A Thinking Reed

Category: Theology & Faith

  • The Groaning of Creation 3: God so loved the world

    In Chapter 4, Southgate develops a trinitarian “theology of creation,” an admittedly speculative enterprise that seeks to shine some light on the relationship between the triune God and an evolutionary process that operates according to Darwinian principles.

    Taking up the theme of kenosis, Southgate suggests that God’s self-emptying love is foundational both to intra-trinitarian relationships and to the relationship between God and the world. God the Father pours out his love, the essence of his being, giving rise to (begetting) God the Son, who, in turn, returns all that he is to the Father. And this intra-divine relationship of self-emptying love constitutes God the Holy Spirit.

    Southgate suggests that this inherently self-emptying, or kenotic, character of the divine love is the ground of God’s desire to create the genuinely other. And this desire is realized in the creation of the world and in the evolutionary process where God “lets be” a great variety of creatures.

    Following Irenaeus, Southgate calls the Son and the Spirit God’s “two hands” in creation. The Son, or Word, provides the intelligible pattern for species, which, in tune with modern biology, Southgate sees not as static essences, but as “points and peaks” on an ever-shifting “fitness landscape.” The Spirit, meanwhile, both provides creatures with their “thisness,” or particularity as unique individuals, and lures them onward toward new possibilities of fulfillment and self-transcendence.

    At any given time living creatures are in one of four states:

  • fulfilled (flourishing as the kind of creature they are)
  • growing toward fulfillment
  • frustrated (prevented from flourishing)
  • transcending themselves (either by chance mutation or some new learned capability)

    • While God takes delight in fulfilled creatures, there always remains an ambiguous note in creation. As Southgate observes, the divine love may be kenotic, or self-emptying, but Darwinian pressures require organisms to be self-assertive, if not downright aggressive. So, while the creatures praise God simply by flourishing as the type of creatures they are, there is a tension between their self-assertive fulfillment and the kind of selfless love that God is.

    This is where the element of self-transcendence comes in: Southgate sees God as luring creation– through the messy, ambiguous, and painful evolutionary process–toward a point where genuine self-giving love becomes possible: love of the other for its own sake. We see traces of this love in some of the higher animals, perhaps, but only in humanity, Southgate maintains, does this kind of love become a permanent possibility (though one that is all too infrequently realized).

    As God draws creations forward toward self-giving love, however, God endures the persistent self-assertiveness of creatures. If flourishing as the type of creature it is can be seen as the creature’s “Yes” to God, the “No” is a refusal of God’s invitation to self-transcendence, rather than selfish and preferential behavior:

    God suffers not only in the suffering of myriad creatures, each one precious to the Creator, and the extinction of myriad species, each a way of being imagined within the creative Word, but also the continual refusal–beyond creation’s praise–of God’s offer of self-transcendence, the continual refusal, beyond all creation’s flourishing, to live by the acceptance of the divine offer that would draw the creature deeper into the life of the Trinity itself. It will be apparent anew how paradoxical the theology of evolutionary creation must be, given the Christian affirmation that a good God has given rise to a good creation, and yet as we have seen the creation is shot through with ambiguity. The purposes of God are, and are not, realized in the life of any given creature. God delights in creatures in and for themselves, and yet longs for the response of the creature that can become more than itself, whose life can be broken and poured out in love and joy after the divine image. (p. 68)

    This creaturely “no” is experienced by God most powerfully on the cross of Jesus. In sketching a theology of the Atonement, Southgate says that the cross is God bearing the brunt of creation’s “no,” and taking responsibility for the pain and suffering etched into the process of life. In becoming incarnate in Jesus, God identified not just with humanity, but with all creaturely suffering, loss, and failure. “The Incarnation is the event by which God takes this presence and solidarity with creaturely existence to its utmost, and thus ‘takes responsibility’ for all the evil in creation–both the humanly wrought evil and the harms to all creatures” (p. 76)

    Southgate calls this “deep incarnation”–“the Christ-event takes all creaturely experience into the life of God in a new way.” In dying and rising, God in Jesus inaugurates a new age in which creation will be freed from its travails–humans freed to love selflessly, and non-human animals freed from the ambiguous nature of the evolutionary process in which they are caught up.

    Questions and considerations:

  • Does it make sense to say that creatures who aren’t capable of self-transcendence are frustrating God’s intentions for them?
  • How does Southgate’s theology of creation relate to a scientific explanation of the evolutionary process? Are there “gaps” in the process that require divine intervention to move it forward? Or does it operate according to purely naturalistic laws? And, if so, what explanatory power does the theological description add?

    • Regarding the first point, Southgate acknowledges that, of course, no moral blame attaches to creatures for failing to transcend themselves. However, he says, it still makes sense to speak of a certain “recalcitrance” in nature as it presently exists that resists the shape of the “peaceable kingdom.” This is in keeping with his general emphasis on creation’s “groaning”: of being in process toward something that will be fully transparent to God’s will and is foreshadowed in some of the eschatological passages in the Bible.

    In response to the second concern, Southgate says in a footnote that “theology of creation is a different sort of discourse from scientific explanation […], so the two can coexist without there necessarily being conflict between them” (fn. 56, p. 161). This needs to be fleshed out more, however. Does he mean that the two “discourse” are just two ways of describing the same phenomena? In which case, why prefer one or the other? Or does he mean that the theological discourse gets at an aspect of the total process that the scientific discourse leaves out, and is therefore necessary to give a complete account?

    Index of posts in this series is here.

  • “Idolatry and fear”

    Wonderful post from Kim Fabricius at “Connexions.”

    UPDATE: See part II, prompted by a comment from yours truly.

  • Food for the faithful

    Bls points us to an article from the Post on how religious believers are reflecting their faith in their food choices.

    I think the idea of having a church garden that supplies all the food for a seasonal picnic is fantastic. Not least because it resulted in an all-veggie potluck, about the opposite of most church potlucks I’ve been to. 😉

    I’m sensitive to the concern voiced by the African-American pastor quoted in the article that many congregants might not have the resources to eat healthy. But surely that just highlights that this should be a pressing issue for churches: not only to embody principles of just and healthy eating in their own congregational lives, but to work for a more just, sustainable, and healthy food system. In fact, many mainline congregations are already involved in “fair trade” campaigns; this would seem to be a logical extension of that work.

  • The Groaning of Creation 2: The Only Way?

    Before moving on, it’s worth spending a post on what Southgate calls the “only way” or the “best way” argument, which is, in his view, “the starting point for any evolutionary theodicy that does not allow itself to be lured down the blind alleys–such as a spurious appeal to fallenness–that I explored in Chapter 2” (p. 47).

    In broad terms, the argument is that, in order to create a world with the kind of life that ours exhibits, it was necessary for God to do so by means of the evolutionary process. And, while this process brings in its trail a host of apparently negative side-effects–suffering, premature death, extinction–these are necessary aspects of that process, and life couldn’t have arisen without them.

    Or, as Southgate himself puts it:

    I hold that the sort of universe we have, in which complexity emerges in a process governed by thermodynamic necessity and Darwinian natural selection, and therefore by death, pain, predation, and self-assertion, is the only sort of universe that could give rise to the range, beauty, complexity, and diversity of creatures the Earth has produced. (p. 29)

    Southgate calls this an “unprovable assumption,” but it’s worth considering reasons to support it. One, I think, is that the processes he refers to (“thermodynamic necessity” and “Darwinian natural selection”) are the only ways we know about whereby biological creatures have come into being, and we have no idea of what a universe governed by radically different laws would look like.

    Everything we know about the development of life on Earth presupposes these processes, so it’s initially plausible to say that this is the only way life could have developed. Given this, Southgate concludes that “a good and loving God would have created the best of all possible universes, in terms of the balance between its potential for realizing creaturely values and the concomitant pain” (p. 48).

    It might seem, given traditional notions of God’s omnipotence, that this account imposes an external constraint on God by saying that God “had to” create things a certain way. But it should be remembered that even traditional accounts of omnipotence concede that God can’t do what is simply (or logically) impossible.

    It may well be that it’s impossible in the strong sense to have a law-governed universe in which life arose by non-Darwinian means. So, it doesn’t impugn God’s omnipotence to say that life had to evolve by broadly Darwinian means, given that God chose to create a law-governed universe.* (I’ve covered this ground a bit before; see here for a more in-depth discussion in conversation with Keith Ward’s Pascal’s Fire.)

    However, Southgate doesn’t think that such a “developmental good-harm analysis,” as he calls it, is sufficient to account for some of the evils we see in the evolutionary process, particularly what I earlier called pointless suffering (animals living lives of frustrated potential and/or unrelieved suffering) and the extinction of entire species.

    In a variation on Ivan Karamazov’s complaint, Southgate deems it unacceptable that God would create by means of a process that left countless individual creatures to permanently frustrated lives of unrelieved suffering, even as a means to the greater good of a universe of complex and diverse creaturely values. This leads him to introduce two other crucial components of his evolutionary theodicy: God’s co-suffering with creatures and the promise of redemption for those creatures who’ve been denied the opportunity to flourish.

    The idea that God suffers along with those of his creatures who suffer has been a motif in much modern theology, particularly in the wake of the World Wars and the Holocaust, despite its challenge to traditional views of divine impassibility. And when it comes to human suffering, we can understand, I think, how the idea of divine co-suffering can provide comfort. Anyone who has taken solace in the presence of Jesus, the “man of sorrows,” in the midst of suffering knows this.

    However, in the case of non-human creatures, it’s less clear how the divine co-suffering could mitigate the problem. Recognizing the limits of what we can say about both animal experience and divine experience, Southgate tentatively suggests that the divine attention lovingly focused on the suffering creature “at some deep level takes away the aloneness of the suffering creature’s experience” (p. 52).

    This is obviously quite speculative, but Southgate also offers another angle on the divine suffering that will be explored in more detail later: in entering into the suffering of creation, especially in the cross of Jesus, God “takes responsibility” or “pays the price” for the necessary suffering that accompanies the evolutionary process.

    Second, the suffering and frustration of individual creatures–the vicitms of the evolutionary process–could be compensated for by positing an “eschatological compensation,” or animal heaven in other words. This has been invoked to address human suffering, so is there any reason to exclude the possibility for animals a priori? This will also get more detailed treatment later on.

    So, to sum up: Southgate’s evolutionary theodicy for non-human suffering affirms that a world of evolving life, with all its attendant pain and suffering, was the only way, or at least the best way, for God to bring into existence a diversity of life-forms to realize complex values in a law-governed universe. However, the suffering of individual creatures who never get the chance to flourish cries out for both divine compassion and solidarity as well as the possibility for redemption in the next life.

    Index of posts in this series is here.
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    *Southgate deals with the question “Why did God not just create heaven?” in a later chapter, and I’ll discuss it when I get there.

  • The Groaning of Creation 1: Intro

    I’ve been reading a very cool book by Christopher Southgate called The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil. This short book hits on several topics that I’ve discussed here: the relation between evolutionary and theological accounts of nature, the understanding of sin and redemption in the context of an evolutionary universe, and the problem of animal suffering.

    It’s the last that makes Southgate’s book unique. While most theodicies focus (understandably) on human suffering, Southgate, who has a background in both biochemistry and theology, has chosen to write a book about the suffering of non-human animals, and whether it is reconcilable with the existence of a loving God. This is what he means by “evolutionary theodicy.”

    In carrying out his project, Southgate pursues a strategy that has been used by others. The evolutionary process, a process by which certain values are realized, such as the existence of a diversity of sentient creatures, contains, as a necessary component, a certain amount of suffering. If God wanted to create a world with such creatures, Southgate suggests, it had to take place by means of a process very much like the Darwinian one that modern biology investigates. Southgate calls this the “only way” argument, as in, this is the only way God could bring into existence the kind of creatures that exist in the world, so some amount of pain and suffering is necessary if there’s to be a world like ours. He calls this an unprovable, but reasonable, postulate, given what we know about how life developed.

    Along with other proponents of evolutionary theodicy such as Holmes Rolston, John Polkinghorne, and Arthur Peacocke, Southgate rejects a historical “fall” as an explanation for the suffering that exists in the natural world, whether in its more literalist, creationist forms or as a “cosmic” fall as suggested by thinkers like David B. Hart. There is simply, he says, no evidence for such a fall. Certainly it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile the story of life’s development as presented by modern biology with the idea that the sin of the first human beings was the cause of nature’s “fallen” condition.

    However, Southgate also rejects “cosmic” fall narratives on the grounds that they posit a kind of dualism within creation: there are good parts and bad, “fallen” parts. In Southgate’s view, the good and bad effects of natural processes are far more tightly bound together than cosmic fall proponents recognize. They arise from inseparable aspects of a single creative process: “it was the same type of tectonic movement in the Indian Ocean that did so much to make the Earth’s surface what it is, with its extraordinary diversity and richness of biosphere, that caused the tragic and devastating tsunami of December 2004” (p. 34).

    And yet, Southgate doesn’t simply affirm that “whatever is, is good.” After all, his book is called “The Groaning of Creation,” and he takes seriously the notion that the natural world is in travail, a state from which it is waiting to be delivered. Creation is good, but it is incomplete and contains persistent evil. More specifically, he thinks there are kinds of suffering and disvalue that standard evolutionary theodicies don’t adequately deal with. These are

  • the existence of countless creatures who live frustrated lives and are never able to fulfill their God-given natures (what we might call cases of pointless suffering) and
  • the extinction of species, or entire ways of being in the biosphere. An adequate theodicy must take these disvalues into account, which will require what he calls a “compound evolutionary theodicy.”

    • This means that any adequate theodicy will emphasize not only that suffering and extinction occur as necessary concomitants of the evolutionary process, but also

  • that God suffers alongside God’s creatures (the “fellow sufferer who understands” in Whitehead’s terms) and
  • that there will be some form of eschatological redemption for creation, possibly including those individual creatures who lived frustrated lives of pointless suffering.

    • In future posts I’ll discuss Southgate’s trinitarian theology of creation, his eschatological views, and the ethical implications he draws for human beings as participants in God’s redeeming work.

    Index of posts in this series is here.

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  • Of dogs and asses

    Today at the library I picked up what looks like a great new book: Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition, by Laura Hobgood-Oster. It’s a study of the role animals have played in Christian stories, art, iconography, and piety throughout the ages, with an eye toward recovering a more positive view of animals within the tradition and the life of faith. Publisher’s page is here.

    I imagine I’ll be posting on this in the days ahead.

  • “Sin boldly! Go vote!”

    Here’s an article from 2004 that gives a good Lutheran perspective on politics and voting in response to an article from evangelical historian Mark Noll about not voting.

    I don’t agree with it in all the particulars, and Christian pacifists will likely not be convinced, but I thought it was a solid statement of a “two kingdoms” perspective.

  • Christians and voting, revisited

    This post from “Inhabitatio Dei” reminds me that I engaged in a fair amount of hand-wringing on this blog* about voting in 2004. That was the year that we had various Christian luminaries–Alasdair McIntyre and Paul Griffiths come to mind–openly advocating not voting.

    I ultimately ended up voting third-party, finding both Bush and Kerry unacceptable for various reasons, but this year I’m far less ambivalent about the matter. Have I gone soft (in the head)?

    For one thing, I think this piece on why Christians can and should prudently participate in the politics of the modern nation-state still holds up pretty well.

    The fact is, there are things that only the state can do, as well as things that it does which it shouldn’t do and which we should, if it’s within our power, try to change. I think that radicalized American Christians are sometimes tempted by a false pose of “powerlessness,” as though we are, or should aspire to be, in the same position with respect to our government that the early Christians were in with respect to the Roman empire.

    However, claiming powerlessness isn’t the same thing as being powerless. What we do (or don’t do) effects not only our fellow citizens but, for better or worse, people around the world. It’s not such a simple matter to abdicate that power.

    This is not to say that there aren’t situations where not voting is the best option. And I agree with many, like anabaptist John Roth, who point out that voting does not come close to exhausting the ways of “being political” (though, who ever said it did?).

    Voting will always be about choosing the lesser evil. We should certainly heed calls not to put our trust in princes to deliver the kingdom. But a clear-eyed and critical (wise as serpents?) approach to political participation seems to me a legitimate undertaking for Christians.
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    *Technically, it was on the Blogspot predecessor to this blog, but all the archives have been imported to WordPress.

  • Who’s got the messiah complex now?

    Good analysis from Chris (of Lutheran Zephyr) on McCain and Obama’s answers to Rick Warren’s “Does evil exist?” question at the Saddleback Church forum.

    Obama’s response–noting that only God can ultimately defeat evil and that the potential for evil lurks in our own hearts and in our best intentions–was very Niebuhrian.

  • Things I miss about being a (fellow traveling) Anglo-Catholic

    Marian feast days!

    We do have a small icon of the BVM and Christ child in the side chapel at our current (Lutheran) church, and our recent Vicar had a closet devotion to her, I suspect. (She agreed when I once mentioned my fondness for the doctrine of the Assumption.) But that’s about as far as things Marian go around there.