The Groaning of Creation

Surely American culture can’t be as insipid and superficial as critics claim when a theologian of the quality of David B. Hart can publish a piece on theodicy in a major newspaper:

The Christian understanding of evil has always been more radical and fantastic than that of any theodicist; for it denies from the outset that suffering, death and evil have any ultimate meaning at all. Perhaps no doctrine is more insufferably fabulous to non-Christians than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe, that this is a broken and wounded world, that cosmic time is the shadow of true time, and that the universe languishes in bondage to “powers” and “principalities”–spiritual and terrestrial–alien to God. In the Gospel of John, especially, the incarnate God enters a world at once his own and yet hostile to him–“He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not”–and his appearance within “this cosmos” is both an act of judgment and a rescue of the beauties of creation from the torments of fallen nature.

Whatever one makes of this story, it is no bland cosmic optimism. Yes, at the heart of the gospel is an ineradicable triumphalism, a conviction that the victory over evil and death has been won; but it is also a victory yet to come. As Paul says, all creation groans in anguished anticipation of the day when God’s glory will transfigure all things. For now, we live amid a strife of darkness and light.

(via Mere Comments)

Also see commentary by Bill Vallicella here.

I have questions about this position, though. For instance, how can we adhere to a belief that creation is fallen if we reject the notion of a literal “fall” at some actual point in time? Or, to put it another way, when did Hart’s “primordial catastrophe” take place? How seriously should we take the idea that there are demonic powers responsible for at least some of what we call “natural” evil? Should we think that there really was a rebellion in heaven (perhaps simultaneously with the creation of our universe) and that this rebellion has infected our world?