David Bentley Hart’s The Doors of the Sea is, in large part, a sharp rejoinder to any “theodicy” that would seek to make evil – physical, natural, or moral – a necessary means to the acheivement of some good. As such, it provides a useful counterpoint to the kind of account offered by Keith Ward.
Hart’s view is that Christians should by no means reconcile themselves to the existence of evil, suffering, and death as somehow necessary parts of the order of nature. Ivan’s diatribe against a world redeemed at the cost of the suffering of innocents in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Hart says, refutes any variety of “metaphysical optimism” that might view the sufferings of the world as necessary concomitants of the process by which rational, finite, and free beings are brought into existence. But it also clears the space where we can glimpse a more authentically Christian view.
That view, he argues, is that “nature” as we know it is not to be identified with “creation.” The God of Christianity is a God of perfect self-giving love, and creation reflects its creator in being peaceful, harmonious, and beautiful. “Nature,” by contrast
is everywhere attended — and indeed preserved — by death. All life feeds on life, each creature must yield its place in time to another, and at the heart of nature is a perpetual struggle to survive and increase at the expense of other beings. It is as if the entire cosmos were somehow predatory, a single great organism nourishing itself upon the death of everything to which it gives birth, creating and devouring all things with a terrible and impressive majesty. Nature squanders us with such magnificent prodigality that it is hard not to think that something enduringly hideous and abysmal must abide in the depths of life. (p. 50)
Death, suffering, and predation are, for Hart, not necessary features of a natural process that will bring about some greater good. Rather they’re signs of a creation shattered by some primordial cataclysm. Hart takes the cosmology of the New Testament quite seriously on this score and says that creation is in bondage to “principalities and powers” who have marred the image of God’s good creation:
Perhaps no doctrine strikes non-Christians as more insufferably fabulous than the claim that we exist in the long melancholy aftermath of a primordial catastrophe: that this is a broken and wounded world, taht cosmic time is a phantom of true time, taht we live in an umbratile interval between creation in its fullness and the nothingness from which it was called, that the universe languishes in bondage to the “powers” and “principalities” of this age, which never cease in their enmity toward the Kingdom of God. (pp. 61-2)
Though Hart doesn’t go into specifics, he seems to have in mind a fall which isn’t strictly speaking historical, but in some way “preceded” historical time as we know it:
[C]osmic time as we know it, through all the immensity of its geological ages and historical epochs, is only a shadow of true time, and this world only a shadow of the fuller, richer, more substantial, more glorious creation that God intends; and [we are required] to believe also that all of nature is a shattered mirror of divine beauty, still full of light, but riven by darkness. (p. 102)
At this point I start to worry that Hart is getting a bit too cozy with Gnosticism, which he admits to having some sympathy for because of its affinity with the “qualified dualism” of the New Testament. It starts to look like the created world as we know it bears very little relation at all to the “real” creation. After all, if the natural world, in its most fundamental features, is compromised by death, struggle, predation, and suffering, in what way does it resemble the “real” world? For instance, all living creatures are products of that enduringly hideous and abysmal something that seems to lie at the heart of nature. In what way, then can they be said to be God’s good creations rather than the monstrous offspring of a creation gone badly wrong?
I agree with Hart that there’s something unsatisfying, from a Christian viewpoint, about affirming a world of predation, suffering, and death as “good,” but his view seems to risk denying that there’s much goodness at all in nature as we find it.
A Thinking Reed 
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