Month: July 2004

Earlier I suggested that any answer to the problem of evil, from a Christian perspective at least, is bound up with God’s redemptive work in Christ. Christians believe that, somehow, God set the world to rights through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

This is what is asserted by the doctrine of the Atonement. Problem is, although there’s broad agreement among Christians on what the Atonement accomplishes (i.e. the defeat of sin, death, and evil), there’s much less agreement on how it accomplishes it. So, what follows will be even more speculative than the usual fare here at VI.

One way of looking at theories of the Atonement is as complementing each other rather than as mutually exclusive. Any language about divine action is necessarily going to be metaphorical and speculative, even if grounded in concrete experience. Each theory could be seen as describing, or trying to picture, one aspect of what is ultimately a mystery beyond human comprehension. With that in mind, let me suggest that there are (at least) three dimensions to the Atonement that are relevant here, each corresponding roughly to one of the major traditional theories. The Atonement is:

Revelatory – it shows us what God is like (this aspect corresponds roughly to Peter Abelard’s “moral exemplar” account of the Atonement)

Reconciling – it effects the forgiveness of sins and the possibility of a new relationship with God (e.g. an Anselmian “satisfaction” theory)

Redemptive – it rescues us from the power of sin and death (“classic,” Christus Victor, or “ransom” theory)

I’m contending that these aspects of the Atonement are all interrelated – or at least not mutually exclusive — and I separate them here solely for analytical reasons. In later posts I’ll try to show in more detail how these three aspects of the Atonement each shed light on the problem of evil.

Thanks to Dave Fiore for putting up a link to VI at his blog. Mr. Fiore writes some really fun and intelligent stuff about comics, literature, film, and early American Puritanism (and the connections therein) among other subjects. His Spider-Man blogging in particular has inspired me to try and dig out some of those 80’s reprints of the Lee/Ditko run that I think are stuffed in a box in my parents’ house. (I think the title was called Marvel Tales Starring Spider-Man or something like that…)

Also hereby added to the VI blogroll is Hugo Schwyzer, a “progressive, consistent-life ethic Anabaptist Democrat” (!) and gender-studies professor. Today Prof. Schwyzer puts the smackdown on a whiny group called Choice4Men who apparently object to being “forced” to be fathers when their wives/girlfriends/one-night-hookups/etc. fail to have an abortion:

Every man who ejaculates inside a woman, whether or not contraception is used, is signalling his willingness to become a father. If men are not ready and willing to raise a child conceived through an act of sex, they are morally responsible for refraining from sex. (I’ll let my sisters make a similar case for women. I’m in enough trouble on that side of the fence already). A man who opposes abortion ought to be certain of his partner’s feelings before he engages in sexual intercourse with her, lest she get pregnant and choose to abort the child that he may well wish to care for. A pro-life man whose girlfriend chooses abortion can hardly blame her for her “choice”. Similarly, a man who has no wish to become a father has no right to complain when biology works as nature intended.  

“I know of no other God except the one called Jesus Christ.” – Martin Luther

 

The question at the heart of the problem of evil is why, if God is good and all-powerful, doesn’t he do something about all the evil and suffering in the world? The usual responses (which I discussed here) often seem to answer this question by fudging one of the terms involved. Either God isn’t really good (or good in any way we can understand) or God isn’t really all-powerful, or what appears to be evil isn’t really evil – that is, it’s a necessary part of some greater good.

 

But if God isn’t good, then, while he might be the object of a certain feeling of awe, he wouldn’t be an object of love, or a being we could enter into a personal relationship with. On the other hand, if God isn’t all-powerful then it seems he is just another being alongside other beings, rather than the ground of being itself. God is reduced to merely one piece of the furniture of the universe, and worship of such a being would be tantamount to idolatry. Either of these solutions would seem to offend the religious impulse. Can we do better?

 

The reason we end up with this dilemma, I think, is that we start out with an essentially “deist” model of God. That is, a God who created the world, but doesn’t (or can’t) intervene in its workings. On these terms, the problem of evil will inevitably end up in a defeat for the theist. God can only end up looking like a distant and uncaring deity, a kind of cosmic constitutional monarch with no real power.

 

The startling claim of Christianity, however, is that God has done something about evil and suffering. Specifically, Christians proclaim that in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, God has dealt decisively with evil. The God of Christianity is not the detached God of deism or Aristotle’s prime mover. Rather, the Christian God is dynamically involved with his creation, going so far as to become incarnate in a human being in order to redeem a world corrupted by evil. 

 

I think that any satisfactory response to the problem of evil, at least for a Christian, demands that we take seriously this central claim about God’s redemptive action. When someone asks, “Why doesn’t God do something about evil?” the first answer has to be that he has.

 

But what does it really mean to say that God’s revelation in Christ is the answer to the problem of evil? Especially given the manifest fact that there’s still plenty of evil afoot in the world 2,000 years later? Stay tuned, true believers…

“The Christian argument for vegetarianism then is simple: since animals belong to God, have value to God and live for God, then their needless destruction is sinful. In short: animals have some right to their life, all circumstances being equal.” — Andrew Linzey

Bill Keezer was kind enough to send me a link to some of his own ruminations on matters theological. Here’s his take on the problem of evil:

God doesn’t violate his own rules of nature.This idea occurred to me about four or five months ago. I took the approach that if there were God, what must his nature be, and what could be reasonably said about it. First of all it seemed that it would lead to a horribly contradictory mess if God willy-nilly chose which laws of nature he observed and which he didn’t. In addition it makes him out to be an arbitrary and capricious Being, similar to Gods of ancient myths. This is assuming that he wrote the laws in the first place. It would also undermine any and all attempts at studying nature, if the rules under study could be altered at any time. Once the assumption is made that God follows his own rules of nature, then a number of things fall into place. Nature being generally deterministic with random elements and events (There is a whole world of discourse tied up in that phrase), both good and bad events will occur without a relationship to any one person or any group of people and their moral status. Hurricanes, tornados, flood, etc. strike good and bad alike, just as a wonderful growing season profits all farmers, not just the morally good ones. Another consequence is that reports of miracles that appear to violate laws of nature would fall into made up events, misconstrued events, mis-reported events, or the use of a law of nature undiscovered to date. Another consequence is that the physical world can be left to science, and religion can focus on what it is best suited for, dealing with the relationships between people and between people and God. The tools of Science are not generally suited to dealing with morality, and the tools of religion are not suited to dealing with science. Religion is concerned with what is inside the person, NOT what is out there. Out there is the province of science.

 

I was asked once by a good friend who is a lay minister, “If God doesn’t violate the laws of nature, is it because He won’t, or because He can’t?” At the time I passed on an answer because I had not thought it out that far. However, like others before me, I conclude that God does not because He cannot. I do not ascribe to an omnipotent (infinitely powerful) God. I tie my concept of God in with my concept of souls. God may be the totality of all the good souls acting in concert yet individually. In other words, as people have evolved and evolved souls, so has God evolved. In this case, God could be relatively omniscient (all knowing) compared to any individual or group of individuals, even though not absolutely omniscient.

More theodicy-blogging soon!

Christ commanded His followers to perform what Christians have come to call the Works of Mercy: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the harborless, visiting the sick and prisoner, and burying the dead. Surely a simple program for direct action, and one enjoined on all of us. Not just for impersonal “poverty programs,” government-funded agencies, but help given from the heart at a personal sacrifice. And how opposite a program this is to the works of war which starve people by embargoes, lay waste the land, destroy homes, wipe out populations, mutilate and condemn millions more to confinement in hospitals and prisons.

On another level there is a principle laid down, much in line with common sense and with the original American ideal, that governments should never do what small bodies can accomplish: unions, credit unions, cooperatives, St. Vincent de Paul Societies. Peter Maurin’s anarchism was on one level based on this principle of subsidiarity, and on a higher level on that scene at the Last Supper where Christ washed the feet of His Apostles. He came to serve, to show the new Way, the way of the powerless. In the face of Empire, the Way of Love.  — Dorothy Day

“Neither party is mine, not the jackass or the elephant.” — Chuck D

Jonah Goldberg doesn’t like Independents and he doesn’t like all the fawning over them by the press. As an Independent I suppose I should take umbrage at this, but he does make some good points. Some “swing voters” certainly make up their minds on the shallowest of criteria (Like, say, who has the better hair!). And he’s right that there’s no virtue per se in not having strong convictions or in waiting til the last minute to make up your mind.

 

Nevertheless, as a registered Independent (or as the say here in the great commonwealth of Pennsylvania, a “decline to state”), I think there are good reasons for not being affiliated with any party.

 

For starters, the cluster of positions that characterize Democrats and Republicans do not, as far as I can tell, hang together in any organic or particularly consistent way. What does favoring a strong military have to do with cutting capital gains taxes or opposing abortion? What principle unites environmentalism and support for gun control?

 

I find myself taking positions on various issues that regularly cross the liberal/conservative divide, so why should I sign up with one team or the other? This does require making judgments about which issues should receive the most weight in a given election. For instance, right now the war seems to me to be the issue of paramount importance, so I will weight it accordingly when deciding how to vote this fall.

 

Moreover, being an Independent gives you a certain psychological and moral freedom. I don’t feel obliged to defend someone’s sleazy tactics or lies just because they’re on “my team.” This doesn’t make me perfectly objective (there’s no such thing!), but it does create a certain critical distance.

Francis Fukuyama writes:

 

Of all of the different views that have now come to be associated with neo-conservatives, the strangest one to me was the confidence that the US could transform Iraq into a Western-style democracy and go on from there to democratise the broader Middle East.

 

It struck me as strange precisely because these same neo-conservatives had spent much of the past generation warning about the dangers of ambitious social engineering and how social planners could never control behaviour or deal with unanticipated consequences.

 

I’ve had the same thought myself. I read Irving Kristol’s essays and thought they were sensible, balanced, and incisive criticisms of utopian thinking on the left. Indeed, I took “neoconservative” to be practically synonymous with “anti-utopian.” Kristol was himself a man of the far left at one time, but rejected it in favor of a pragmatic and humane conservatism. Sort of an American Michael Oakeshott. His intellectual heirs, however, seem to have accepted the conclusions of Kristol’s conservatism without its style of thinking: skeptical, empirical, and mistrustful of ideological abstractions.

Some items of note from around the web:

 

Here’s a heart-warming article from today’s Philadelphia Inquirer (registration req’d) about a network of volunteers who rescue stray dogs from high-kill shelters in rural areas and find homes for them in the urban northeast. (Sadly, according to the article, there were still over 8,000 stray dogs put to death in Philly last year.)

 

Over at Tech Central Station, Arnold Kling criticizes both the Canadian and American approaches to health care and proposes what he calls “limited paternalism” as an alternative.

 

A great post at Disputations on God’s forgiveness and ours.

 

A thought-provoking article from the New Criterion: “Fundamentalism Isn’t the Problem”  (link via Pontifications)