens in the world. They believe God selects who will be saved and that every single event that happens is according to God’s intricately detailed plan.

The problem with this approach is that it makes God directly responsible for evil. On this understanding, every last detail of every murder that has ever been committed was planned by God down to the last, intricate detail. On this understanding, every last detail of every rape that has ever happened was planned by God down to the last, intricate detail. On this understanding, Satan and demons are but puppets through whom God tortures the universe. God becomes the author of evil on an astounding level.

This is untenable and incoherent. If God is responsible for all evil on that level, then Christianity is a farce.

When we say that God allows evil, we are saying that God has chosen—on God’s own authority—to give the creation some freedom in decision-making. There are likely many things that God makes happen in the creation, things that God determines. But Christians from my tradition believe that God has given some freedom to the creation to make its own decisions.

Chapter 7 Excerpt -- Good

Excerpts so far from God with Ten Words:

• Mystery
• Love
• Power (excerpt 1)
• Power (excerpt 2)
• Knowledge (excerpt 1)
• Knowledge (excerpt 2)
• Presence (excerpt 1)
• Presence (excerpt 2)
• Immanuel (excerpt 1)
• Immanuel (excerpt 2)

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... The classic answer is the second one. God is good. God could stop evil and suffering. But God has good reasons not always to do so, even though we often do not know what they are.

When I think of this question, I often think of the story of Abraham arguing with God over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18. God knows how the conversation is going to end. God knows how many righteous people are in Sodom and has since the creation of the world. But God walks through the conversation with Abraham for Abraham’s sake. Abraham is a creature in time. God is outside of time and knows exactly how it will turn out without forcing it to go a certain way.

“Will you save Sodom for fifty righteous people?”

“Sure,” God says.

“What about forty?” “What about thirty?” “Twenty?” “Ten?”

Again, God saw this conversation before the foundation of the world. God knew what Abraham would (freely) ask, and God knew what would be answered.

What I find particularly interesting about the conversation is one of Abraham’s questions. “Will not the Judge of all the land do justice?” (Gen. 18:25).

To me, this is an excellent picture of our situation. We know that God is good and will always do what is the best and what is right. The problem is that we do not always know what that is. God does, but we don’t.

Is COVID-19 God's Judgment?

1. Whenever there is a disaster, it is natural for us to ask why, especially when we believe in a God whose has a defining characteristic of love. We find the same question in the Bible in more than one place. In Luke 13, Jesus addresses some Galileans that Pilate had killed and some people who had a tower fall on them in Siloam (Luke 13:1-5). Was it a punishment for their sin? What about the young man who had been born blind? Had his parents sinned or had he sinned to bring it on (John 9:2)?

The Bible does indicate that events can be a consequence of sin. Israel loses a battle with Ai because of Achan's sin (Joshua 7). The northern and southern kingdoms both meet their demise as a consequence of their sin (2 Kings 17, 24:3). And it is not just the Old Testament. Ananias and Sapphira die in Acts 5 as a result of their sin, and need we merely mention the book of Revelation.

2. It is important to have a "whole Bible" theology of such questions. Once we begin to read the Bible in context, we realize that we get different angles on these questions from different books. I have hypothesized often that there is a growing precision on some subjects in the course of the Bible. The afterlife seems to be an example of this dynamic.

Another example is what we might call Deuteronomistic theology. Deuteronomistic theology gives us a basic principle--obedience to God leads to blessing, disobedience leads to disaster. However, Deuteronomy and the historical books that follow it (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings) only look at this question from the standpoint of this life. Those who teach a prosperity gospel tend to focus on these parts of the Bible while ignoring others.

However, it is clear that not all suffering is a consequence of sin and disobedience. Jesus denies it in John 9 mentioned above. Indeed, Isaiah 53 and Jesus himself illustrate that a righteous person can be persecuted unjustly. Ecclesiastes is rife with the sense that, from all appearances, it often looks like the wicked sometimes prosper and the "good die young."

Ironically, the most righteous king in 2 Kings, Josiah, dies prematurely in battle. The most evil king of Judah, Manasseh, has a long and prosperous reign and dies peacefully in bed. The situation deeply troubled many at the time. The generation that went into captivity felt like they were being punished for the sins of their parents' generation.

Psalm 44:17 captures this lament well: "All this came upon us although we had not forgotten you. We had not been false to your covenant." There was a saying that circulated around Israel: "Our fathers ate sour grapes, but it is our teeth that hurt" (Jer. 31:29; Ezek. 18:2). God says he is going to change the policy. From now on it will be the person who does the sin who will die, not their children or grandchildren (Ezek 18:4).

2. Here is a good illustration of growing precision within the pages of the Old Testament. "God has no grandchildren"--our eternal fate is a matter of our individual relationship to God, not that of our parents. It goes the other way as well--our eternal judgment is not a matter of our parents either.

There are still consequences to sin in this life, of course. If a mother takes drugs while pregnant, God may not intervene to protect the unborn child from the consequences. The child of an alcoholic parent may still have to deal with the psychological consequences of growing up in that environment.

The book of Job brings out the complexity of the situation. Job suffers even though he has not sinned. He never finds out why in the pages of the book. God comes to him at the end and basically tells him that understanding the situation is above his pay grade. Here is the final answer to the problem of suffering. God is in control. God is good and knows what is happening. We will never fully understand. We must simply have faith that "the judge of all the earth will do what is right" (Gen. 18:25).

Of course we know that Satan has made a wager with God from Job 1-2. Job never finds this out. In my Wesleyan theology, this is a good example of the fact that much of the suffering that happens in the world is a matter of God's permissive will rather than his directive will. That is to say, God does not directly order everything that happens.

God is sovereign. Nothing happens without God's permission. God is in control. God signs off on everything. But God gives some degree of freedom to the creation. God gives some degree of freedom to humanity and to the natural order. God knows what will happen, but he does not dictate everything that will happen.

There is of course a competing view, the idea that "everything happens for a reason." There is the Calvinist view that God specifically directs everything that happens. In my view, this makes God the author of evil. It makes the statement that God is love meaningless.

3. An important observation here is that the understanding of Satan is not present in the earliest parts of the Old Testament. Satan only appears in Job 1-2, 1 Chronicles 21, and Zechariah 3. It is common to think of Job as one of the earliest books of the Old Testament but in my view this is the common confusion of the subject matter of a book with the circumstances of its writing.

This is another example of growing precision in understanding as we move through the Bible. The earliest parts of the Bible simply ascribe all spiritual activity to God. This is not untrue, since God approves of everything that happens.

But it is not as precise as an awareness of Satan. Does God really directly send evil spirits on King Saul (1 Sam. 16:14)? Does God directly command that a person be born blind or deaf (Exod. 4:11)? These are true but imprecise statements. God signs off on everything that happens. But we now know that Satan is often the more direct instigator.

Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in comparing 2 Samuel 24:1 with 1 Chronicles 21:1 The first says that God tempted David to sin. The second says that Satan did it. If we have no sense of a developing precision in understanding, these two passages will certainly seem to contradict each other. In the end, James gives us the final word: "Let no one say when tempted that God is tempting me. For God is not tempted with evil nor does he tempt anyone" (Jas. 1:13).

4. All of that is background to the question at hand. Is COVID-19 God's judgment in some way?

We can say with certainty that God has allowed COVID-19 to happen. God is in control. But we cannot say with any certainty whether God is judging certain people. That is above our pay grade. We have an urge to speculate on such questions, but Job tells us we must trust that God is in control and resist matters that are beyond our understanding. We are not competent to fish for Leviathan with a fish hook (Job 41:1)!

We can say that Christians will die. Indeed, some American Christians have been very resistant to believe in the current crisis. What if they had died in higher numbers as a result? Even if that had happened, Job would implore us not to conclude that such an eventuality would have been God's judgment on us in some way.

We can conclude that God has and will likely allow people to experience the consequences of their choices. We do not know the intentions or detailed actions of the Chinese government. But God has allowed China and the world to experience the consequences. I do not know whether the United States has mishandled the lead up to the crisis here. But God may very well let the rest of us experience the consequences.

In all this I remember that death is not so powerful in the face of Christ. Death has no victory over us! In my own journey with the problem of evil and suffering, a key conclusion has been that I give too much credit to death and suffering, as if they are a big deal.

God is a big deal. I am only a big deal because God loves me. My death is only a big deal because I am one of the sparrows God watches over.

So I will take precautions. I will be vigilant. I will heed the advice of experts. I will pray for my leaders. I will pray for others.

But in the end, "The LORD is with me. I will not be afraid what a mortal [or a virus] might do to me."

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." :-)

Gen Eds Series P2: Philosophy of Religion

This is the second week of philosophy in my series, "The Gen Eds in a Nutshell." Last week I overviewed the subject matter of philosophy and set out a course for twelve posts on the topic.

1. A philosophy class might not normally begin with the philosophy of religion. Questions about God, as it were, are logically a subcategory of questions about what is real (metaphysics). And before we can ask questions about anything, don't we have to establish what it means for something to be true (epistemology)?

I start with philosophy of religion not only because I teach in a Christian context but because some Christians believe there are certain assumptions or presuppositions that must be made before any discussion of truth can take place. These are "epistemological" questions that have to be addressed first if that particular way of Christian thinking is correct.

We are dealing here with the role of reason and revelation when it comes to truth. We might outline three basic positions:

• I believe in order to understand (credo ut intelligam, Anselm)
• I understand in order to believe (intelligo ut credam)
• I believe because it is absurd (credo quia absurdam, Tertullian)

At present, there are strong forces in Christian circles against a predominant role for "reason" and evidentiary thinking in theological or Christian philosophical thinking. This way of thinking is particularly typical in Reformed thinking ("Reformed epistemology"), which has often emphasized the given-ness of Christian belief. from this perspective, unless you assume the right presuppositions (which the elect will ultimately assume), you cannot hope to arrive at the right conclusions.

These forces have had significant influence in late twentieth century American Christian thinking, and they have been empowered by postmodernism in recent decades. Late twentieth century postmodernism seriously undermined any claim to objectivity on the part of thinkers, opening the door for a kind of fideism which isolates faith from any rational evaluation or evaluation on the basis of evidence.

Another force that fits this Zeitgeist or "spirit of the age" is post-liberalism. Post-liberalism is a post-modern movement toward faith emerging from "liberal" circles where traditional faith claims had largely been marginalized, especially in mainline churches and seminaries. Post-liberalism tends to see all of us as situated within "narratives" from which we cannot remove ourselves in order to get anything like an objective standpoint. From this perspective, we cannot really get outside of our narrative in order to evaluate our narrative, so we more or less can just assume it. [1]

2. By contrast, the Methodist tradition has more typically seen a significant role for reason in truth-seeking, born as it was at the height of the Enlightenment. Wesley's theological method has often been called a "quadrilateral" of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. [2] American frontier Christianity, both heavily Methodist and Baptist, was very comfortable with human reason, and the possibility that argument or persuasion might convince someone to believe. American fundamentalism, which is strongly Baptistic, has always claimed to correlate strongly with reason and evidence, as captured well in the title of Josh McDowell's well known book, Evidence That Demands a Verdict.

The Catholic tradition has also had a strong openness to rational argument, especially under the influence of Thomas Aquinas. "Faith seeking understanding" may be the dominant mode of truth-pursuit, but reason is not seen as the enemy of faith. "The heavens declare the glory of God" (Ps. 14:1) is taken to indicate that there is both natural revelation (truths that God has put into the universe to be discovered) and special revelation (truths we would not know unless God revealed them.

Next week's post on epistemology will set out an argument for a kind of critical realism. This perspective recognizes that no one is objective and that none of us can have a God's eye view of truth. But reason and evidence are paths to truth. Indeed, they are ultimately inescapable. The evidence may not demand a verdict, but Christian faith hopefully is not irrational. That which refuses to be subject to evaluation is prone to abuse.

3. "Faith versus evidence" is thus one key topic within the philosophy of religion. We might mention three others: 2) the meaning of life, 3) arguments for the existence of God, and 4) the problem of evil and suffering.

The meaning of life of course relates heavily to other topics in philosophy like the philosophy of a person and ethics. Nevertheless, religion usually makes claims on ultimate meaning. Albert Camus once suggested that the only serious philosophical question was, "Why not suicide?" [3] In other words, what do you have to live for? For him, this was a question without a particular answer. A person simply needed to have one or end it all.

Soren Kierkegaard started this "existentialist" line of thinking in the 1800s. For him, we take a "leap of faith" to embrace some meaning in our lives. For him, God was the appropriate destination toward which to jump. But of course he had no basis to preclude jumping into something else.

Christians believe that God should be the ultimate focus of our existence. As the Westminster Confession says, "The chief goal of humanity is to glorify God and enjoy him forever." Augustine prayed to God, "You have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find rest in you." God is thus should be the focus of our lives, the one for whom we exist. He is the meaning of life.

4. Many arguments have been made for the existence of God. It is not clear that they actually prove God's existence, although they may suggest that faith in God's existence is reasonable. Alvin Plantinga, coming from a Reformed perspective, has suggested that belief in God is a "warranted Christian belief." That is to say, it is such a fundamental human belief that no argument is necessary.

Blaise Pascal suggested that belief in God is a good wager to make. If you are wrong, you have lost nothing. If you are right, you have won everything. However, Pascal did not believe God had made his existence obvious. Rather, God had left his existence sufficiently ambiguous that believing in him required faith more than proof.

Nevertheless, the three classical arguments for the existence of God are the 1) cosmological argument, 2) the teleological argument, and 3) the ontological argument. The cosmological argument suggests that the existence of the universe needs to have a cause, since we observe no effect in this world without a cause. [4] The current consensus that the universe was created in a big bang and that it began 13.8 billion years ago plays into this argument. What caused it to begin? [5]

The teleological argument is sometimes called the argument from design. It suggests that the complexity of the universe is unfathomable without positing some sort of intelligent Designer. While this idea is often applied to the question of evolution by chance, the argument extends much further. Life on the earth is predicated on a razor thin set of circumstances, sometimes called the "anthropic principle."

If the earth were a little closer or further away from the sun, life would not exist as it does. In current theory, if there had not been a two in a billion imbalance between matter and antimatter in the early universe, no stars or galaxies would be here. In current theory, if the sun had not burned and exploded multiple times, there would be no heavy elements to form the world. Even smaller molecules like carbon and oxygen were not the immediate by-products of helium fusion in the early universe, in the current understanding.

All that is to say, an unfathomable number of chance events would have had to happen in just the right sequence for life to be here by chance. It is much simpler to suppose that an unfathomable Mind was involved.

A third argument usually mentioned is the ontological argument. In its principal forms, it is unconvincing. As Anselm in the 1000s and Descartes in the 1500s formulated it, it largely argued that God must exist in reality because he exists in our minds. If I can conceive of God, he must exist.

But perhaps there is a more profound version of the argument, perhaps something akin to Thomas Aquinas' argument for God as a necessary Being. If every thing that exists were contingent, then there would be no basis for anything to exist. Surely, Aquinas argued, there must at least be one Thing that exists necessarily, which cannot not exist. This, he suggested, we call God.

Ultimately, the strongest reason to believe in God is a personal one. In Wesleyan theology, God reaches out to everyone in the world at some point of their life so that no one can be without excuse (prevenient grace). In Calvinist theology, God reaches out to those who are chosen. In either case, faith in God is initiated and empowered by God himself.

If these beliefs are true, we should expect them to correspond to our experience. We should experience a "tug" from God that leads us toward faith in his existence and goodness. It is not a matter of rational proof, although it is more than likely that God draws some people to him through argument. Ultimately, however, our faith comes from an encounter with God and so, for any specific individual, the definitive argument for God's existence is a matter of personal experience.

5. The problem of suffering and evil is one of the strongest objections to the idea of God, especially against a God who cares for his creation. It is often noted that the other arguments for the existence of God do not in any way point toward a God who is good, even if they suggest a creator. [6]

The issue has been expressed in this way: "If God is God he is not good. If God is good he is not God." [7] The idea here is that if God had the power to stop evil and suffering, he would have if he were good. On the other hand, if God is good, then he must not have the power to stop evil and suffering.

Two primary arguments have been advanced to explain the conundrum. The one is called the "Irenaean theodicy," where a theodicy is an explanation for how God can be just and yet evil persist. Irenaeus' suggestion was that God uses suffering to help us grow morally. The struggle against suffering and evil helps us become better people. In the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, who was no friend to Christianity, "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger."

Perhaps better known is the "Augustinian" or "free will theodicy." The idea here is that God does not force us to choose the good because a world in which we freely (or somewhat freely) choose him and the good is a better world than one in which we are forced to do the good. But if God gives humanity the freedom to choose, some will make the wrong choice and will bring evil into the world.

Of course in Augustine's thinking, it was Adam, the first human, who made the wrong free choice. Now, according to Augustine, the world is fallen. Sin is woven into the fabric of the universe. The evil and suffering in the world is not only the result of the evil perpetuated by fallen angels but is the direct consequence of Adam's sin.

From Paul's perspective, perhaps we might say more precisely that our world is currently under the power of Sin. Christians believe that God has used his power to address this situation. He sent Jesus to fix the problem and to identify with human suffering. The power of Sin is broken, even if it has not finally disappeared. But God has definitively addressed the problem of evil and suffering. The solution just has not finally worked its way out into history.

6. These are thus the primary topics relating to the philosophy of religion: the role of reason and evidence in faith, the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the problem of evil and suffering.

Next week: Philosophy 3: How do I know what I think I know?

Classical Reading

• Plato's Euthyphro
• Augustine's Confessions, City of God
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
• Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, Concluding Unscientific Postscript

[1] It is thus another kind of fideism that tries to isolate itself from the possibility of critique.

[2] Unsurprisingly, post-liberal forces in the Methodist tradition have pushed back on this description in recent decades.

[3] The Myth of Sisyphus.

[4] Thus the law of conservation of mass and energy. Matter cannot be created or destroyed, although we have come to learn that it can be converted to energy.

[5] One theory currently in play is the idea that our universe is just one "bubble" as it were in a multiverse. Even if this theory were to gain traction, it might only extend the question back into such a multiverse. What caused the multiverse?

[6] A "moral argument" is sometimes made to suggest a moral God. In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis suggested that the fact that human beings have a morality (not the specific content of that morality) suggested a moral God. Given the general moral state of the world, however, it seems difficult to argue for a moral God on the basis of human morality.

[7] From Archibald MacLeish's play, J.B.

The Question of Evil

1. I don't think the biggest question in relation to faith is science. Nor am I threatened by battles over the Bible. Christ has died; Christ has risen; Christ will come again. We're good. The evidence doesn't have to demand anything, but it is plausible. There is no body. Multiple people were strongly convinced they had seen Jesus alive in different places and at different times after he died. In the end, faith is not based in proof.

The biggest question in relation to faith is why a loving God allows evil and suffering to continue in the world. I find incredulous the hocus pocus of some who wave a magic wand and say, "Love is whatever God does by definition." God has already defined love just fine in Scripture numerous times. He has defined it in Christ, not least. It involves related words like "saving," "giving," "kind," "hopes."

2. By faith, we believe that God is love, defined in the normal ways. The world does not always look that way. But then again, I don't believe God directly wills every event that happens. In many cases, I believe God allows things to happen that would not be his preferred course. This is the question of how much freedom God has built into his creation and given to humanity.

Some believe God directly decides and causes every event that happens. The problem is that this view makes God into Satan, almost literally, for it would mean that God directs every action Satan takes. Then he would direct the action of every demon down to the last evil detail. God becomes the direct author of all evil. God would then direct every feeling of pleasure that the worst serial killer has.

No, that position more or less makes Christianity incoherent, a devilish religion much to be avoided.

3. Most of the time, we will not know why God allows specific events of evil and suffering. We only know that they fit in some way with God's love. We know that God is currently allowing evil to fight back against him, although its days are numbered. There are personal agents of evil in the world, ranging from Satan to lost human individuals needing to find their God.

We know that God's priorities are eternal rather than the temporary. We know that we do not always have a good sense of what is most important. We know that God can use suffering for good. There can also be times when the good weighs against the good, but we cannot discern the better because we do not know the big picture.

In the end, however, these answers are not likely to feel sufficient in the moment of pain. Ideas and head answers are always weak in the face of the heart. For our pains, God has given us each other as an answer. Brothers and sisters in Christ are God's immediate answers to the question of evil and suffering. And by faith we know that God is still in control.

4. What we know is that Christ cries with us. He remains fully human. In Christ, God embraced our suffering, and in Christ he embraces it still.

E2. God created the possibility of evil choices.

Now the second post in the third section of theology in bullet points.
____________________
God created everything, including the possibility of evil.

God created the world out of nothing. Therefore, there is nothing that exists that he did not create and there is nothing that exists that he did not create at least as a possibility.

For some Christian thinkers (e.g., John Piper), there is little difference between whether God created the possibility of evil or whether God created the actuality of evil. Similarly, some would suggest that the fact that God knew Satan and humanity would choose evil is therefore tantamount to God creating the actuality of evil.

The key difference is that, if God only created the possibility of evil, then we can say that the overall structure that he created was good and we can say that he did not directly create evil. We do not know enough to say whether this is the best of all possible worlds (Leibniz). But we would argue that, from the perspective of the world God has created, a world in which persons have the choice for good or evil is a better world than one in which we have no choice but to be good (or evil).

First, evil is not a "thing," as we argued in the previous article. Evil is not a noun; it is an adjective. Evil describes certain intentions, not actions or objects. God thus did not create evil things. He created the possibility of evil intentions, desires, and thus choices.

Augustine was thus wrong also to suggest that evil was the absence of goodness. It is true that, in the current situation of the world, we will do evil by default, without the power of God enabling us to do good. Our current default is to do evil in the absence of the power of God. But this is a question of evil's cause, not what evil actually is.

If evil is a matter of intention and choice, then we can explain how a being like Satan or Adam could sin without having "evil" within them or how Christ could be tempted when he did not have a "sin nature." God gave us drives such as the drive to excel ("rule," "subdue" in Genesis 1) and to have sex ("multiply"). These can be good desires.

Temptation can come from evil desires, but temptation can also come from good desires that are directed at inappropriate objects or expressed in an inappropriate context. Thus, the drive to be attracted to the opposite sex is good. Where it becomes an evil desire is when it is directed at someone else's spouse--a good drive with an inappropriate object.

For Satan to want more power or for Eve to want more knowledge or for Adam to want more power--these are good drives that became evil temptations in inappropriate contexts. In each case, all of them wanted something that conflicted with the authority and rights of God. Good desires become evil temptations.

So when God created the possibility for Satan to choose to do something God did not prefer him to choose, God created the possibility of evil. But the creation of that choice was good. This dynamic explains how a good God can create a good world that nevertheless can generate of its own will evil choices without God being thereby indicted for creating evil.

God created the possibility of evil choices without having created evil itself. God created a world that was capable of creating evil on its own, and that was good because it also created a world that could (at least initially) do good on its own as well.

Next week: Suffering is not evil.

E1. Evil is a matter of choice, intention, and desire.

Now with two sections of my theology in bullet points done, we move on to the third section I am doing, "The Problem of Evil."
_____________________
Evil is a matter of choice, intention, and desire.

Technically speaking, people are not literally evil and no one literally has evil inside them. This is figurative language. Literally, people make choices based on evil intentions, and such choices can so typify a person's choices that we might say metonymically that they are evil people or that they have evil inside of them. [1] People have evil desires. And people make evil choices.

Most significantly, an evil desire is a desire to do harm to others or see harm happen to others. This is because the ultimate standard of good is the twin love command to love God and love neighbor. It is against this standard that wrongdoing is most meaningfully measured.

An evil intent is an intent to harm others directly or to cause harm in some degree to others indirectly. An evil choice is an act, physically or mentally, intended to harm others or to lead to the harm of others. We call such evil choices, "sins," intentional acts against God and others when we know what the righteous choice would be.

Desires are not yet sins (Jas 1:14-15). It is only when the desire conceives a choice to act that a sin has taken place.

We can of course speak more broadly. It is perverse to desire to harm "the good" in general, where the good is anything God has called good. It is perverse to want to destroy or damage beautiful things.

There are thus degrees of evil intent and thus degrees of sin. The more defiant the choice against God, the more "high handed" the sin. The greater the intent to see harm done to others, the more heinous the evil. You might say with Paul that "nothing is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for that person it is unclean" (Rom. 14:14).

The most meaningful standard of evil intent is thus measured most appropriately against the most meaningful standard of good intent, which is the love of God and others. It is not most meaningfully measured against standards outside of human intent, such as a set of objective laws or rules. God is interested in the consequences of our actions, because he loves everyone and he loves his creation. But the standard of moral culpability is a standard of intention.

The same act can thus be sinful when done by one person but not sinful when done by another. It depends on the knowledge and intention of the person involved.

Note that it is a misinterpretation of Romans 3:23 to see sin as anything short of perfection. The New Living Translation wrongly translates the latter part of this verse to say, "fallen short of God's glorious standard." Rather, all are "lacking the glory of God," where the glory of God is what God originally created humanity to have within the creation (Ps. 8:5; cf. Heb. 2:6-8). The verse is not defining sin as anything short of God's perfect standard.

Despite how popular it is to say that "all sin is the same," the Bible does not in any way bear out this slogan in terms of sin itself. There is some truth to the saying if you mean to say that no one can earn God's favor and that "all have sinned" (Rom. 3:23). But this is something different from what we are saying, namely, that some sins are more heinous than others.

The Old Testament sharply distinguishes between sins with intention (e.g., Num. 35:16-21) and unintentional sins (e.g., Lev. 4:1, 13, 22). In general, the Levitical system of atonement did not make provision for atonement in relation to intentional wrongdoing. The death of the perpetrator was generally required for that.

However, the holiness codes established objective standards of what was clean and unclean, and you could violate these codes unintentionally by accidentally touching the wrong thing. The New Testament more or less does away with this system of cleanness (e.g., Mark 7:19).

It is still possible to wrong others unintentionally in the New Testament, as it is today, but the primary sense of sin in the New Testament is doing wrong with intent, including the wrong of others. [2] John Wesley called this sort of wrongdoing, "sin properly so called" and defined sin as a "voluntary transgression of the known law of God." [3] So James 4:17 tells believers that it is sin if someone "knows the good they ought to do and doesn't do it." Paul in Romans 14:23 says that "everything that does not come from faith is sin." Both verses strongly reference the intention of the wrongdoer in the light of what they are thinking.

Emotions are thus not sinful in themselves. You can be angry and not sin (e.g., Eph. 4:26). You can have evil desires and not yet have sinned (Jas 1:15). It is when we make the wrong choices in relation to our emotions that we cross the threshold of sin.

The level of intentionality correlates directly with the intensity of the evil. This is why law systems distinguish between manslaughter and first degree murder. The punishment for a well planned out murder (murder in the first degree) is greater than killing someone in a fit of rage (manslaughter). Wesley somewhat humorously called the latter kinds of sins, "sins of surprise." [4] They bear the intentionality of the moment rather than a more extensive act of will.

However, Wesley was also clear that a person can set themselves up for sins of the moment. A momentary act can be the culmination of emotions and desires that have been brewing long before the act. A person is morally culpable for failing to deal with the storm before the lightning came. Similarly, one may have chosen not to know better. In short, a person can be wrongly convinced about the known law of God (e.g., Rom. 14:22).

Sin is thus to do wrong or to wrong others. You can sin unintentionally. Unintentional sin is not evil because it does not involve intention. By contrast, all intentional sin is evil to some degree. It is primarily intentional sin for which God holds us morally culpable. [5]

You can have evil desires without yet sinning. This is a desire to do wrong or to wrong others that has not yet reached the level of intent. Evil intentions are when a person has made the choice to sin.

Next Sunday: God created the possibility of evil choices.

[1] A metonymy is when something is so associated with something that you can refer to the thing by it. So you might say of someone known for wearing a bow tie, "Here comes the bow tie." In the same way, to say someone is evil--indeed to say God is love--is not to imply that their atoms are made up of evil or love but that evil and love so typify them that we can say figuratively, "He's evil."

[2] All sin is thus a function either of motive or consequence. Unintentional sin congeals around consequence. Intentional sin centers on motive. In neither case is sin fundamentally a matter of the act itself. Character, the fourth domain of ethical consideration, is the accumulated pattern of one's intentions and choices.

[3] You can find references to "sin properly so called" in Wesley's sermon, "The Scripture Way of Salvation" and you can find this definition of sin in a letter he wrote in 1772 to a Mrs. Elizabeth Bennis.

[4] E.g., in his sermon, "The Fruits of the Spirit." He did not reference murder when speaking of this category, I should make clear.

[5] However, you might argue that, apart from trusting in the atonement provided by Christ, we are also held morally culpable for our unintentional sin.

Tough Philosophy Night

Tonight's philosophy class was on the problem of suffering and evil. Difficult because the bottom line to me is that we just have to trust God:

• We have to trust that God can stop evil and suffering, even if he doesn't.
• We have to trust that God is loving in a meaningful sense. A meaningful sense is one in which God actually would prefer for everyone to be saved and doesn't determine who will be saved or damned. 
• Within that context, we have to trust that, despite our suffering and the continuance of evil, there is some bigger picture that we do not see in which God still loves us in a meaningful sense.

Where I think I got into murky waters, I think, is in relation to what evil is. In my philosophy, evil always involves personal intentionality. If I made the class suffer tonight out of delight for them to suffer, I was evil. If it was unintentional torture, it was just suffering, not evil.

I function with two definitions of sin. The most important, the one by which I believe God judges us, is a matter of intention. To paraphrase Wesley, the meaningful sense of sinning is when a person intentionally does something they know they shouldn't do. This is the intransitive sense of sin, "I sinned."

Yet a person can also sin against another person without intending to do so. A person can lose control of the wheel through no fault of his or her own and swerve and kill someone. They have sinned against the other person although they have not sinned in intent. A person can also sin against God, not by violating some absolute law but by wronging God, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

Here's the most controversial thought. My Wesleyan theology would be incoherent, I think, if God judged anyone on the basis of the second definition of sin, although the second definition of sin is atoned for by Christ's blood, just as the first one is.

The first kind of sin is evil. The second kind of sin relates to suffering. Of course there is also much suffering that is not a matter of human action, but I'll stop here. I'm sure I unsuccessfully tried to tease this out here.

Why Does God Allow It?

Last year, I wrote about 46 pages on the problem of evil, pretty much all but the concluding section.

So I thought I would write the conclusion today:
____________
The problem of evil and suffering is the question of why God allows it.  Pain and suffering in themselves are not evil. God can actually use them to help us grow. Even death, from one perspective, is simply the beginning of a joyful eternity. It is those of us who remain who usually suffer the most.

Even then, some of our concern over the problem of evil comes from imagining our own suffering and death rather than from our own suffering per se.  We imagine ourselves in the shoes of those who may have suffered only for a moment. Sometimes our sense of the magnitude of the issue comes from fear as much as from actual suffering.

But if God loves us and is able to stop evil and suffering, then why doesn't he? Here again, we do not know the extent to which he does.  God may be intervening all the time, constantly, without us knowing it.  We are mostly aware of the times when he doesn't.  It is quite possible that they stand out to us in great disproportion to the number of times he does step in and change the course of history.

Why doesn't he step in every time?  We must ultimately trust that he has some larger reason not to step in.  We must believe that he doesn't step in because there is some greater good either for us or for humanity as a whole.

For example, one old explanation for the bigger picture has to do with moral freedom.  It is not a perfect answer, but it suggests that a world in which we can choose the good (and thus can choose evil) is a better world than one in which we are simply God's robots playing out a script he has written for us. But if some individuals will choose the good, then some will choose the evil, and suffering will result.

This answer to the problem of evil is the "free will" explanation.  In its classical form, it says that God gave Satan and Adam a choice between good and evil, and they made the wrong choice.  In Adam's case, the result was a world where people have a tendency to do wrong and where the created realm is enslaved to corruption and decay (cf. Rom. 8:19-21). St. Augustine in the 400s saw the evil and suffering in the world as a direct consequence of Adam's sin in Genesis 3.

As someone from the Wesleyan tradition, I believe that God still empowers us to make choices for good in this world.  We can of course go with the human default of selfishness, usually with a resulting detriment to ourselves and others around us.  But I believe God makes it possible also for us, both individually and collectively, to do good in the world as well, if we will.

A supplemental answer to that of free will is the "Irenaeus" answer, proposed some two hundred years before Augustine.  Irenaeus suggested that suffering can make us stronger.  Without hardship, our wills would not face the kinds of choices that enable us to grow and become morally great. We can understand natural laws as a mirror of the principle of freedom, where God allows the laws of nature to play themselves out without regularly intervening. Sometimes, those laws play out in a way that results in our suffering, and we face the choice to grow or become bitter.

But ultimately, it comes down to faith in the mystery of God's goodness.  By faith we believe that God is good.  I do not believe that God orchestrates evil or that he directly causes all suffering.  For reasons that are usually beyond our full understanding, he certainly allows it.  Sometimes he intervenes.  Sometimes he doesn't.

Ultimately, we must believe that there is a big picture that we often do not see.  We as Christians believe that, if God allows evil or suffering, he must do so because it is either beneficial for us in some way or that it benefits the big picture.  We do not see the big picture.  We cannot know how the alternative would play out.

We believe by faith that God is good and that the sovereign king of the universe will do right (Gen. 18:25).  Sometimes we can guess at why God might allow something, but we cannot be certain in this life.  We must have faith in the mystery of his goodness, that he is working everything for good in his ultimate game plan.

The Speakable and the Nameless

Twenty children are speakable this morning.  They are not in pain.  We don't fear of their eternal destinies.  We mourn their moments of terror yesterday.  Their families and the good who look on are the ones who now suffer.  The families of the dead are speakable.  The lives of these children are speakable, and we celebrate their lives.

Six, maybe seven adults are speakable. I don't know of their virtue. The martyred almost always become saints.  They are speakable for the injustice done them. They are not in any pain. We sympathize with their moments of terror and honor their lives. We celebrate their lives.

There is one nameless, once significant but now an insignificant loony, forever forgotten.

How do we move forward? Hire a policeman for every school? Use the opportunity to move forward with common sense gun control? Consider the culture of violence in movies and games we have allowed to overtake us?  Increase funding to deal with the mentally ill of society?  Probably.

What of God?  Was this part of his well-laid out plan, as some Christian pop-theology would say? I would rather say God allows such things to happen than orchestrates such things.

Faith in the mystery of God's permissive will at least gives hope. Those who abandon faith at this point are left with no hope of joy for the dead or sense of justice for the nameless.

We are reminded again of how little we are against the scope of all space and time, which of course also makes our death a relatively minor detail.  But today we celebrate the significance of twenty-six or seven lives.  We will celebrate them well.

What God Intends

By now the passing comments of Richard Mourdock in an Indiana Senate debate have made their way around the nation and have become part of the presidential debate.  When asked his position on abortion, he said:

"I know that there are some who disagree and I respect their point of view but I believe that life begins at conception. The only exception I have to have an abortion is in that case of the life of the mother. I struggled with it myself for a long time but I came to realize that life is a gift from God, and I think that even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape that it is something God intended to happen."

The first part of his comment allows for abortion when there is a competing claim on life between the mother and the unborn child.  The second half relates to the question of making exceptions when there isn't a competing life claim.  For example, in the case of rape, is that an exceptional situation?  His answer was that it is not. Being consistent with his view that we have a human being, probably even from the point of the initial zygote where sperm and egg join, he cannot justify abortion in that case because it is taking a life.

There are all sorts of ethical and theological issues here.  For example, does a blastocyst hours or days after conception have the same moral status as a three month old or six month old fetus?  If so, then IUDs and the day after pill should be made illegal (so in Mourdock's position, a raped woman should not be given a day after pill to make sure she doesn't get pregnant from the rape).  Does a fertilized egg have a soul?  To what extent can the religious views of an individual be forced onto American citizens who do not share that view?

But those debates are very old.  Mourdock did not say, "I believe a life is a life and thus that even in the case of rape a woman can't have an abortion."  He went further to say that God intended her to get pregnant.  This is the Rick Warren, purpose-driven-life perspective.

It is not a Wesleyan perspective.  Wesleyans believe that God has given humanity free will in some measure. Accordingly, not everything that happens is God's perfect plan or directive will.

I would go further to say that God gives the creation some degree of freedom as well.  Let's call it "the laws of nature."  God does not decide every time whether I'm going to stick to the ground or fly off into space.  He made something called the law of gravity.

The result is that God doesn't micromanage the creation.  God allows everything that happens because he is sovereign, in control of everything.  But God does not direct everything that happens.  Otherwise, God becomes the direct author of evil, which James 1 disallows.  This is a potential inconsistency in Mourdock's position.  If God intends the pregnancy, he must explain why God did not intend the rape in the first place.

In the end, this is the age old problem of evil.  The best explanation--and even it is admittedly not perfect--is that God has allowed evil to exist in the world for a time.  Evil happens.  Some Christian thinkers, like John Piper and Wayne Grudem, prefer to think that God orchestrates and directs every single thing that happens.  There would thus be no difference between God and Satan, for God would make Satan do everything he does.

At least the "free will explanation" distances God from evil. It says that God, for some reason, has allowed evil and suffering to exist for the moment, but that he will eventually destroy it once and for all, for good.

Catastrophes and God's Judgment 3

Thus far in this segment:

God and Catastrophes 1
God and Disabilities 2

Now Catastrophes and God's Judgment 3
We have to reckon with similar ambiguity when it comes to events as God's judgment.  To be sure, a significant stream of biblical thought--especially in the Old Testament--sees a direct correlation between sin and event.  For example, the books of Joshua and Judges assume that defeat of Israel in battle or its enslavement to foreign powers must imply that someone, somewhere has sinned.  When Israel loses in battle to Ai, it must be because someone in Israel has sinned--a man named Achan, as it turns out.

This way of thinking is called "deuteronomistic theology."  In the light of all Scripture, however, it is clearly only a partial picture.  In the thinking of Deuteronomy 28, the righteous do not suffer in the service of God.  Certainly people like Jesus do not get crucified.  Those today who preach a prosperity gospel do so from Old Testament passages that make a  direct correlation between serving God and material blessing and ignore the New Testament sense that those who serve God should not be surprised if they suffer in this world.

The fuller revelation of Scripture thus points to some serious refinements to deuteronomistic theology.  For example, Ezekiel 18 and Jeremiah 31 give one: "In those days they shall no longer say: 'The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.' But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge" (Jer. 31:29-30, NRSV).  Jeremiah goes on to give important verses on the new covenant God is going to make with his people, verses that Hebrews 8 quote extensively.

In deuteronomistic theology, the individual sinner may not be the one who gets punished--it could be his or her grandchildren. Jeremiah and Ezekiel point to individual punishment in the future, with whole groups not suffering for the sins of others.  In other words, Jeremiah and Ezekiel raise questions about the idea that an earthquake might kill a lot of people because of the sins someone else did somewhere else.

It is also important to remember that Deuteronomy and the other historical books of the Old Testament do not yet know of a significant life after death.  At this point in the flow of revelation, they understand that there is reward and punishment to come, but they think of it only taking place in the land of the living.  Thus sin must be punished in this world, either to the sinner or to the sinner's children.  These are instances where the New Testament significantly refines and clarifies matters.

The point is that the model of Christian thinking that connects catastrophic events with God's judgment faces serious questions in the light of all Scripture.  For example, those who see in the 9-11 tragedy God's judgment on America must face Jeremiah 31:30 above.  Such thinking, in effect, is saying that those people in the towers did not die for their own sins but for the sins of others.  Someone else ate sour grapes but their teeth were set on edge.

A better model is to see God's instructions to humanity as indications of lives that are more likely to prosper and involve fulfillment, while sin is a path more likely to bring pain and suffering.  It is not that God is a cowboy sheriff waiting to blow you away when you mess up, but God has given you ample warning of what happens when you follow a certain path.  Bad things happen.  And, yes, there usually is collateral damage for your sins.  Your children usually do pay for the bad choices you make and the sins of the fathers are passed down to the third and fourth generation (e.g., Deut. 5:9).

Certainly we cannot say that God never causes cataclysmic events in judgment on a group of people.  We are saying that great caution must be exercised with these verses from the Old Testament because they are not yet "fully cooked."  And the dynamics of thinking this way can hide a heart of hate toward others, when Christ has commanded us to love our enemies.  It is interesting that people were ready to attribute the 2011 tsunami in Japan to the fact that Japan is not a nation with many Christians.  But we did not hear this explanation later in the year when tornadoes ripped through the Bible belt of Missouri.

God does have a plan for the world, and God may have very specific plans for you.  His plan for the world is to see as many reconciled to him as will, although he forces no one.  And sometimes God does have a very specific plan for a Moses--a plan that God would have allowed Moses to nullify if he had so chosen.  God does not make us slaves to his will, however.  He walks with us and interacts with us.  If we fail to get into a relationship with someone, we have not missed "the one" he had planned for us to marry for life.

God does not micromanage the creation, but he has created it with freedom to choose wisely and to choose poorly.  He has created it with natural laws that run on their own.  Our pain and suffering is often a result of our own choices or the choices of others.  When he steps into the chain of self-running cause and effects is a mystery.  Surely he does.  But the question of pain and suffering is more about why he allows it, not why he directly causes it.

Next week: Why does God allow suffering?

God and Disabilites 2

The second part of "God and Catastrophes," which I have deceivingly labeled, "God and Disabilities."  It is in there... wait for it...


God and Catastrophes 1
_____________
God and Catastrophes 2
... We are suggesting here something in between these two extremes.  We are suggesting that God largely does let the natural world continue in its normal sequence of cause and effect.  Sometimes the pressure in the tectonic plates builds up to such an extent beneath the surface of the earth that the plates slip and the reverberation shakes the surface so much that buildings fall on thousands of people.  Or maybe this happens under the ocean and a tsunami kills 10,000 people.

Sometimes a body of matter going down fifth street at such and such a speed comes into contact with a body of matter going down second avenue at such and such a speed.  Neither driver had evil intent, but one of them ran a stoplight by accident.  And now both of them are in the hospital.  Maybe one of them is dead.

We have argued that the deaths and suffering of these individuals is not evil because no one caused them to happen as a matter of evil intent.  We are now arguing that while God allows such things to happen, he rarely if ever directs them to happen.  Catastrophes are not generally God's punishment of some group for their sin or God trying to teach us something.  They are God allowing the normal sequence of cause and effect play itself out, this feature that he created as part of the world.

Again, we are not saying that God never causes suffering or catastrophe.  We are not saying that God never causes events as punishment for sin.  We are not saying that God never orchestrates or micro-manages your life or the world.  We are saying that God mostly allows human will and natural law to play themselves out freely.

Underlying this entire discussion is again the old debate between freedom and determinism, of love and autocracy.  Is God more interested in a world where people choose him freely or is he more interested in everyone obeying him?  The picture we are painting is one in which God has, in his sovereignty and authority, created a world that is free to be less than the ideal if it so chooses, and that such a world can be a good world.  And we are saying he largely treats the natural world the same way.

What about the Bible?  What does it say?  Because the Bible is not a philosophy book, it says things that seem to endorse both perspectives!  We have debates such as these because the Bible does not work out a systematic theology of evil, pain, and suffering.  Read in context, the books of the Bible are individual and separate pieces of revelation to address individual and distinct situations over the course of a thousand years in diverse ancient contexts.  It speaks far more locally, contextually, and proverbially than universally. [1] When we read the Bible as one book whose every verse speaks directly to me, we simply are not reading the words anything like they were originally understood.

So we read a verse like Exodus 4:11: "Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?" (NRSV).  We hear what God is saying to Moses. I am both the one who made you have difficulty speaking and the one now calling you to preach to Israel.  Go do it.  So the case seems closed.  Any birth defect or disability you get is directly orchestrated by God.

But then we remember what we wrote in relation to God causing temptation.  The earlier parts of the Old Testament do see everything directly orchestrated by God... but the later parts and the New Testament often do not. [2] Remember how 2 Samuel 24 says God did something that 1 Chronicles says Satan did? There is a development in understanding in the Bible on God as the direct cause of evil, with the more developed parts seeing Satan and other evil forces more directly responsible for evil.

Whether we like it or not, we cannot settle theological debates such as these with a single verse or one strand of the Bible.  We have to take the whole Bible into account.  We have to recognize where God is going in Scripture on an issue, not just where he started working with humanity.  And to systematize such things, we inevitably get into the kinds of reasoning that both sides engage in.  This sort of philosophizing has to process these issues in ways that none of the biblical texts do because we are looking for an overall perspective that fits with an overall understanding of God's character.  We do this sort of reasoning whether we admit it to ourselves or not...

[1] Proverbs are pictures of general truths.  They are not absolute, and they are not promises.  If you train up a child in the way it should go, it will generally go that way (Prov. 22:6).  But it is not the nature of proverbs to say that a child will never go astray despite parents doing everything in their power to train up the child correctly.  Proverbs just don't work that way.

[2] Another important insight is that God reveals himself in categories we can understand (otherwise communication would not take place).  The fact that God says this to Moses does not change our conclusion, since God would speak to Moses on a level Moses would understand.  The Bible's language about God is "incarnated" in the thought of the times and places its documents were written just as much as its language about other things.

God and Catastrophes 1

I think I'm getting close to finishing this strangely evolving series relating to the problem of evil and suffering.  I put in some headings to give a sense of the organization.

Where is God?
Questionable Explanations

Definitions
What is evil?
Pain is not Evil
What is sin? 1
What is sin? 2

God doesn't directly cause evil and suffering.
Does God tempt? 1
Does God tempt? 2
God and Catastrophes 1 (today's)

Ultimate Questions
Why did God create evil?

Today, God and Catastrophes
So far, we have argued that evil has to do with intent to do wrong and to harm.  Pain thus is not evil in itself when it does not come in some way from someone's intent to do wrong.  We have argued that God allows evil to take place but does not generally cause it directly. In this section, we want to complete the circle and say that God allows pain, suffering, catastrophe and such, but does not generally cause it directly.

This notion flies in the face of a great deal of popular teaching about suffering, because many Christians comfort themselves in the middle of their problems with the idea that God is trying to teach them something.  Maybe God is disciplining them because they have not been paying attention to him.  Maybe he is getting them ready for something bigger that is coming.  Some Christians act as if God is behind the scenes orchestrating the minute details of their lives, down to which jello they picked for lunch.

Of course who is to say that God does not directly intervene in our lives?  Christians believe in miracles and God interjecting himself into the stream of human and natural cause and effect.  Christians are not deists, who think God created the world but is no longer involved with it.  In all that we are about to say, we are not denying that God can and may, from time to time, interject himself as a cause in the stream of otherwise "natural" causes and effects.

But there also seems something decidedly narcissistic and immature about the way popular Christianity thinks God is directing the minute details of their lives.  This view creates a world in which it's all about me and what God's doing in my life.  Sure, he's doing it for you as well--I'll let you share and be happy about it too.  But now it's my turn to share about what God is teaching me right now.

There is something curiously American about this approach to things, not to mention something curiously post-Freudian and post-Romanticism.  It is a symptom of modern introspection and psychology, atypical of other times and places in history.  It is a by-product of the world after Sigmund Freud, who taught us that who we are today is a product of key events that took place in our childhood, which has led the west to scour their individual past for significance.  It is a symptom of the hyper-individualism of the west.

Of course the Enlightenment of the 1700s went too far in the opposite direction.  Fascinated with the newly discovered laws of nature, some thinkers went so far as to say that God never intervenes in the world.  To them, the world was just one big machine that God created, wound up, and then gave a push to.  The rest is simply the pool balls bouncing off one another according to the laws of physics.  If we knew all the variables and the math, we could predict everything that would happen for the rest of the world.

We are suggesting here something in between these two extremes.  We are suggesting that God largely does let the natural world continue in its normal sequence of cause and effect...

Why did God create evil?

If you remember, I decided to continue my series on the problem of evil and pain on Sundays.  Here is the next installment:

Where is God?
Questionable Explanations
What is evil?
Pain is not Evil
What is sin? 1
What is sin? 2
Does God tempt? 1
Does God tempt? 2

Why did God create evil?
Thus far we have made two basic claims.  The first is that evil in its most meaningful sense is a matter of intention.  Evil involves the intent of a thinking agent to do harm or to do wrong.  Pain and suffering, in that sense, are not technically evil, no matter how devastating they may be.

The second claim is that God never has an evil intention.  Justice is not evil and primarily involves withholding mercy.  God's dominant characteristic however is love.  God does not generally (and may not ever) direct the evil intentions of others.  Because he is in control of everything, he certainly must allow everything that happens in the world.  But he does not directly cause evil.

This line of thought leads us to what is perhaps the key question behind the entire debate. Why did God create evil in the first place?  If God created everything that exists out of nothing, then every single thing that exists in this realm is also God's creation.

First, it is important to recognize that, as we have been saying, evil is not a thing.  Evil is an adjective we give to certain intentions of moral agents like humans.  The question technically is not, "Why did God create evil?" but "Why did God create a world where moral agents could have evil intentions?"

Notice the wording: "... where moral agents could have evil intentions."  We are saying that, since God created everything, he must have created the possibility of evil.  To be consistent, we have to be able to say that a world in which the possibility of evil exists can be a good world.

In our opinion, it does not have to be the best world.  The philosopher Leibniz once suggested that God could not create a world that was anything less than the best possible world.  We are not arguing that.  We are only arguing that a loving and just God could create a world in which the possibility of evil existed.

The most frequently given answer is that a world in which we are free to choose God and the good is a better world than one in which we are forced to.  It seems hard to evaluate this statement, since we are in no position to know what other kinds of universes God might create.  Nevertheless, this explanation does seem to make some sense in this universe, and this is the universe about which we are speaking.

It does imply a rather high value on allowing human moral choice.  We have a tendency as humans to want to intervene, to want to stop evil.  It is hard after following this line of thought not to see God as often or more often leaving moral agents to choose, despite the ensuing consequences.

In the end, it is not so important that we can explain how it could be loving to create a world with the possibility of evil.  We only need to find it plausible that God, in his knowing of all things, could create the world with good intentions.  We do not have to know completely what those intentions were, only that it is plausible that they were good, despite the fact that he created the possibility of evil.

A key question for many Christians at this point is Satan.  One way those who have believed in a good God in history have accounted for the existence of evil is to see an evil power co-existing with the good one.  The Zoroastrians had their evil Ahriman whose power paralleled the good being Ahura Mazda.  The Gnostics saw the origins of evil in the material world that God did not create but that has always been.

These systems are not properly Christian, but have less difficulty accounting for evil. Satan for Christians is not powerful in any meaningful sense when placed next to God.  We thus cannot account for evil in the world meaningfully by saying that Satan motivates the evil intentions of humans because God created Satan.  The question is still, how could a good and loving God create a world in which the possibility of Satan existed.

And the best answers remain the same.  Presumably God did not create Satan evil originally but with the possibility for Satan to make evil moral choices.  Presumably it is good for moral agents to be able to make moral choices despite the fact that they may make evil choices.

Next week: Implications for Suffering

What is sin? 2

I want to shift my blogging energies a little, so may finish this one more intermittently... maybe on Sundays.

Where is God?
Questionable Explanations
What is evil?
Pain is not Evil
What is sin? 1
What is sin? 2
Does God tempt? 1
Does God tempt? 2

What is sin continued...
It is also important for us to recognize the standard by which these intentions were measured.  The New Living Translation imposes later theological categories on Romans 3:23 when it translates it to say that all have fallen short of "God's glorious standard," as if the problem is the fact that we cannot be perfect.   More likely, Paul was saying that human lack the glory that God intended them to have in Psalm 8.

There are at least two respects in which the rhetoric many Christians use in relation to sin is out of focus.  First, we have a tendency to put more emphasis on one argument Paul makes than I am convinced he himself did.  This is the "no one can keep every law their entire life; therefore, we are entirely guilty" argument.  True, Paul does say all have sinned in Romans 3 and Galatians 3:19 does seem to make an argument something like this.

But Paul's purpose here is not to give a systematic theological statement.  He is backing up his claim that we all need Christ's atonement--little more.  He certainly is not saying that we are guilty of every law (a mistaken interpretation even of James 2:10).  He is not saying we are totally depraved (that there is no good in us whatsoever). He is simply stating something everyone would have agreed with at the time--all humanity needs atonement.

Those who say they do not are deceiving themselves, are making God a liar (1 John 1:8, 10).  That is what all these statements amount to.  Later theologians like Augustine and Calvin systematized and absolutized passing arguments in Paul.  However, we will inevitably get Paul out of focus if we use such passages as the starting point for understanding God's character in relation to justice.

A second difference to keep in mind is how introspective modern Westerners have become in our individualistic, post-Romantic context. We can self-analyze our motives and intentions in a way that neither Jesus or Paul came close to assuming.  Even the level of Christian perfection John Wesley had in mind went far too introspective for the standards of Jesus' day, causing not only many Wesleyans since but Wesley himself sometimes to torture themselves in an unhealthy inward focus.

The result is a lot of distraction with regard to what is important about the category of sin, which is one's intent to do wrong or to do things contrary to a heart devoted to God.  Sin and evil are most meaningful concepts when we are talking about our intentions toward others and the extent to which we filter our lives through true devotion to God.  Sin as any imperfection, as unintentional wrongdoing--these have a place in a systematic treatment but are not particularly helpful in sorting out how to live a righteous life.

This also leads us to a massive myth that is widely circulated these days--that all sin is sin.  This idea has absolutely no biblical basis at all in terms of the life of a believer.  True, when we first come to Christ, any sin we have in the past amounts to breaking our relationship with God. In that sense we might say that all sin is sin for our pre-Christian past.  But the New Testament nowhere treats all sin after justification as equal.  Not only does Paul dispense different consequences for different sins, but some sins can keep a person from inheriting the kingdom of God (e.g., 1 Cor. 6:9-11).

The key once again is intention, a fact usually missed by the pop notion that all sin is the same.  As in a relationship with other people, some wrongs can break a relationship while others only damage it a little.  There is a vast difference between forgetting an anniversary and having an affair.  It is this way in our relationship with God.  There is a vast difference between losing our temper with someone because we have not had enough sleep and murdering millions of Christians in the name of atheism.  To suggest these two sins would be the same in God's eyes is patently ludicrous.

By the same token, emotions are not, in themselves, sinful.  As someone once said, "Emotions are neither good nor bad; they just are."  True, you can choose to act in a sinful way because you are angry--"Be angry and do not sin" (Eph. 4:26).  And you can subtly err by setting yourself up for wrongdoing because of your emotions.  You can miss sleep or food.

The level of intention is again the measure of the degree of wrongdoing.  If you know certain courses of action make you more susceptible to do wrong and you do not change, then your intention is involved.  And if your intention is involved, then we get into the realm of morality and evil.

This discussion relates to the question of evil and suffering because it gets in front of us exactly what we are asking.  The questions of evil and pain are questions about God's intentions, not questions of how bad these things feel or how horrendous an effect they have.  When we consider evil and sin in terms of the consequence, measured against an absolute standard of perfection, we are not asking the right question.  These are questions of God's intentions.  Suffering and pain in themselves, the effect of moral evil, are not evil.  They are just rather unpleasant.

Next Sunday: Why does God allow evil?