T&T Clark Handbook of Suffering and the Problem of Evil 9780567682437, 9780567682468, 9780567682444

Table of contents :
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Figures
Abbreviations
Chapter 1: Introduction: Suffering and the Problem of Evil
Part I: Biblical Perspectives
Chapter 2: Moses: The Suffering Servant
Chapter 3: Suffering and the Problem of Evil in the Prophets
Chapter 4: The Book of Job
Chapter 5: Suffering and the Quest for Its Causes in the Psalms
Chapter 6: Covenant Faith and Qohelet’s Questions
Chapter 7: Wrath in the Bible
Chapter 8: “The Lord Is in Your Midst” (Zeph. 3:15): Righteous Suffering in the Synoptic Gospels
Chapter 9: The Gospel of John
Chapter 10: Paul: Suffering as a Cosmic Problem
Chapter 11: The Epistle to the Hebrews
Chapter 12: The Book of Revelation
Part II: Historical and Contemporary Figures
Chapter 13: Irenaeus and Origen
Chapter 14: Gregory of Nyssa
Chapter 15: Augustine
Chapter 16: Thomas Aquinas
Chapter 17: Dante
Chapter 18: Julian of Norwich
Chapter 19: Martin Luther
Chapter 20: John Calvin
Chapter 21: Richard Hooker
Chapter 22: G. W. F. Leibniz
Chapter 23: Immanuel Kant
Chapter 24: Friedrich Schleiermacher
Chapter 25: Søren Kierkegaard
Chapter 26: Abraham Joshua Heschel
Chapter 27: Simone Weil
Chapter 28: Hannah Arendt
Chapter 29: Karl Barth
Chapter 30: Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Chapter 31: Hans Urs von Balthasar
Chapter 32: Jürgen Moltmann
Chapter 33: Johann Baptist Metz
Chapter 34: Paul Ricœur
Chapter 35: John Hick
Chapter 36: Marilyn McCord Adams
Chapter 37: Eleonore Stump
Part III: Dogmatic Themes
Chapter 38: The Origin of Evil
Chapter 39: Creation
Chapter 40: The Suffering of God
Chapter 41: Trinity and Suffering
Chapter 42: Christology
Chapter 43: Divine Suffering and the Communicatio Idiomatum
Chapter 44: Kenosis
Chapter 45: Atonement, Suffering, and Evil: The Problem of Meaninglessness
Chapter 46: The Cosmic Spirit’s Creatorship and Redeemership in the Context of Natural Theodicy
Chapter 47: Suffering, Evil, and Eschatology
Chapter 48: Providence
Chapter 49: Ecclesiology
Chapter 50: Sacraments
Chapter 51: Prayer and Suffering
Chapter 52: Personified Evil in the Judeo-Christian Tradition
Part IV: Philosophical and Ethical Issues
Chapter 53: Neoplatonism
Chapter 54: Evil and Divine Excellence
Chapter 55: Skeptical Theism
Chapter 56: Anti-Theodicies
Chapter 57: Free-Will Theodicies
Chapter 58: Suffering and the Meaning of Life
Chapter 59: Everlasting Creating and Essential Love
Chapter 60: Science and Theodicy
Chapter 61: Pain and the Mind–Body Problem
Chapter 62: Evil and Moral Realism: A Problem of Evil for Atheism
Chapter 63: Christian Ethics
Chapter 64: Non-Human Suffering
Chapter 65: Bioethics and Suffering
Chapter 66: Disability and Suffering
Part V: Interreligious and Interdisciplinary Approaches
Chapter 67: Suffering and the Problem of Evil in Judaism
Chapter 68: The Kabbalistic Concept of Tsimtsum (“Contraction”)
Chapter 69: The Concept of duḥkha in Hinduism
Chapter 70: Suffering and Evil in Buddhism
Chapter 71: Zoroastrian Views on Suffering and Death
Chapter 72: The Problem of Evil in Islamic Thought
Chapter 73: Muslim Perspectives on Evil and Suffering
Chapter 74: The Holocaust
Chapter 75: Psychology and Theodicy: The Meaning-Making Model and Growth
Chapter 76: Unmasking the Systemic Problem of Evil in Theology: A Feminist Critique
Chapter 77: Suffering and Problems of Evil in Black Theology: A Narrative Approach
Chapter 78: Music, Sacred Sound, and Suffering
Chapter 79: Richard Wagner
Chapter 80: The Arts
Contributors
subject Index
scripture Index

Citation preview

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF SUFFERING AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Forthcoming titles in this series include T&T Clark Handbook of Christology, edited by Darren O. Sumner and Chris Tilling T&T Clark Handbook of Election, edited by Edwin Chr. van Driel T&T Clark Handbook of Modern Theology, edited by Philip G. Ziegler and R. David Nelson T&T Clark Handbook of the Doctrine of Creation, edited by Jason Goroncy T&T Clark Handbook of Theology and the Arts, edited by Imogen Adkins and Stephen M. Garrett T&T Clark Handbook of Intercultural Theology and Mission Studies, edited by John G. Flett and Dorottya Nagy T&T Clark Handbook of Biblical Thomism, edited by Matthew Levering, Piotr Roszak and Jörgen Vijgen T&T Clark Handbook of Neo-Calvinism, edited by Cory Brock and Nathaniel Gray Sutanto

Titles already published include T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and Climate Change, edited by Ernst M. Conradie and Hilda P. Koster T&T Clark Handbook of Political Theology, edited by Rubén Rosario Rodríguez T&T Clark Handbook of Pneumatology, edited by Daniel Castelo and Kenneth M. Loyer T&T Clark Handbook of Ecclesiology, edited by Kimlyn J. Bender and D. Stephen Long T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and the Modern Sciences, edited by John P. Slattery T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Ethics, edited by Tobias Winright T&T Clark Handbook of John Owen, edited by Crawford Gribben and John W. Tweeddale T&T Clark Handbook of Theological Anthropology, edited by Mary Ann Hinsdale and Stephen Okey

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF SUFFERING AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

Edited by Matthias Grebe and Johannes Grössl

T&T Clark Handbook of Suffering and the Problem of Evil.indb 3

18-03-2023 10:32:03 AM

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Matthias Grebe and Johannes Grössl and contributors, 2023 Matthias Grebe and Johannes Grössl have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. Cover image: Lisbon earthquake and tsunami, 1755 Science History Images/Alamy Stock Photo All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-8243-7 ePDF: 978-0-5676-8244-4 eBook: 978-0-5676-8245-1 Series: T&T Clark Handbooks Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To our children: Charlotta, Raphael, and Clementina; Jonathan, Helena, and Theresa.

CONTENTS

Preface: Theology, Conversation, and Friendship xiii List of Figures xv List of Abbreviations xvi 1

Introduction: Suffering and the Problem of Evil Johannes Grössl

1

PART ONE: BIBLICAL PERSPECTIVES 2

Moses: The Suffering Servant Mark W. Scarlata

13

3

Suffering and the Problem of Evil in the Prophets John Barton

22

4

The Book of Job Katharine J. Dell

31

5

Suffering and the Quest for Its Causes in the Psalms Erhard S. Gerstenberger

40

6

Covenant Faith and Qohelet’s Questions John Goldingay

50

7

Wrath in the Bible Peter J. Leithart

59

8

“The Lord Is in Your Midst” (Zeph. 3:15): Righteous Suffering in the Synoptic Gospels Pheme Perkins

9

The Gospel of John David F. Ford

67 76

10 Paul: Suffering as a Cosmic Problem T. J. Lang

84

11 The Epistle to the Hebrews Bryan R. Dyer

92

viii

12 The Book of Revelation Joseph L. Mangina

CONTENTS

102

PART TWO: HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY FIGURES 13 Irenaeus and Origen Mark S. M. Scott

113

14 Gregory of Nyssa Alexander L. Abecina

118

15 Augustine Lydia Schumacher

123

16 Thomas Aquinas Brian Davies

127

17 Dante Rachel Teubner

131

18 Julian of Norwich Rachel Muers

136

19 Martin Luther Simeon Zahl

141

20 John Calvin James N. Anderson

146

21 Richard Hooker Paul Dominiak

150

22 G. W. F. Leibniz Alex Englander

155

23 Immanuel Kant Alex Englander

159

24 Friedrich Schleiermacher Shelli M. Poe

163

25 Søren Kierkegaard Sean Turchin

168

26 Abraham Joshua Heschel C. K. Martin Chung

173

27 Simone Weil Stephen J. Plant

178

CONTENTS



ix

28 Hannah Arendt Philip Walsh

182

29 Karl Barth Paul Dafydd Jones

186

30 Dietrich Bonhoeffer Michael P. DeJonge

190

31 Hans Urs von Balthasar Richard McLauchlan

195

32 Jürgen Moltmann Matthias Remenyi

199

33 Johann Baptist Metz Matthias Grebe

204

34 Paul Ricœur Christopher King

209

35 John Hick Chad Meister

214

36 Marilyn McCord Adams Shannon Craigo-Snell

218

37 Eleonore Stump Georg Gasser

222

PART THREE: DOGMATIC THEMES 38 The Origin of Evil Matthias Grebe

229

39 Creation Nadine Hamilton

245

40 The Suffering of God Paul S. Fiddes

255

41 Trinity and Suffering Matthew Levering

267

42 Christology Kenneth Surin

277

43 Divine Suffering and the Communicatio Idiomatum David R. Law

284

x

CONTENTS

44 Kenosis Robert Stackpole

296

45 Atonement, Suffering, and Evil: The Problem of Meaninglessness Adam J. Johnson

306

46 The Cosmic Spirit’s Creatorship and Redeemership in the Context of Natural Theodicy Jongseock (James) Shin

315

47 Suffering, Evil, and Eschatology Stephen J. Plant

328

48 Providence Vernon White

337

49 Ecclesiology Jeremy Worthen

347

50 Sacraments David Grumett

356

51 Prayer and Suffering Jonathan D. Teubner

366

52 Personified Evil in the Judeo-Christian Tradition Gregory A. Boyd

377

PART FOUR: PHILOSOPHICAL AND ETHICAL ISSUES 53 Neoplatonism Adrian Mihai

387

54 Evil and Divine Excellence David P. Hunt

397

55 Skeptical Theism Daniel Speak

408

56 Anti-Theodicies Stephen Torr

419

57 Free-Will Theodicies Chad Meister

428

58 Suffering and the Meaning of Life Clifford Williams

440

59 Everlasting Creating and Essential Love Thomas J. Oord

449

CONTENTS



xi

60 Science and Theodicy Christopher Southgate

460

61 Pain and the Mind–Body Problem J. H. W. Chan and Joshua R. Farris

469

62 Evil and Moral Realism: A Problem of Evil for Atheism James K. Dew, Jr.

481

63 Christian Ethics Joshua Hordern

490

64 Non-Human Suffering Bethany N. Sollereder

501

65 Bioethics and Suffering Yechiel Michael Barilan

510

66 Disability and Suffering Hilary Yancey and Kevin Timpe

524

PART FIVE: INTERRELIGIOUS AND INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES 67 Suffering and the Problem of Evil in Judaism Oliver Leaman

541

68 The Kabbalistic Concept of Tsimtsum (“Contraction”) Simon D. Podmore

549

69 The Concept of duḥkha in Hinduism Ankur Barua

559

70 Suffering and Evil in Buddhism Daniel Rumel

569

71 Zoroastrian Views on Suffering and Death Almut Hintze

577

72 The Problem of Evil in Islamic Thought Nasrin Rouzati

589

73 Muslim Perspectives on Evil and Suffering Mehrunisha Suleman

599

74 The Holocaust Sarah K. Pinnock

611

75 Psychology and Theodicy: The Meaning-Making Model and Growth M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall

620

xii

CONTENTS

76 Unmasking the Systemic Problem of Evil in Theology: A Feminist Critique Esther McIntosh

630

77 Suffering and Problems of Evil in Black Theology: A Narrative Approach Anthony G. Reddie

641

78 Music, Sacred Sound, and Suffering Jonathan Arnold

654

79 Richard Wagner Richard Bell

666

80 The Arts Jil Evans and Charles Taliaferro

677

Notes on Contributors 689 Subject Index 695 Scripture Index

719

PREFACE Theology, Conversation, and Friendship

You might ask if we really require yet another volume on Suffering and the Problem of Evil. It is a fair question, although editing a handbook on this topic during a worldwide pandemic has only emphasized to us its relevance. The volume’s starting point is the belief that logical thinking alone cannot solve theological problems, since there will always be a plurality of theories and approaches. This assessment emerges not only from the various philosophical, cultural, and religious backgrounds of those involved here, but also from the fact that humanity cannot and will never obtain the divine perspective on reality; all our theological models and theories remain fragmentary and piecemeal. Indeed, it is important for theologians, pastors, and teachers of religious education to “endure ambiguity” and maintain the ability to engage with problems from several perspectives simultaneously, including when discussing the problem of theodicy. Crucial among these voices, surely, are those of the suffering themselves; their personal and existential struggle to reconcile their experience with their personal faith is placed at the center of this volume. Since religious faith can be understood as communion or friendship with God, it is our conviction that theology is best done in conversation between friends. Our own friendship stretches back to the beginnings of our theological journeys. Without knowing each other, we grew up in small villages only seven miles apart in Southern Germany but only met first in 2005, when learning Latin, ancient Greek, and Hebrew together. We then parted ways: Johannes to study Roman Catholic Theology (with a strong philosophical emphasis) at the University of Munich and Harvard Divinity School, and Matthias to study Protestant Theology (with a strong exegetical and dogmatic emphasis) at the Universities of Tübingen, Cambridge, and Princeton. It was another ten years later, after our doctorates, that our paths crossed once again, and despite the differences in our own approaches to theology – resulting not only from our denominational backgrounds – we soon realized our common interests and enthusiasm. This Handbook is the product of many years of exceptionally fruitful conversation. We are most proud of the breadth of the scholarship we were able to include in the volume, and the variety of academics. Many of the contributors are known to at least one of us, whether in the capacity of doctoral advisor, mentor, colleague, supervisor, or a scholar we have met at conferences. And while we do not know all contributors personally, many are friends with each other, and still others came warmly recommended to us by those we do know. We are grateful to all contributors for their hard work and enthusiasm for the project. On several occasions, their suggestions, feedback on omissions, and gentle corrections have enhanced this volume greatly. What unites these chapters then, besides the common theme of course, is less their content or a particular approach, than the idea that theology is best done as a conversation between friends, even friends who disagree. We have consequently decided against a unified approach to the subject and intentionally sought a wide range of voices. Together,

xiv

PREFACE

the contributions give the reader an insight into the conversations we have had over the years, on a topic that we find not only extremely intellectually stimulating but also of acute pastoral relevance for our society. We also want this volume to be an ongoing conversation for people to join in, learn from, reflect on, and be stretched by. Reading these chapters will require listening to different voices, pausing to think and reflect, at times disagreeing, and even stopping abruptly to reconsider our own positions. The volume is neither exhaustive nor does it claim to be the final word on the subject, but we are certain that it is unique in its scope and has widened the circle of conversation partners offered in existing volumes, with contributions from fields as wide-ranging as biblical, historical, dogmatic, philosophical, and psychological studies. It also includes several scholars from non-Christian backgrounds, intentionally aiming for diversity in seniority, gender, and country of origin. Where we have been unsuccessful in including a wider range of voices, we want the reader to know that we have tried extremely hard to find the right balance of background and field, to include a variety of different perspectives. We must end by expressing our gratitude: this project would never have been developed without the support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for Matthias’ research fellowship on theodicy and the problem of evil, or without the fabulous mentorship Johannes continues to enjoy from Matthias Reményi. We are particularly thankful to T&T Clark for including the volume in their Handbook series, and especially to Anna Turton for commissioning a title with all these chapters in one volume, as well as to Sinead O’Connor and Veerle Van Steenhuyse for their editorial assistance. We would also like to thank Melanie Freund, Julian Heise, Arthur Markus, Franziska Veer, and Julia van der Wal for their work in the editing process. We are grateful to everyone who shaped our theological thinking, for friends both in academia and the Church, and – most of all – to our families. Our wives Victoria and Eva deserve special mention for suffering more than others due to the (often) self-inflicted responsibilities and hardships in pursuing an academic career, as do our children, Charlotta, Raphael, and Clementina, and Jonathan, Helena, and Theresa, to whom we dedicate this Handbook. Our prayer is that they may grow up in a world marked with less suffering and evil. Matthias Grebe & Johannes Grössl Cambridge and Würzburg, 31 August, 2022

FIGURES

80.1 Crucifix, c. 1300 80.2 Cimabue, The Flagellation of Christ, c. 1280 80.3 Nikolaus of Haguenau and Matthias Grünewald, The Isenheim Altarpiece, c. 1512–16 80.4 Amanda Hamilton, Dark Adaptation, 2018

678 681 683 686

ABBREVIATIONS

AB

Anchor Bible

AD

Anno Domini

AH

Anno Hegirae (Hijri year, according to Islamic lunar calendar)

AIL

Ancient Israel and Its Literature

ANF

Ante-Nicene Fathers

AOAT

Alter Orient und Altes Testament

APPL. ANIM. BEHAV. SCI.

Applied Animal Behaviour Science

ATD

Das Alte Testament Deutsch

BAI

Bulletin of the Asia Institute

BC

Before Christ

BCE

Before Common Era (= bc)

BL

Sergius Bulgakov’s The Bride of the Lamb

BMJ

British Medical Journal

BZAW

Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft

CD

Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics

CE

Common Era (= ad)

CF

Christian Faith by Friedrich Schleiermacher

CF.

confer (compare with)

CG

The Crucified God by Jürgen Moltmann

CONBOT

Coniectanea Biblica Old Testament Serie

CSHB

Critical Studies in the Hebrew Bible

DBWE

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works series

EVT

Evangelische Theologie

EXPTIM

Expository Times

FLE

The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker

ABBREVIATIONS

 xvii

FOTL

The Forms of the Old Testament Literature

FTS

Fuller Theological Seminary

GNO

Gregorii Nysseni Opera (Gregory of Nyssa’s works)

HBS

Herders Biblische Studien

HBTH

Horizons in Biblical Theology

HTR

Harvard Theological Review

IJPR

International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion

INST.

Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559) by John Calvin

INT. J. SYST. THEOL.

International Journal of Systematic Theology

J. EXP. BIOL.

The Journal of Experimental Biology

JBL

Journal of Biblical Literature

JBTH

Jahrbuch für Biblische Theologie

JSOT

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament

JSOTSUP

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Supplement Series

KM

Kenotic Model (in Christology)

LGA

The Love of God and Affliction by Simone Weil

LNTS

Library of New Testament Studies

LW Luther’s Works, American Edition N.B.

nota bene (note well)

NPNF

Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers

NRSV

New Revised Standard Version of the Bible

NT

New Testament

NZSTH

Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie

OBO

Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis

OT

Old Testament

PBT

Perfect Being Theology

PMLA

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

RELS

Religious Studies

RII

Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans (second edition)

xviii

ABBREVIATIONS

RSV

Revised Standard Version of the Bible

SBS

Stuttgarter Bibelstudien

SCOTTISH J. THEOL.

Scottish Journal of Theology

SPG

The Secret Providence of God (1558) by John Calvin

STH

Summa Theologiae by Thomas Aquinas

TAPA

Transactions of the American Philological Association

TKG

The Trinity and the Kingdom by Jürgen Moltmann

TNC

Two-Nature Christology

TRE

Theologische Realenzyklopädie

VTSUP

Vetus Testamentum, Supplements

WA

Luthers Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe (Weimar edition of Martin Luther’s works)

WJC

The Way of Jesus Christ by Jürgen Moltmann

WUNT

Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament

YT Yašt

Chapter 1

Introduction Suffering and the Problem of Evil JOHANNES GRÖSSL

In theology, the problem of evil is often – in a too narrow sense – equated with theodicy: how can an almighty, omniscient, and benevolent God allow horrendous suffering and evil in the world? Most literature on the topic focuses on the attempts to reconcile these divine attributes with the reality of suffering caused either by the evil acts of free agents or by natural causes.1 This handbook aims to deal with the problem of evil and the reality of suffering not only from a logical but also from a wider perspective. While conventional disciplinary boundaries have tended to separate theological approaches from philosophical ones, this volume seeks to surpass these divisions by addressing the nature of suffering and the problem of evil from biblical, historical, systematic-theological, philosophical, ethical, as well as pastoral and interreligious perspectives. Authors of this volume include thinkers from analytic and continental traditions, conservative and liberal backgrounds, multiple Christian denominations, and other religions. This introduction provides an overview of classical and modern approaches to deal with the problem of evil. In classical theodicies, explicit and implicit premises of the problem of evil are challenged, for example by redefining certain divine attributes or by arguing for a reason or meaning behind all suffering. Following this, practical attempts to ease the problem or else avoid it altogether are presented; adherents of the latter strategy reject implicit arguments such as the human ability to understand God, his motives, or attributes. Finally, the problem of evil is discussed in light of a religious epistemology: Is it necessary to answer the problem of evil in order to have a rational (or at least a non-irrational) belief in God? How does the problem relate to other arguments for and against the existence of God?

THE ARGUMENT FROM EVIL Theodicies can be construed by challenging an argument that concludes that, due to the existence of evil, God does not exist. Here one must distinguish between theodicies and defenses: A theodicy seeks to show why God is justified in allowing or being unable to prevent certain instances of suffering and evil. A defense only looks to show that there is at least one possible world in which God and evil coexist; it is thus a humbler approach.

See, for example, Michael L. Peterson, God and Evil: An Introduction to the Issues (London: Routledge, 2019).

1

2

T&T CLARK HANDBOOK OF SUFFERING AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

But let us turn to the argument from evil first, which is based on Epicurus (341–270 bce) and Leibniz (1646–1716 ce), here in a formulation by philosopher Michael Tooley:2

1. If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.



2. If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.



3. If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists [and how to eliminate evil].



4. If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.



5. [Gratuitous] evil exists.



6. If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn’t have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn’t know when evil exists, or doesn’t have the desire to eliminate all evil.



7. Therefore, God doesn’t exist.

In showing that this argument is not sound, by rejecting one of the premises, one can only construe a defense, since it only shows that the reality of evil does not necessarily lead to the nonexistence of God. But even if one can show that this problem is in principle solvable, this does not say anything about the plausibility of such solutions. One can avoid the logical problem of evil (as formulated here) but still be challenged by an evidential version of the argument, which only concludes that from what we know about God and the reality of enormous, horrible suffering in the world, it is more likely that God does not exist. I will turn to this latter issue later. First, I will summarize classical defenses and other ways to avoid the logical argument from evil. Since there are six premises to the argument, there are six different ways to question the soundness of the argument.

CLASSICAL SOLUTIONS Rejecting Premise 1 leads to a redefining of the concept of God. Process theologians assume that God is not omnipotent, since primordial matter and God exist coeternally.3 Kenoticists might believe that by creating the world, God had to (temporarily) give up his omnipotence.4 Open theists assume that God’s omnipotence is limited by created agents’ free will, and God’s knowledge is restricted by an essentially open future.5 Divine

Michael Tooley, “The Problem of Evil”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/win2021​/entries​/evil/, section 1.1. For a more detailed overview, see Graham Oppy, “Logical Arguments from Evil and Free-Will Defences”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil, ed. Chad Meister and Paul K. Moser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 45–64. 3 See David R. Griffin, God, Power, and Evil: A Process Theodicy (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976). 4 See John C. Polkinghorne, “Kenotic Creation and Divine Action”, in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2001), 90–106. In between voluntary kenosis views and process theology stands Thomas J. Oord’s essential kenosis view, see “An Essential Kenosis View”, in God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views, ed. Chad Meister and James K. Dew Jr. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 77–97, 97: “God’s inability to prevent genuine evil is not based on some exterior force or coeternal demigod. But neither is this inability a voluntary self-limitation. Instead, God’s limitations derive from God’s nature, in which self-giving love – kenosis – is essential to God and logically primary . . . Essential kenosis offers a plausible answer to why God . . . doesn’t prevent the countless other genuine evils we witness in our world.” 5 See William Hasker, The Triumph of God over Evil: Theodicy for a World of Suffering (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2008); Gregory Boyd, Is God to Blame? Beyond Pat Answers to the Problem of Suffering (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003). 2

INTRODUCTION



3

voluntarists reject divine benevolence for it contradicts divine sovereignty.6 Developmental theists assume that God is not (from the beginning) omnibenevolent but rather needs to develop his moral character in the way humans do.7 Euteleological theists go as far as to reject or reinterpret all the given attributes by insisting that God is not a person at all but rather an abstract teleological principle guiding the cosmos to actualize certain goods.8 Premise 2 – God’s power to eliminate evil – is rejected by most free-will theists. Omnipotence can be defined as the power to do anything that is logically and/or metaphysically possible. If God created genuinely free agents, for example, he would have needed to accept the possibility that creatures act contrary to God’s will. If free will is understood as the power to choose between good and evil (or different morally significant options), God cannot create free agents without allowing evil to happen. As open theists argue, to “take back freedom once it is given on the grounds that it is being used wrongly would mean that freedom was never given in the first place”.9 Still, the question remains as to why God cannot diminish the impact of evil decisions, whether horrible evils are justified by the existence of free will, and, most particularly, why God does not prevent those evils which do not result from decisions of free agents (so-called natural evils). The argument here can be easily reformulated to focus on severe natural evil or horrible moral evil (instead of simply on “all evil”). Premise 3 – God’s knowledge of evil – is harder to reject. Even open theists assume that God knows all possible futures including probabilities of possible outcomes; he knows when and how to intervene in history in order to let less suffering occur without compromising any greater goods.10 A combination of strict eternalism, divine impassibility, and aseity, however, may result in the view that God cannot know anything contingent, as this would make him dependent on creation. Accordingly, in this premise, God only knows the necessary facts, including logical truths and the set of all metaphysically possible worlds.11 But still, in this view, his moral perfection would necessitate his creation of the best of all possible worlds (with the best initial conditions) or at least a sufficiently good

This view is prominent in Calvinism in Christianity, here often labeled “divine command theory”, or in Ashՙarist schools in Islam; see Timothy Winter, “Islam and the Problem of Evil”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil, ed. Chad Meister and Paul K. Moser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 230–48, 241: “Against Muՙtazilite objectivism Ashՙarism proposed a view variously described as voluntarism, a divine command theory or a ‘theistic subjectivism’. God transcends the framework of rights and duties which connect frail human subjects and so has no obligations towards us.” 7 See Peter Forrest, Developmental Theism: From Pure Will to Unbounded Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). In this framework, one might even consider moral perfection itself to be an inconsistent attribute, since a necessarily moral perfect being cannot be considered a moral agent. 8 See John Bishop and Ken Perszyk, “Concepts of God and Problems of Evil”, in Alternative Concepts of God: Essays on the Metaphysics of the Divine, ed. Andrei A. Buckareff and Yujin Nagasawa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 106–27; Thomas Schärtl, “The Divine Self-Mediation in the Universe: Euteleology Meets German Idealism”, European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 10, no. 4 (2019): 83–116. 9 Gregory Boyd, God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 73. 10 See ibid.; Gregory Boyd, “Neo-Molinism and the Infinite Intelligence of God”, Philosophia Christi 5, no. 1 (2003): 188–204. 11 For an overview of this common objection to divine simplicity and a possible refutation, see W. Matthews Grant, “Divine Simplicity, Contingent Truths, and Extrinsic Models of Divine Knowing”, Faith and Philosophy 29, no. 3 (2012): 254–74. 6

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world. But there might still be enough reasons to assume that the actual world is not sufficiently good. Thus, questioning this premise does not solve the problem.12 Premise 4 – God’s desire to eliminate evil – can be rejected by presenting reasons as to why a benevolent God might not want to eliminate evil. God might have the desire to inflict some evils as a punishment for our wrongdoing, since God is not only benevolent but also just.13 Evil may be a by-product of a much greater good (such as free will and the power to love) or may have another important function in reality, for example to enable healing and moral growth, possibly even increase moral responsibility of those creatures who have the power to assist in eliminating evil. However, there is too much suffering and evil in this world, where we cannot construe any reason why a benevolent God would allow or even inflict it on creatures.14 Rejecting Premise 5 is only possible if one denies that there is genuine gratuitous evil in the world. After certain horrible events in human history this strategy seems absurd; however, rejecting genuine evil does not necessarily imply the rejection of the reality of suffering. In the history of Christianity, before the plague hit Europe in the fourteenth century, it was common to explain suffering as a penalty by God for one’s sins. But the pointless suffering even of flawless people who were thought to be in God’s grace is strong evidence against this assumption. In Eastern religions, the problem is eased due to the theory of reincarnation: suffering in this life might be a result of immoral actions one has committed in a former life. Another variant of a rejection of the reality of evil is the privatio boni thesis from Platonism: if evil is just the “absence” of good, evil does not exist.15 However, this only changes the problem to why there is not more good in the world. If God were omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent, he would have been able, would have known how, and would have wanted to bring about a world featuring less the absence of good and more the reality of goodness.16 Premise 6 and the validity of the argument seem indefeasible. Logically, one can change the argument to not dealing with “all evil” but only with “gratuitous” evil, which makes it a lot harder to reject certain premises. Analytic philosophers tend to discuss the logical soundness and validity of such arguments, reformulate the argument, and discuss divine and human nature, the reality of free will, the metaphysics of time, and related issues. However, to this day, there is no universally accepted solution to the theodicy problem A possible but problematic way to follow this strategy is to assume that God has knowledge of counterfactuals of freedom, thereby knowing that if he created a different kind of world, free agents would have used their free will for worse. In such a “Molinist theodicy”, God eternally knows about a trans-world depravity which He himself did not cause, leading him to create the best possible world given his knowledge of counterfactuals of freedom. See Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 164–95; William L. Craig, “A Molinist View”, in God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views, ed. Chad Meister and James K. Dew Jr. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 37–56. 13 Daniel Howard-Snyder, “God, Evil, and Suffering”, in Reasons for the Hope Within, ed. Michael J. Murray (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 76–115, 86: “God would be justified in punishing evildoers, and suffering is a result of his punishing them.” Howard-Snyder notes that the only way to deny that there is undeserved suffering is to combine it with a theory of reincarnation, which, however, was always rejected within the Christian tradition. 14 See, for example, John Martin Fischer’s critique of Eleonore Stump’s theodicy: “Struggling with the Evil: Comments on Wandering in Darkness”, European Journal for Philosophy or Religion 4, no. 3 (2012): 109–22. 15 See Augustine, City of God, 11.9; Confessions 7.12.18. 16 For an argument why privation theories “fail to capture the notion of evil” and thus should be “put to rest”, see Todd C. Calder, “Is the Privation Theory of Evil Dead?”, American Philosophical Quarterly 44, no. 4 (2007): 371–81. 12

INTRODUCTION



5

even among philosophers. Indeed, for quite a number, the unsolved problem is a reason not to believe in an almighty and benevolent God at all.17

GENUINE THEODICIES A rejection of certain premises of the problem of evil goes hand in hand with the story of what God’s intentions might have been in permitting evil. A theodicy (“justifying God”) claims that God did or does have these intentions and that these intentions do explain the reality of suffering and evil. However, few thinkers assume that certain theodicies explain all instances of evil. For example, God’s intention to create free beings may explain the reality of moral evil (evil perpetrated by human beings) but not of natural evil. There are attempts to explain all evils by moral evils, with the price of interpreting the biblical story of the Fall in a very literal way or even defending the reality of supernatural beings who are – by their free will – responsible for the “fallenness” of creation.18 But usually, it is assumed that the free-will defense is not a theodicy, since there are too many instances of suffering that cannot be explained by acts of free agents. Adherents of a natural law theodicy try to extend the free-will approach in order to create a full-fledged theodicy: “In order to have a world with creatures who can choose freely, the environment in which they are placed must be set up in certain well-defined ways.”19 However, it is challenging to show why only a world with our natural laws, with all its natural evils, is capable in bringing about free beings in an evolutionary process. Instead of our world being “the best of all possible worlds” (at least regarding its initial conditions), it seems evident – given the amount of gratuitous evil in the world – that God could have created a better world which includes free agents but less natural evil.20 Proponents of a natural law theodicy reject this intuition, claiming that in order to make such an argument, we need to specify alternative laws that enable humanity’s freedom: “For all we know, the laws that govern our world are the only possible laws; alternatively, for all we know, there are very tight constraints on what sorts of adjustments in the laws can be permitted while retaining life-sustaining capabilities.”21 Natural evils are thus considered a by-product of a world which is designed to make intelligent life with free will possible. A soul-making theodicy, introduced by Church Father Irenaeus (c. 130–202 ce) and made prominent by John Hick, claims that no suffering counts as genuine evil since suffering can always be used to form character.22 In some Jewish and Islamic theodicies, a

See John L. Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence”, Mind 64, no. 254 (1955): 200–12, 212: “[T]here is no valid solution of the problem [of evil] which does not modify at least one of the constituent propositions in a way which would seriously affect the essential core of the theistic position.” 18 See C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London: Fontana Books, 1957), 122–3; Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 58; Gregory Boyd, Satan and the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2001). 19 See Howard-Snyder, “God, Evil, and Suffering”, 94. 20 See ibid., 96: “God could have made free creatures without permitting natural evil.” This contradicts Leibniz’s thesis of this world being the best of all possible worlds. See Michael J. Murray and Sean Greenberg, “Leibniz on the Problem of Evil”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/win2016​/entries​/leibniz​-evil/. 21 Ibid. 22 See John Hick, “An Irenaean Theodicy”, in Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, ed. S. T. Davis (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 38–51. 17

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similar point is made when referring to certain evils as opportunities to remain faithful to God, sometimes interpreted as God testing his creatures.23 While there is certainly some suffering that helps to build character or strengthen personal faith, this strategy sounds cynical when applied to horrendous evils like earthquakes eradicating whole villages or the actions of serial killers. Consequently, if at all possible, a theodicy drawing the “big picture” needs to combine several strategies, comprising the free-will thesis, the natural law (no-better-world) thesis, and the soul-making strategy.

SPECIFIC THEOLOGICAL STRATEGIES In the history of Christian theology, theodicies were discussed which would not count as such from a philosophical point of view but could still help believers to reconcile their faith in God with their experience of suffering and evil. Of course, these strategies may not convince atheists who reject God primarily because of the problem of evil. Even for strong believers, the reality of suffering can prompt profound doubt, though in this case, the problem of evil is a challenge to strengthen one’s faith in the light of suffering. When Paul says in his Letter to the Romans, “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (8:18), he does not present reasons for present sufferings, which for early Christians included the reality of torture and death as a consequence of faith in Christ. Paul simply asks the reader to trust in the existence of heaven as a place from which, retrospectively, the earlier sufferings are viewed as not as bad as they are perceived without the eschatological perspective. From the viewpoint of an Anselmian or Lutheran cross-theological soteriology, in which the suffering and death of Jesus were essential for our salvation, a Christian might argue that a world full of suffering is necessary for the atonement, or at least that the greater goods of the incarnation and the atonement need to be included in a Christian theodicy.24 Among theologians, there is also discussion of “practical theodicies”, which focus not on how to solve the logical problem of theodicy but on how to deal with this problem as believers.25 One reason for the skepticism concerning a theoretical theodicy is that in history it was common to justify the suffering of others for some higher good – not only in communist political systems but also within religious institutions. Until today, some

For the Jewish interpretation, see prominently the Book of Job, in which God permits Satan to inflict evils upon Job in order to test his faith; for the Islamic interpretation, see Q 2:155; 6:165; 67:2. Of course, both traditions are rich in various strategies to deal with the problem of evil, not just what can be comprised under soul-making theodicies. See Lenn E. Goodman, “Judaism and the Problem of Evil”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil, ed. Chad Meister and Paul K. Moser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 193–209; Winter, “Islam and the Problem of Evil”; as well as the respective contributions in Part V of this volume. 24 See Alvin Plantinga, “Supralapsarianism, or ‘O Felix Culpa’”, in Christian Faith and the Problem of Evil, ed. Peter van Inwagen (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 1–25. 25 See John Swinton, Raging with Compassion: Pastoral Responses to the Problem of Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 4: “[T]heodicy should not be understood as a series of disembodied arguments designed to defend God’s love, goodness, and power. We require a different mode of understanding, a mode of theodicy that is embodied within the life and practices of the Christian community. Such a mode of theodicy does not seek primarily to explain evil and suffering, but rather presents ways in which evil and suffering can be resisted and transformed by the Christian community and in so doing, can enable Christians to live faithfully in the midst of unanswered questions as they await God’s redemption of the whole of creation.” 23

INTRODUCTION



7

church authorities are convinced that covering up sexual abuse is justified for the “higher good” of the integrity of the institution. Justifying evil might be a great source of evil, which is why one should be very careful in attempts to solve the problem of theodicy by giving reasons for people’s suffering. Nick Trakakis even claimed that theodicies “mediate a praxis that sanctions evil” and should thus be avoided.26 Possibly, religious faith is the only way to deal with the enormous suffering in the world, because the dual eschatological perspective ensures justice for both victims and perpetrators. Of course, practical theodicies are only significant for those who already possess faith and especially for those whose faith is not ultimately challenged by the problem of evil. Believing that God suffers with us, that God suffered to an even greater degree when, incarnate, He hung on the cross, being abandoned by those He loved, may comfort the believer when in a state of suffering. As the common proverb says, a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved.27 Moreover, considering Christ’s suffering from the perspective of the resurrection might help believers to evaluate their suffering from the viewpoint of the resurrection.28 The narrative of Christ’s suffering might also lead them to trust – even if they do not currently perceive a reason for their suffering (just as Christ may not have fully understood the atoning function of his suffering) – that there might be a reason for their suffering which is just not accessible to them at that moment.

APOPHATIC AND SKEPTICAL APPROACHES There are some religious people who believe that the theodicy problem is an insoluble one, even a paradox. The challenge for this approach is to show why this assessment should not count as an argument against theism but might even be a result of a proper concept of God.29 There are different variants of this strategy: strong fideism holds that “human” logic (including the law of noncontradiction) does not apply to God; apophatic theology rejects the possibility of attributing properties (such as omnipotence or benevolence) to God in a univocal sense; skeptical theism – the weakest variant, defended by quite a number of philosophers – holds that God’s reasons to do or allow evil are not accessible to our cognitively limited human minds.30 The advantage of the latter strategy is that it still allows for an understanding of God’s reasons at some time in the future, by either acquiring enhanced minds or God choosing to share his reasons with us – in this life (by revelation) or in the afterlife (eschatological verification of theism).

26 Nick Trakakis, The End of Philosophy of Religion (London: Continuum, 2008), 28–9. See Amber Griffioen, “Therapeutic Theodicy? Suffering, Struggle, and the Shift from the God’s-Eye View”, Religions 9 (2018): 99, 1: “[T]he theodical approach in analytic philosophy of religion exhibits both morally and epistemically harmful tendencies and that philosophers would do better to shift their perspective from the hypothetical ‘God’s-eye view’ to the standpoint of those who actually suffer.” 27 Notably, this assumption is only compatible with certain types of Christologies: Alexandrine approaches which reject divine impassibility. 28 See Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 29 Karl Rahner claimed that the inconceivability of evil results from the inconceivability of God; see Karl Rahner, “Warum läßt uns Gott leiden?”, in Schriften zur Theologie 14 (Zürich: Benziger, 1980), 450–66, 463. 30 See Timothy Perrine and Stephen J. Wykstra, “Skeptical Theism”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil, ed. Chad Meister and Paul K. Moser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 85–107, 86: “If the theistic God does exist, then very likely there is a divine-human gap such that we humans should, for many evils in our world, not expect to grasp the divine purposes and reckonings behind God’s allowing these evils.”

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The assumption that all our concepts only apply to God in an analogical way renders logical arguments from evil invalid. God might be omnipotent but in a way different as we understand power; God might be benevolent but in a way different as we understand goodness.31 Even if one assumes that the apophatic approach stands in contrast to the task of theology as reasoning about God, it can still serve as a reminder that all our models of God are preliminary and that God is always greater than our favored concept of God. Moreover, even apophatic theologians and skeptical theists require a certain “idea of a story that contains both God and all the evils that actually exist”,32 which is, as already noted, referred to as a defense rather than a theodicy. Eleonore Stump describes the strategy of a defense as such: [A defense] does not claim either that the morally sufficient reasons for God’s allowing suffering which the defense proposes should be taken to be those (if there are any) which in the actual world do in fact justify God’s actions in permitting suffering (if in the actual world there is a God). A defense, then, makes no claim about the way the actual world is or about any actual intentions and reasons for allowing evil on the part of God.33

THEODICY AND RELIGIOUS EPISTEMOLOGY Even if one does not fully share an evidentialist probabilistic epistemology (such as that defended by Richard Swinburne34), it can help to show what role arguments from evil can play in a person’s faith. We can assume that proofs for the existence of God are neither wrong nor indefensible but rather increase the epistemic probability of theism. Correspondingly, arguments from evil are neither simply unsound nor do they disprove God’s existence but rather decrease the epistemic probability of theism.35 Additionally, personal religious experience and experiences shared by others can work to slightly increase this probability; disappointments in one’s religious life, unanswered prayers, or the observation of immoral actions by religious leaders can slightly decrease this probability. In this probabilistic framework, defenses dealing with certain instances of suffering (such as the majority of moral evils or certain natural evils) can be sufficient to lower the negative impact of the problem of evil on the rationality of theism to a point such that theism becomes a viable or even the most rational option.36 Thus, even if one cannot solve the problem, it may still be worth attending to it.

Redefining omnipotence is a common strategy in modern theodicy, as outlined earlier. Rejecting the conceivability of benevolence, however, leads to a concept of God which comes very close to divine voluntarism, in which God is even justified to harming innocent people without reason; God might be still benevolent in this case but in ways we simply do not understand. 32 Peter van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), xii. For van Inwagen, it is sufficient for such a story to be true “for all anyone knows” (ibid.). 33 Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 19. 34 See Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). 35 See Alvin Plantinga, “The Probabilistic Argument from Evil”, Philosophical Studies 35 (1979): 1–53. 36 Sometimes it is argued that it is necessary that the truth of theism is not too obvious, because free will regarding religious faith requires the possibility of rational atheism (cognitive distance argument); see John Hick, “God, Evil and Mystery”, Religious Studies 3 (1967): 539–46. See also Swinburne, Existence, 269: “We need ‘epistemic distance’ from God in order to have a free choice between good and evil.” Thus, a certain amount of inexplicable suffering might be necessary in order to enable genuine faith as a free, loving relationship between man and God. 31

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Pragmatist attempts within religious epistemology do not necessarily hold that theism need be more rational than atheism in order to maintain a “rational faith”.37 Sometimes it is justified to act upon a strategy based on an unlikely state of affairs, but this is only the case if it is the strategy most promising to achieve one’s goals. According to Pascal’s wager, it is rational to believe in God even if the theoretical probability of His existence is less than 50 percent, since, if God exists, the risk of eternal condemnation as a consequence of nonbelief outweighs the risk of losing finite goods in this world as a consequence of practiced religious belief if God does not exist.38 Based on such an approach, it might be sufficient to solve the logical problem of evil, showing that the amount of evil in this world is principally compatible with the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent God. Even if the defenses given remain not fully convincing, they enable practical-rational faith. In this case, the problem of evil is to be understood more as a problem of how to deal with and overcome evil and not a problem of apologetics. It is a challenge as to how to understand one’s own life, despite all suffering, failure, and disappointment, as ultimately meaningful: The search for meaning in life is arguably an ineradicable part of what it is to be human, and that search cannot be satisfied merely by security, comfort and convenience . . . Given the kind of creatures we are, a life that is meaningful, subjectively and objectively, in the end requires some attempt to understand our human predicament, and that in turn requires us . . . to come to terms with our own “evil doings” . . . and to realise how these impact the lives of others. The struggle is not just to endure the evil that may impinge on us through the actions of others but also to rise above the evil in our own flawed nature, and to understand that both kinds belong to our common humanity.39 To learn how to lead a meaningful life and how to maintain religious faith in the light of an unsolved problem of evil and one’s own experience with suffering and evil is indeed a practical task from which we cannot be released by scholarly work. But hopefully, theological scholarship on the problem of evil can be useful not only for those interested in the coherence of theism but also for those engaging in the practical task of trying to believe despite the reality of inexplicable evil.

CONCLUSION AND OUTLOOK From a Christian perspective, it is valuable to analyze the way that biblical authors, figures in biblical stories, Church Fathers, and medieval theologians deal with the problem of evil. It is quite likely that purely philosophical attempts have neglected important perspectives on the problem. There might be certain insights into the problem of evil that can only be acquired through revelation or other types of religious experience, possibly even through narrative, art, and music. If reformed epistemology is true, religious believers might be empowered to certain insights which are inaccessible to secular reason. If Vatican II is correct in saying that in other religions there is a “ray of that Truth which enlightens See Richard Swinburne, Faith and Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 147–9. See Michael Rota, Taking Pascal’s Wager: Faith, Evidence and the Abundant Life (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2016). 39 See John Cottingham, “Evil and the Meaning of Life”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil, ed. Chad Meister and Paul K. Moser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 11–26, 26. 37 38

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all men” (Nostra Aetate 2), then in the same way Christian theology may be enriched by or even rely on the ways that non-Christian theologians deal with the problem of evil. Finally, it is critical to listen to the voices of those who are or have been suffering; there can be no theodicy without recognizing psychological and physical illness, discrimination, oppression and slavery, genocide, and other instances of evil affecting specific individuals. Ultimately, the problem of evil is both an intellectual challenge and a practical responsibility.

FURTHER READING Howard-Snyder, Daniel, ed. The Evidential Argument from Evil. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. McCord Adams, Marilyn, and Robert M. Adams, eds. The Problem of Evil. Oxford Readings in Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Meister, Chad, and James K. Dew Jr., eds. God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2017. Swinburne, Richard. The Existence of God, 2nd edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Van Inwagen, Peter. The Problem of Evil. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

PART ONE

Biblical Perspectives

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Chapter 2

Moses The Suffering Servant MARK W. SCARLATA

There is no greater figure in the Old Testament who reflects the divine pathos than Moses. He is the archetypal prophet, shepherd, and judge. He is the only one through whom God’s law is delivered and he is the priest-maker who inaugurates the cult. Moses is the great leader who guides Israel out of Egyptian bondage and into a covenant relationship with YHWH as they make their way toward Sinai and the promised land. As God’s chosen servant, however, Moses also enters into a unique relationship with YHWH of such depth and intimacy that it remains unrivaled in the rest of the Old Testament (Deut. 34:10-12). Through this relationship Moses embarks on a journey of transformation as he is shaped into the image of God and reflects both the divine glory and pathos.1 This journey will provide the model for sacrificial love and suffering on behalf of God’s people in the Old Testament and especially in the prophets. Moses’ transformation and growth as God’s chosen servant are highlighted in Jewish midrash. The rabbis note God’s forbearance and patience in allowing Moses to mature as the divine attributes are gradually revealed to him.2 God does not force Moses to become the servant he desires but is mindful and accommodating of his human frailty. Moses grows from one who was afraid to look at the divine in the burning bush (Exod. 3:3) to one who later boldly proclaims “Show me your glory!” (Exod. 33:18). The one who feared speaking (Exod. 4:10) gives a magisterial sermon at the end of his life in Deuteronomy. The one who was reluctant to go to Israel becomes their most significant leader. And though he feared God, he spoke with him face-to-face (Exod. 33:11; Num. 12:8) and embodied his glory (Exod. 34:29). But just as Moses is drawn into the divine presence, so too is he drawn into the heart of God and the divine pathos. The Pentateuch reveals a God who is intensely concerned with the affairs of humanity. Abraham Heschel refers to this phenomenon as “anthropotrophism”, or God’s turning toward humanity and calling them into his presence.3 The God of the Hebrew Bible is not depicted as a transcendent deity aloof and indifferent to the ways of the world. He is not the God of the philosophers, but a God who pursues his people and draws them into relationship. Divine pathos emerges from God’s “steadfast love” (ḥesed) that is bound to See Patrick D. Miller, “‘Moses My Servant’: The Deuteronomic Portrait of Moses”, Interpretation 41 (1987): 245–55. 2 Moshe Greenberg, Understanding Exodus (New York: Behrman House, 2013), 76–7. 3 Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 562–3. 1

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Israel by the covenant. Through covenant and divine promise God has drawn to himself a people in human history who are participants in a relationship of love and blessing but who also experience anger and judgment if disobedient to his command. God’s pathos, then, is the result of his love and his desire to be intimately involved with Israel for the sake of their salvation and for the redemption of the world. The pathos of God is also shared by the prophet. The prophet’s calling is one of physical, emotional, and spiritual communion with the divine. The prophet is not merely a megaphone for God’s command, but he or she is one who is overwhelmed and consumed by the divine pathos and is set to task to convey a word to the people. Heschel argues that “the fundamental experience of the prophet is a fellowship with the feelings of God, a sympathy with the divine pathos, a communion with the divine consciousness which comes about through the prophet’s reflection of, or participation in, the divine pathos”.4 Since Moses is the prophet par excellence in the Old Testament, we can see how his life becomes paradigmatic of the experience of the divine pathos. He embodies and experiences the suffering of God on behalf of the people, but he also mediates on behalf of divine love when justice is triggered by disobedience. Moses often acts as the counterbalance to divine wrath in the Pentateuch, but at times he is also the executor of justice. To witness the dynamic relationship between God and his people we look to the figure of Moses. Through his life we gain glimpses into the divine character and what it means to experience the depths of God’s love and pathos. The story of Israel’s greatest period of suffering in the Pentateuch begins in Exodus. Four hundred years of Egyptian slavery present us with a severely oppressed people and a God who responds. After his seeming absence among the Hebrew slaves for hundreds of years, we are told that the groans of the people rose up to God (Exod. 2:23). God heard, God remembered, God saw, and God knew the plight of his people (Exod. 2:23-25).5 The succession of verbs conveys YHWH’s identification with his people’s suffering which acts as the catalyst for his breaking into space and time to deliver them from bondage. In order to do so, however, God calls Moses as his servant to act on his behalf and to suffer for his people (Exod. 3:7-8). On the surface, Moses is far from being the perfect agent for God’s will and purpose in Egypt. His shortcomings and reluctance to act as God’s messenger make him an unlikely candidate for such a massive task. What will unfold throughout the narrative, however, is that the prophetic calling is not concerned with one’s natural abilities as much as it is with one’s capacity to experience and embody the divine pathos. Suffering is inextricably bound to covenant commitment and God’s love. Having delivered the Israelites from Egypt, YHWH leads them to Mt. Sinai to enter into covenant and to give the law. Though Moses experiences frustrations throughout the wilderness wanderings, it is not until the Golden Calf episode that we see him experience the depths of God’s anger and pain at the disobedience of his chosen people.6 He will intercede on four occasions throughout the narrative in order to save the people from YHWH’s destructive wrath (Exod. 32:11-13; 32:30-32; 33:12-23; 34:9). In the first

Heschel, The Prophets, 31. Terrance Fretheim, Exodus (Louisville: John Knox, 1991), 127–9; see Mark W. Scarlata, The Abiding Presence: A Theological Commentary on Exodus (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 2017), 35–9. 6 A parallel narrative of disobedience and judgment occurs in Num. 14:1-22 where God also threatens to wipe out the Israelites. 4 5

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instance Moses is already at the peak of Sinai with God when he is alerted to the sins of the Israelites below.7 Rather than immediately descending, Moses appeals to YHWH on behalf of the people. The nature of Moses’ plea gives us insight into the nature of his suffering and God’s response. God’s condemnation of the people passes on the liability to Moses. “The Lord said to Moses, ‘God down at once! Your people, who you have brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely’” (Exod. 32:7). We note the subtle transference of responsibility to Moses since YHWH has previously referred to Israel as his “firstborn son” (Exod. 4:22). In the light of their covenant disobedience, YHWH has forsaken his parental duties toward Israel and has passed them into the hands of Moses. Moses, however, responds like a compassionate father pleading for the life of his children. His passion reminds YHWH of his covenant love and that, despite their disobedience, Israel remains God’s chosen and beloved people. Moses refuses the idea of God decimating and eliminating one people-group only to raise up another (Exod. 32:10). Instead, he understands that to suffer on behalf of Israel is to always desire for their good even when they deserve otherwise. Moses’ response is forthright as he reminds God that they are, in fact, his people whom he delivered from Egypt (Exod. 32:8). Moses goes on to argue that after having delivered the Israelites so miraculously out of Egypt, demonstrating his sovereignty and power over all nations, would God really want to wipe them from the face of the earth? Would the Egyptians not mock such an end to their former slaves and the God who delivered them (Exod. 32:12)? Yohannan Muffs calls Moses’ response “moral blackmail”, but his tactics highlight that through the unique act of entering into human history, YHWH has also entered into a particular relationship with the Israelites that has never been witnessed before.8 Moses sums this up as he reflects in Deuteronomy, “Or has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself in the midst of another nation . . . as the LORD your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes?” (4:34). How could a non-capricious God bring disrepute on his own name by destroying the people whom he loves? Moses knows that this cannot be possible unless YHWH is like the other gods who cannot be held to any consistent moral or ethical behavior. This is his challenge to YHWH and a reminder that covenant fidelity is one characterized by benevolence and loyalty. It is here that God invites Moses further into the divine dialectic between justice and mercy, love and anger, when he responds, “Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation” (Exod. 32:10). The request to “let me alone” is one that the rabbis interpreted as an invitation to intercession where God opens up the possibility for Moses to respond.9 Here we witness the internal battle between a God who must act justly according to his covenant and yet who must also remain true to his promise through divine mercy. Moses becomes the counterbalance to divine justice by pleading for mercy. Moses’ intercession is an appeal See Brevard S. Childs, The Book of Exodus (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1974), 567–8; Fretheim, Exodus, 50–1; Scarlata, Abiding Presence, 210–27; Yochanan Muffs, “Who Will Stand in the Breach? A Study of Prophetic Intercession”, in Love and Joy: Law, Language and Religion in Ancient Israel, ed. Yochanan Muffs (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1992), 12–14; R. W. L. Moberly, At the Mountain of God: Story and Theology in Exodus 32-34 (JSOTSup 22; Sheffield: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Press, 1983), 48–53. 8 Muffs, “Who Will Stand in the Breach?” 12. 9 Ibid., 34; Gary Anderson, “The Impassibility of God: Moses, Jonah, and the Theo-Drama of Intercessory Prayer”, in Christian Doctrine and the Old Testament: Theology in the Service of Biblical Exegesis (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 26. See. Num. 14:12.

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to one aspect of the divine (mercy) so that it might prevail over another (justice). He is not asking God to do something that is not already a part of his divine character or will. Instead, he is appealing for the mercy of God to prevail in a particular circumstance. Moses reminds God that Israel’s sin is not simply a breach of contract that has legal consequences but, rather, that the covenant is also a personal relationship bound in the love of a father for a son. The covenantal aspect of God’s concern for Israel is critical to Moses’ defense because it is an extraordinary act that requires a reciprocal loving relationship by both parties alongside its juridical commitments. God is just, but Moses reminds Him that He is also merciful. The psalmist later reflects on Moses’ intercession at Sinai with the image of one who “stood in the breach” to prevent God’s wrath from destroying the people (Ps. 106:23). The depiction of the prophet standing in the gap and interceding on behalf of a sinful Israel offers the biblical picture of the prophet’s calling as one who suffers for the love of God’s covenant people.10 Israel will always be in need of an intercessor and Moses is the archetypal figure of the one who bears the burden of the divine pathos in the hope of receiving mercy and restoring the covenant. Moses establishes his argument further by reminding YHWH that these stiff-necked people and this object of wrath are also the ancestors of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to whom he swore an oath that their descendants would increase exponentially and inherit the land (Exod. 32:13). Moses appeals to a legal defense regarding God’s promise and that, despite Israel’s broken covenant, YHWH has bound himself by oath to this people. Though YHWH maintains the right to act with justice against the sin of his people, and judgment will later come upon the Israelites who sinned, Moses appeals to a historic promise that preserves the continuity of God’s relationship with their ancestors. This intimate scene at Sinai bears resemblance to the inner dialogue articulated through the prophet Hosea which reveals YHWH’s struggle between his covenantal love and his justice. How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath. (Hos. 11:8-9) The pathos of God is revealed to the prophet and we find YHWH’s own lament as he is caught between compassion and justice. Hans-Walter Wolff describes this divine vacillation as part of God’s holy essence. “Yahweh cannot set aside his love just as he cannot set aside his divinity. His love shows itself in a multitude of calls and actions . . . as suffering love On the connection between apatheia and agape, see Ellen Davis, “Vulnerability, the Condition of Covenant”, in The Art of Reading Scripture, ed. Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hays (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 277–93.

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(vv 5-7), it struggles against the divine wrath and thus bears the anguish of neglect within itself (vv 8-9), thereby arriving at the ultimate development of its power (vv [10] 11).”11 This is the very same wresting that we witness in Moses. Though his anger is enflamed by the people’s sin, he pleads for mercy so that they might not be utterly destroyed. Moses’ intercession stems from his conviction that YHWH is not capricious or indifferent, but that he is a God who cannot set aside his covenant love (ḥesed) for his people even when justice must be upheld. Like God, Moses’ heart “recoils” because his suffering for Israel mirrors YHWH’s compassion. The suffering of God becomes the suffering of Moses as the servant is drawn into the mystery of the divine character. Though the Hebrew representation of God through anthropomorphism and poetic metaphor may seem to equate God’s emotions to human emotions, we cannot press the metaphors beyond their intended purpose.12 In this instance, God’s pathos expressed in and through Moses points allusively to the interior struggle of the divine and its ontological implications. Because of Moses’ passionate plea, God changes his mind, or he “relents” from what he was going to do.13 The decision to preserve Israel does not, however, undermine a theology of divine impassibility.14 YHWH’s initial proclamation of destroying the people is only one possibility within the divine will, but he invites Moses to search for another possibility – divine mercy. God’s change of mind is born out of an appeal to his covenant love and fidelity. Both partners in this debate know what should happen to Israel, but Moses reminds YHWH that he is not only a God of justice but that he is also a God of mercy, steadfast love, and forgiveness. In doing so, the divine will is altered to a new possibility that is consonant with God’s character and his previous promise. Despite mercy prevailing, divine judgment is still meted out through Moses as he calls the Levites to go through the camp killing all who are not on YHWH’s side and we are told that three thousand were killed (Exod. 32:25-28). Alongside a judgment that comes through human hands, we are also told that a plague is sent upon Israel as a punishment for their sins (Exod. 32:34-35). It is significant that divine anger is expressed through God’s individual responses to disobedience. Anger or wrath is never to be seen as an essential attribute of the divine.15 Divine wrath expressed through judgment is the outcome of covenant disobedience and so YHWH’s change of mind and his acts do not betray the divine character. Instead, he relents from his initial intention of wiping Israel from the face of the earth because of Moses’ appeal to the God who is gracious, merciful, and slow to anger (Exod. 34:6). Within God’s mercy justice is expressed. In and through Moses’ suffering, God invites his servant to respond with a certain level of audacity in the form of prayer and intercession. Muffs argues that “The divine strong hand does not lobotomize the prophet’s moral and emotional personality. Prophecy does not tolerate prophets who lack heart, who are emotionally anesthetized”.16 Moses Hans-Walter Wolff, Hosea: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Hosea, trans. G. Stansell, ed. P. D. Hanson (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 203. 12 See David Brown, God and Mystery in Words: Experience through Metaphor and Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 44–72; Janet Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); George B. Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible (London: Duckworth, 1980). 13 For further discussion, see Jan-Dirk Döhling, Der Bewegliche Gott: Eine Untersuchung des Motivs der Reue Gottes in der Hebräischen Bibel (HBS 61; Freiburg: Herder, 2010). 14 See Anderson, “The Impassibility of God”, 23–31; David Bentley Hart, “No Shadow of Turning: On Divine Impassibility”, Pro Ecclesia 11 (2002): 184–206. 15 Heschel, The Prophets, 71. 16 Muffs, “Who Will Stand in the Breach?” 11. 11

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cannot suffer for a people whom he does not love. As he grows in his understanding and experience of the divine pathos, he is also transformed by YHWH’s love for his people. As Moses’ heart is shaped by the will of YHWH, so too is he further exposed to suffering on behalf of God’s people. The prophetic concept of suffering on behalf of others is taken up by Fretheim, who argues that the experience of the prophet is an intensification of the divine presence that results in the prophet becoming a vehicle for divine immanence. He contends, “The people thus not only hear the Word of God from the prophet, they see the Word enfleshed in their midst. In and through the suffering of the prophet, the people both hear and see God immersed in human experience. Through the prophet, Israel relates not only to a God who speaks, but also to a God who appears.”17 To suffer for others is an essential aspect of Moses’ embodiment of the divine pathos. For the Pentateuchal authors, Moses is the example par excellence of self-sacrifice for the sake of Israel because he is the only one who has borne the weight of the divine glory (Exod. 34:29). After judgment within the camp, Moses returns up the mountain. Before he ascends, however, he tells the Israelites, “perhaps I can make atonement for your sin” (Exod. 32:30). At this point in the narrative there is no priestly institution established to make atonement, so it is unclear what Moses intends to do. He does not go up the mountain with blood, nor does he make an altar. His only response to YHWH is “But now, if you will only forgive their sin – but if not, blot me out of the book that you have written” (Exod. 32:32). The Hebrew is unclear, but the context of the passage alludes to the fact that Moses may be asking YHWH to blot himself out as some sort of vicarious sacrifice so that Israel will not be blotted out.18 He is willing to take on the covenant curse for Israel by being struck from the heavenly book.19 It is also possible that Moses identifies himself in complete solidarity with Israel and if they are struck from YHWH’s book, then he should be struck too.20 The Pentateuchal authors present Moses’ suffering and commitment to the people unto the point of sacrificing his own life. Eichrodt describes this intercession as “a complete turning of Man to God, a becoming one with the will of God to the point of self-sacrifice, and therefore as something to which God ascribes atoning value sufficient for the removal of guilt”.21 Widmer, however, argues that “to conclude that Moses intended to stand in the place of Israel in the same way as the suffering servant would be reading too much into the text”.22 Yet this is exactly what the context of the narrative demands as Moses goes up to “make atonement”. The setting is distinctly one of sacrifice in that Moses will try to make atonement in the only way he knows how – by offering to be struck from YHWH’s presence.23 Even if the request is not taken as a vicarious offering, it still points

Terrance Fretheim, The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 165. 18 Childs, Exodus, 571; Scarlata, Abiding Presence, 216–17. 19 The divine book reflects an ancient Near Eastern idea that there are books in the heavens that record all human life and works (Pss. 40:7; 69:28; 139:16; Ezek. 2:9-10; Zech. 5:1-4; Mal. 3:16). 20 Bernd Janowski, Stellvertretung: Alttestamentliche Studien Zu Einem Theologischen Grundbegriff (SBS 165; Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1997), 29. 21 Walter Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, 2 vols, trans. J. A. Baker (repr. London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1967), 2:450. 22 Michael Widmer, Standing in the Breach: An Old Testament Theology and Spirituality of Intercessory Prayer (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2015), 88. 23 See Miller, “Moses My Servant”, 253–4. 17

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to the fact that Moses’ suffering on behalf of the people extends to his willingness to be cut off from YHWH. Von Rad sees this prophetic act of suffering as something that comes to fruition in the major prophets and especially in Jeremiah. The prophet is no longer merely the intercessor between God and his people, but he bears the weight of God’s judgment. Von Rad argues that this is a late development but we already see elements of such vicarious suffering reflected in the life of Moses. In Jeremiah, however, we see one who “bears God’s suffering and at the same time that of his people . . . for the prophet, who is a watchman, answers for the rest of the people with his own life (Ezek. 33:1ff.); everything depends upon his going up into the breaches (Ezek. 13:4ff)”.24 The sacrificial act of the prophet is not simply to speak the word of the Lord to the people or to intercede on their behalf but, rather, it is an entrance into, and bearing of, the divine pathos. This ultimate sacrifice for the other is taken up by Emanuel Levinas in his concept of “substitution”. He argues that to give self-sacrificially for the sustenance of another is to support them in their material destitution. It is also to put oneself in the place of the other so that one might answer or bear the punishment of the other’s transgressions.25 To suffer for others is to take on the pain that they cause and to bear the burden of that pain by enduring it and taking responsibility for it. He writes, “The subjectivity of subjection of the self is the suffering of suffering, the ultimate offering of oneself, or suffering in the offering of oneself.”26 In the case of Moses, the prophet is willing to offer himself for the pain and judgment associated with Israel’s broken covenant. He is willing to accept the curse so that they might survive and enter the promised land. Despite Moses’ plea for substitution, however, YHWH reserves the right to judge as he sees fit. The possible Deuteronomic response of “Whoever has sinned against me I will blot out of my book” (Exod. 34:33) reminds Moses that the divine tension between judgment and mercy is not resolved by abandoning justice. Instead, YHWH will reveal the depths of his attributes and character in the theophany of covenant renewal where he declares himself to be “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty” (Exod. 34:67). The revelation, known as the “thirteen attributes” in Jewish tradition, unveils the divine love and mercy that YHWH has for his people and, consequently, the suffering he experiences because of their disobedience. The Golden Calf episode reveals that Moses’ suffering mirrors YHWH’s suffering. Both God and Moses experience deep pain on behalf of Israel and their disobedience.27 Why does Moses bear this suffering on behalf of Israel? Can he not lead Israel without being in an intimate relationship with them? The answer for the Pentateuchal authors is clearly “no”. If Moses is a reflection of the great shepherd (Ezek. 34:1-16) then he must love his sheep. To discover the mystery of the divine, Moses must become like God in order to reflect his love and covenant faithfulness. Moses is forever being drawn to the heart of YHWH and though God and Moses still judge the people, mercy and love offer continuity to Israel’s preservation and blessing. G. von Rad, Old Testament Theology, vol. 2: The Theology of Israel’s Prophetic Traditions (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1965), 376. 25 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Boston: Kluwer, 1991), 99–130. 26 Ibid., 54. 27 See Claus Westermann, Praise and Lament in the Psalms (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1965), 280. 24

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Later in the wilderness wanderings after Sinai, the Israelites are given a further opportunity to respond with covenant obedience and faithfulness as they spy out the land, but once again their sin calls for Moses’ intercession (Num. 14:1-24). The account closely parallels the Golden Calf incident whereby God intends to wipe out the Israelites and give Moses a new nation (11-12). Similar to Moses’ appeal at Sinai, he reminds YHWH of his reputation among the nations (13-16). Rather than calling attention to YHWH’s covenant promise to the Patriarchs, however, Moses is armed with the revelation of the divine attributes and so he pleads for forgiveness. “Forgive the iniquity of this people according to the greatness of your steadfast love, just as you have pardoned this people, from Egypt even until now” (19). With an understanding of YHWH’s fundamental attributes, Moses can now make his case for the people by reminding God of who He is. This, as Muffs contends, is at the heart of biblical prophecy. “Therefore, God allows the prophet to represent in his prayer His own attribute of mercy, the very element that enables a calming of God’s feelings.”28 Just as Moses reflects the divine pathos as prophet, so he too becomes a representation of divine mercy.29 Later Deuteronomic reflection on Moses as the suffering servant appears at three places (Deut. 1:37; 3:23-28; and 4:21-22). Moses is judged for the people’s sin (1:34-37) and as a result is not allowed to enter into the land. In 3:22 and 4:21-22 Moses bears God’s anger because of his role as Israel’s representative. Moses is bound to the people and his suffering is the result of his role as prophet and shepherd. For the Deuteronomic authors, Moses’ punishment is not the result of his individual actions but, rather, is due to his intimate association with God’s covenant people. Moses suffers and bears the burden of their disobedience which leads to his exclusion from the land, while the people are allowed to enter (Deut. 4:21-22). This sacrificial act offers a paradigm for the prophetic suffering needed for the salvation of the covenant people. Without one who will “stand in the gap” and substitute themselves for the nation, Israel will potentially be destroyed. The people will always requires one like Moses, the innocent, suffering servant, who will bear divine judgment on their behalf of the people. This Deuteronomic vision of Moses as the suffering servant plants the seeds for prophetic intercession and mediation in Israel. Because Israel is a “stiff-necked people” they will always be in need of one like Moses, who is willing to take on judgment for covenant disobedience so that others might live. The patterns of suffering revealed in the Pentateuch are affirmed by the prophets who imitate Moses’ vulnerability through covenant relationship, self-sacrifice, intercession, mediation, and the bearing of others’ sin. This vision reaches its climax, in the work of Deutero-Isaiah who paints the fullest depiction of such a servant: Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole,

Muffs, “Who Will Stand in the Breach?” 33. Anderson, “The Impassibility of God”, 31, highlights the power of this relationship and the potential danger if the prophet (e.g., Jonah) fails to live up to this calling.

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and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. (Isa. 53:4-6) The vision of the prophet offers a type of one who stands in the Mosaic tradition, but here we find the servant’s vocation articulated in the most explicit way.30 The vicarious suffering of one human being will offer atonement for all of Israel’s sins (Isa. 53:10). This represents a post-exilic theological development where we find the conflation of the atoning work of the temple with the self-sacrifice of the prophet. In an extraordinary twist, however, the prophet who embodies the divine presence on earth becomes representative of the suffering of God through his own suffering and atoning death. Fretheim rightly argues that “the suffering of the servant is reflective of the suffering of God . . . as the servant is the vehicle for the divine immanence, we should also say that God, too, experiences what the servant suffers”.31 For the Pentateuchal authors, God’s transcendence does not mean that he is isolated, aloof, or disengaged with humanity. Instead, he has bound himself to creation and humanity through covenant as an expression of his divine love. This is not merely a legal, contractual arrangement but, rather, it requires the expression of love and the desire of good for the other. As God binds himself in covenant to his people, he exposes himself to their possible disobedience which elicits his own anger, frustration, and suffering. God’s covenant love for Israel is not a one-sided affair, but it expresses all the vulnerability and risk that exists in any relationship. His desire for authentic relationship and to dwell in the midst of his people (Exod. 25:8) creates a dynamic that reveals his divine pathos. And it is this pathos that we see reflected in his servant Moses. For Moses to express God’s covenant love for the Israelites he must bear the same suffering that God bears. Like YHWH, Moses is not depicted as some distant, detached, leader who blazes the trail for everyone else to follow. He is the compassionate shepherd who is willing to lay his life down for his sheep and is willing to enter into the depths of divine intimacy and pathos on their behalf.

FURTHER READING Brueggemann, Walter. Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005. Fretheim, Terrance. The Suffering of God: An Old Testament Perspective. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Ancient Judaism. London: Aronson, 1987. Levenson, Jon D. The Love of God: Divine Gift, Human Gratitude, and Mutual Faithfulness in Judaism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Walther Zimmerli, The Old Testament and the World, trans. J. J. Scullion (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1976), 141–50; See also von Rad, Old Testament Theology, vol. 2, 250–62; 273–7. 31 Fretheim, The Suffering God, 165; see Claus Westermann, Isaiah 40-66, trans. D. G. M. Stalker (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1969), 262–4. 30

Chapter 3

Suffering and the Problem of Evil in the Prophets JOHN BARTON

The problem of evil may be defined as the question of why bad things happen to people, and especially why they happen to good people. Most human cultures probably generate conjectures about this: in the Hebrew Bible the classic texts reflecting on it are Job and Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth). The prophetic books contain much engagement with human suffering, and how it relates to God. But in many ways evil is not a problem for most of the prophets, and the aim of this chapter will be to explain this and also to mention some exceptions.

PRELIMINARY COMMENTS (1) In the past it was normal to think that the original teaching of the prophets could be largely reconstructed by distinguishing between “authentic” and “inauthentic” passages or sayings within the prophetic books. Thus, we could ask what individual prophets had to say on the subject of suffering and the problem of evil, and perhaps trace lines of connection or dependence among them. Nowadays it has become more usual to emphasize the books of the prophets as finished entities, and to argue that we cannot usually get back to the prophets’ underlying message.1 It remains true that each prophetic book retains its own flavor, which may result from a core of authentic sayings of the prophet in question; but commentators are increasingly skeptical about speaking of the message of a given prophet in any detail. Accordingly, this chapter will concentrate on the picture of the prophets’ teaching as it is presented to us in the books, and abstain from arguing that this teaching genuinely goes back to the named prophet, though for practical reasons I shall often adopt the shorthand use of the prophet’s name as though we could know his own teaching. (2) Where questions about evil and suffering are concerned, the prophetic books are generally concerned with the suffering of the nation or part of it. There is little about the sufferings of individuals. A partial exception is Jeremiah, where there are passages about the sufferings of the prophet himself, particularly in the so-called confessions.2 But in On this development, see Reinhard G. Kratz, The Prophets of Israel (CSHB 2; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2014; from German of 2003) and Uwe Becker, “Die Wiederentdeckung des Prophetenbuches”, Berliner Theologische Zeitschrift 21, no. 1 (2004): 30–60. Here is a full survey of the issue in Odil H. Steck, The Prophetic Books and their Theological Witness (St Louis: Chalice Press, 2000; from German of 1996). 2 See Jer. 11:18-23; 12:1-6; 15:10-21; 17:14-18; 18:19-23; 20:7-13. 1

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general, corporate suffering predominates. The prophets appear to have spoken about the suffering caused by war and by natural disasters (including plagues), rather than about normal illness or individual financial misfortune. (3) All the prophetic books assume that the prophets had an audience. Sometimes this is the king and his government, sometimes a group within Israelite or Judean society, or among the exiles in Babylonia. The oracles against foreign nations imply that these nations constitute the prophets’ audience, though most would think that the really intended hearers are the prophets’ own people, who are meant to draw lessons themselves from what is said about foreigners. There is in all the prophets a clear rhetorical intention to persuade those who hear the prophets’ words, and, as we shall see, much of what is said about the nation’s sufferings is directed at persuading the people that they are to blame for their own afflictions. Though the audience is presented as contemporary with the prophet in question, it may in reality sometimes be a later community, which is invited to apply allegedly ancient prophecies to its own situation.3

ALLEGED MONISM One of the themes in the verse section of the book of Job is the inscrutability of God, whose government of the world human beings cannot question (see Job 38). On the face of it, there are places in the prophets that seem to recognize the problem of evil and to explain it similarly in terms of mere divine decision. Two well-known texts appear to make God the direct source of evil: Amos 3:6 and Isa. 45:7: Does evil befall a city unless the LORD has done it? (Amos 3:6) I form light and create darkness; I make weal and create evil; I the LORD do all these things. (Isa. 45:7) These passages appear to recognize that the presence of “evil” in the world is indeed a problem, but they resolve it by tracing all causality back to God in a way that may be called “monistic” – the opposite of an explanation in terms of malign forces opposed to God. During the twentieth century two major biblical theologians saw the Old Testament as putting forward this kind of explanation for apparently unmotivated suffering and evil. Thus, Walther Eichrodt wrote: all that happens without exception is the action of God. Thereby apparent accident was also excluded, and even evil was traced back to the will of God . . . even misfortune and evil of every kind was reckoned the work of God, devised and sent by him. . . . Thus for every event there was but one divine causality, and the dark and mysterious sides of the world-order were traced back unequivocally to the one divine Lord.4 For an example of this development in the case of Hosea, see James M. Trotter, Reading Hosea in Achaemenid Yehud (JSOTSup 328; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2001), and Ehud Ben Zvi, Hosea (FOTL 21A/1; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005). 4 Walter Eichrodt, “Vorsehungsglaube und Theodizee im Alten Testament”, in Festschrift Otto Procksch, ed. A. Alt et al. (Leipzig: Deichert, 1934), 45–70, 48. My translation of the German: “alles Geschehen ohne Ausnahme [ist] Gottes Handeln, womit auch der scheinbare Zufall ausgeschlossen und selbst das Böse auf Gottes Willen zurückgeführt wurde . . . auch Unglück und Böses aller Art als Gottes Werk gilt, von ihm gewirkt und gesandt. . . So gab es für alles Geschehen nur eine göttliche Kausalität, und die unumwundene Zurückführung auch der dunklen und rätselhaften Seiten des Weltlaufs auf den einen göttlichen Herrn.” 3

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Gerhard von Rad agreed: The appalling, the simply destructive event was part of the direct action of Yahweh in the world. Israel . . . had to understand this “dualism” as a phenomenon within the Godhead, and to bear it . . . the understanding of the world in ancient Israel was characterized decisively by the idea of the “pancausality” of Yahweh.5 Underlying these comments is probably the sense that anything other than “pancausality” might compromise monotheism. It is problematic to ascribe even evil events to the causality of God, but the alternative – to believe in wicked forces outside God’s control – is even worse. Hence, it is suggested, a “monistic” solution to the problem of evil is part of the price ancient Israel paid for its unflinching monotheism. In an important monograph, however, Fredrik Lindström argued that this is a misunderstanding of these prophetic passages (and of other places in the Old Testament).6 He proposed that “evil” here does not mean some kind of cosmic force that is being ascribed to God, but, much more prosaically, “disaster”. Modern translations such as the NRSV have generally accepted this understanding of “evil” in the two places in question (“disaster” in Amos 3:6, “woe” in Isa. 45:7). If there is a disaster in a city, says Amos, it comes from God. But this is not an aspect of divine inscrutability or “pancausality”. On the contrary, it is a just punishment for the city’s sins. Second Isaiah similarly means to say that God is the source not only of blessing but also of punishment: he is not a God who simply favors his own people, but one who visits their sins on their heads, and in that sense is a source of “darkness” as well as “light”, and of “woe” as well as “weal”. But this does not imply that God is the source of “bad” events as well as good ones, for events that constitute his punishment of sinners are by definition not bad at all, but good. There is no “pancausality” in von Rad’s sense. The prophets do not stress the opacity of the divine will, as some later mystics would do, but on the contrary its transparency. For those with eyes to see, there is no mystery about it: people simply get what they deserve, surely a cause for satisfaction. The same is true of what may seem to be a particularly egregious prophetic idea, Ezekiel’s assertion (20:25) that God gave Israel “statutes that were not good, and ordinances by which they could not live”. This may seem highly “monistic”, tracing even human sin back to an impenetrable decision by God, and affirming that the existence of evil is indeed a problem – an insoluble one, because God cannot be interrogated. All things are in his hands, and the clay cannot argue with the potter (cf. Isa. 45:9 and Rom. 9:20). Again, however, this at least partly misunderstands the book of Ezekiel. It is not that God gave evil laws to people who would otherwise have been morally excellent. Rather, it is because Israel is already wicked that he “shuts them up” in their sin by allowing them to adopt evil laws that require the sacrifice of their children. To a modern sensibility this is indeed still a problem, but in its context, it is a satisfactory explanation that does not treat

Gerhard von Rad, Das fünfte Buch Mose, Deuteronomium; übersetzt und erklärt (ATD 8; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964), 62f. (my translation). Original: “[D]as Entsetzliche, das schlechthin Zerstörerische . . . war . . . ein Teil des unmittelbaren Handelns Jahwe an der Welt. Israel . . . hat diesen ‘Dualismus’ als ein innergöttliches Phänomen zu verstehen und zu tragen . . . das Weltverständnis des alten Israel entscheidend von der Vorstellung von der ‘Allkausalität’ Jahwes geprägt worden ist.” 6 Fredrik Lindström, God and the Origin of Evil: A Contextual Analysis of Alleged Monistic Evidence in the Old Testament (ConBOT 21; Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1983). 5

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God as the inscrutable source of evil as well as good, but instead as the judge who punishes harshly but fairly. The “statutes that were not good” are indeed given by God, but this is because he needs to punish Israel and does so by causing them to sin even more and so be even more deserving of chastisement. This is indeed a very strange idea, but it does not mean that God is the source of evil, only that he devises ingenious ways of punishing his people. Few modern people would want to endorse such an idea of God. But in context it does not breach the bounds of what could be affirmed about God and does not imply pancausality. There may well have been a popular belief that God was unpredictable, and that evil as well as good came from him. It could even be argued that such a belief is indeed a necessary precursor of monotheism, refusing to attribute what is bad in the world to an anti-God force or a god of evil. But if there was such a belief in Israelite society, the prophets did not espouse it, and it is not present in the examples just discussed. It is the kind of popular belief they are trying to argue their hearers out of. For the prophets, “evil” is not seen as a deep mystery, hidden in God’s secret purposes, but simply as divine punishment – making God predictable rather than inscrutable. This is the majority position in the prophetic books.

SUFFERING AS PUNISHMENT It may fairly be suggested, then, that there is no problem of suffering and evil in the minds of the prophets, as they are presented to us in the Hebrew Bible. Their major task was to persuade people, especially rulers and those with the power to direct the nation, that national disaster was not at all puzzling or problematic, but just, and thus in principle predictable, for those with eyes to see. Arguing this was clearly uphill work, but it does seem to have been a major part of the prophetic role, at least for the pre-exilic prophets. There is a rational, argumentative aspect to “classical” prophecy that may to some extent mark it out from other prophecy in the ancient world, and this is seen in the prophets’ determination to present the coming judgment as not arbitrary, but justified. If this is right, then denunciation of sin belongs to the prophets’ explanation of what could possibly cause the God of Israel to seek Israel’s destruction, rather than being primarily a call to repentance – even though they did come to be seen as preachers of repentance from at least the time of Zechariah (Zech. 1:4). Their moral critique is a rationalization (as we might see it) of an originally non-rational certainty of coming disaster. The moral “teaching” of the prophets is primarily part of a theodicy, an explanation of why “woe” is decreed by God. This set of ideas is expressed most succinctly in W. H. Schmidt’s short book, not much used in the Anglophone world and never translated into English, Zukunftsgewißheit und Gegenwartskritik,7 “certainty about the future and criticism of the present”. Schmidt assembles a number of arguments to show that certainty about the future comes first, and that criticism of the present state of society is then brought in as an attempted explanation of what the future holds. For example, he points out that the formula “thus says the LORD” (or variants of it) usually precedes predictions, rather than being attached prefaced to the reasons for them. The frequent formula is “because you have done X, thus says the LORD, Y will happen to you”: see Isa. 1:21-24; 5:8-10; 7:5-8; 22:12-

Werner H. Schmidt, Zukunftsgewißheit und Gegenwartskritik: Grundzüge prophetischer Verkündigung (Biblische Studien 64; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1973).

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14; 28:15-16; Amos 3:10-11; 5:16; 7:16-17; Mic. 2:1-4; Zeph. 2:8-9. Schmidt argues form-critically that the Drohwort, the word of threat, is thus primary, and the Scheltwort, the word of accusation, is secondary. And he maintains that the Mahnwort, the word of command or exhortation, scarcely occurs in the classical prophets at all, or that where it does, it is usually an insertion by later editors, or an indication of what could have saved the day, only it was now too late. Thus, according to Schmidt, the prophets were not moral reformers with a program for national improvement, as both Jewish and Christian readers have often seen them, but thought the time for reform long past. This was also strongly argued in Rudolf Smend’s classic and famous essay “Das Nein des Amos”, about Amos’ “no!” to his contemporaries.8 There is one particular argument deployed by Schmidt that is worth revisiting. This is that the primary character of the word of judgment, rather than the moral explanation for it, can be seen precisely in the fact that the judgment is often so out of proportion to the sin: in other words, that no one starting from the analysis of sin would ever have come to the conclusion that it must lead to a judgment on such a scale. This is easily seen in Amos, for whom the moral failings of a small group, those in positions of power, is to bring judgment not simply on them but on the entire northern kingdom. No one, Schmidt argues, who was simply convinced that the rulers were offending God by oppressing the poor would have concluded from this that the whole nation, including those very same poor people, was about to perish by the hand of God. The conviction of the coming disaster must have come first, and then the prophet cast around to find moral reasons for it, and came up with an explanation that to our minds is rather far-fetched. But it seemed better to him to give a reason, even one that was not all that plausible in human terms, than to give no explanation at all. In other words, he was groping for a theodicy, a way of making sense, to his audience, of the message he thought God had given him about the impending destruction of Israel. One might argue similarly in the case of Isaiah. During the years leading up to the Assyrian crisis of 701 bce, Isaiah (according to the text) presents one reason for judgment as the pride of the leaders of Judah, a pride which is manifested in the way they trust in human power, that is, the Egyptians, instead of in YHWH alone. Now it is odd to see the kind of acknowledgment of Judah’s weakness and military powerlessness that was manifested in the desperate courting of Egyptian help as evidence of pride: surely it is evidence of a kind of humility? The fact that Isaiah assimilates it to the model of pride is another example of implausibility, and points us to the conclusion that he was doing the best he could to find a good and adequate reason for God to punish Judah; and he was looking for that, because he was already convinced that Judah was going to fall. An explanation of the coming judgment as a punishment for pride was not very convincing, however rhetorically constructed, but it was better in his eyes than regarding the judgment as irrational and unmotivated. At least in that way God could be presented as just.

Rudolf Smend, “Das Nein des Amos”, EvTh 23 (1963): 404–23: “Der Prophet hat dem Volk die Entscheidung mitzuteilen, die Jahwe getroffen hat, und hat sie zu begründen. Daß das Volk diese Entscheidung durch eine eigene Entscheidung rückgängig machen kann, ist . . . kein fester Bestandteil der Verkündigung des Amos. Er zeigt nicht einen Weg zur Rechten und einen zur Linken, sondern er sagt, wohin der Weg zur Linken geführt hat.” My translation: “The prophet has to tell the people of the decision Yahweh has taken, and has to explain its grounds. The idea that the people is able, by its own decision, to avert this decision, is no firm component of Amos’s proclamation. He does not show them a way to the right and one to the left; rather, he shows where the way to the left has led.”

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This thread of theodicy is of course also very important in Ezekiel, where the whole thrust of chapter 18 is to persuade the audience that what has happened to them is just. you say, “The way of the Lord is unfair.” Hear now, O house of Israel: Is my way unfair? Is it not your ways that are unfair? (Ezek. 18:25) Whatever one thinks about the traditional supposition that this chapter operates with a distinction between the individual and the community, the motivation behind the prophet’s utterances is clearly to get the community being addressed to agree that it is itself to blame for the disasters it has experienced: that the way of YHWH is just, and that it is the ways of Israel that have been unjust. Ezekiel 18 is almost an ideal type of a biblical passage concerned with theodicy. The prophet (as the book presents him) is concerned to emphasize that what has happened in the exile is the people’s own fault, and that God is blameless in the matter. Indeed, Israel has been guilty throughout its entire existence, all the way from the exodus, in fact even before it: Thus says the Lord GOD: On the day when I chose Israel, I swore to the offspring of the house of Jacob – making myself known to them in the land of Egypt – I swore to them, saying, I am the LORD your God . . . But they rebelled against me and would not listen to me; not one of them cast away the detestable things their eyes feasted on, nor did they forsake the idols of Egypt. (Ezek. 20:5, 8) Another important aspect of Ezekiel 18 is that the chapter asserts the non-transmissibility of guilt. It appears that Ezekiel’s audience could accept that the disaster of the exile was a divine punishment, but protested that it was a punishment for someone else’s sin – the sin of their ancestors. They quote a proverb, “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (18:2). This explanation of suffering as the result of a build-up of sin down the generations is accepted in the deuteronomistic literature, where the exile is the result not of the contemporary generation’s wrongdoing, but of the sins of Manasseh in a previous generation, which have not yet been adequately punished (2 Kgs 24:1-4). Ezekiel, like the Chronicler in later times, has a “doctrine of immediate retribution”: the person who sins will die, irrespective of the virtue of his ancestors. Conversely, the person who does good will live, however evil his ancestors may have been. Each generation suffers only for its own sins. God here observes his own law as it applied to human justice, where “a child shall not suffer for the iniquity of a parent, nor a parent suffer for the iniquity of a child” (Ezek. 18:20, cf. Deut. 24:16). What is true of individuals, Ezekiel implies, is true also of the nation: if it is suffering, it must be because of its own wickedness – blame cannot be shunted off on to previous generations.9 He would presumably have rejected the claim in Lamentations that “our ancestors sinned; they are no more, and we bear their iniquities” (Lam. 5:7). (In Jeremiah, by contrast, it is said that the “sour grapes” proverb will no longer be true in the future, presumably implying that in the present it is – see Jer. 31:29-30.) Lamentations is not a prophetic book but is clearly influenced by the prophets. In it the classic formula saddiq hu’ YHWH appears: “The LORD is in the right, for I have rebelled against him” (1:18). The whole of Lamentations is concerned with the issue of divine justice, and describes the pre-exilic conduct of the people of Jerusalem in

For the line of argument here, see Paul M. Joyce, Divine Initiative and Human Response in Ezekiel (JSOTSup 51; Sheffield: Continuum, 1989). 9

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such a way as to argue, just as the prophets do, that the disaster it has experienced was only what could reasonably have been expected. It can be identified as a “doxology of judgement” (Gerichtsdoxologie), which emphasizes its character as theodicy: it is a means of “giving glory to God” for his punishment (as Joshua urges Achan to do in Josh. 7:19) by showing that the punishment was deserved. The lament psalms can be seen in a similar light: they are what Christiane de Bos calls Klage als Gotteslob aus der Tiefe,10 “lament as the praise of God from the depths”. In the midst of suffering and disaster, lamenting is a way of acknowledging the God who is the source of suffering as well as of good things. But this is not a mere stoical acceptance of the deeds of an inscrutable God: it is a matter of giving praise to a righteous God for his justice, even when that justice is punitive. Theodicy is not far from this way of thinking. Just as in the prophets, the articulation of reasons for disaster, indeed the ability to put the experience of disaster into words, is in this culture a way of attributing it to God and so of feeling that it makes some kind of sense, of however unpleasant a kind. That is the purpose of much prophecy. Thus we might say that the prophetic solution to the problem of suffering and evil is often to deny that there is a problem. Bad things simply do not happen to good people – to think they do is to err grievously. If a bad thing happens, then the victim must be to blame for it. There is a difference of opinion about whether the victims themselves are personally to blame, or have inherited guilt from previous generations. But there is agreement among all the prophets that suffering implies some kind of preceding sin. This applies at any rate to national disaster; as remarked earlier, the prophets do not generally speak of individuals and their suffering except in this larger context. It is the prophets’ refusal to see that there is such a thing as the suffering of the innocent that makes them so alien to most modern readers. We resist the implication that the way things work out in international or local affairs is an index of divine justice – that when nations or groups collapse and fall they are simply getting their just deserts.

THE PROSPERITY OF THE WICKED There is, however, an opposite problem that does occasionally surface in the prophetic books. Though those who suffer are thought to have sinned, not all who prosper are necessarily righteous. This matter is raised classically in Job, of course (e.g., in Job 21:1718), and it also arises in Jer. 12:1-2: You will be in the right, O LORD, when I lay charges against you; but let me put my case to you. Why does the way of the guilty prosper? Why do all who are treacherous thrive? You plant them, and they take root; they grow and bring forth fruit; you are near their mouths, yet far from their hearts. Christiane de Vos, Klage als Gotteslob aus der Tiefe: Der Mensch vor Gott in den individuellen Klagepsalmen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005).

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It is also discussed in Hab. 1:13: Your eyes are too pure to behold evil, and you cannot look on wrongdoing; Why do you look on the treacherous, and are silent when the wicked swallow those more righteous than they? In both these cases the issue is raised by the prophet himself. But note also Mal. 2:17, where it is presented as an objection in the mouths of the prophet’s audience: You have wearied the LORD with your words. Yet you say, “How have we wearied him?” By saying, “All who do evil are good in the sight of the LORD, and he delights in them”. Or by saying, “Where is the God of justice?”11 Just as in psalmody (e.g., Ps. 73) and wisdom (e.g., Job 24), so here the prosperity of the wicked is a reproach to the “God of justice”. Whereas the evil of suffering is more or less always explained in prophetic literature as a just punishment, so that those who perhaps appear righteous must in reality be sinners, there is no attempt to reverse the argument by saying that those who prosper must really be more innocent than they seem! In Jeremiah and Habakkuk the problem of evil is very real when it takes the form of immunity from suffering for those who thoroughly deserve to suffer. In Malachi the community addressed by the prophet raises the issue, apparently without the prophet’s agreement. But in all three cases the argument is that God’s faithfulness and goodness is compromised by his tolerance, or even promotion, of success for the undeserving, at the expense of the innocent. Whereas the problem of suffering seems to the prophets to be a non-problem, raised only by sinners who cannot see that they deserve the wrath of God to be poured out on them through military defeat or natural disaster, the problem of the non-suffering of the wicked is for them an example of real evil. Jeremiah offers no solution to it, simply asking God to take vengeance on the unrighteous people whom he seems to be favoring. For Habakkuk it appears to be an insoluble problem. While in Malachi it is only faithless people who accuse God of injustice, though he does not show how the world-order is indeed just, but simply asserts it. In none of these three places are we given any satisfactory resolution of the problem. For the most part the prophets are spokesmen for the justice of the God of Israel. They see this justice manifested in the sufferings that their nation has to endure, and their role is to try to convince their hearers that God is not arbitrary but purposeful. Only the prosperity of the wicked seems occasionally to upset their picture of the world as geared to ensure a right distribution of blessings and curses. Where human suffering is concerned, they believe implacably in God’s just judgment and refuse to countenance any questioning of it.

On the quotations in Malachi attributed to “the people” – a distinctive feature of the book – see Karl William Weyde, Prophecy and Teaching: Prophetic Authority, Form Problems, and the Use of Tradition in the Book of Malachi (BZAW 288; Berlin: W. De Gruyter, 2000).

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FURTHER READING Bergmann, Michael, Michael J. Murray, and Michael C. Rea, eds. Divine Evil? The Moral Character of the God of Abraham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Fiddes, Paul and Jochen Schmidt, eds. Rhetorik des Bösen / The Rhetoric of Evil. Studien des Bonner Zentrums für Religion und Gesellschaft. Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2013. Joyce, Paul M. Divine Initiative and Human Response in Ezekiel. Journal for the Study of the Pseudepiagrapha, Supplement Series 51. Sheffield: Continuum, 1989. Lindström, Fredrik. God and the Origin of Evil: A Contextual Analysis of Alleged Monistic Evidence in the Old Testament. Coniectanea Biblica – Old Testament Series 21. Lund: Christian Wilhelm Kühl Gleerup, 1983. Schmidt, Werner H. Zukunftsgewißheit und Gegenwartskritik: Grundzüge prophetischer Verkündigung (Biblische Studien 64). Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1973.

Chapter 4

The Book of Job KATHARINE J. DELL

THE BOOK OF JOB: OVERVIEW AND ORIENTATION Mr Zuss: Oh, there’s always someone playing Job Nickles: There must be Thousands! What’s that got to do with it? Thousands – not with camels either: Millions and millions of mankind Burned, crushed, broken, mutilated, Slaughtered, and for what? For thinking! For walking round the world in the wrong Skin, the wrong-shaped noses, eyelids: Sleeping in the wrong city – London, Dresden, Hiroshima. There never could have been so many Suffered more for less. Archibald MacLeish, J. B. The book of Job is widely considered to be one of the most profound treatments of human suffering and of the problem of evil not only within the Bible but within world literature as a whole. It has in turn inspired other works such as the 1950s existentialist play (and Pulitzer prize-winner) by Archibald MacLeish in which he takes on the suffering theme and models his main character J. B. on Job.1 The two characters in the citation here mimic the God/the Satan prologue in Job in that Job is being discussed before he appears. It is like a prologue, relativizing the main action. These characters make the point that suffering is all around us, in history and in the present day. It is nothing extraordinary that an innocent person should suffer – it happens every day and for no apparent good reason.

Archibald MacLeish, J. B.: A Play in Verse (New York: Samuel French Inc., 1958).

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J. B. is just one such innocent sufferer, as is Job, and they both represent Everyman in the situation of suffering. The book of Job is on the face of it a simple tale of one who was “blameless and upright, fearing God and turning away from evil” (1:1) on whom calamity struck suddenly and without cause. In the opening prologue Job is portrayed as scrupulously pious, a kind man who helped others in his community and even performed religious practices for his family in case they might have inadvertently sinned (1:5). In the biblical Job it is at this point that the reader is introduced to the “behind the scenes” action in heaven where God and the Satan are having a discussion regarding the motivation for faith. The key question is whether a person will continue to be God-fearing even when the worst kind of suffering is inflicted upon them. Are people only religious for the perceived benefits that it brings and thus, when suffering strikes, does it shake those foundations of faith? The Satan asks the key question: “Does Job fear God for nothing?” (1:9). God holds Job up as a paradigm and so this unsuspecting figure is chosen as the one on whom the test will be performed. The suffering is actually meted out by the Satan to whom God gives the power to inflict it – this raises an interesting question of who is responsible for suffering. God clearly allows it here but the actual inflicting is at one remove, attributed to “the adversary”, later to become the embodiment of evil.2 This raises the problem of evil – how can a good God allow evil in the world? In Job “the Satan” is simply one of a wider divine council, but he has the responsibility of being in the world “going to and from on the earth, and . . . walking up and down on it” (1:7) suggesting that evil has its root in the world. The calamities that are then brought down upon Job fall into two types – one is death from warfare, and the second is natural disaster. The first calamity is that the enemy Sabeans steal all the oxen and donkeys and killed their attendants, except for one who comes to bring the news to Job. Wealth is measured in terms of goods and so this represents the loss of Job’s possessions and livelihood. The third disaster is the same – the Chaldeans this time carry off Job’s camels and kill the servants tending them. The other two disasters are natural ones leading to the death, first, of sheep and their shepherds by fire, and second a desert wind that causes a house to fall upon his children, killing them all straight away. Job’s response is immediate mourning but continued praise of God. He says, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (1:22). His reaction then is as God foretold, a pious one. Job expresses the view that suffering has to be simply accepted in the same way as good fortune is accepted, as God’s will, with no questions asked. This is not a determinism that says that everything is planned, but it is an acceptance of one’s fate in relation to God who is still deemed worthy of praise and seen to be in control, with humans not needing to know the reasons for their misfortune. It is not a mechanistic view of retributive justice as will emerge later in the book, rather it is outside those rules. Despite being innocent and good, Job does not wonder why those qualities are no longer rewarded, rather he simply accepts his fate. We as the audience know the reason is the bet between God and the Satan, but Job knows nothing of that discussion having not witnessed the heavenly scenes. “The Satan” has the definite article in Job, distinguishing him from the personal name “Satan” found later on in Zechariah and elsewhere. It is thought that Job is the earliest mention of the idea of an adversary or opponent to God, perhaps finding its way into Hebrew thought from Persian dualism and later developing into the idea of a full-blown evil opponent to God.

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The second discussion in heaven has God affirming that “He [Job] still persists in his integrity, although you incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason” (2:3). This “no reason” echoes in our ears – does there always have to be a reason for suffering? It seems not. God allowed Job’s destruction “for no reason” – what does that tell us about God? What kind of God, furthermore, allows this kind of testing to be done to his innocent God-fearers? We are reminded of the near-sacrifice of Isaac when God performs a similar test on Abraham (in Genesis 22) who is brought to the brink of doing the terrible deed until God gives a last-minute reprieve. The Satan’s response is to goad God further and say that illness to the point of death will be the real test of Job’s resilience and his motivation for faith. Don’t people lose their faith in the face of intense physical and mental suffering? This has to be allowed now for the test to be valid – the Satan challenges God to “stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face” (Job 2:5). But God does not do this deed either, even though he agrees to it – Job is to be in the Satan’s power, but his life is to be spared. When he is struck down, though, Job does not know that he will not die. We as readers know that this is a test Job will also survive, but Job becomes worried that he will die prematurely and never be able to settle what now becomes his intense theological argument with God. Job’s wife tells Job to curse God now, but at this point he is still accepting, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?”, he says (2:10). Good and bad alike are seen to come from God for no apparent reason nor in any apparent ratio – for this pious Job, life (good and bad) just happens. Interestingly J. B. in MacLeish’s play says the same words, but then explicitly adds a point about chance: J. B. says to his wife, Sarah: “Shall we take the good and not the evil? We have to take chances, Sarah: evil with good. It doesn’t mean there is no good.” MacLeish here adds a point about human activity, that life is a risk but that if evil occurs it does not cancel out the good in the world. Job is thus struck down with a virulent skin disease that makes him an outcast like a leper. Poverty and now disease have turned him into a pitiful figure, scratching his sores on a dung heap. Three friends appear at this point and sit with Job in comforting silence, but all this is shortly to change. Again MacLeish adds a dimension to this image of the dung or ash heap when he has his character Mr Zuss exclaim: “Isn’t there anything you understand? It’s from the ash heap God is seen. Always! Always from the ashes. Every saint and martyr knew that!” This adds the ironic insight that sometimes suffering brings a human closer to God – through suffering our understanding of God can deepen, or at least our questions deepen leading us to engage on a more profound level. This we see in what is to come in the dialogues. It is at this point though that the real subtlety of the book of Job as a discussion of questions of suffering and evil emerges because the character of Job changes. This may well be the work of an author who saw the possibility of opening up and deepening the discussion by the addition of poetry to the simple prose of the folktale. Suddenly from the depths of human despair comes chapter 3, Job’s opening lament. The character of Job seems more real in the desperate words that he utters, wishing that he had never been born to endure such suffering, or that he had died at birth so as not to have lived through this, calling on the powers of darkness. He curses the first days of his existence, thinking of death as entirely preferable to life, death the great leveler of rich and poor. The language of light and darkness is interesting, recalling the primal creative acts of separation of light from darkness, of order out of chaos (see the controlling of chaos by God in the hymn in Genesis 1). From this vantage point of extreme suffering, death seems attractive to one for whom “my sighing comes like my bread, and my groanings are

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poured out like water” (3:24). This is a real expression of human suffering, not simply the physical toll that it takes but also the mental anguish to which it leads.3 A dialogue ensues between Job and the three friends, who move from comforting silence to verbose arguments that turn into insults from time to time. This is where the theological meat of the book emerges where the problem of innocent suffering is discussed in relation to the doctrine of retribution, according to which the good prosper and the wicked are punished. Job is wrestling with himself in order to understand this experience of suffering that has overturned what he had previously believed. That belief is represented by the friends – they insist that Job must have sinned in order to be punished by God in this way. There is no thought of Satan doing the punishing – both the friends and Job blame God as the source of these evil happenings, an interesting shift in the book. But for the friends these are not evil happenings, they are deserved punishment for Job who has become complacent and has inadvertently sinned. They seek to find the rational cause of the problem. For Job though going through the experience makes a difference to the friends’ approach – he knows he does not deserve the suffering and is in agony and pain during the process. He too wants to understand why – “Teach me, and I will be silent”, says Job to God, “Make me understand how I have gone wrong” (6:24). The arguments of the friends tire him and he begins to realize that his real argument is with God. How could God have allowed these things to happen to him? Of course, he does not know about the bet – it would be interesting to know whether that would have made a difference if he had! I suspect he would still have accused God of indifference and malignant infliction of unreasonable suffering. All of them try to rationalize the suffering in relation to what they had traditionally been taught – but because of his experience Job breaks outside the traditional mold. Job is beginning to realize that the just and the wicked do not get their just desserts. He cries, “I am blameless; I do not know myself; I loathe my life. It is all one, therefore I say, he destroys both the blameless and the wicked” (9:21-2). The author of the Job dialogues uses a parodying technique of taking traditional lament sentiments from the psalms and turning them on their head.4 Job then starts to go on the attack against God, “When disaster brings sudden death, he mocks at the calamity of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked” (9:23-24). He mounts a protest against God. Everything is topsy-turvy and God is turning into the malevolent hand rather than the nurturing one. The God of justice is turned unjust. How does one retain faith in a God who metes out suffering, and furthermore in mockery, at a whim? Job cries out in his final plea, “He [God] has cast me into the mire, and I have become like dust and ashes. I cry to you and you do not answer me; I stand and you merely look at me. You have turned cruel to me, with the might of your hand you persecute me” (Job 30:19-21). He even asks for a mediator to judge between himself and God (19:23-27), an impossibility since God is both judge and apparently the one leading the case for the prosecution! Legal language designed to try to force God into the dock does not work

See discussion in Katharine J. Dell, “What Was Job’s Malady?” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 41, no. 1 (2016): 61–77. See also, Katherine E. Southwood, Job’s Body and the Dramatized Comedy of Moralising (Routledge Studies in the Biblical World; London: Routledge, 2021). She also likens Job to a dark comedic play. 4 As I argued in Katharine J. Dell, The Book of Job as Sceptical Literature (BZAW 197; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991) and as was taken up by Will Kynes, My Psalm Has Turned into Weeping: Job’s Dialogue with the Psalms (BZAW 437; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012). 3

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here. Here then as a result of the dialogue debate, issues of the nature and character of God emerge that God will eventually appear to answer in person. Other characters such as a fourth friend appear (Elihu in chs 32–37), and we have a hymn to wisdom (ch. 28). But the full climax of the book comes in the speeches of God. God appears in a whirlwind ostensibly to answer Job. This is surprising in itself in that God does not normally appear nor does he normally feel the need to justify himself. The irony is that God in these speeches does not provide a direct justification for his actions – the bet is never mentioned, nor is Job’s own situation referred to. Rather, God appears to reiterate his amazing creative acts in a series of rhetorical questions designed as a “put down” to Job. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” God asks, “Tell me, if you have understanding” (38:4). This seems to be a show of knowledge and power in the context of creation, of which Job (representing all humans) would have no knowledge. Indeed God accuses Job of “darken[ing] counsel by words without knowledge” (38:2). We are being given here a glimpse into the inner workings of God as he creates and sustains the world. The inference is that God is busy doing such actions of which humans are unaware and thus, by extension, why should they think they have any answers as to God’s actions and motivations for doing anything? The whole scale on which God is working is different to ours – “Who has cut a channel for the torrents of rain and a way for the thunderbolt, to bring rain on a land where no one lives . . . to satisfy the waste and desolate land, and to make the ground put forth grass?” (38:35-37). This verse suggests also that human beings are not at the center of concern – God even sends rain where no human habitation is in order to sustain life in a barren area for nature and the animal world. The message is that God’s works are beyond human understanding. This implies that there are no answers to innocent suffering either, although that issue is not directly addressed. Job appears to be overwhelmed and lays his hand on his mouth (40:4). His responses indicate that he is no longer going to argue back (40:5) and that he is submissive, if not repentant (42:2-6). Is God’s appearance in itself enough to satisfy Job (verse 5: “I had heard of you . . . but now my eye sees you”) or is it what God says that makes Job realize his insignificance in the context of the wider universe (verse 3: “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know”)? Job had sought answers and justice – does he get either of these? The reality seems to be what he suspected from the start that God can do as he pleases – good and evil – and is not accountable to human beings and their perception of the system of justice in place. This though raises difficult questions about the God–human relationship. If there are no rules, no boundaries, no expectations, how can a relationship be meaningful? This is not the realm of the Israelite covenant, but it is an example of individual human relationship with God and it raises the issue of what it is to behave in an ethical manner and why we might do so. If there are no rules, why do humans impose morality upon themselves – is any of this God-given. Does God expect some behavior according to the rules but then overturn his own rules as it suits him? Is God ultimately good and wishing good for his creation or is there something more malevolent at work? The description of wild animals (ch. 39) and of the great monsters that represent chaos (chs 40–41) add to a feeling of unease, that there are boundaries of which human beings only have an inkling and that God is occupied on all these other fronts as well as attending to human concerns. These questions are all raised in this profound section of the God speeches and Job’s responses. We are then returned to the world of the prose tale with the epilogue. It is interesting that God says to the friends that “you have not spoken of me what is right, as my

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servant Job has” (42:7). This is perhaps ironic in the light of the dialogues where the friends did seem to be saying the right things – at least the traditional things – while Job was highly critical of God to the point of blasphemy. And yet, in the light of the God speeches it suggests that Job’s questioning came nearer to the truth than the friends’ bland repetition of dogma. Job is called upon to sacrifice on behalf of the three friends and to atone for them (42:8-9). He is then restored to double his possessions and a new family, thus vindicating the doctrine of retribution and the positions of the friends! This would be the natural outcome of the prose story – that having passed the tests Job is restored. But in the light of the dialogues and God speeches it becomes a highly ironic ending. How satisfactory is it to go through such suffering and then end up back where one started? MacLeish in J. B. suggests that at the end of the day it is only love that endures: “Blow on the coal of the heart” he has Sarah, J. B.’s wife say at the end of the play, “The candles in churches are out. The lights have gone out in the sky. Blow on the coal of the heart. And we’ll see by and by.” The coal of the heart represents the burning ember of love left in a darkened world. These words come out of the darkness, with the awareness that love is stronger than any other answer they have found. Even if God does not appear to love, that emotion is so strong in humans that God must be the source of that love. This is not an answer found in the biblical book of Job, rather it is through a fresh sense of understanding acknowledged by Job (42:3) that some kind of reconciliation is found. The restoration then follows with Job welcomed back into his community who show sympathy and comfort (42:11). This is perhaps an indication of that warmth of human fellowship and love that MacLeish refers to. A Hebrew sign of blessing is longevity and many generations of children and these Job gains in abundance.

ARGUMENTS FROM JOB REGARDING SUFFERING AND EVIL BEARING ON THEODICAL DISCUSSIONS The book of Job is about individual human suffering, but it is also profoundly about the relationship between God and humanity. The two are intertwined and in the course of that discussion the issue of the problem of evil emerges. The author of Job seems to be raising a variety of answers for the reader to ponder, without providing one single solution and that is perhaps the power of the book, that it raises many questions and some answers but does not solve any issues, perhaps because they are ultimately unsolvable. One answer is that God’s purposes are greater than ours. As Job seems to acknowledge in the prologue it could be that God has our fate in his hand for good or ill and our actions have no effect on that outcome. It may be, as the God speeches suggest, that God’s actions and his reasons for doing things are ultimately a mystery for humans who do not have the full picture of the world that God has. It is possible that human reason will never ascertain answers. This is slightly unsatisfactory from the human angle in that if God’s purposes are higher than ours and we will never know his purposes, then how can we be in a meaningful relationship with him. If he sends evil just as he sends good, how can we know where we stand? If he has revealed himself in certain ways in the past, is that not the ground for a relationship that demands consistency? The second issue is in the area of morality. Is God moral at all? Are God’s categories of morality simply different to ours? What does it mean then to say that God is good? And

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if that is the case, what is the source of human morality and why should we even need to pursue it? Is morality just a way of humans interacting with others in society, giving us boundaries for our own protection? There are a good deal of questions here – if morality is God-given and God is ultimate goodness, then the problem of evil arises. Even if a Satan figure does the actual inflicting – as in the prologue – God is still the responsible deity behind these actions. It is clear from the Job dialogues that no one blames anyone other than God for the calamities that fall upon Job. This raises questions about God’s purposes for the world and its moral parameters. As M. Tsevat writes, God must take some of the blame: “He [Job] is compelled to affirm that the cause of the terrible atrocities that God has unleashed against him lies not in him but in God. God wants to torment him, torment him without reason, because God is cruel . . . In ever-repeated and diverse ways Job accuses God of wanton cruelty.”5 Another possible answer from the Job author is that traditional motifs of retributive justice are right after all. Even if Job did suffer, the epilogue indicates that he did receive his reward in the end and often after a period of suffering, hindsight can see some patterns and reason find some sense in what has occurred even if it was not apparent at the time. This seems to be denied in the book when God criticizes the friends, but it does raise the question of whether one should rely on one’s own experience when it contradicts traditional ideas, or whether the weight of generations of human experience should hold more sway. Another possibility is that God is not all he is made out to be. Although he makes a display of his knowledge and power in the speeches, there is an absence of the discussion of justice. This suggests that God is capricious, some have even said that these speeches show a God who is actually not firmly in control of his universe. Maybe the book of Job shows the limitations of God and especially the limitations of God in relationship. This is a God who is so overwhelmed simply by holding the forces of chaos at bay and delighting in the ways of wild animals that he might occasionally overlook divine justice in individual cases. And yet, God in the prologue picks Job out as an example of piety, which is why Job is so ripe for the test. Or again is that a sign of capricious testing that human beings should be suspicious of? One of the limitations is the natural world itself – although God sets it up, does it not take on a life of its own where natural disasters are concerned? Is God immediately responsible for such things or does the planet take on a life of its own, with God as directing the action behind the scenes only? Some have even said that Job’s repentance is somewhat tongue in cheek and that in his replies he realizes that God is not all that he once thought. Carl Jung for example in his famous Answer to Job wrote, “Job had noticed during this harangue [the God speeches] that everything else had been mentioned except his right. He has understood that it is at present impossible to argue the question of right, as it is only too obvious that Yahweh has no interest whatever in Job’s cause but is far more preoccupied with his own affairs.”6 Of course, another possible dimension is that human suffering is just that – a human occurrence most often caused by actions toward each other. Otherwise, it is just down to random acts of natural catastrophe. After all two of the calamities of the prologue were Matitiahu Tsevat, “The Meaning of the Book of Job”, in Studies in ancient Israelite Wisdom, ed. J. L. Crenshaw (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1976), 341–74, 344f. 6 Carl Jung, Answer to Job, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954; original German, 1952), 26. 5

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the result of warring factions moving against Job’s possessions to plunder and steal, the other two were natural disasters. These are presented as deliberate acts, but what if they were not? Maybe human beings are simply evil, especially in the context of war. This is not something that is especially discussed in the book of Job but it is waiting to be asked. While the nature of humanity as sinful is not discussed either, we might cross-refer to the Fall here and ask whether, in the light of the gaining of “the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 3:22) and the loss of innocence, this is simply now the human lot. This then raises the question of why God created a world in which humanity was destined, early on, to fail. While this is not specifically a Job question, Job does indicate that the odds are ranged against humanity with God shooting his arrows like a bowman to those already suffering and in despair (“the arrows of the Almighty are in me . . . the terrors of God are arrayed against me”, 6:4). If not that, then natural disasters in the form of earthquakes, volcanoes, wind, and fire would be to blame. Another angle is the issue of knowledge – that suffering somehow leads to human self-knowledge and a deeper relationship with God. With its home in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, Job does engage with ideas of gaining understanding (cf. Prov. 1:1-7) and chapter 28 discusses the hiddenness and limitations of wisdom (cf. Proverbs 8). Perhaps the message here is that the quest for knowledge simply leads to a barrier and that God is the only source of all knowledge most of which is beyond human understanding. This would explain why God exposes Job’s lack of knowledge of the creative process in chapter 39 and why he describes a wild and barren world of which humans would have no direct experience. This book is showing the limitations of knowledge, and that includes knowledge of God. Again, that puts God beyond human understanding of morality that would limit the sphere of God’s action. The nature of God is a conundrum of the book. If God is good, why does he subject his servants to tests? If God seeks a relationship that is meaningful, why does he undercut moral norms that are the only way for humans to make sense of the world? How can God create humans and then watch them suffering “without cause” and how can he make a particular spectacle of his most God-fearing servants? Job rails against God using words that many would see as blasphemy and cursing and yet God justifies him over the friends. The restoration suggests that all will be well in the end, but isn’t Job’s view of God – and ours as readers – profoundly changed in the process? Maybe that is the answer that through suffering comes a deepened and more profound awareness, and yet that does not seem a wholly satisfactory answer either. We have seen then that the book of Job opens up questions about human suffering and about the problem of evil, notably in the God–human relationship with a profundity that has led it to be described as the “Matterhorn” of the Old Testament. Individual issues of experience versus traditional ideas are aired that go to the heart of the God–human relationship. The innocent sufferer is a type, he is an “everyman”, in some ways it is an unrealistic “set-up” for how would anyone know that they were totally innocent, totally good, and so on? But it is set up in this way to highlight the central issues brought out by the book – to enter into the profundity of the motivation for faith, of the reasons (or not) for suffering and to engage with the very nature of the God–human relationship. Perhaps the ultimate answer is that there are no answers, only further questions. In the light of terrible happenings in the world, as MacLeish expresses it through Sarah’s words again, “God is there too in the desperation. I do not know why God should strike. But God is there in what is stricken also”. And J. B. himself says, “No one deserves it, Sarah, not in the world that God has given us. But [he laughs] I believe in it, Sal, I trust in it. I trust

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my luck – my life – our life – God’s goodness to me.” At the end of the day, trust in God is what Job has in abundance – even if God turns out to be capricious, what more can a faithful servant do, but trust and hope that good will triumph.

FURTHER READING Balentine, Samuel. Have You Considered My Servant Job? Understanding the Biblical Archetype of Patience. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2015. Clines, David J. A. Job. Word Biblical Commentary 17 & 18, 3 Vols. Dallas: Word Books, 1989; Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2005, 2011. Dell, Katharine J. Job: Where shall Wisdom be Found? 2nd edition. T&T Clark Study Guides to the Old Testament, edited by A. Curtis. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016. Dell, Katharine J. “Job”. In The History of Evil in Antiquity, Vol 1. Edited by T. Angier, 24–33. London: Routledge, 2018.

Chapter 5

Suffering and the Quest for Its Causes in the Psalms ERHARD S. GERSTENBERGER

MAPPING OUT THE TERRAIN Suffering, a universal phenomenon, is pluriform and does affect everyone through all walks of life. Very rare are those witnesses who may rightfully claim a biography free of hardships or social groups without a history of serious constraints. Forms and circumstances of suffering vary ad infinitum. Physical, mental, and psychic realms of the individual may be affected, as well as segments of population, whole cultural entities, and, eventually, all humankind and living beings. Obviously, the burdens of pain, deficiencies, and threats have never been distributed equally. From all periods of known history we may hear voices decrying excessive ailments. This raises the question for causes and origins of anguishes, as well as their just administration. Why do I/we have to suffer? Popular wisdom has it that a certain measure of hardships does serve well a balanced development of personality or a just equilibration of group identities. Along this line the dynamics of suffering do make sense; they belong to the general structure of this world, being in some way pedagogical provisions orienting human beings. As a rule, unbalanced, overdosed occurrences of pain, however, need special explanations and counter-measures. The Psalter bears witness to the width and depth of thinking and experience in Old Testament times with regard to the manifold problems of suffering. Being a collection of prayers, songs, and meditations from the midst of early Jewish spiritual life we may expect rich information about how contemporaries looked at basic situations. Indeed, the collection of OT psalms does have a special affinity to those fundamental questions of life: a large part is directly concerned with personal suffering in grappling with the vulnerability of being and searching for ways to regain wholesome living conditions. We call them “complaints of the individual”, and they are echoed by “communal complaints” and their corollaries are “personal and communal thanksgivings” to be recited after salvation by God has occurred.1 Complaint genres have their origin in rituals for overcoming miseries and restituting fullness of life. At the beginning they have been administered by healing

See Erhard S. Gerstenberger, Psalms, Part I, with an Introduction to Cultic Poetry (FOTL XIV; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 9–22.

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experts;2 later they became inserted into the Jewish synagogal textbooks of prayer and spiritual songs. Another group of poems in the Psalter is fraught with somber meditations about life’s fragility (see Psalms 39; 90), futility (see Psalm 73), and injustice (see Psalms 9–10; 37; 73; 102). These and other poems represent wisdom traditions and may have grown in some kind of educational setup within the early Jewish community. Their origin and use imply a good deal of reflection on the precarious sides of existence. Still other types of psalms from different life situations like hymns, Zion songs, Yahweh-kingship odes, historical narrations, musings over Torah, and so on may also refer to past or present inconsistencies, irregularities, breaks, and catastrophes which cause pain and despair. Some caveats are necessary, however, the Psalter, as a repository of various experiences of suffering, does hardly contain autobiographical texts. Rather, those prayers, songs, and meditations are prescriptive, formulaic compositions, authored by ritual experts, and given to users for recitation in ceremonies. And another warning: the collection of psalms in the Hebrew Bible is far from representing a uniform theological doctrine, like that of absolute Yahwism. On the contrary, it reflects numerous shades of popular and scholarly visions of the divine3 along with strictly Yahwistic convictions.

KINDS OF MISERY Systematic categorizations of evil conditions are all but absent in the Hebrew Scriptures much in contrast to the manifold specifications of Akkadian diagnostic, medical, and therapeutic literatures.4 There are only chance references to dreaded calamities, for example David’s having to choose between pestilence, starvation, and war: 2 Sam. 24:1016; dangers only to be overcome by crying to the Lord. There are possibly graded listings behind Ps. 107:4-32 – forlornness in the desert, imprisonment, serious illness, ship wreckage – or the plagues of Egypt (Exodus 7–12), the curses in Lev. 26:14-33; Deut. 28:15-44, and the accusation of Amos 1:3–2:12. Leading principles in classifications may well have been the parts of the sufferer’s body (see Ps. 38:4-11; Eccles. 12:3), social locations of misery (poverty; enemy-devastations, see Lamentations 1–2; 4–5), and other identifiable causes of anguish (see Ps. 7:4-6). Unless a definite origin of turbulences (e.g., own transgression, evilmongers, demonic powers, trespasses against the holy) could be established, no treatment of ills was possible. In case of divine wrath being responsible, the priests certainly knew sets of rules to neutralize awful consequences (see Leviticus 13–15). Thus, possible ancient classifications of sufferings combined with modern perspectives

See Erhard S. Gerstenberger, Navajo Chants, Babylonian Incantations, Old Testament Psalms: A Comparative Study of Healing Rituals (Integrité 17/1; St. Louis: Missouri Baptist University, 2018), 16–35. 3 See Erhard S. Gerstenberger, “Theologies in the Book of Psalms”, in The Book of Psalms. Composition and Reception, ed. Peter W. Flint et al. (VTSup 99; Leiden: Brill, 2005), 603–25. See also n. 2. 4 See Nils Heeßel, Babylonisch-assyrische Diagnostik (AOAT 43; Münster: Ugarit Verlag, 2000); Nils Heeßel, “Diagnosis, Divination, and Disease. Towards an Understanding of the Rationale behind the Babylonian Diagnostic Handbook”, in Magic and Rationality in Ancient Near Eastern and Graeco Roman Medicine, ed. Manfred Horstmannshoff and Marten Stol (Studies in Ancient Medicine 27; Leiden: Brill, 2004), 97–116; Daniel Schwemer, Abwehrzauber und Behexung, Studien zum Schadenzauberglauben im Alten Mesopotamien (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007); Barbara Böck, “Krankheit und Heilung (Alter Orient)”, in Das wissenschaftliche Bibellexikon im Internet. Alttestamentlicher Teil, ed. Michaela Bauks and Klaus Koenen (2011), https://www​ .bibelwissenschaft​.de​/stichwort​/24060/. 2

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may guide this scrutiny of the Psalter. All cases dealt with pose serious problems to the life and well-being of ancient Israelite faithful.5 Personal and familial hardships6 loom large in the Psalter. Suffering often impacts one person, be it by bodily illness or other kinds of agony. But his or her next relations are necessarily involved with individual ailments.7 Physical, psychic, and mental illness may confine patients to their beds (Ps. 6:7; Isa. 38:1-3; see drastic description of terminal ills in Job 33:19-22), where they are visited by friends and kinspeople (Ps. 41:7; see Job 33:23-26). This may end up not only in strong solidary support of the sick (see Ps. 88:9.19) but also in denunciations of treacherous friends (Ps. 41:7). Pain, anxieties, and prospects of descending into the netherworld (see Pss. 6:6-8; 38:4-9; 88:4-8.16-18) torment the sufferer. He or she cries out to God – that is, the poet/healer, author of the prayer, has the patient emotionally describe his or her hopeless state. Body, mind, and spirit are crumbling under those heavy afflictions. “When, at night, I cry out in your presence, let my prayer come before you” (Ps. 88:2b-3a; NRSV v. 1b-2a). The prayer service takes place at home, during the ritual hours before dawn. As long as the diagnosis is not yet certain, the “why” question is appropriate: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? / Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, / and by night, but find no rest. (Ps. 22:2-3; NRSV vv. 1-2; see Ps. 88:15) The drama of individual suffering in the Psalms, including combat of evil powers, battling with own failures and unanswered questions does fully comply with modern experiences, in spite of large differences in medical knowledge and religious beliefs.8 Communal sufferings (war, drought, epidemics, etc., see Lamentations 1–2; 4–5; Psalms. 44; 66; 74; 89; 106; 137) are equally grave. The phenomenology of collective misery has perhaps intensified over the centuries, but not essentially changed. Enemies ravaged homes and territories, burned cities, temples, and harvests (Ps. 74:3-8; Lam. 1:10-15; 2:5-8), defeated Israel’s army, and took its population captive (Ps. 44:10-13; 89:41-44; 106:40-42; 137:1-3), putting to shame the renown of the people and even of God himself (Ps. 44:14-17; 74:4-8.18; 89:42-43.51-52; Lam. 2:16). Many people have been slain; survivors perish by starvation (see Lam. 4:4-5.9-10; 5:1-10). Women are raped (Lam. 5:11). Likewise, endless are the troubles caused by droughts and epidemics.9 Obviously, experiences of collective defeat in wars against contemporary powers, in particular against Nebukadnezzars Neo-Babylonian troops (598–597 bc) led to annual performances of mourning ceremonies (see Zech. 7:3-5). Commemoration of the destruction of Jerusalem, its temple, and the Davidic dynasty has been burned into

See Christoph Barth, Die Errettung vom Tode in den individuellen Klage- und Dankliedern des Alten Testaments (Zollikon: Evangelischer Verlag,1947); re-edited by Bernd Janowski, Die Errettung vom Tode. Leben und Tod in den individuellen Klage- und Dankliedern des Alten Testaments (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1997). 6 See Pss. 6; 22:1-22a; 38; 51; 55; 59; 69; 88; 102; 109; 140–143, etc. 7 Irmtraud Fischer and Ottmar Fuchs, eds., Mitleid und Mitleiden (JBTh 30; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018). 8 To give but one modern example: Steven M. Parish, Subjectivity and Suffering in American Culture: Possible Selves (New York: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2008). 9 See Jer. 14:2-10; Num. 11:33; 12:10-14; 14:36; 17:11-13; 25:7-9. 5

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Jewish memory until today. At least some of the communal lament texts in the Psalter and in Lamentations have their origin in this very distant event. Psychologically speaking individual and communal suffering do have a different profile, because they clearly involve distinct social organizations. While the single patient – very much in need of his or her support group – is in danger to be mistrusted by kinsfolks and friends as a possible bearer of a divine curse (see Ps. 41:8-10; 55:13-15; 69:8-13), any larger community hit by a catastrophe most likely – if no culpable member can be made out – will stick together and try to avert divine wrath. Thus communal suffering may strengthen mutual bonds and We-identity (see Ps. 44:18-27; 66:10-12; 106:43-47). Political and social corruption, injustice, and oppression are patent in sometimes so-called “Psalms of the poor” (Pss. 9/10; 37; 49; 73). These poems come out of wisdom traditions and school life. Concerns for justice and the protection of the underprivileged have all along been important in the ancient Near East.10 Small wonder, therefore, that blatant violations of basic rules were a source of trouble among those who felt responsible for the just order. Psalms 9-10, an acrostic poem, starts out with hymnic praise to Yahweh who “maintains justice” (v. 5, NRSV v. 4), and “does not forget the cry of the afflicted” (v. 13, NRSV v. 12). But the rest of the composition turns back to the world in disorder, describing with brutal clarity the exploitation of the weak by the rich ones: In arrogance the wicked persecute the poor – / let them be caught in the schemes they have devised. / For the wicked boast of the desires of their heart, / those greedy for gain curse and renounce Yahweh. In the pride of their countenance the wicked say: “God will not seek it out”. / All their thoughts are, “There is no God”. Their ways prosper at all times; / your judgments are on high, out of their sight; / as for their foes, they scoff at them. They think in their hearts, “We shall not be moved; / throughout all generations we shall not meet adversity.” Their mouths are filled with cursing and deceit and oppression; / under their tongues are mischief and iniquity. They sit in ambush in the villages; / in hiding places they murder the innocent. / Their eyes stealthily watch for the helpless; They lurk in secret like a lion in its covert; / they lurk that they may seize the poor; / they seize the poor and drag them off in their net. They stoop, they crouch, / and the helpless fall by their might. They think in their heart, “God has forgotten, /he has hidden his face, he will never see it.” Social ills like debt slavery, inflated prices, and high interests have been causing mass sufferings in ancient Near Eastern societies, noticeable also in prophetic, narrative, and Saul Olyan, Social Inequality in the World of the Text: The Significance of Ritual and Social Distinctions in the Hebrew Bible (Journal of Ancient Judaism, Suppl. 4; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 2011). 10

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legal texts of the Old Testament.11 Awareness of these aberrations and consequently of potential misery of low-class populations was widespread.12 Yet, who would be entrusted with discussing the evil and amending the situation – when a royal authority was lacking? Mesopotamian kings issued social reform edicts as early as the third millennium (Urukagina of Lagaš).13 In exilic-post-exilic Israel scribal schools and their Torah teachers, the later rabbis, may have taken up this responsibility. Spiritual breakdowns, crises of trust, emotional despair are patent in the Psalter (Psalms 39; 42–43; 69; 73; 90). Loss of confidence in one’s personal God did possibly occur also on the personal complaint level (see Ps. 22:2-3; 42:6; 43:10-12; 88). General doubt in God’s help was a result of disappointing experiences and depressive reflections. Thus Psalms 39 and 90 lament the transience of life. “You have made my days a few handbreadth” (Ps. 39:6, NRSV v. 5); “For all our days pass away under your wrath” (Ps. 90:9). Death itself becomes a problem for the believer. How much are human transgressions responsible for short life spans? How much is it a divine decree which inevitably sets short limits to human existence? Wasn’t there a blessed time when life did not end (see Gen. 3:25)? The prospect of death and netherworld was horrible to some people; it was a kind of “Weltschmerz”, prevalent among sensible and reflective contemporaries, who may have lamented their fate in scribal schools or synagogue meetings. Undoubtedly, there is an affinity of these wailings to the skeptical wisdom tradition extant in the books of Job and Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes). The problem of human culpability in the shakiness or fragmentariness of life has a role in these reflections.

CAUSES OF HARDSHIPS AND MODES OF TREATMENT Whatever are the variants of suffering, if humans want to deal with their agonies, they need ways and means to diagnose their causes. Especially from Babylonian sources we learn that diagnostic in different forms and techniques was a highly scientific enterprise in the ancient Near East.14 Professional diagnosticians had to take into account physical state, roles, habitat, surroundings of patients, their anamnesis and relations, omens sent by divine beings involved in the case, and dreams of agents. Specialized diviners, healers, and related personnel were quite active also in Old Israel (see Deut. 18:9-11; 1 Sam. 28:8-19). They could be consulted in life crises as for example wise men or women (see Gen. 35:8; Judg. 4:4-5), necromants (see 1 Sam. 28), fortune-tellers (see Gen. 44:5; 1 Sam. 9:3-10), interpreters of dreams (see Gen. 40:5-19), “men of God” (see Elias; Eliseu), prophets (see 1 Kings 14:1-3), priests (see Lev. 13:2-3), Levites (see 2 Chron. 35:3), Torah-scribes (see Neh. 8:1), and others. Shamanistic activities in the land of Israel also can be brought to light by archeologists.15 All proceedings to establish causes of suffering needed to take into account various possible factors like own wrongdoing, evil-minded fellow men, destructive forces, demons and lower deities, and the wrath of a supreme God.

See Amos 5:11-12; 6:4-7; 8:4-6; Neh. 5:1-13; Leviticus 25. See Rainer Kessler, Der Weg zum Leben. Ethik des Alten Testaments (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2017). 13 See Martha T. Roth, Law Collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1995). 14 See Heeßel, Babylonisch-assyrische Diagnostik; Amar Annus, ed., Divination and the Interpretation of Signs in the Ancient World (Oriental Institute Seminars 6; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 15 See Robert D. Miller II, “Iron Age Medicine Men and Old Testament Theology”, in Between Israelite Religion and Biblical Theology (Leuven: Peeters, 2016), 87–128. 11 12

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Confessions of wrongdoing, theories of sin, misbehavior, own transgression are frequent in the Psalter (Psalms 6; 14; 38; 51; 78; 106). The literatures of the ancient Near East in general reveal a good amount of self-critical reasoning when it comes to determine causes of torment, both on the individual and the community levels. Psalms 6; 38; 51 testify to the former, Psalms 14; 106 to the later cases. “Yahweh, do not rebuke me in your anger; / or discipline me in your wrath” (Ps. 6:2, NRSV v. 1; see Ps. 38:2) implies own faults. Affirmations of unspecified misconducts lead up to formal confessions of sin: “I confess my iniquity; I am sorry for my sin” (Ps. 38:19; NRSV v. 18), or – even more sweepingly: “Against you, you alone, have I sinned, / and done what is evil in your sight, / that you are justified in your sentence / and blameless when you pass judgment. / Indeed, I was born guilty, / a sinner when my mother conceived me” (Ps. 51:6-7; NRSV vv. 4-5). Hidden, unconscious wrongs are included (see Ps. 90:8). Psalm 51:6-7 has been infamously used to establish the doctrine of hereditary sin, but it very probably was a means to include every and all aberrations of the patient which could have caused his/ her ill fate.16 The community as a whole had to clarify its aberrations from the ways of their God in different forms and from their historical perspective.17 “Both we and our ancestors have sinned; / we have committed iniquity, have done wickedly” (Ps. 106:6). There follows a review of salvation history from liberation out of Egypt to the conquest of the promised land (Ps. 106:7-39; a similar pattern is extant in Ps. 78:5-64) with Israel turning away from Yahweh, being pardoned and restituted by their God (see Neh. 9:6-37; Ezra 9:6-15). Admissions of guilt aim at forgiveness and rehabilitation. That goal could be reached, according to the experience and worldview of the ancients mostly by rituals of atonement, sacrifice, pledges of renewed loyalty, and so on. Full details of such ceremonies have not been transmitted in the Hebrew Bible. There are only fragmentary references to ritual performance: Lev. 5:1-6; 2 Sam. 12:7-14; Zech. 8:18-19; Judg. 20:26; and so on.18 Anyway, personal responsibility for suffering was a strong option and rites of atonement therefore were widely applied.19 Evilmongers, mobbing, foes, and treacherous friends (Psalms 3; 56; 63; 64; 143 etc.) were considered to cause trouble.20 In the absence of knowledge about infectious microbes, the ancients often concluded – taking experiences from social conflicts as a guide – that ill-minded persons of their vicinity, sometimes even close friends, were at the root of their illnesses and other ailments. Slander, false accusations, secret malediction, vicious look

See Simeon Zahl, “Sin and Bodily Illness in the Psalms”, HBT 42 (2020): 186–207. Deuteronomistic evaluations of past disloyalties are very influential in the Hebrew Bible, especially in the books of Kings and Jeremiah. 18 See M. J. Boda, D. K. Falk, and R. A. Werline, eds, Seeking the Favor of God, Vol. 1: The Origin of Penitential Prayer in Second Temple Judaism (Early Judaism and Its Literature 21; Atlanta/Leiden: SBL/Brill, 2006). 19 See Fredrik Lindström, Suffering and Sin: Interpretations of Illness in the Individual Complaint Psalms (Lund: Almquist and Wiksell, 1994); Keith L. Johnson and David Lauber, eds, T&T Clark Companion to the Doctrine of Sin (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 3–126; Adam J. Johnson, ed., The T&T Clark Companion to Atonement (London: T&T Clark, 2017). 20 See Othmar Keel, Feinde und Gottesleugner. Studien zum Image der Widersacher in den Individualpsalmen (SBS 7; Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1969); Bernd Janowski, Konfliktgespräche mit Gott, 2nd ed. (NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2006), 98–105. 16 17

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might be causes of sickness and other calamities.21 Villains are portrayed, for example, in Prov. 6:12-14; Ps. 10:3-11. To counteract mischief originating with hostile people, very probably, prayer rituals were staged containing maledictions against the evildoers or else strong pleas to God to annihilate these dangerous people. To curse especially unknown foes of the individual sufferer was a dangerous act (see Judg. 17:1-3; Ps. 109). God’s punitive assistance very likely was a safer way to eliminate the causes of evil. “All my enemies shall be ashamed” (Ps. 6:11; NRSV v. 10); “Those who seek to destroy my life / shall go down into the depth of the earth” (Ps. 63:10; NRSV v. 9); “In your steadfast love cut off my enemies, / and destroy all my adversaries” (Ps. 143:12). Under changed conditions the plea for help to God and the conviction of his support also was inherent in communities, be they settlements or religious groups in Old Israel.22 The ancient world was full of destructive powers, demons, lower gods (Psalms 22; 55; 59; 91).23 There were impersonal destructive forces like those connected with cursing. There were hosts of demonic beings, often likened to or (metaphorically?) spoken of as wild animals (see Pss. 22:13-14; 55:11-12; 59:7-8.15-16; 91:5-6), up to damnify humans. And some of these may be counted to the ranks of lower deities. All of these forces were not necessarily considered as totally evil, but bad enough to cause vicious mischief. How to diagnose them and then ward them off or expel them from suffering people? Details of necessary procedures we do not know. Babylonian incantations tell us that Israel’s neighbors worked with a variety of rituals to neutralize any evil powers. The means and techniques included the burning of effigies (see incantations series “šurpu”; “maqlû”; “namburbi”), exorcisms, pleas to superior deities (series “šuilla”),24 and so on. The Hebrew Bible carries little evidence of related ceremonies in Israel (see Num. 5:1128; 22–24; 2 Kgs 4:29-35; 5:10-14). God, finally, carried his own responsibilities: he was alternately credited with just punishments, arbitrary castigation, lack of providence, and abandoning the faithful (Psalms 7; 9–10; 17; 26; 37; 39; 42–43; 44; 73; 88; 89; 90). Thus the concepts of deity differ in the Psalms. Only partly God is considered the direct cause of ills. Several aspects then call for attention: personally offended he punishes individuals and communities as a recognized judge (see the previous discussion). But many psalmists take issue with the legitimacy of God’s punishments or his basic ordinances, for different reasons. First, the suffering believers may feel unjustly treated. “I/we do not deserve those ills which have overcome us” is the tenor – in a Jobian way – of several individual and communal complaints. “Yahweh, my God, if I have done this, / if there is wrong in my hands, / . . . then let the enemy pursue and overtake me, / trample my life to the ground / and lay my soul in the dust” (Ps. 7:4.6; NRSV vv. 3.5). Psalms 7; 17; 26 resemble a juridical vindication of a falsely accused defendant who is appealing to the divine judge. See Alexandra Grund-Wittenberg, “‘Wer steht mir bei wider die Übeltäter?’ (Ps 95,16): Zur Bewältigung des Bösen in den Psalmen”, Jahrbuch für biblische Theologie 26 (2011): 55–84. 22 See Ps. 68:2-4.22-24.29-31; NRSV vv. 1-3.21-23.28-30. 23 See Henrike Frey-Anthes, Unheilsmächte und Schutzgenien, Antiwesen und Grenzgänger. Vorstellungen von “Dämonen” im alten Israel (OBO 227; Göttingen/Fribourg: Vandenhoeck/Fribourg University Press, 2007). 24 See Stefan M. Maul, Zukunftsbewältigung: eine Untersuchung altorientalischen Denkens anhand der babylonischassyrischen Lösungsrituale (Namburbi) (Mainz: Zabern, 1994); Christopher G. Frechette, Mesopotamian Prayers of “Handlifting” (Akkadian Šuillas) (AOAT 379; Münster: Ugarit Verlag, 2012); Daniel Schwemer, The AntiWitchcraft Ritual Maqlû. The Cuneiform Sources of a Magic Ceremony from Ancient Mesopotamia (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2017). 21

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Implicitly, his impartiality is at stake. More directly accusatory sound the reproaches in Psalms 44 and 89. “All this [i.e., defeat from enemies] has come upon us, / yet we have not forgotten you, / or been false to your covenant” (Ps. 44:18; NRSV v. 17). And the following statement starts out like an oath of innocence turning into an accusation against God: If we had forgotten the name of our God / or spread out our hands to a strange God, / would not God discover this? / For he knows the secrets of the heart. / Because of you we are being killed all day long, / and accounted as sheep for the slaughter. And immediately thereafter the vehement appeal to the “sleepy”, “negligent” God: Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, o Lord? / Awake, do not cast us off forever! / Why do you hide your face? / Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? / For we sink down to the dust; / our bodies cling to the ground. / Rise up, come to our help. / Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love. (Ps. 44:2127; NRSV vv. 20-26) A similar line of reasoning and complaining is followed in Ps. 89:39-52, specifically in regard to the rejection of the Davidic dynasty. Emphasis on human innocence in suffering, then, makes God responsible for the calamity at hand. He at least stood afar when his clients were overwhelmed by need, persecution, defeat, and bad luck. And at a maximum he arbitrarily caused the crisis in his unfounded rage, see also Pss. 69:8-9; 88:7-9.15-18. The other two kinds of involvement of God in human suffering are less instantaneous, but of longer range, being reflected in meditative prayers rather than explosive complaints. God implicitly is made responsible for the existence of evil in this world, and likewise for the lamentable transience of life. Why are there so many evil-minded, deadly enemies around? How could God allow criminals to rule the world? “O Yahweh, how many are my foes! / Many are rising against me; / many are saying to me: ‘There is no help for you in God’” (Ps. 3:2-3; NRSV vv. 1-2). The experience of being hostilized immediately raises the question of God’s competence to maintain the good order. “Truly God is good to the upright, / to those who are pure in heart. / But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, / my steps had nearly slipped. / For I was envious of the arrogant, / I saw the prosperity of the wicked” (Ps. 73:1-3). Although ending up in affirmations of confidence (see vv. 17-20.27-28) this Psalm clearly demonstrates serious afflictions of the believer because of the rotten state of this world (see the books of Job and Qoheleth). The second branch of skeptical reflection is concerned about the impermanence of life. There has been a myth of origin in the ancient Near East assuming that eternal life for humans had been lost by some incident and confronted living beings with death (see Gen. 2:16-17; 3:4-5; Epic of Gilgamesch, tablet XI). Thus Psalms 39 and 90 succinctly blame human transgressions for this unhappy state of affairs, but implicitly also point at God’s imbalanced attribution of time: “You turn us back to dust, / and say: ‘Turn back, you mortals.’ / For a thousand years in your sight / are like yesterday when it is past, / or like a watch in the night” (Ps. 90:3-4). These critical insights are deeply disturbing to the believer: “My heart becomes hot within me, while I mused” (Ps. 39:4; NRSV v. 3).

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SUMMARY The Psalter mirrors various types and situations of suffering. They include multiple experiences, diagnoses, and reactions of the people affected and professionals concerned with cure and rehabilitation. While different agonies may be clearly distinguished, the common denominators of all are dangers, deprivations, and physical, mental, and psychic pains which take the afflicted to the brink of death. Uniform answers as to the causes and treatments of any of the ills must not be expected. Existential anxieties trap afflicted people. Mourning may spread out to nature as a whole. Humans are struggling to (re) gain life and well-being as they are confronted with countless dark forces seeking to drag them down. God may be the ultimate resource of survival, although there are also conflicts waged with him in person. His unfathomable presence may also prove a source of discomfort: Where can I go from your spirit? / Or where can I flee from your presence? / If I ascend to heaven, you are there; / if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. / If I take the wings of the morning / and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, / even there your hand shall lead me, / and your right hand shall hold me fast. / If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, / and the light around me become night”, / even the darkness is not dark to you; / the night is as bright as the day, / for darkness is as light to you. (Ps. 139:7-12) The deepest, inscrutable problem of humankind in this line of thinking is God himself. The dominant accord in most texts of wailing, however, and in songs of thanksgiving and hymns of praise is an intense longing for comfortable safety under the protection of the Highest Power (see Pss. 31:1-4; 71:1-3; 91:1-8; 105:7-45; 135:1-14).

THEOLOGICAL EVALUATIONS The richness of the Psalter’s testimony as to suffering also implies that there is a plurality of theological interpretations and conceptualizations at hand.25 So every genre of psalms concerned about the agonies of humans should be investigated separately for its visions of the divine. The wealth of spiritual insight has been overwhelming until this day. Good and evil. In spite of the fact that many psalms make a clear-cut distinction between “wicked” and “righteous” people neither the Psalter nor the Hebrew Bible synthesize the evil into one spiritual entity in opposition to a “totally good deity” as strict dualistic systems of thought do. In consequence, all beings, especially the spiritual ones between heaven and earth (see Psalm 8), are considered to embrace a mixture of goodness and faults, deficits, ill-will, and so on. While the flood story of Genesis 6–9 tells about a frustrated effort to stage a wholesale cleanup of this world many psalms preach the annihilation of instant outbreaks of evil, or plead for a better world in equity and justice. Despite a likely “Yahwistic” redaction of the Psalter, the collection of different poems still is full of various concepts of beings and forces, which were considered the causes of suffering. Thus uncertainties as to the real origins and the nature of evil remained high, as the “why” questions of complaint and the desperate arguments with God clearly reveal.

See Erhard S. Gerstenberger, Theologies in the Old Testament (London: T&T Clark, 2002); Gerstenberger, “Theologies in the Book of Psalms”.

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The Psalter encompasses true “melanges” of ancient spiritual experiences, reflections, and conceptions borne out of manifold life crises. Theodicy. A full-fledged doctrinal discussion on the incompatibility of God’s goodness and justice with the undeniable existence of evil in this world does come about only in Christian – partly also Jewish and Islamic – post-biblical traditions, and only after a monotheistic or Trinitarian theological consolidation. Such systematic debates are the outcome of Greek philosophical reasoning. The OT Psalter clings to temporal experiences and conclusions from past history with regard to God’s qualities and capacities, not, however, to absolutized speculations.26 As pointed out earlier, theological musings in the Hebrew Psalter move around God’s justice (ṣädäq) and trustworthiness (ḫäsäd; NRSV: “loving-kindness”). Complaining and accusatory prayers are longing for firm relationships of trust (see Pss. 3:6-7; 4:6; 11:7; 17:15; 22:4-6; 23; 27:1-3 etc.) in the midst of sparks of uncertainty and doubt. The Psalter does not hide away human anxieties. The relationship with God – and with other spiritual beings – constantly has to be tested in never-ending arguments with the divine world.27

FURTHER READING Gerstenberger, Erhard S. and Wolfgang Schrage. Suffering. Nashville: Abingdon, 1980. Lindström, Fredrik. Suffering and Sin. Lund: Almquist and Witsell, 1994. Scheuer, Blazenka and David Willgren Davage, eds. Sin, Suffering, and the Problem of Evil. Tübingen: Mohr, 2021. Schwemer, Daniel. The Anti-Witchcraft Ritual Maqlu. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2017.

See Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, Consolatio philosophiae, Rome 524 (various English translations), book IV. The influential philosopher and theologian lived about ad 480–526. 27 See James Crenshaw, Defending God: Biblical Responses to the Problem of Evil (Oxford: University Press, 2005); Ingolf U. Dalferth, Malum. Theologische Hermeneutik des Bösen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008). 26

Chapter 6

Covenant Faith and Qohelet’s Questions JOHN GOLDINGAY

My title riffs on the title of a lecture on The Wisdom Movement and Israel’s Covenant Faith by David Allan Hubbard and on two sentences in it, “Proverbs seems to say, ‘Here are the rules for life; try them and find that they will work.’ Job and Ecclesiastes say, ‘We did, and they don’t’”.1 Proverbs is close enough to Israel’s covenant faith to use the name Yahweh for God, and its assumptions about rules resemble those of the covenant that we are to consider. I use the word “covenant” to denote a formally sealed commitment between two parties. But it is a tricky word. In British English it can denote a one-sided commitment; people “covenant” their charitable giving, whereas in US English they “pledge” it. And US English uses covenant more in political contexts; the word has complex political and cultural connotations. In Bible translations, covenant usually renders the Hebrew word “bərît”, but bərît can also be translated by words such as treaty, contract, pledge, or obligation, and can denote a two-way relationship or a onesided one. In the Septuagint, diathēkē is the usual translation of bərît, though translators occasionally use sunthēkē in passages suggesting an agreement between two parties; the New Testament regularly uses diathēkē. The Vulgate usually uses foedus but sometimes words such as “pax” or “amicitia”. A further complication (or perhaps a simplification) is that both the Testaments see the relationship between God and his people as covenantal in the sense of involving a definite ongoing commitment between the two parties, even where the words “bərît” or “diathēkē” do not occur. The framework of thinking implied by the word “theodicy” is a modern one that has become prominent in Old Testament study only in recent decades.2 While it can obscure an understanding of the Old Testament, it can also illumine it. Differences between a modern and an Old Testament worldview can give modern readers some insight on the culture-relative nature of our framework. Theodicy is an aspect of our mental horizon

1 David Allan Hubbard, “The Wisdom Movement and Israel’s Covenant Faith”, Tyndale Bulletin 17 (1966): 3–33, 6. 2 David Noel Freedman published a study of “The Biblical Idea of History” in 1967 with which the following study of the Deuteronomistic History overlaps, but it was too early to use the word “theodicy”. The same applies to Martin Noth’s work of 1943, “a type of theodicy”; see Walter Dietrich, “Martin Noth and the Future of the Deuteronomistic History”, in The History of Israel’s Traditions: The Heritage of Martin Noth, ed. Steven L. McKenzie and M. Patrick Graham (JSOT 182; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 153–75, 173.

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that overlaps enough with the Old Testament’s horizon for it to provide a way into understanding an aspect of it and also into broadening our horizon. Within the Old Testament, Deuteronomy and the books that follow are among the works that are especially confident about an understanding of God’s ways and of the propriety of them, and thus about the question of theodicy, while Qohelet questions the possibility of such understanding. Neither deals with the wider question of theodicy, of how evil comes to exist and how it relates to the will and power of God. Both focus on the human experience of blessing and calamity and the possibility of understanding its relationship to whether we act faithfully or faithlessly. It is thus possible to set them over against each other, though the thesis of this chapter is that both resist an unequivocal or binary understanding.

COVENANT FAITH While Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers work with the concept of covenant and sometimes use the word, the word itself is most prominent in Deuteronomy. Covenant is the framework for portraying the relationship between Yahweh and Israel. Deuteronomy leads into the account of Israel’s story in Joshua to Kings, which is a “Deuteronomistic History” where Deuteronomy states the principles of Yahweh’s relationship with Israel, and Joshua to Kings tells Israel’s story in light of that statement.3 The relationship of Yahweh and Israel is indeed a mutual bərît; Yahweh blesses Israel as Israel lives by Yahweh’s instructions, but afflicts them if they do not. The answer to the problem of theodicy is then that there isn’t a problem. This framework of thinking appears elsewhere in the Old Testament, especially in Jeremiah and Chronicles, but Deuteronomy to Kings is its classic articulation. It finds clear expression in Yahweh’s address that opens Joshua, in the account of a confirming of the covenant in Joshua 24, in the framework for telling Israel’s story in Judges, in Samuel’s address in 1 Samuel 12, in the commentary on the fall of Samaria in 2 Kings 17, and in the recounting of the reigns of kings in 1 and 2 Kings. At the same time, there is variety in the form of the narrative, in the difference (for instance) between the short stories in Judges, the songs of praise near the beginning and end of Samuel, the extensive narrative about David in 2 Samuel 11–20, and the linked stories about Solomon in 1 Kings 1–11. One implication is that an author has not simply created this work as a whole but has assembled earlier material and set it in a framework. In examining its exposition of the covenant faith, we will consider both the material that directly reflects that Deuteronomistic framework and also the rest of the material that the work includes. In their theological perspective as well as their form, the successive books vary in how Deuteronomistic they are; Israel’s covenant faith as presented in the Deuteronomistic History as a whole is more nuanced than a bald summary of the Deuteronomistic framework indicates.

This understanding goes back to Martin Noth, Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien I: Die sammelnden und bearbeitenden Geschichtswerke im Alten Testament (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1943); English translation: The Deuteronomistic History (JSOTSup 15; Sheffield: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Press, 1981). Study of the Deuteronomistic History has become complex, convoluted, and controverted; see, e.g., Albert de Pury et al., ed., Israel Constructs Its History: Deuteronomistic Historiography in Recent Research (JSOTSup 306; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000); Thomas Römer, The So-called Deuteronomistic History (London: T&T Clark, 2007). The discussion focuses on the redactional process behind the work.

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Deuteronomy itself first recalls the way Yahweh looked after Israel on its journey from Horeb to the border of Canaan, lays out his consequential expectations of Israel in general terms and in terms of many specifics, then describes blessings that will follow from fulfilling these expectations and – at greater length – troubles that will follow from not doing so. It also incorporates some hints of recognition that the link between faithfulness and blessing is not infallible. It refers to the Israelites having previously been in an iron smelter, a household of serfs, that was characterized by disease (e.g., 4:20; 5:6, 15; 6:12, 21; 7:8, 15; 8:14; 26:6-7), with no suggestion that they had deserved this. It notes that Yahweh engages in testing or proving or disciplining (8:1-6): in causing undeserved trouble, though with a positive aim. Most intriguing are some statements about the reason Moses may not enter Canaan. While in one passage it is because he and Aaron broke faith with Yahweh (32:51; cf. Num. 20:1-13), elsewhere Yahweh is angry with Moses “on your account” (‘al dibrêkem 1:37; 3:26; 4:21).4 One might conflate the two “explanations” and infer that the people led Moses into breaking faith. But the statements are separate in the text hints, and “on your account” rather implies that Moses cannot evade the guilt attaching to the nation, which prohibited the exodus generation from entering the land. Within the set of rules that dominate Deuteronomy, the directives about handling the consequences of debt (15:1-18) are instructive for our purposes. They presuppose that people get into economic trouble, with no implication that it issues from their wrongdoing. It hardly fits with Yahweh’s promises of blessing. Moses adds that if Israel lives by the entire commandment he is giving, there will be no needy people. But his directives implicitly recognize that they will not do so, and that some people will suffer. Israel then needs to follow the directives, to enable people in trouble to get back on their feet. Deuteronomy thus implicitly recognizes that life works in a more complex way than its promises say. The link between wrongdoing and suffering is qualified in four ways. Yahweh’s response to suffering may not be “you deserved it” but “I’ll get you out of it”. Yahweh may bring suffering to achieve some end for himself and for his people. Suffering like blessing may issue from being part of a wider whole. And suffering is a challenge to human action to counter its effects. Joshua begins and ends by reiterating an emphasis on keeping Moses’ instruction and promising that success will follow, and the closing chapters incorporate references to a covenant. But the main body of the book makes no allusion to the operation or non-operation of this principle. Nor does it indicate that the Canaanites’ waywardness explains Yahweh’s wanting their defeat and slaughter. The Rahab story perhaps implies that he might exempt cities that were prepared to acknowledge Yahweh, and the Gibeonites escape annihilation both because they recognize what Rahab recognizes and because Joshua falls for their ploy in pretending not to be Canaanites. Otherwise, the stories’ focus lies on Yahweh’s freedom and power to do as he wishes; they offer no rationale for his action. Their anti-theodic implication will find explicit expression in Paul’s comments on whether God acts in a way that is not right, acts with adikia: he’s God, so shut up (Rom. 9:14-21). In contrast, Judges initially works explicitly with the negative version of the Deuteronomistic principle: Israel does what is bad in Yahweh’s eyes, and he sends them trouble. The pattern changes midway through the book. Samson’s story implies

All scriptural translations are my own.

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exceptions, as people have experiences they do not deserve: Samson’s mother had been unable to have a baby, and his first wife and her father get killed. Much worse are the horrifying stories of Jephthah’s daughter and of the Levite’s wife (Judges 11 and 19). First and Second Samuel almost begin by asserting that “those who honor me I will honor” (1 Sam. 2:30) and offer an extended illustration of this Deuteronomistic principle in their account of David’s life; his song of praise near the end of his story (2 Samuel 22) affirms it. For most of his story he is a model of trust in and commitment to Yahweh, and he attains the position of king, completes the Israelite hegemony over Canaan, and establishes Jerusalem as its capital (he is deceptive and violent, which clashes with some recent Western ideals, but it does not conflict with Deuteronomic ideals or receive negative judgment in the narrative). Then he commits adultery and murder and his story unravels. First and Second Samuel also offer the most systematic set of contrasts with the Deuteronomistic principle.5 These begin right at the beginning: Yahweh closes Hannah’s womb, for no apparent reason except (one may eventually infer) what he plans to achieve by it. Hannah’s own song of praise speaks of people who are hungry, infertile, poor, and needy, with no implication that they deserve it, though with a declaration that Yahweh reverses it. The Philistines attack the Israelites on a number of occasions and sometimes defeat them (e.g., 1 Samuel 4; 17; 19), without there being any explanation such that Judges routinely provides. Gadites and Gileadites get gruesomely maimed, and the priests of Nob and their families get slaughtered (1 Samuel 10 and 22). Saul’s story as a whole suggests a subtle reflection on our theme. Samuel twice announces that Saul will cease to be king because he has rejected Yahweh’s instructions (1 Sam. 13:13-14; 15:22-26). Yet Saul’s action on the first occasion seems understandable and on both occasions not very terrible; the stories will be paralleled by the apparently disproportionate calamity that comes on the people of Beth-Shemesh and on Uzziah (1 Samuel 6 and 2 Samuel 6). Notwithstanding Samuel’s announcement, however, Saul continues as king for a considerable period. And in the narrative as a whole, it’s hard to be clear on the interaction between Saul’s incompetence and personal failings, Yahweh’s withdrawal of his spirit and sending of a bad spirit, and the possibility that his appointment was itself an act of chastisement on Israel. However we consider the issues that Saul’s story raises, it is not simply an illustration of the Deuteronomistic principle. For all its broad clarity, David’s story also raises a question. When he acknowledges his wrongdoing, Nathan says that Yahweh has made his wrongdoing pass or go (‘ābar hiphil; 2 Sam. 12:13). The unusual formulation recurs in connection with the aftermath of a census (24:10; cf. 2 Chron. 21:8). Where does the wrongdoing go? Nathan’s announcement concerning the death of David’s son raises the chilling possibility that it passes to the child, who will pay the penalty for the father’s wrongdoing, though the other occurrences of the unusual formulation (Job 7:21; Zech. 3:4) do not suggest that the wrongdoing needs to go somewhere in such a sense. Yet the expression fits the implications of the story of David’s family. Yahweh has not said he will “carry” David’s wrongdoing (nāśā’, the usual word for “forgiveness”). While he will not require David’s death (2 Sam. 12:13), David, his family, and the child are indeed going to “carry” it, bear its consequences, and pay the price for it. Similar dynamics apply in connection with the census story where the verb recurs (2 Sam. 24:10-14). If that story’s opening (2 Sam. 24:1) refers to

On the broader question of Samuel and the Deuteronomistic History, see Cynthia Edenburg and Judith Pakkala, eds., Is Samuel among the Deuteronomists? (AIL 16; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013).

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an unexplained outburst of Yahweh’s anger, it is an instance of something contrasting with the Deuteronomistic principle, but it is more likely an anticipatory summary of the consequences of David’s wrongdoing, which was what issued in Yahweh’s anger. First and Second Kings compare with Judges more than with Samuel. Solomon’s story almost begins with Yahweh’s promise to relate to him on the Deuteronomistic basis, and things work out accordingly. A qualification going back to Yahweh’s promise to David in 2 Samuel 7 says that Yahweh will moderate the chastisement he brings to Solomon and his dynasty. This moderation continues through 1 and 2 Kings: Yahweh allows Abijam to rule because David had been upright, “except in the thing about Uriah the Hittite” (1 Kings 15:5). Conversely, because of Ahab’s repentance disaster will not come in his day, though it will come in his son’s day. Like Judges, Kings includes events that clash with the Deuteronomistic principle, such as the death of prophets at the hand of Jezebel and the death of Naboth (1 Kings 18–21). Two subsequent instances are the long reign of Manasseh and the early death of the faithful Josiah, though the “problem” of the former is at least partially solved by seeing Manasseh’s faithlessness as finding its redress in the subsequent fall of Jerusalem (cf. 2 Kings 21:10-16).6 It is thereby that Manasseh’s story can form part of an exposition of “the logic in history” that is the Deuteronomistic History’s concern,7 part of its act of praise at the justice of the judgment of God,8 which by its nature is thus in our terms an exercise in theodicy.9 Israel’s covenant faith as expounded in Deuteronomy to Kings thus not only has a framework principle for approaching theodicy but also tells many stories implying other possibilities.

1. The books’ first and last answer is indeed that national disaster is Yahweh’s response to national wrongdoing, and in between they can portray individual calamity as Yahweh’s response to individual wrongdoing.



2. They implicitly acknowledge that this answer does not cover everything they report, and they have no explanation for happenings such as the suffering of Jephthah’s daughter and of the Levite’s wife, and some Israelite reversals.



3. They may presuppose that such events can issue from the wilfulness of people acting against Yahweh’s intentions, as Ezekiel speaks of Yahweh bringing Nebuchadnezzar to take Tyre but of Tyre frustrating his efforts (26:1-21; 29:1720). Apparently, Yahweh does not choose to exercise the sovereignty that he possesses.



4. While they offer no justification for the slaughter of the Canaanites and may presuppose that the Canaanites deserve it, as is asserted elsewhere, their own

See Marvin A. Sweeney, I & II Kings, Old Testament Library (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 426–30. It seems less plausible to see Josiah’s early death as an act of mercy to spare him from seeing the fall of Jerusalem (Sweeney, I & II Kings, 439–43). 7 Martin Rose, “Deuteronomistic Ideology and the Theology of the Old Testament”, in Israel Constructs Its History: Deuteronomistic Historiography in Recent Research, ed. Albert de Pury, Jean-Daniel Macchi, and Thomas Römer (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement 306; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 447. 8 Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962), 1:343; see Gerhard von Rad, “Gerichtsdoxologie”, in Gesammelte Studien zum Alten Testament (Munich: Kaiser, 1973), 2:245–54. 9 John Barton, “Historiography and Theodicy in the Old Testament”, in Reflection and Refraction: Studies in Biblical Historiography in Honour of A. Graeme Auld, ed. Robert Rezetko et al. (VTSup 113; Leiden: Brill, 2006), 27–33. 6

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implication is that Yahweh is God and can do anything he wishes. The same logic may apply to the opaque aspects of Yahweh’s dealings with Saul, which relate to the entire monarchic project and not just to his individual relationship with Yahweh.

5. Their general understanding of Yahweh would question any inference that he needs no moral justification for his actions, but would assume that he need not feel compelled to provide it.



6. Their story is set in the context of Yahweh’s promises to the ancestors, his getting Israel out of Egypt, his meeting with them at Sinai, and his taking them through the wilderness. Yahweh’s generous and powerful acts in the past make it possible to live with more problematic acts in the present.



7. Some calamities come as exercises in discipline that imply not wrongdoing but a desire to prove people in the sense of showing that they are faithful or of giving them opportunity to grow into more faithful people.



8. Sometimes Yahweh’s answer to the problem of suffering is to do something about it, as he did in respect of the Israelites being turned into serfs in Egypt; Hannah’s song of praise says that he takes action for poor and needy people.



9. Sometimes Yahweh’s answer to the problem of suffering is to expect people themselves to do something about it. If there are needy people in Israel, Israelites are to support them and help them back onto their feet.

10. Trouble can issue not from people’s own wrongdoing but from their being bound up in the bundle of life with a family or people engaged in wrongdoing. 11. A variant of this possibility is that Yahweh can delay bringing trouble, as happens in both Ephraim and Judah, possibly with the hope that the next generation may turn from wrongdoing. The variety in these ideas supports the idea that Deuteronomy to Kings is not so much a Deuteronomistic History as a Deuteronomic debate.10

QOHELET’S QUESTIONS Qohelet’s teaching has converse implications to the perspective of the Deuteronomistic History. Qohelet comprises the words of a “son of David, king in Jerusalem” (1:1) who is in a position to testify to wide-ranging achievement, reflection about issues, and enjoyment of life (1:12–2:26). Although the book doesn’t name Solomon, its opening chapters make one think of him. This in itself makes Qohelet a suggestive companion to the Deuteronomistic History, of whose framework theology Solomon constitutes a noteworthy example. But making this link carries an irony, because Qohelet questions the convictions the Deuteronomistic History expresses. “Solomon” disparages the emptiness of the things he tested. They are “merely breath” (hebel; 1:2): something flimsy and insubstantial, and also fleeting and ephemeral. Qohelet makes no mention of a covenant between Yahweh and Israel, nor indeed does it make mention separately of covenant,

See K. L. Noll, “Deuteronomistic History or a Deuteronomic Debate? (A Thought Experiment)”, JSOT 31 (2007): 311–45.

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of Yahweh, or of Israel. And it questions any possibility of understanding the basis of God’s dealings with us, as Deuteronomistic theology thinks it can. In Qohelet’s time in the Second Temple period, Chronicles provides an updated version of the Samuel-Kings story and fills in some of the fissures in the way the Deuteronomistic theology works out. Manasseh repented and Josiah ignored a word from God (2 Chronicles 33–35), which explains the length of Manasseh’s reign and Josiah’s early death. While Chronicles thus encourages people to believe that it is indeed possible to see how Yahweh works, Qohelet would shake the confidence of people who think this way. Studying theodicy, Qohelet implies, is like pursuing wind (1:14, 17). As something twisted such as a tree branch can’t become straight, so something missing can’t be counted (1:15): and an understanding of the big picture concerning what the world is about or how human life works is missing, in the sense of inaccessible to humanity. Things happen when they happen: birth and death, crying and laughing, war and peace (3:1-8). We don’t control them and we can’t see how they fit into some bigger picture. God put the notion of time as a whole (‘ȏlām) into the human mind, but did so with frustrating results because he didn’t give humanity the means of understanding the big picture of God’s activity in the world (3:11). As you do not know what the way of the wind is, like the bones in a full womb, So you do not know the deed of God who does everything. (11:5) Qohelet rules out the idea that a positive afterlife will make it possible for things to be put right for the victims of wrongdoing. He takes the regular Old Testament view that human life ends up in the thin part-life of Sheol, and makes explicit the basis for accepting that view: just look at what remains of grandma the next time you open the family tomb. We have no evidence for the contrary view, about which some of his contemporaries may have been wondering (3:19-21). So live your present life with enjoyment and energy, “because there’s no acting or reasoning or knowing or being smart in Sheol, where you are going” (9:10). Life under the sun is insubstantial and fleeting, yet this is not a reason to despair of it or turn one’s back on it. It is a reason to enjoy it as what it is. Qohelet develops such an exhortation six or seven times, urging readers to focus on the value of food, drink, work, looking good, and relationships. They are not of ultimate significance, but they are God’s gifts, and they are worth enjoying. Qohelet recognizes the principle that things turn out well for people who live in awe of God (translations traditionally have “fear God” for the verb yārē’, but this gives the wrong impression) and do not turn out well for faithless people. They will not last long – either they won’t live long or they won’t do well for long. But alongside that principle is the empirical fact that things can work out the opposite way: the faithful may die young, and the faithless live long (8:12-14). So don’t fool yourself that you can ensure living a long life by being obsessively faithful or obsessively sensible. Be easy-going; don’t spoil your life that way – but don’t be incorrigibly faithless or stupid, either, which will also spoil your life (7:15-18). As a faithful or smart person engaging in acts of service, your life is in God’s hand, and you cannot know whether you will be on the receiving end of love or hostility (9:1; the verse may refer to God’s attitude or to that of other human beings). Both faithful and faithless end up with the same experience (miqrâ, a euphemism for death; 9:2-3).

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Someone who digs a pit falls into it, someone who demolishes a wall – a snake bites him. Someone who quarries rocks is hurt by them, someone who splits logs is endangered by them. (10:8-9) The race does not belong to the quick, the battle does not belong to the strong. Neither does bread belong to the smart, nor does wealth belong to the insightful, Nor favor to the knowledgeable, because time and accident happen to all of them. (9:11) Qohelet overstates, in an opposite hyperbole to the Deuteronomistic one, and at other points it makes statements indicating that it recognizes such statements to be hyperbolic. While achievement, thinking, and enjoyment are ultimately “merely breath”, people should not discount their interim and partial value. It is smarter to be smart than stupid (7:19; 8:1). Qohelet almost closes with a repetition of its opening dictum that everything is merely breath (12:8). But some endnotes follow; all or some may be additions to the original author’s work or may be part of it. They first affirm the work of the teacher and urge readers to come to terms with his tough teaching. It resembles spurs with which a rider drives and directs an ox or horse; without them, the animal will not go the right way or do anything useful (12:11). While one book of teaching like Qohelet is thus useful, however, a library-full would be a bad idea (12:12). And finally: Everything has made itself heard. Live in awe of God and keep his orders, because this is everyone’s. Because God will make every deed come to a ruling, with everything that has hidden, whether good or bad. (12:13-14) These last sentences form a startling contrast with most of what has preceded. Qohelet commended living in awe of God (e.g., 8:12), but did not speak of keeping his orders, which is, indeed, Deuteronomistic language (e.g., Deut. 4:2). Whereas the reference to God making things come to a ruling (bәmišpāṭ) is almost unique (it recurs only in Job 14:3), Qohelet has spoken of God examining human deeds and making decisions according to whether they are good or bad, but made this allusion only in order to question it. It not only fits Deuteronomistic theology, but also fits the way prophets speak; Isaiah refers to Yahweh coming to a ruling (Isa. 3:14; this expression recurs only in Ps. 143:2). Readers need to take Qohelet seriously and not avoid the sharp edge of his teaching, then, but they also need to set it in the context of the Torah and the Prophets. They should not read the Torah and the Prophets in a way that avoids the questions Qohelet raises; they should not treat Qohelet as the last word on a relationship with God. As the Deuteronomistic History, then, has a framework conviction but qualifies it, so does Qohelet, though it manages only three qualifications.

1. Life does not work out fairly and we will never be able to work out its meaning or the rationale for the way life works.



2. Gaining understanding is still better than being stupid.



3. Food, drink, work, looking good, and relationships are good gifts from God.



4. The Torah and the Prophets still tell us how to live and think.

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Qohelet has been characterized as skeptical, cynical, pessimistic, and nihilist, but it stops short of a thoroughgoing affirmation of any of these attitudes. The complex character of its thinking has been seen as issuing from a redactional process whereby a thoroughly pessimistic work has had its skepticism qualified by more orthodox statements. Conversely, one might hypothesize that Qohelet starts from orthodox statements that it quotes in order to disagree with them. But alternatively, as the Deuteronomistic History has been described as a debate, Qohelet may be described as a dialogue.11

CONCLUSION Some of us as human beings appreciate the sense that the answers to questions are clear and that we know how life works. We may like binary oppositions such as objective and subjective, society and individual, order and chaos, religious and secular, traditional and modern, mind and emotion. Deuteronomistic theology and skepticism are examples of such a binary. Such antitheses facilitate understanding, though also hinder it. Other human beings appreciate the sense that things are fuzzier than such antitheses imply. I suspect there were Israelites who liked working with binaries and, for instance, trusted the principle that God blesses the faithful and that trouble reflects unfaithfulness, and there are Christians who live on that basis. Perhaps there were Israelite theologians who worked that way; analysis of the redaction history of the Deuteronomistic History, of Jeremiah, or of Qohelet can be predicated on that basis, and it is impossible to disprove the results. But what we actually have in these works is an interweaving of perspectives, a debate, or a dialogue. If it is issued from a redactional process, one is grateful to the agencies that brought these works to be the rich entities that they are.

FURTHER READING Freedman, David Noel. “The Biblical Idea of History”. Interpretation 21 (1967): 32–49. Goldingay, John. Ecclesiastes. Eugene: Cascade, 2021. Kim, JimYung. Reanimating Qohelet’s Contradictory Voices: Studies of Open-Ended Discourse on Wisdom in Ecclesiastes. Biblical Interpretation Series 166. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Noll, K. L. “Deuteronomistic History or a Deuteronomic Debate? (A Thought Experiment)”. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 31 (2007): 311–45. Rose, Martin. “Deuteronomistic Ideology and the Theology of the Old Testament”. In Israel Constructs Its History: Deuteronomistic Historiography in Recent Research. Edited by Albert de Pury, Jean-Daniel Macchi, and Thomas Römer. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement 306, 424–55. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000.

See, e.g. JimYung Kim, Reanimating Qohelet’s Contradictory Voices: Studies of Open-Ended Discourse on Wisdom in Ecclesiastes (Leiden: Brill, 2018). In taking up Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of dialogue, Kim notes (19) that Robert Polzin also applied it to the Deuteronomistic History in Moses and the Deuteronomist: Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges (New York: Seabury, 1980).

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Chapter 7

Wrath in the Bible PETER J. LEITHART

There have always been Christians who object to the biblical God of wrath. At the extreme, Marcion taught that the jealous, volatile, angry Creator of the Old Testament was a different being from the God of the gospel, full of love and mercy. Torah, with its inflexible brutality, was a fitting expression of the malevolent will of the Creator, and easily given up. But Marcion discovered he had to bowdlerize the New Testament too, in order to mold it to what he viewed as pure evangelical theology. In his response to Marcion, Tertullian observed that the Apostle Paul taught that God is Judge and therefore Avenger, and he highlighted the repeated references to wrath in Marcion’s favorite epistle, Romans. Whose wrath is revealed from heaven (Rom. 1:18)? Tertullian demanded. The Creator’s, of course. For Paul, wrathful judgment is not an expression of law, but of the gospel. A day of wrath is coming when “according to my gospel, God will judge the secrets of men through Christ Jesus” (Rom. 2:5, 16; Against Marcion 5.13). Many of the earliest church fathers echoed Tertullian in speaking without hesitation of the wrath of the God of the Old and New Testaments. Both, Irenaeus insisted, display the same “righteousness of God when God takes vengeance”. If anything, the vengeance of the New surpasses that of the Old, for the wrath of Yahweh was typical, temporary, and moderate in comparison with the eternal reserved for those who reject the gospel (Against Heresies 4.28.1). Cyril of Jerusalem compared the propitiation of the cross to the zeal of Phinehas, who turned away the wrath of God by slaying a fornicating couple in the camp of Israel (Numbers 25; Catechetical Lectures 13.2). In the fourth century, Lactantius devoted an entire treatise, the first of its kind, to the ira Dei. No philosophers, he argued, conceived the truth of Christian faith, “that God is angry, since He is moved by kindness”. True religion depends on wrath, since “no honor can be due to God, if He affords nothing to His worshippers; and no fear, if He is not angry with him who does not worship Him” (de ira Dei 6). Though the church renounced Marcion, his ghost has haunted Christian theology. Greek philosophers had questioned mythical accounts of divine wrath, jealousy, and joy. Plato made theoprepes, “what is fitting to a god”, a key theological test, and judged wrath unworthy. This Platonic principle seeped into the common sense of ancient philosophy. Epicurus began his Kyriai doxai with the claim that the divine is unmoved either by wrath or mercy, Cicero applied Epicurus’ principle to banish fear of divine anger (de natura deorum 1.17.45), and eliminating dread of divine wrath is one of the main motivations behind Lucretius’ de rerun natura. Philo brought these instincts and arguments into contact with the Hebrew Bible. In his philosophical work, he rarely uses the biblical language of wrath without qualification but accepts the Platonic axiom that wrath is

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unworthy of God, since “God is not at all susceptible to any passion whatever” (quod deus sit immutabilis 52). Philo explains references to wrath as an act of synkatabasis or condescensio, a pedagogical accommodation, directed especially to the dull and tardy. For such people, “untruth is sometimes the only means to benefit them”. By presenting a wrathful God, Scripture instructs those “who can be brought in line only by threats” (quod deus sit immutabilis 61-69).1 Mainstream in Christian theology, east and west, followed Philo’s lead. “Wrath and indignation he possesses not”, writes Aristides (Apology 1). In his ennaratio on Ps. 2:5, Augustine no sooner mentions wrath than he hedges it by insisting it does not involve any “mental perturbation”, but refers only to “the might whereby He most justly avenges”. Wrath describes an effect on the recipient or observer, not an action or passion of God. If there is emotion, it is in the “soul which knows the law of God, when it sees the same law transgressed by the sinner” (Exposition of Psalm 2, 4). Origen concedes, “We speak indeed, of the wrath of God”, but immediately adds it is not a passion but pedagogue, “assumed in order to discipline by stern means those sinners who have committed many and grievous sins” (Contra Celsum 4.72).

THE WRATH OF YAHWEH Wrath cannot be domesticated quite so easily, however, and it certainly cannot be scrubbed from Scripture. The pervasiveness of wrath in the Hebrew Bible is undeniable. Ten different Hebrew words for anger are used over five hundred times in virtually every book of the Old Testament. References to divine anger outnumber references to human anger by a 3:1 ratio.2 Scripture is vivid in its portrayal of wrath as fire, smoke, raging water, a storm; it blows the wicked away like chaff and pours down from Yahweh’s cup as intoxicating drink for sinners. Beyond mere statistics, wrath plays a key role in the main episodes of Old Testament history. ‘evrah is translated as “fury” or “rage”, and often refers to the rage of the wicked (Gen. 49:7; Job 21:30; Ps. 7:6), yet the same term describes Yahweh’s fury against Egypt, which takes the form of “a band of destroying angels” (Ps. 78:49; cf. Exod. 4:14; 15:7), and his indignation against idolatrous Israel (Isa. 9:19), which takes the form of Assyria, the rod and axe of his wrath (Isa. 10:6). The exodus and the Assyrian invasion are days of Yahweh, days of wrath and fury, desolation and destruction, when the earth is devoured in his fiery jealousy (cf. Zeph. 1:15, 18). Israel’s liturgical practices and institutions are inseparable from fear of Yahweh’s wrath. Far and away the most common idiom for God’s wrath is ‘aph charah, “the nose burns”. Human nostrils receive the divine breath of life (Gen. 2:7; 7:22), and human anger is an expulsion of hot breath (e.g., Gen. 30:2; 39:19). An angry person breathes fire, directing the burning energy of his life-breath against the object of his anger. This energy not only can lead to murder (Gen. 49:6), but it can also lead to vigorous action against idolatry (Exod. 32:19) and injustice (see David’s ironic wrath in 2 Sam. 12:5). Yahweh’s nose burns too. He is not, like Adam, a recipient of life, but a giver of life

On Philo, see Pieter Willem van der Horst, “Philo and the Problem of God’s Emotions”, Etudes Platoniciennes 7 (2010), available online at journ​​als​.o​​pened​​ition​​.org/​​etude​​splat​​onici​​e​nnes​​/636;​ Anthony Tyrrell Hanson, The Wrath of the Lamb (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, [1957] 2010), 56–62. 2 See Terence Fretheim, “Theological Reflections on the Wrath of God”, HBTH 24, no. 2 (2002): 4f. 1

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and power, a “consuming fire”, sheer, boundless everlasting energy. When provoked, his nose burns, expelling his infinite heat against his enemies. He breathes smoke from his nostrils and fire from his mouth (Ps. 18:15), and his fiery breath splits the sea (Exod. 15:8; Ps. 18:15), strikes the earth, and slaughters evil human beings (Isa. 11:4). No wonder sacrifice is directed toward Yahweh’s nose, with smoke rising as a sweet savor to cool the fire (Gen. 8:21; wayyarach YHWH ‘et-reyach hanniychoach). Yahweh’s nose burns first, though, not at Pharaoh or idolatrous Israel but at Moses as he stands on the mountain of God before the burning bush (Exod. 4:14). In this, as in so many other ways, Moses’ personal history anticipates Israel’s communal history, for later, again at Sinai, Yahweh’s nose burns at Israel (Exod. 32:10), while Moses intercedes, to pacify Yahweh’s nose. The first time Yahweh is subject of the Hebrew verb “be wrathful” (qatzaf) is Lev. 10:6 (cf. Num. 1:53), when, immediately following the dedication of the tabernacle, Yahweh breaks out against Aaron’s sons, Nadab and Abihu, who offer strange fire. As soon as Yahweh takes his throne above the cherubim, his wrath threatens. The priests and Levites encircle the tabernacle as a protective barrier to keep wrath from breaking out against the rest of Israel. Wrath, in short, comes to its most intense expression with the gift of Torah and tabernacle. It is an outburst of offended love, Yahweh’s jealousy for the bride with whom he covenanted at Sinai (cf. Ezek. 16:38; 23:25). When angry, Yahweh remains persuadable. His nose can be cooled by sacrifice, by prayer, mediation, and repentant action. Prophets stand in the breach to deflect wrath, as Abraham does with regard to Sodom (Gen. 18:16-33) and as Moses does after the golden calf incident (Exod. 33:12–34:9). Wrath or the threat of wrath is intended to drive sinners to repentance (Jon. 3:8-9), and on the far side of wrath comes refinement, cleansing, and new life (Isa. 48:9-11).3 Wrath is not Yahweh’s fixed attitude toward neither Israel nor the world. Wrath ends (Ps. 30:5; Isa. 54:8). Yahweh’s wrath acts through created agents. Famine, pestilence, invasion (Jer. 14:1322), and even the passions of sinners (Dan. 8:6-8) are expressions of divine wrath. Assyria is the axe of Yahweh’s anger, which he wields against covenant-breaking Judah (Isa. 10:6), and Babylon is Yahweh’s royal cup to pour wrath on other nations (Jer. 51:7). Eventually, Yahweh’s wrath is turned against the instruments of wrath. Yahweh kindles a flame in Assyria when the axe boasts against Yahweh the woodsman (Isa. 10:15-19), and Babylon drinks the cup it has poured out on others (Jer. 51:8-10). Yahweh often expresses his wrath by giving people their desires. When they worship idols, he gives them over to idol-worshiping invaders (Judges passim) or to the futility and paralysis that results from devotion to lifeless images (Ps. 115:1-8). As the great Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel insisted, wrath is one of the most distinctive attributes of the biblical God. Yahweh’s very name is “Jealous” (qanna), expressing his protectiveness of his own name (Ezek. 39:25) and of his exclusive covenant relation with Israel. Jealousy is a passion of love. To love entails intense opposition to everything that inhibits the continuation and perfection of communion. In this sense Lactantius was right: qui non odit non diligit (de ira Dei 5). Yahweh is husband to Israel, utterly devoted to his bride, daughter Zion (cf. Zech. 1:18), jealous with great wrath (Zech. 8:2). He expects the same devotion in return. When Israel turns to rival images, he visits sin to the third and fourth generations (Exod. 20:5; Deut. 5:9). As Jealous, he is a consuming fire, the God who was angry with Moses (Deut. 4:21-24). When they make

Fretheim, “Theological Reflections on the Wrath of God”, 26.

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him jealous with gods that are not gods, he is provoked to anger, and will carry out a just penalty: he will make them jealous with a people that is not a people (Deut. 32:21; cf. Ps. 78:58). As Heschel emphasizes, his anger is not unaccountable, unpredictable, or irrational, not a “spontaneous outburst” but always a “reaction occasioned by the conduct of man”.4 Yahweh breaks out in wrath when the integrity of his world is at stake.5 His anger is “official”, the wrath of a king (Jer. 10:10), warrior (Jer. 21:5), and judge (Ps. 7:10) who defends justice by defending or reordering Israel and the nations. Wrath is a “specifically political emotion”,6 controlled not by the demonic passion but by an ideal of justice. Wrath is thus essential to Yahweh’s dominion over the creation, his preserving, delivering, justice-creating relationship to the world. Mercy and wrath are inextricably linked; together, they constitute the form of Yahweh’s relationship with the world.7 Wrath, Heschel writes, is “the end of indifference”. Human beings find God’s wrath uncanny not because it is primitive or cruel but because we are so well adjusted to wickedness: “We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done unto other people. Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself; it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous.” The prophet’s “great contribution to humanity was the proclamation of the evil of indifference. One may be decent and sinister, pious and sinful”. Prophecy is “one great exclamation: God is not indifferent to evil!” We find God’s wrath uncanny because it displays a perfectly calibrated hatred of injustice: “The exploitation of the poor is to us a misdemeanor; to God, it is a disaster. Our reaction is disapproval; God’s reaction is something no language can convey.” To Marcion and his half-hearted disciples, Heschel throws down this challenge, “Is it a sign of cruelty that God’s anger is aroused when the rights of the poor are violated, when widows and orphans are oppressed?”8 The various themes associated with wrath cluster together in Isaiah’s song of the vineyard and the oracles that follow it (Isa. 5; see v. 25).9 Isaiah’s oracle of Yahweh’s anger begins as a story of love and care. Yahweh takes a vine from Egypt and plants it in the land (cf. Ps. 80:8-13). He cares for it and cultivates it, clears the ground, digs a protective furrow around it. He does all he can do to make the vineyard productive, including giving his people king and temple, which Isaiah obscurely alludes to.10 Israel has everything it needs to produce wine to delight God and man (Judg. 9:13). It is not to be. The vineyard does not produce the wine of joy and justice for the nations, but the opposite. Yahweh Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 2001), 362f. Yahweh’s deadly anger at Uzzah for touching the ark of the covenant is often cited as evidence of Yahweh’s irascibility (2 Sam. 6:1-11), but, offensive as they may be to moderns, Yahweh prohibited even Levites from touch or looking at the uncovered ark, on pain of death (Num. 4:15-20; cf. 1 Sam. 6:17-18). 5 See Fretheim, “Theological Reflections on the Wrath of God”, 9f. 6 Jan Assmann, Politische Theologie zwischen Ägypten und Israel (München: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 1992), 85: “ein spezifisch politischer Affekt.” 7 Assman, Politische Theologie, 85–7. 8 Heschel, The Prophets, 363–5. 9 Jeremy J. Wynne, Wrath Among the Perfections of God’s Life (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 119–46, provides a helpful theological commentary on this text. 10 The phrase “choice vine” (Isa. 5:2) comes from Gen. 49:11, in Jacob’s blessing on the royal tribe of Judah. The well-beloved plants his vineyard is on a “horn, a son of oil” (Isa. 5:1; beqeren ben-shamen), and there is even a faint echo of the name of David in the Hebrew phrase “my beloved” (dodi), which has the same consonants as the name David. “Well-beloved” (Isa. 5:1; yedidi) echoes Jedidiah, Solomon’s given name (2 Sam. 12:25). The tower in the midst of the vineyard is the temple, a house of wine to delight Israel, the nations, and Yahweh himself. 4

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expects judgment – mishpat, but instead find only outpouring of blood – mishpach; he looks for righteousness, tzedeqah, but finds only a cry of helplessness and pain – tza’aqah (Isa. 5:7). The vineyard’s produce looks like choice grapes that will produce delightful wine, but in fact they are “stinking things”. Injustice parades itself as justice, decks itself out in the rhetoric of fairness and equity, yet grinds the faces of the poor.11 Yahweh’s wrath tears away the façade and, in a series of “woes”, details the injustices: the rich add house to house and field to field, until they drive everyone away and are isolated in the midst of their vast holdings; liars call evil good and good evil; fools boast of their wisdom; some are champion drunks (Isa. 5:8-23). Yahweh’s anger is not an irrational outburst, but the end result of a legal process: “Judge between me and my vineyard” (Isa. 5:3), he tells the jury made up of residents of Jerusalem and Judah. Having judged Judah guilty, he carries out his sentence. Because of Judah defiance, Yahweh will turn the garden into a wilderness (Isa. 5:24) and the grape harvest to chaff (Isa. 5:24), and he will whistle for an invader to come on Judah like a lioness on its prey (Isa. 5:26-30). In giving Judah over to her sin and its consequences, Yahweh vindicates his own divinity. The holy God consecrates himself in justice (Isa. 5:16), proving himself to be God by doing justice. In the Hebrew Bible, the problem of evil is a problem of wrath. When David suffers at the hands of his enemies, he pleads with Yahweh to turn away his wrath (e.g., Psalm 6). Innocent Job cannot fathom why he suffers disasters at Yahweh’s hands (Job 14:13). The political triumph of wickedness is also a problem of wrath: How long will Yahweh wait before he judges those who defy him and sets his world in order? (Psalms 37 and 73). The problem of evil is the delay of vengeance, and Israel’s hope is the promise of future wrath, the day of Yahweh when all wrongs will be put right. Surveying the world’s ruin, the Old Testament indicates that wrath is both problem and solution.

WRATH OF THE LAMB The history of Israel and Israel’s God is a story of wrath, Yahweh’s personal, intense, just indignation and opposition to evil. Pulling out this thread undoes the whole fabric. Marcionites of all stripes will concede the point, but insist that the God of the New is not a God of wrath. This rests on a fundamental error. The New Testament is not an absolute beginning. If wrath is an inextricable feature of Israel’s story, we expect it will have an important place in final chapters of that story. The first pages of Matthew confirm our expectations. The Gospel begins with John’s programmatic announcement of imminent wrath: the axe is already at the root of the tree (Matt. 3:7; Luke 3:7). To be sure, Jesus seldom uses the word “wrath” (orge; Luke 21:23; John 3:36), but his preaching and ministry unfolds under the shadow of the doom that faces Jerusalem, its temple, and the leaders of Israel. This is no side issue in Jesus’ preaching (Matt. 8:11-12; 10:15; 12:39-41, 43-45; 23:35, 38; 24:2, 37-39)12 or his personal response to Israel’s condition. Jesus has compassion for the shepherdless flock, but he also is grieved and angry at the hard-heartedness of the synagogue leaders (Mark 3:5) and indignant when his disciples deflect parents from bringing their children

11 Thomas L. Leclerc, Yahweh is Exalted in Justice: Solidarity and Conflict in Isaiah (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 57. 12 See the fuller catena of oracles of judgment in N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 182–5.

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to him (Mark 10:13-16). He issues an angry warning to two blind men (Matt. 9:2731)13 and jealousy for his Father’s house moves him to drive out the money changers (John 2:12-17). As he grieves at the grave of Lazarus, Jesus “raged in spirit” (John 11:22; embirmaomai to pneumati), furious at the power of death.14 As the opposition of the Jewish leaders intensifies, Jesus rachets up his parabolic warnings of divine vengeance. Cities that refuse to repent will suffer more complete devastation than Sodom and Gomorrah (Matt. 10:15). The owner of the vineyard will bring the wicked tenants who murder his son to a wretched end and lend the vineyard to others (Matt. 21:33-46). In rage, the king will send his armies against those who refuse his wedding invitation and mistreat his messengers, to destroy the murderers and burn their city with fire (Matt. 22:1-7). When the master discovers his servants have been unfaithful, he will cut them in pieces and assign them a place with hypocrites (Matt. 24:45-51). C. H. Dodd denies that we can interpret the owner, king, or master figure as God, and concludes we cannot infer divine wrath from these parables.15 But the rhetorical point of the parables is to warn Jesus’ hearers about the consequences of their resistance to the arrival of God’s kingdom.16 In at least one case, the “allegorical” import is explicit: “And his lord, moved with anger, handed him over to the torturers . . . so shall my heavenly Father also do to you” (Matt. 18:34-35). Jesus’ warnings about punishment in Gehenna (Matt. 5:22, 29-30; 10:28; 18:9; 23:33) have usually been taken as references to future eschatological punishment (see Rev. 20:1115; 21:8), but Jesus’ parables have to do with an imminent historical judgment. For Paul too, though wrath is sometimes an eschatological danger (Rom. 2:5-16), it often refers to a power within history that comes to its fullest expression not in the “primitive” period of the law but as a complement to the gospel. As the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, so the wrath of God is now being revealed (Rom. 1:17-18).17 With the coming of the new age, the time of ignorance comes to an end. Inherent in the gospel is the declaration that Jesus has been appointed Judge of all, Jews and Gentiles (Acts 14:16; 17:30-31; Rom. 2:16). God’s initiative in the Christ provokes a parallel satanic reaction, the revelation of the man of sin who does signs and wonders, has his own parousia, and manifests the mystery of lawlessness. God will not tolerate this rival. A day of the Lord is on the horizon, when the Lord will slay the wicked (2 Thess. 2:1-12). As Peter warns in his earliest post-Pentecost sermons, Israel is under threat in the apostolic generation because of her rejection of the Prince of life (Acts 2:22-24, 33-40; 3:14-23). Paul takes up the same theme: the Jews killed the Lord Jesus and drove out the apostles, as they had killed the prophets. As a result, “wrath has come upon them to the end” (1 Thess. 2:13-16). The only escape is to turn to Jesus, the Lamb who is the only refuge from his own wrath (1 Thess. 1:10; Rev. 6:16; cf. Rom. 5:9). Paul penetrates deeper to show that wrath is inherent in life under Torah. Torah “works wrath” (Rom. 4:15), not because of anything defective in Torah itself, which is spiritual, holy, and good

The verb “embrimaomai” means “to be very angry” or “to be moved with indignation” in classical Greek. B. B. Warfield, “The Emotional Life of our Lord”, in The Person and Work of Christ (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1950), 93–145. 15 C. H. Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans (Moffatt New Testament Commentary; Hodder and Stoughton, 1936), 23. 16 See R. V. G. Tasker, The Biblical Doctrine of the Wrath of God (London: Tyndale Press, 1951), 29–30. 17 Hanson, Wrath of the Lamb, 84–5. Against Tasker, Biblical Doctrine, 10, who takes apokaluptetai as a “prophetic present” describing a continuous process. 13 14

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(Rom. 7:12, 14), but because Torah confronts an Israel that lives in Adamic flesh. Faced with Torah’s prohibitions, the flesh rebels, and so the Torah, intended to bring life, gives life to sin, which leads to wrath and death (Rom. 7:7-11). In this line of argument, Paul is reflecting on the fact that, as discussed earlier, Sinai reveals both Torah and wrath. Because of the dynamics of Torah, Yahweh’s wrath is concentrated in Israel so that the true Israel, the Messiah, might bear it away.18 God’s jealous wrath is operative within the church too (1 Cor. 10:22), as it was in Old Testament Israel (Ezek. 23:35; 36:6; Zeph. 1:18). Paul conjures the wilderness period of Israel’s history as a cautionary tale for Christians who despise their spiritual food and drink, turn to idols, grumble, and crave evil things (1 Cor. 10:1-13). The writer of Hebrews quotes Psalm 95, “I swore in My wrath, they shall not enter My rest”, in support of his warning to those whose hearts are evil and unbelieving, apostates who fall from the living God (Heb. 3:7-12). Unfaithful believers fall into the dreadful hands of the living God (Heb. 10:31), who is a consuming fire (Heb. 12:29). The body of Christ is a refuge from wrath only so long as the members of the church walk by the Spirit and build, rather than destroy, the temple of God (cf. 1 Cor. 3:17).

THE HISTORY OF WRATH Wrath pervades the Christian canon, but theologians and exegetes have attempted in various ways to evade this conclusion. Some soften wrath by saying that it is directed against sin rather than sinners. That is untrue. “Unrighteousness” is the object of wrath in Rom. 1:18, but wrath is typically directed against evildoers themselves (Luke 21:23; Rom. 2:5, 8; Eph. 5:6; Col. 3:6; 1 Thess. 2:16).19 Over the past several decades, some have argued that the New Testament presents wrath not as an attitude of God, much less an emotion, but as a condition of human beings. Wrath is, on this reading, an impersonal force, the natural outworking of moral wrong in God’s universe.20 In support of this claim, Hanson notes that the New Testament writers almost never use “God” as the subject of verbs of anger or wrath, but tend to use circumlocutions that appear to open a gap between God and the working of wrath. For Hanson, the apostles’ key motive is to affirm the love of God, which, he thinks, is the antithesis of wrath. Though this reading has some force, it is exegetically and theologically unsatisfactory. Hanson dismisses evidence that runs against his thesis. Paul was not thinking carefully when he wrote Rom. 2:8-9, and he was not at his most profound in 1 Corinthians 10. Theologically, Hanson runs the risk of turning God into a divine spectator instead of the primary agent of history,21 and leaves open questions about the ontological status of “the wrath”. Does it operate outside God’s control? If so, is God God? If not, how is it different from God’s personal wrath? Hanson’s thesis has more than a whiff of Marcion about it. Did Jesus somehow expunge wrath from God’s character? Did he so shift the

See Leithart, Delivered from the Elements of the World: Atonement, Justification, Mission (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2016). 19 Tony Lane, “The Wrath of God as an Aspect of the Love of God”, in Nothing Greater, Nothing Better: Theological Essays on the Love of God, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 154–5. 20 Hanson, The Wrath of the Lamb; Dodd, The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, 20–4; G. H. C. MacGregor, “The Concept of the Wrath of God in the New Testament”, New Testament Studies 7, no. 2 (1961): 101–9. 21 Erich Zenger, A God of Vengeance? Understanding the Psalms of Divine Wrath, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1996), 73. 18

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balance of compassion and anger that the latter recedes to nothing? Hanson dresses up his Marcionism with the respectable apparatus of critical scholarship, but it is Marcionism just the same: for Marcion was the earliest of the critical scholars. Yet there does appear to be a development in the way God’s wrath is portrayed across the canon. When Israel worships idols in the wilderness, Yahweh’s response is instant and direct. After Israel settles the land, the primary instruments of wrath are other people – invaders and predators like the Midianites, Philistines, Assyrians, and Babylonians. Philistines have their own reasons for gobbling up Israelite territory, but Yahweh channels their complex political and military interests and actions toward his passionate pursuit of justice. For Paul as for Moses, wrath is an affectus as well as an effectus, but, as Israel matures, God expresses his wrath less by direct punishment and more by delivering idolaters to their own lies and darkness, the ungrateful to perverse sexual desires, sexual transgressors to all forms of social evil (Rom. 1:18-32). Wrath loosens the leash, influencing and allowing the power of habit, social custom, and perversion to run its course. Through the canon, in short, we discover a development that can be described as a “humanization” or “historicization” of wrath. This development has a positive dimension. Adam was for a little while lower than angels (Psalm 8; Heb. 2:7), but was destined to be elevated to share in God’s rule over creation. That includes the privilege of mediating God’s judgment. Paul instructs believers to refrain from vengeance and to do good to their enemies, which leaves room for the avenging wrath of God (Rom. 12:19-21). In context, this wrath is enacted by diakonoi of wrath, political powers who serve as ministers of God’s wrathful vengeance (Rom. 13:1-7). Paul does not rule out fireballs from heaven, but he expects wrath to be mediated by human agents. It is a hint of the ultimate human destiny. “You will judge angels”, Paul reminds the Corinthians (1 Cor. 6:3). Angels pour out chalices of wrath (Rev. 15:5–16:21), but human beings are created to take over that task. Jeremiah was already cupbearer to the divine king (Jer. 25:12-29), and now, by the Spirit, Jesus has formed a company of prophets, servants of wrath who pursue the justice of the kingdom.

FURTHER READING Fretheim, Terence. “Theological Reflections on the Wrath of God in the Old Testament”. Horizons in Biblical Theology 24, no. 2 (2002): 1–26. Heschel, Abraham. The Prophets. New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 2001. Lactantius. de ira Dei. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7. Translated by William Fletcher. Edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe. Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1886. Wynne, Jeremy J. Wrath Among the Perfections of God’s Life. London: T&T Clark, 2010.

Chapter 8

“The Lord Is in Your Midst” (Zeph. 3:15) Righteous Suffering in the Synoptic Gospels PHEME PERKINS

Reading the gospel narratives in light of Christian creeds can obscure their puzzles about divine presence, righteous suffering, and the persistence of evil. The triumphant resurrection and exaltation of Jesus as God’s messiah could suggest that the problem of evil is solved, even though he had been put to death by religious and civic agents of injustice whose power seemingly remained intact. The messiah, Jesus, inaugurated a global religion and guaranteed eternal life for righteous believers. That default teaching included the education of Christ-believers to anticipate and frame hostility they experienced as the continuation of what Jesus had suffered (cf. Phil. 1:27-30; 1 Thess. 2:14-16). Even with a delayed timing for the judgment, God wins with a cosmic destruction of the arrogant and wicked, and glorious rejoicing for the righteous. This default setting edits out challenges to God’s sovereignty, justice, or beneficence posed by innocent suffering. It is only human malice that led chief priests and scribes to scorn the crucified, “He saved others; he is not able to save himself. Let the Messiah, the king of Israel now come down from the cross, so that we might see and believe” (Mark 15:31-32a). Even those crucified alongside Jesus express contempt for this weak victim (v. 32b). But such responses could spring from a deep disappointment, God’s failed promise. No shining light of divine justice brought people back from the diaspora or attracted the nations to seek Israel’s God. As Matthew and Luke supplement Mark with additional Jesus traditions to form the communal memory of their implied audiences, we catch a glimpse of how first-century believers responded to the story.1 Both supplement the “mockery” episode. Matthew underlines the filial relationship between Jesus and God, “He trusted in God, now let him deliver him if he wishes, for he said, ‘I am Son of God’” (Matt. 27:43).2 Luke dramatizes the saving power of the cross. After rebuking his fellow

For the “standard model” account of the composition of the synoptic gospels, see Pheme Perkins, Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 54–125. 2 Supplementing the allusions to Psalm 22 already present in Mark’s passion account with the righteous sufferer and his adversaries in Wis. 2:13-18; see R. Alan Culpepper, Matthew (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2021), 558. 1

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for mocking an innocent man and turning to Jesus, one criminal is saved, “Amen, I tell you, ‘Today, you will be with me in paradise’” (Luke 23:43).3 The transition to salvation as a divine reward for those who remain loyal to a God’s-eye vision of righteousness whether encoded in the Mosaic heritage, the “higher righteousness” of Jesus’ teaching (Matt. 5:17-20), or the Spirit-inspired mutual love of Paul’s Gentile churches (Gal. 5:22–6:2), can obscure God’s covenanted relationship to a specific people. The fierce loyalties of groups within second temple Judean society sought to embody a holiness pleasing to the Lord by weeding the garden. Christians often disregard such concerns as outdated tribalism and praise the gospel depictions of Jesus befriending tax-collectors and sinners (Matt. 11:19; Luke 7:34).4 Neither Paul nor the compilations of Jesus’ sayings and miracles used by the evangelists anticipated the Judean rebellion that resulted in Roman destruction of the Temple. That event may be pending or recently concluded as Mark composed his narrative. For Matthew and Luke, it lies further in the past, a vindication of Jesus’ prophetic recognition that Jerusalem’s tragic history will not end with God’s peace (Luke 12:49-53; 13:31-35; Matt. 23:37-39). God’s beloved city will persist in killing those prophets and messengers sent to her.5 Whatever the historical circumstances that affect Jerusalem, its Temple, leaders, and people after the rejection/crucifixion of the Messiah, Jesus, they no longer encode decisive turns in God’s relationships with humanity. Whatever metaphors, symbolic, or theological language New Testament authors employ, they incorporate this foundational insight, in the faithful death of Jesus the cycle of sin – punishment – repentance and restoration no longer obtains (2 Cor. 5:19-21; Mark 14:24; Matt. 26:28; Luke 22:20).6 However the social, political, and even natural world within which believers live remains untransformed. Jesus performed the script of suffering servant (Isa. 52:13-53:12) or of one persecuted for exemplary devotion to God (Wisdom 2).7 Believers reframe their own experiences of righteous suffering as a participation in the suffering of Jesus en route to

Luke knows an earlier tradition that connects salvation with Jesus’ exaltation in glory (Luke 24:26; Acts 2:3236). Of the three, only Luke makes it clear that “salvation” refers to a destiny beyond this life; see Joseph Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke X-XXIV (AB 28A; New York: Doubleday, 1985), 1507–9. 4 See Joseph Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX (AB 28; New York: Doubleday, 1979), 681; “Though he preached the wisdom and freedom of God’s kingdom, he did not do it in isolation from those elements upon which Palestinian society generally looked down.” The Q proverb, “Wisdom will be justified by all her children” retained in Luke is shifted in Matthew, “Wisdom will be justified by her works”, referring to the works of Jesus as evidence that he is the anticipated messiah (Matt. 11:45; compiled from Isaiah passages Isa. 26:19; 29:18; 35:5-6; 4 2:6-7, 18; 61:1). Jesus is wisdom personified and those who follow his teachings will be justified by his works (Matt. 10:41; 12:37; 25:46); see Culpepper, Matthew, 220–1. 5 In Matthew (and Q) the anticipated coming is the Son of Man coming in judgment. Luke’s narrative focuses on the king arriving for the destined crucifixion, though judgment may be implied. See Acts 1:11; Joseph Fitzmyer, Luke X-XXIV (AB 28A; New York: Doubleday, 1985), 1035. For Matthew, hostility reflects the implied reader’s experience: “from the prophets, sages and scribes sent by God, some are crucified, some beaten in synagogues and hounded from town to town” (Culpepper, Matthew, 458–60). 6 For Paul reconciliation was not appeasing an angry God, but the new, unanticipated expression of God’s enduring love for Israel. See Margaret E. Thrall, The Second Epistle to the Corinthians. Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 431. 7 Though reframed by the scenarios of divine vindication or exaltation to heavenly glory, righteous suffering even by the one with a special filial relationship to God might appear to leave the powers of evil entrenched. For a challenge to easy acceptance of the “default” mode, see Lauren Stuckenbruck, “How Much Evil Does the Christ Event Solve? Jesus and Paul in Relation to Jewish Apocalyptic Thought”, in Evil in the Second Temple Period, ed. C. Keith and L. Stuckenbruck (WUNT 2/417; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 142–68. 3

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heavenly vindication. That paradigm even generates the possibility of joy in suffering, a pattern that Paul engrains in exhortations to his churches.8

DISRUPTING THE POWERS OF EVIL: GOD’S REIGN IN MARK Apocalyptic revelations provided a periodized version of Jewish history and subjection to empires that depict a world hastening toward the cataclysmic divine judgment. Evil and sin were given mythic origins in stories of the fallen angelic figures who had bred with human females. The judgment represented by the flood prefigured the final end of history. God has consistently dealt justly with humankind.9 The final transformations suggest that human nature itself will return to primordial perfection.10 Whether or not the larger population was engaged in the scribal erudition evident in apocalyptic writings,11 images from Daniel, such as the Son of Man’s ascent to God’s throne, and familiarity with a demon-infested world are presumed in the gospels. In Mark the game has changed; God’s sovereignty takes the form of Jesus’ complete control over both the demonic and natural powers. At his first public appearance in a Galilean synagogue, the demon acknowledges this fact, “I know who you are, the holy one of God” (Mark 1:21-28). This power to control unclean spirits grabs public attention. Healing powers have Jesus constantly pressed by desperate people. Both Matthew and Luke have recognized the narrative gap and introduced the public ministry with “new teaching”. A sermon in the Nazareth synagogue opens with Isa. 61:1-2. Jesus fulfilling that eschatological promise is fated to suffer (Luke 4:16-30). Matthew has Jesus open with the most famous compendium of Jesus’ teaching in the gospels, the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:1–7:27). It is the teaching which marks the transition to a “new authority” not the evidence of miracles. Similarly the tradition of Jesus’ triumph in “testing” by Satan during forty days in the wilderness that Matthew (4:1-11) and Luke (4:1-13) employ in place of Mark 1:12-13 demonstrates Jesus’ mastery of God’s word against the enticements of power. With Jesus’ control over the demonic and natural forces amply demonstrated Mark’s readers would not share the skepticism of those mocking the crucified. As Jesus attempts to prepare his disciples for the divinely ordained passion12 his efforts appear to fail. Peter

See 2 Cor. 8:1-5, introducing a collection for impoverished Jewish Christ-believers in Jerusalem. Suffering could be considered as the test of authenticity. Paul typically understands the word “δοκιμή” (2 Cor. 8:2) to indicate a positive outcome. See Hans Dieter Betz, 2 Corinthians 8 and 9 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 43. 9 See George W. E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch Chapters 1-36, 81-108 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 356–407. 10 1 Enoch 10:21-11:2; 90:37-38. See Nickelsburg, Enoch, 407. 11 In the new genre of “historical review”, it becomes the task of the wise to calculate the remaining time until the end. See Paul J. Kosmin, Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 127–8; 162. Jesus refuses to engage in such speculation (Mark 13:32-36; Matt. 24:36-44, expands his Markan source). Luke 17:22-37 relocated that tradition from the impending destruction of Jerusalem, to connect the unpredictable suddenness of the “days of the Son of Man” with the certain destiny toward which Jesus and his disciples are moving, “For as lightning flashes, lighting the heaven from one end to the other so the Son of Man in his day. But first it is necessary for him to suffer many things and be rejected by this generation” (Luke 17:24-25; Fitzmyer, Luke X-XXIV, 1166–70). 12 Mark 8:31-38//Matt. 16:21-28//Luke 9:22-27; Mark 9:30-32//Matt. 17:22-23//Luke 9:43b-45; Mark 10:3234//Matt. 20:17-19//Luke 18:31-34. 8

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mounts a vigorous if misguided protest on the first occasion. By the third, Mark depicts the disciples following behind Jesus, a frightened bunch. Matthew omits that note of fear, as does Luke. Luke also shifts the request for places of honor in Jesus’ kingdom by James and John that follows the third passion prediction in Mark and Matthew. At Jesus’ final meal with the disciples, he intervenes in a dispute over which is the greatest among them (Luke 22:24-30). Both evangelists smooth out rougher edges when retelling stories critical of Jesus’ disciples for their misunderstanding, fear, or lack of faith. Literary analysis draws attention to the growing isolation of Jesus as one moves through Mark’s passion narrative. Within that setting, Jesus’ final words, an Aramaic version of Ps. 22:1, raise the horrifying possibility that even God’s presence has been withdrawn.13 Attentive readers may remember a very different motif in earlier miracle stories: exorcisms and physical healings that enable sufferers reintegration into society from situations of extreme isolation, in some cases both physical and of long duration. Ritual impurity added to the concern over those afflicted with leprosy (Mark 1:40-45//Matt. 8:1-4//Luke 5:12-16) or women with bloody discharge (Mark 5:24b-34//Matt. 9:20-22// Luke 8:43-48). Outside Israel, Jesus heals a man so tormented by a legion of demons that he rages among the tombs even injuring himself on the stones (Mark 5:1-20// Matt. 8:28-34//Luke 8:26-39). The other evangelists orchestrate each of these stories differently. Where Mark had the leper ignore Jesus’ command to say nothing but carry out the prescribed Mosaic ritual, Matthew ends at that point, leaving readers to conclude that the ritual requirements had been met. Luke also drops the man’s choice to spread the news rather than obey by substituting a generic claim that the word got out (v. 15). In abbreviating the story of the woman with a bloody discharge, both Matthew and Luke retain the punch line “your faith has saved you” but have attenuated the severity of her distress, a woman impoverished by twelve years of medical treatments leaving her condition worse than before. So Mark’s Jesus adds reassurance to praising her faith. This affliction is permanently ended. Mark expects readers to recognize that Jesus’ healing powers represent the “new age”, the approach of God’s reign.14 With the narrative emphasis on demonic forces being disrupted by Jesus’ presence one might anticipate human opposition to Jesus as evil’s last gasp rather than a paradigm that continues in Christian experiences of suffering.15 How does the abandonment motif played out in Mark’s passion narrative complicate this initial picture? Jesus’ passion predictions indicated what is more dramatically exhibited in Jesus’ impassioned prayer in Gethsemane, everything that occurs is willed by God. Neither human malice nor a demonic evil power has taken over.16 In the initial version that ended with the frightened

Matthew Rindge objects to the scholarly tendency to interpret the thread of Psalm 22 allusions running through the narrative as the basis for reading these words as evidence of Jesus’ exemplary trust in God. The allusions evade those psalm verses which involve praise or divine vindication and have moved backward to land on the opening words of the psalm. See Matthew S. Rindge, “Reconfiguring the Akedah and Recasting God: Lament and Divine Abandonment in Mark”, JBL 131, no. 4 (2012): 756–61. 14 Joel Marcus, Mark 1-8 (AB 27; New Haven: Yale, 2000), 369. 15 Following that baseline on suffering, Mark’s audience will find their own situation in these stories: “In baptism Jesus has turned to them, and confirmed through faith that they now stand in the sphere of the new age; when persecution, apostasy, and death threaten to engulf them, their faith will save them” (Marcus, Mark 1-8, 369). 16 Mark 14:10-11 provides no motivation for Judas’ betrayal though readers have known since Mark 3:19 about Judas’ role, Matt. 26:14-16, but after Jesus’ arrest has a remorseful Judas throw the money back at the chief priests who paid him and hang himself (Matt. 27:3-19), while Luke does propose Satan as the agent of Judas’ action. Luke knows a legend about the death of Judas as an act of divine vengeance to Acts 1:18-20. 13

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women fleeing the empty tomb (Mark 16:8) there is no narrative presence of the risen Jesus. Readers are twice reminded that the risen Jesus would “go ahead” and see his stricken disciples in Galilee (Mark 14:28; 16:7).17 The other gospels fill that gap with the risen Jesus appearing to women outside the tomb (Matt. 28:9-10), despondent followers heading out of Jerusalem (Luke 24:13-35), the disciples gathered at a meal in Jerusalem (Luke 24:36-49), and the promised reunion with the eleven in Galilee (Matt. 28:16-20). Such stories dramatize what Christians had been preaching from the beginning (e.g., 1 Cor. 15:3-5). Contemporary readers may prefer Mark’s narrative gap that leaves a risen presence of Jesus to the affirmation of faith that the Son of God who died on the cross lives as exalted Lord (e.g., Phil. 2:6-11). It does not require speculation about the bio-mechanics or physiology of risen bodies.18 The magic realism of resurrection stories might elicit the happy ending syndrome that puts a distance between Jesus’ suffering and the very real experiences of his followers. In disrupting the demons and end-time calculations of apocalyptic, Mark does not read either the social or individual suffering of God’s people as a world imploding of its own evils. God’s saving power is not awaiting a recharge. But the story does pose a challenge evident in the disciples’ resistance to Jesus’ passion predictions. God can will suffering even for those most beloved.19 Another chord in Mark’s narrative distinguishes whatever suffering or deprivation the faithful accept to enter God’s reign, belonging to this new community (Mark 10:2631//Matt. 19:25-30//Luke 18:26-30). Peter’s anxious query about those who have renounced everything to follow Jesus (Mark 10:28, cf. 1:16-20) is met with assurances about hundredfold restitution “in this present time” as well as eternal life. However, Mark incorporates the base note of that communal present, “persecutions” (διωγμοί). That note is omitted when Matthew and Luke repeat this episode, suggesting that in those communities, persecution is not as frequent or disruptive a factor in lived experience as for the implied audience of Mark’s narrative.20 Mark concludes this section of his gospel with a Jesus saying that leaves open a possibility for some wealthy people to be included among the righteous despite the discouraging example of the rich man offered discipleship in Mark 10:17-22, “many first ones will be last ones” (v. 31).21 The Q version of that logion (Matt. 20:16//Luke 13:30) lacks the “many” qualifier and opens with “the last” who are to be “first”. How is eschatological status reversal played out in the synoptic gospels?

On the ending(s) of Marks Gospel, see Joel Marcus, Mark 8-16 (AYB 27A; New Haven: Yale, 2009), 1088–96. Or its ancient variations in the Sadducees effort to discredit resurrection beliefs in Mark 12:18-27//Matt. 22:2333//Luke 20:27-40. 19 Marcus, Mark 8-16, 772. 20 Though Christians are taught to anticipate external harassment or abuse simply for “the name” or the offense that their good conduct causes in former associates. Such experiences also reflect a conformity to the pattern of Christ’s suffering (1 Pet. 4:1-6, 14-19). In apocalyptic settings, the contrast between “this present age” and “the age to come” characteristically suggests that the present time represents that exponential growth of evil which requires of the righteous minority steadfast endurance buoyed by the knowledge that the end is near (Marcus, Mark 8-16, 733). Mark employs the two-age framework without its apocalyptic timing mechanism. 21 Marcus, Mark 8-16, 733.

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FROM HUMILIATION TO GLORY: STATUS REVERSAL IN GOD’S REIGN Post-exilic Judeans imagined their historical experience as liberation from the humiliations of exile for a glorious future that is evidence of God’s sovereign justice. What had been an intensification of the characteristic pre-exilic prophecies of impending defeat as divine punishment to be followed by renewal translated into apocalyptic visions. Until God’s decisive intervention, the righteous remnant can only endure its lowly, marginalized position. Luke sets a lyrical Jewish-Christian composition that celebrates such a reversal on the lips of Mary (Luke 1:46-55).22 God dethrones rulers and exalts the lowly, fills the starving and sends the wealthy away hungry, and shows mercy to His servant Israel (vv. 51-54). Since this praise song for God as savior responds to Elizabeth’s Spirit-inspired acknowledgment of Mary’s child as the one promised by God, readers should anticipate this apocalyptic status reversal. Of course, the history of political rulers was not ended or even changed, though with the destruction of Jerusalem nothing remains of those responsible for executing Jesus. Luke weaves laments over Jerusalem’s fate into Jesus’ progress toward his passion. It is God’s necessity that a prophet dies there (Luke 13:31-35; 19:41-44). To the women of Jerusalem mourning Jesus’ impending death, his prophetic voice redirects attention to the sufferings they will endure when Jerusalem’s leaders bring about its destruction (Luke 23:27-31).23 Neither a striking divine rescue nor an end-time fury is on offer to eradicate the sufferings experienced by the lowly righteous ones when the arrogant and powerful cause devastation. Jesus extends a compassion that even places the women’s future suffering above his own. A striking retelling of Jesus’ last saving act, promising the repentant criminal a place in paradise today (Luke 23:43), indicates that the definitive status reversal exists in heaven, not in apocalyptic history.24 The best-known example of the status reversal paradigm in the synoptic gospels is Matt. 5:3-12, the beatitudes. Luke has a shorter formulation of beatitudes (6:20-23) followed by corresponding woes directed against the rich, those “filled up now”, and “laughing now” (vv. 24-26). Luke contrasts the social location of each group. The “blessed” suffer the hatred, abuse, and dishonor for their allegiance to Jesus like that directed at the prophets (v. 23); the condemned enjoy the acceptance accorded false prophets (v. 26). Luke’s short list of conditions to be reversed only referred to victims (poverty, hunger, weeping, hatred); Matthew expands from such passive situations of suffering and reversal to incorporate beatitudes of character formation. Such virtues may be adjuncts or even necessary to those “hungering and thirsting for justice” (v. 6) but only result in suffering if activated in pursuit of justice (v. 10) or other witness “on my account” (v. 11). In any event the reward is “in heaven”. Matthew will conclude the entire public ministry of Jesus with a famous parable of judgment. Returning in glory the Son of Man separates humankind based on their treatment of the ”little ones”, suffering nakedness, imprisonment, illness, or as outsiders with whom Jesus identifies as “brothers”

Fitzmyer, Luke I-IX, 356–62. Citing Hos. 10:8 in v. 30. 24 Parables in Luke also exhibit this eschatology of immediate post-mortem transit to punishment for the arrogant/ rich or reward/refreshment for the poor ones who have suffered from their abuse (Luke 12:16-21; 16:19-31), though their primary function may be to instruct Christians on the proper relationship to material possessions and generosity toward the poor (Fitzmyer, Luke X-XXIV, 972, 1127–9). 22 23

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(Matt. 25:31-46). Neither the saved (“sheep”) nor the goats (“condemned”) recognized the Jesus/Son of Man before them in those sufferers.25 Matthew’s Gospel concludes with the risen Jesus sending the remaining eleven disciples on mission to incorporate “the nations” into community through baptism and instruct them in his teaching. So from the vantage point of Matthew’s implied audience, that day of judgment lies in a distant future. Present suffering has two dimensions in the experience of Christ-believers, alleviating that of those invisible “little ones” and accepting the persecution visited on those who act on hunger for justice. So the suffering of either group does not signal an inflationary growth of evil anxious to move the apocalyptic clock forward. God is firmly in control of the world, able to care for and provide “good things” to his own (Matt. 6:25-34//Luke 12:22-34; 7:11//Luke 11:13).26 A similar perspective informs the prayer that Christians have recited daily since the end of the first century.27 Luke’s briefer formulation likely represents the Q version that goes back to Jesus (Luke 11:2-4), while the more balanced, liturgical phrasing of Matt. 6:9-13 was adopted as the formal prayer in Christian worship. Expanding the petition for the coming of God’s reign with the parallel, “your will come to exist also on earth as in heaven” (v. 10), intensifies the eschatological tone of the prayer.28 Scholars who understand the prayer as hope for the apocalyptic realization of God’s reign rely on two points of ambiguity. Not even the erudite patristic commentators were familiar with the adjective “ἐπιούσιος” attached to the bread petition. Proposed etymological derivations could produce (i) bread to sustain life; (ii) daily bread, as in the admonition against anxiety for the future in Matt. 6:34, or (iii) bread for the coming day, interpreted as a reference to banqueting in the kingdom. Luke’s version concludes with a single petition that God does not lead the petitioner into “temptation” or testing (πειρασμός). Luke has Jesus give the disciples comparable advice in Gethsemane with a less direct reference to God (22:40, 46). Though an apocalyptic interpretation considers “testing” to mean the time of inflated wickedness prior to the end, Luke 22 has no apocalyptic overtones. Similar ambiguity permits an apocalyptic reading of the parallel since the τοῦ πονηροῦ could refer to either a situation “the evil” or a personage “the evil one”, that is the personification of Satan to appear at the end-time. If one adopts the apocalyptic interpretation of Matthew’s concluding parallelism, then the opening which suggests a desire that God hasten the appearance of his reign on earth stands in tension with its conclusion, requesting God to spare his faithful the Satanic eruption of evil of an ending to history. The Lord’s Prayer articulates an ethical requirement that is amply illustrated in sayings and parables of Jesus, forgiveness of debts, or other offenses suffered. The exchange between Jesus and Peter on communal expectations for reconciliation concludes with a dramatization that sets no limits on how often or how extreme the offense (Matt. 18:15-35). Forgiving others is a necessary condition for receiving it from God (Matt. 6:14-15). How does such Since this universal judgment is directed to “the nations” non-recognition might presume a standard that does not require belief in God or Jesus’ teaching (just as “reward” is promised those who offer water to the disciples on mission, Matt. 10:40-42). 26 As Ulrich Luz points out the parables of Matthew 13 represent a “reality defying hope of the suffering” with a justice that does not fit into the worldview of any age. Similarly, miracle stories are about addressing human need, see Ulrich Luz, Matthew 8-20 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 297. 27 Didache 8.3 prescribes reciting the Lord’s Prayer three times a day. 28 Fitzmyer, Luke X-XXIV, 897–9. Luke’s kingdom language refers to God’s activity in and through Jesus. This petition reflects the community’s identification with that activity, not hope for a speedy arrival of the Parousia. 25

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forgiveness recalibrate the calculus of suffering and evil? Our final example of synoptic gospels reorchestrating conventional expectations poses a challenge to Jesus’ teaching on love of enemies. Will the wicked find mercy at God’s judgment? Or does has the love shown by their victims added to the charge sheet and magnified the guilt of those responsible for righteous suffering as Rom. 12:17-21 suggests?29

“SUN RISES ON THE WICKED AND THE GOOD” (MATT. 5:45): LIFE WITHOUT ENEMIES Matthew 7:12 attached the Golden Rule to the assurance that God’s response to prayer far exceeds the beneficence of humans. The sayings of Jesus originally included it with the “love of enemies” group (vs. 31 in Luke 6:27-36//Matt. 5:38-48). A variant on exhibiting “love of enemies” as a general moral principle occurs in Rom. 12:17, “do not return evil for evil to anyone taking care for good things recognized by all people”. Matthew used a rhetorical pattern to underline the more perfect righteousness/justice in Jesus’ teaching so that its “turn the other cheek” (5:39) presents a challenge to the legal principle of retaliation or restitution proportionate to the severity of an injury suffered. Where human justice fails, the faithful expect God to settle accounts. Classical discussions of theodicy find extreme cases of righteous suffering, corporate or individual, and find fault in the goodness, presence, or power of God. The Christian response to such evil: seeing Jesus’ suffering and death as taking that suffering into Godself, also seems a weak answer to media images of horrific suffering and violence.30 Both the examples and principles associated with “love of enemies” teaching suggest activity beyond passive acceptance accompanied by positive inner feelings instead of anger or hatred.31 Matthew’s formulation drives that action message home rhetorically with phrases that have found their way into our general lexicon, “turn the other cheek” or “go the extra mile”. Without their context in the gospel, these expressions appear less challenging than Jesus’ words on forgiveness. When the imagery is transposed to the key of God and creation, the challenge is even greater. Contrary to much of the biblical tradition, God is not drawing up the enemies list. And as Jesus’ response to pilgrims killed by Pilate or those killed in a tower collapse insists, “wrong place, wrong time” suffering and death have no correlation with anyone’s sins.32 As Luke tells the story, that insight should not fuel skepticism or moral indifference but repentance.

CONCLUSION A powerful but challenging picture of suffering and evil emerges from the synoptic gospels. Contrary to a picture formulated in Israel’s historical experience and revised by apocalyptic visions of righteous suffering end times, the gospels insist that God is not By citing Prov. 25:21-22; see Krister Stendahl, “Hate, Non-Retaliation and Love: 1 QS x, 17-20 and Rom. 12:19-21”, HTR 55 (1962): 343–55. 30 Paul K. Moser refers to this New Testament conviction as “God’s theodicy incarnate” (“Theodicy Incarnate: Divine Self-Justification”, ExpTim 133/5 (2022): 192–200). Francois Bovon asks whether “love of enemy” may be a plausible principle for suffering individuals, but not among nations (Luke 1. A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 1:1-9:50 [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002], 234). 31 Hence the formulation as a command (Fitzmyer, Luke I-IX, 638). 32 Luke 13:1-5; similarly in John 9:1-3. 29

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missing in action. Though not the full realization of salvation, in Jesus God’s reign has broken into that demon-infested world. A firmly held conviction that God has limited the powers of iniquity that were expressed by a demon in Mark 1:24, “you have come to destroy us . . . you are the Holy One of God” is essential to Christianity.33 God not only responds to the prayers of the faithful but does so even more reliably than imperfect humans. Conversion to “purity of heart” and “hunger and thirst for righteousness” is possible even for the weakest. Does the concluding petition of the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:13) implicate God in sufferings caused by human injustice?34 Does Jesus’ acceptance of suffering as God’s righteous servant prove an effective hope for believers? Its persistence as the Christian paradigm from our earliest evidence in Paul’s letters through the synoptic gospels and to the consistently harassed believers in 1 Pet. 4:12-19 shows that it was. In addition, disciples schooled in suffering are not encouraged to withdraw into an isolated apocalyptic sectarianism that treats outsiders as “sons of darkness”. Instead they are to actively engage the world as its “salt” and “light” (Matt. 5:13-16).35 That engagement cannot be suffering-free. Contemporary readers may be less willing to find the suffering now but exuberant joy in heaven (Luke 6:22) pattern of early Christian belief compelling, but that shift was not a Christian innovation. It was already in process among Second Temple Jews along with resurrection and the final divine judgment of humanity.36 In framing their striking narrative accounts of Jesus, the synoptic gospels do not address philosophical or other critical problems of theodicy. Rather they provide a vision of faith and hope to sustain engagement and hope for a minority community. Evil is in process of being dismantled by God’s powerful presence.37

FURTHER READING Allison, Dale C. The Sermon on the Mount. Inspiring the Moral Imagination. New York: Herder, 1999. Black, C. Clifton. The Lord’s Prayer. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2018. Brown, Raymond E. The Death of the Messiah. New York: Doubleday, 1994. Moser, Paul K. “Theodicy Incarnate: Divine Self-Justification”. The Expository Times 133, no. 5 (2022): 192–200. Neville, David J. “Moral Vision and Eschatology in Mark’s Gospel: Coherence or Conflict?” Journal of Biblical Literature 127, no. 2 (2008): 359–84. Perkins, Pheme. Introduction to the Synoptic Gospels. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007.

W. D. Davies and D. C. Allison, The Gospel according to Saint Matthew. Volume I. Matthew I-VII (London: T&T Clark, 1988), 403. 34 Betz, 2 Corinthians 8 and 9, 314. The petition asks to be rescued from temptation/testing, not for its eradication. 35 Betz, 2 Corinthians 8 and 9, 507. 36 Readers often treat expecting heavenly rewards inferior to acting on principle (Fitzmyer, Luke I-IX, 635). 37 A “showing-how theodicy” (Moser, “Theodicy Incarnate”, 199). As “practical theodicy” eschatological promises do not explain suffering or evil but envision a new world which makes righteous suffering bearable (Davies and Allison, Matthew 1, 467). 33

Chapter 9

The Gospel of John DAVID F. FORD

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (1:14).1 That pivotal verse in the Prologue of the Gospel of John, signaling the drama of the incarnation, the free self-expression, and self-giving of God in human history, gives the primary perspective of this Gospel on suffering and evil, as on other questions. It is the perspective of living “among us”, the perspective of a drama, of the interaction of people and events in the ongoing life of our world, with a concentration on one person in particular, Jesus Christ. Jesus later says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (14:6). The implication of this, as of other sayings and actions of his, is that the primary way to the truth of suffering and evil is through knowing who Jesus is, and following the drama of his life, death, and resurrection “among us”. That will be the main approach of this chapter. There are other perspectives in this Gospel. The Prologue itself frames the drama of Jesus within an encompassing horizon of God and all reality, and verse 5 simply states, in a visual metaphor, a cosmological perspective relevant to suffering and evil: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it” (1:5). That does not try to explain the origins of darkness. But it does make an important double statement. On the one hand, darkness does not have the last word and does not win out; on the other hand, darkness continues as a present reality. But that is a very general statement, and an understanding of the drama centered on the person of Jesus is needed to learn more of its meaning in this Gospel. The main way to grasp the depth of John’s meaning is through slow and close reading and rereading of the story that follows. The Prologue culminates with the ultimate, core reality: “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” (1:18). The Prologue’s opening concluded (v. 5) with the mysteries of light and darkness in interrelationship; its culmination (v. 18) is the invisible mystery of God. From the heart of this mystery, which the rest of the Gospel (above all, John 17) shows to be one of mutual love, knowledge, and glory, comes the visible Son, Jesus Christ. Central to his purpose is to be the person who embodies and reveals who God is – “who has made him known”. Who God is is inseparable from who Jesus is, and there is no answer to questions relating to suffering, evil, or other basic concerns that can bypass these “who” questions and the narrative in which they occur. After some preliminary remarks about method, the approach here will be to focus on the three climactic, and deeply interconnected, sequential events in the drama that are

Verse references are to the Gospel of John in the NRSV, unless otherwise indicated.

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most instructive about who Jesus is and also about suffering and evil: the Last Supper in John 13–17; the trial and crucifixion of Jesus in John 18–19; and, briefly, the resurrection stories of John 20–21.

METHOD This chapter reflects on the canonical text of the Gospel of John, the main concern being its literary and theological meaning. That is because I consider its chief contribution to current understanding of suffering and evil can come through these two approaches in combination. My approach to interpreting it is laid out at length in my theological commentary on John.2 Other interpreters whom I have found most helpful (while not always agreeing with them) include Augustine, C. K. Barrett, Richard Bauckham, Jo-Ann Brant, Thomas Brodie, Raymond Brown, Frederick Dale Bruner, Rudolf Bultmann, John Calvin, Mary Coloe, Margaret Daly-Denton, Alan Ecclestone, Ruth Edwards, Jörg Frey, Thomas Gardner, Edwin Hoskyns and F. N. Davey, Susan Hylen, Dorothy Lee, Andrew Lincoln, Martin Luther, Lesslie Newbigin, Gail O’Day, Adele Reinhartz, Sharon Ringe, Rudolf Schnackenburg, Sandra Schneiders, Jean Vanier, B. F. Westcott, and Frances Young.3

THE LAST SUPPER (JOHN 13–17) The two opening verses of John’s account of the Last Supper raise sharply the question of evil. “Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him” (13:1-2). That has something of the Prologue’s Godcentered horizon, together with a historical horizon set by the main foundational event in Israel’s past, the exodus from Egypt, celebrated at Passover. But it moves at once to the Gospel’s primary perspective of people and events in interaction, as seen in the love of Jesus for “his own”, and the unfolding drama of how he “loved them to the end”, to the extent of dying for them. Then comes the blunt statement about the devil inspiring the betrayal of Jesus by Judas Iscariot. The stage has been set: the love of Jesus over against the betrayal by Judas. The events of the rest of John 13 complexify and deepen this theme. First, the love of Jesus is performed in a surprising way: he washes the feet of his disciples, including Judas. This is the work of a slave, and it has immense, radical implications. Jesus not only does it, but he gives a clear command to his disciples to do likewise, “So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you” (13:14-15). Nothing else in the Gospel of John is insisted upon like this – there are multiple reinforcements4 of this imperative throughout the chapter, culminating in the “new commandment” to love as Jesus has loved (13:34). It is an action that both is

David F. Ford, The Gospel of John. A Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021). See ibid., 445–59 (Bibliography) for a list of their works. See the Author Index, 471–3, for details of their particular contributions through the commentary. 4 For a list, see Ford, The Gospel of John, 260–1. 2 3

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intimately interpersonal, the washing and touching of feet in one-to-one encounter, and at the same time is systemic, turning power relations upside down, and challenging how groups and societies are led and organized. The meaning of love has been exemplified in a way that is only surpassed in this Gospel by Jesus laying down his life (see the following paragraphs). Then Jesus drops a bombshell. “Jesus was troubled in spirit, and declared, ‘Very truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me’” (13:21). The disciples are puzzled, and this is the cue for the entry into the story of “one of his disciples – the one whom Jesus loved”. He is described twice as “reclining next to” Jesus, literally “on the bosom”, or “on the breast” of Jesus, echoing 1:18 where Jesus is in the bosom of the Father. Peter asks this beloved disciple to ask Jesus who is meant, and Jesus indicates Judas by dipping a piece of bread and giving it to him. “After he received the piece of bread, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, ‘Do quickly what you are going to do’ . . . So, after receiving the piece of bread, he immediately went out. And it was night” (13:27-30). How is this pivotal moment to be understood? It is a portrayal of evil as the rejection and betrayal of trust and love. The contrasting figures are, on the one hand, the beloved disciple, who responds to Jesus with trust and love (and later he is present at Jesus’ crucifixion, and is brought together by Jesus with Jesus’ mother into a domestic community of love – 19:25-27), and, on the other hand, Judas, who responds to having his feet lovingly washed by Jesus, and being fed by Jesus, by betraying Jesus. As we will see, John’s account of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus also describes the evil that led to the crucifixion of Jesus in more corporate, systemic terms, seen in the Roman Empire and the Jewish leadership. These wider, systemic dynamics of evil, including but reaching beyond individual sin, are indicated here by Satan entering into Judas; and the cosmic horizon is hinted at in the final note, “And it was night”. John is not giving a theoretical account of evil and sin, but a conceptual analysis of his way of telling the story might help to illuminate what the key points are. One way of analyzing it is as a triple realism. First, there is realism about individual sin and the evil it can do, especially when it adds its energies to more systemic, institutionalized forces, as with Judas helping the Jewish and Roman authorities. Throughout the Gospel of John (and also the accounts in the other Gospels) there is never any attempt to remove responsibility from Judas for his betrayal of Jesus or to make excuses for him. It is possible to read phrases such as “Satan entered into him” or “The devil had already put it into the heart of Judas son of Simon Iscariot to betray him” (13:2) as a sort of determinism, relieving Judas of responsibility for his actions, but there is no hint of that in the text. The realism of personal responsibility persists and is vital for this Gospel’s insistence on the importance of personal response to Jesus. Second, there is a realism about those more systemic forces, reaching beyond individuals, and helping to shape their thoughts and actions. They can be personified as Satan, or “the devil” (8:44, where he is identified with murder and lies), or the “ruler of this world” (12:31; 14:30; 16:11), but there is no independent interest in this figure. He is a personification of evil, enabling clear recognition of evil beyond individual responsibility, and John has one overwhelming concern: to affirm that he has been defeated and does not have the last word (12:31; 14:30; 16:11, 33). This leads to the third, embracing realism: that of Jesus. He is the primary agent in this scene and throughout the Farewell Discourses, his trial, his crucifixion, and his resurrection appearances. His agency is that of love. And love itself is being given new

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content by how he acts and suffers. Judas is free not to respond to having his feet washed and to being fed by Jesus, and Jesus can even say to him, “Do quickly what you are going to do”. But then, after Judas goes into the night, Jesus in the rest of the Farewell Discourses shares with his remaining disciples an understanding both of his own impending death (together with their suffering and grief) and of the ongoing drama of their discipleship beyond his death and resurrection, in which the triple realism is deepened. The deepening happens verse by verse and needs to be followed slowly and reflectively in a way not possible here.5 But for the purposes of this discussion it might be summarized in relation to those three realisms as follows. The first realism about individual sin and personal responsibility is immediately emphasized in the later part of John 13. The “new commandment” to love as Jesus has loved is a radical challenge to each person and to the disciples as a group. It is immediately followed by Simon Peter promising to lay down his life for Jesus, only to be told by Jesus that instead he will deny Jesus three times. All the Gospels are clear about the fallibility of those chosen by Jesus as his disciples.6 Yet the invitation by Jesus into his way of love is intensified in the rest of the Farewell Discourses. Beyond the “servant love” of washing feet, he calls his disciples his friends for whom he is laying down his life (15:12-15), and in the culmination of his climactic prayer he declares his ultimate desire for them: utter union in love and glory with him, his Father, and each other, for the sake of the world (17:20-26). Trust in Jesus is at the heart of this eternal life of mutual love and joy. All through the Gospel the fundamental challenge to readers is to respond to Jesus with trust and belief (the Greek πιστεύειν covers both), and the basic sin is to refuse this. Why? Because the love of God for the world (3:16) is taken as given in Jesus, but for it to be fulfilled it needs to be mutual, and there cannot be mutual love without trust, given freely. Sin and evil are fundamentally about preventing, corrupting, or destroying trust and love. John’s Gospel is crafted so as to attract readers into a deep, lasting life of trusting and loving Jesus: “But these are written so that you may come to believe [πιστεύσ ητε; or πιστεύητε, continue to believe] that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name” (20:31). Its realistic narrative portrays a full range of responses to Jesus chapter by chapter, with the starkest coming in the Last Supper’s line-up of the beloved disciple on the bosom of Jesus, Judas heading into the night to betray him, and Peter on the verge of denying him. John 14–16 then intensifies and enriches the attractiveness of becoming a beloved disciple in terms of loving and being loved, answers to prayer, mutual indwelling, joy, and, above all, the gift of the Holy Spirit; but at the same time there is the prospect of being tested through suffering hatred and persecution. The mystery here is of human freedom and responsibility in relation to the other two realisms.7 The second realism, about evil beyond the individual, is represented by “the world” and by Satan under various names. In the rest of the Farewell Discourses, its mystery is most vividly expressed in the quotation that Jesus uses in preparing the disciples to be hated as he was hated. “If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before

The commentators mentioned earlier have been my main guides in this, and my distillation of their and my own reflections on the Farewell Discourses cover pages 251–353 in Ford, The Gospel of John. 6 For a nuanced, perceptive account of the fallible disciples and others in John’s Gospel, see Susan Hylen, Imperfect Believers: Ambiguous Characters in the Gospel of John (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009). 7 For the importance of this throughout this Gospel, see Ford, The Gospel of John, index references under action/ agency, attraction, decision, desire, freedom, predestination, sin. 5

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it hated you . . . It was to fulfil the word that is written in their law, ‘They hated me without a cause [δωρεάν]’” (15:18, 25). The word “dōrean” literally means “as a gift” and is used for both good and (as here) bad things, resonating with later centuries of wrestling with the bright and dark mysteries of good and evil. These are not capable of explanation, but John 16 concludes with the final anticipatory word on their practical resolution that is about to be enacted in the crucifixion: “But take courage: I have overcome the world!” (16:33). Yet it is vital to note that the content of that victory is his suffering and death, and that this is a victory that requires “courage” on the part of those who claim it, since to be attached to this victor is to be vulnerable to his fate. Donald MacKinnon, whose profound reflections on the tragic dimension of the Gospel of John ring true to me,8 tells a relevant story about a woman who “remarked to the great Duke of Wellington, ‘A victory must be a supremely exhilarating and glorious experience.’ The old man replied: ‘A victory, Madam, is the greatest tragedy in the world, only excepting a defeat.’”9 The third realism is the ultimate bright mystery, that about Jesus, “the light of the world” (9:5), the one to whom, in the theological culmination of the Gospel, Thomas says: “My Lord and my God!” John’s narrative realism strikingly combines pre-resurrection and post-resurrection perspectives,10 and he repeatedly stretches titles, concepts, images, metaphors, and scriptural intertexts in order to try to do justice to it, while always recognizing that nothing is adequate to the unique, utterly unprecedented reality he is portraying: Jesus Christ, the Word of God incarnate, one with humanity, one with the Father, crucified, resurrected, ascended, breathing the Holy Spirit; the “I am” who is present, living and loving as God is present, living and loving, now and eternally. A key term for this radiant, God-centered mystery is glory – or, more distinctively in John, the activity of glorifying.11 Glory first appears in the pivotal verse of the Prologue, 1:14; it frames the Book of Signs (2:11; 11:4, 40; 12:28); it frames the Farewell Discourses (13:31-32; 17:1-5, 22, 24); and its final mention is in the resurrected Jesus’ moving, prophetic conversation with Peter in the final chapter (21:19). As the Farewell Discourses proceed, the glory of who Jesus is is intensified further, inseparably from his forthcoming crucifixion, and associated with astonishing promises (14:12-13; 15:7-8; 16:13, 14) and finally with Jesus summarizing his own achievement in sharing this glory: “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one as we are one” (17:22). So much more could be said about this.12 How do these three realisms relate to each other? That is the ongoing theological challenge of the Gospel of John. I have named them mysteries because they are

See Ford, The Gospel of John, 384. Donald MacKinnon, “Ethics and Tragedy”, in Explorations in Theology 5 (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1979), 182–95, 192. 10 How he does this, and how to come to terms with it, has always been one of the most challenging and fascinating aspects of this Gospel, and is a recurrent theme in Ford, The Gospel of John. 11 See David F. Ford, “‘To See My Glory’: Jesus and the Dynamics of Glory in John’s Gospel”, in Exploring the Glory of God: New Horizons for a Theology of Glory, ed. Adesola Joan Akala (Lanham: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2021), 15–26. 12 See David F. Ford, “Ultimate Desire: The Prayer of Jesus in John 17”, in T&T Clark Handbook to Christian Prayer, ed. Ashley Cocksworth (London: T&T Clark, 2021), 103–20; “Mature Ecumenism’s Daring Future: Learning from the Gospel of John for the Twenty-First Century”, in Receptive Ecumenism as Ecclesial Learning: Principles, Practices, and Perspectives, ed. Paul D. Murray, Paul Lakeland, and Gregory A. Ryan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 414–28. 8 9

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unfathomably deep, and no one has an overview of them except God. They go on stretching minds, hearts, and imaginations. The Gospel of John does this primarily by drawing the reader into constant rereading, rethinking, reimagining, fresh praying, and (some of us) fresh writing. Its final verse acknowledges that the world could not contain the books needed to give a full account of Jesus. But all of this has a practical aim: readers are to use their freedom to go deeper and deeper into this drama and their relationship with Jesus, so as to be able to improvise creatively in their ongoing drama, breathing the Spirit of Jesus, and leading lives of inspired praying, loving, and serving. This way of living as followers of Jesus is a practical response to the problems of suffering, sin, and evil. The complexity and mystery of the drama’s triple realism act, on the one hand, to disrupt overarching generalizations, theories or explanations and, on the other hand, to recall reflection again and again to the drama centered on Jesus and what it means to be sent as he was sent (17:18; 20:21).

TRIAL AND CRUCIFIXION (JOHN 18–19) The intimate drama of the Last Supper is followed by the public drama of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. Space forbids detailed analysis,13 but the key themes already noted are developed further. Judas betrays Jesus (18:1-11), and evil and sin are represented by the political and religious forces of the Roman Empire and the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem combining to have Jesus executed. The complex figure of Pontius Pilate14 takes over from Judas as the individual focus of these dynamics. Simon Peter is the flawed disciple, using his sword (18:10-11) and denying Jesus (18:15-18, 25-27). The beloved disciple stays loyal, and his exemplary role is shared by four women, especially the mother of Jesus, as Jesus, from the agony and humiliation of the cross, forms a new community of love (19:25-27). But, through it all, the primary realism is that of who Jesus is, brought home by the triple “I am” in the arrest scene (18:5, 6, 8), the nature of Jesus’ kingship and of Pilate’s power (18:33-38; 19:11), the truth-centered vocation of Jesus (18:37), the ironies throughout the account regarding who is the real judge (Pilate or Jesus?), the emphasis on the completeness of his death (“Jesus knew that all was now finished . . . ‘It is finished’” – 19:28, 30), and many other touches. What about suffering? Jesus in John is vulnerable and suffers,15 with a distinctive mark of his suffering being its relationship to his loving – for example, being deeply disturbed and weeping over the death of Lazarus (11:33, 35), and, above all, laying down his life for love (15:13). His suffering in anticipation of his crucifixion, which in the Synoptic Gospels is concentrated in his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, is in John distributed across three settings: at the tomb of his friend Lazarus; in prayer to his Father about his death (12:27);16 and at the Last Supper as he anticipates being

See Ford, The Gospel of John, 354–93. On Judas and all the other characters of this Gospel, see D. Hunt Steven, Francois Tolmie, and Ruben Zimmermann, eds, Character Studies in the Fourth Gospel: Narrative Approaches to Seventy Figures in John (WUNT 314; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013). 15 For discussion of this, which has been much debated, see Ford, The Gospel of John, subject index references under darkness, death, flesh, flogged, suffering, tragedy. 16 Note the wider setting of this prayer, which is his response to the approach of some Greeks, representing the wider world beyond Israel. There is a resonance with the headline statement in 3:15-16 about the “lifting up” 13 14

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betrayed (13:21). His suffering during his trial is described as flogging, a crown of thorns, mockery, and being struck in the face (19:1-3). Then, after his condemnation, there is the stark simplicity of: “There they crucified him.” Readers are left to add their own understanding of this appalling form of death by torture. The soldiers dividing his clothes indirectly draws attention to him being naked. His action from the cross is to form a new community of family and more than family, ensuring that the memory of this humiliating death will be at its heart (19:25-27). His suffering on the cross is indicated by “I am thirsty”, and being given sour wine (19:28). Drinking, water, and wine have been important literal and symbolic themes through this Gospel, with their resonances ramifying through the rest of Scripture. The deep irony here is that this is the person who has told the Samaritan woman at the well, “Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty” (4:14), and who provided the best wine for a wedding (2:10). This is a tragic convergence of sin and evil, individual and systemic, in suffering to the point of death. Its meaning is not primarily in any general lesson about sin, evil, and suffering, though the horizon of God and all reality opened up by the Prologue encourages searching out connections, analogies, and wisdom across cultures, religions, arts, fields of knowledge, and other spheres of experience and inquiry. At the heart of it is who Jesus is. The most profound reflection I have found about the suffering of Jesus on the cross is in a poem by Denise Levertov, which is itself a reflection on a passage in the Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich. Julian and Levertov evoke not only the individual, singular human suffering of Jesus but also his universal solidarity: the immense significance of him being at the same time in union with his Father, and at one with human suffering in all times and places.17 The approach of this Gospel to suffering might be seen as a fourth realism, which has its own mystery. And, as with the other three realisms and their mysteries in interplay, the response to this one is primarily practical. All through the Book of Signs, John 2–12, Jesus demonstrates that one key headline for him being sent, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (10:10), means that suffering (a wedding facing disaster, illness, hunger, blindness, and more) is to be responded to with compassion and practical action. The implication is that his followers too (who are later sent as he was sent) should act to alleviate suffering, as well as to enable other ingredients of abundant life – above all, trust and love. But that summary of his mission in 10:10 is immediately followed by 10:11: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” This draws attention inseparably to who he is and to his death for others. There is a more comprehensive mission than dealing with suffering. There are also sin, evil, and death to be dealt with, and all are to be engaged with in person by him. As analyzed earlier, they are dealt with climactically in the interconnected dramas of the intimate Last Supper and his public trial and crucifixion.

of the crucifixion as the key event in God’s love for the whole world. That is the first explicit mention of love in this Gospel. 17 See “On a Theme from Julian’s Chapter XX”, in The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov, ed. Paul A. Lacey and Anne Dewey (New York: New Directions, 2013), 769–70. See Ford, The Gospel of John, 381–2 for comments on this poem.

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RESURRECTION AND ONGOING DRAMA (JOHN 20–21) What is the outcome of this way of “dealing with” sin, evil, suffering, and death? John 20 and 21 give the answer of this Gospel. The outcome is the resurrected Jesus Christ, alive in a new way, bearing the marks of his crucifixion, present as God is present, and inspiring a new act in the drama: “Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (20:21-22). Darkness remains – sin, evil, suffering, and death – but this person has taken them on himself in love, and shares his Spirit so that others too can deal with them. The crowning theological moment of this Gospel is when Thomas, who has insisted on seeing and touching the crucified and risen Jesus, says, “My Lord and my God!” That is the final answer to the question of who Jesus is. But this is immediately followed by Jesus saying, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” (20:28-29). And immediately after that John addresses his readers and gives the purpose of writing his Gospel: for them to believe in and trust Jesus, and to have “life in his name” (20:31). The seeing by original eyewitnesses is to be replaced by reading this testimony. A way forward through this world, with all its sin, evil, suffering, and death – a way embodied and blessed by Jesus – is to be found with the help of this companion text. As Ingrid Kitzberger interprets this beatitude: “Blessed are those who read and reread the gospel and believe”; on which Margaret Daly-Denton comments: “This is a text that calls for re, re and re-readers.”18

FURTHER READING Brodie, Thomas. The Gospel according to John: A Literary and Theological Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Ford, David F. The Gospel of John: A Theological Commentary. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021. Frey, Jörg, “Edler Tod – wirksamer Tod – stellvertretender Tod – heilschaffender Tod: Zur narrativen und theologischen Deutung des Todes Jesu im Johannesevangelium”. In The Death of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel. Edited by Gilbert Van Belle, 65–94. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007. Gardner, Thomas. John in the Company of the Poets: The Gospel in Literary Imagination. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011. Hylen, Susan. Imperfect Believers: Ambiguous Characters in the Gospel of John. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009. Margaret Daly-Denton, John. Supposing Him to Be the Gardener. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017.

Quotation by Kitzberger and comment on it in Margaret Daly-Denton, John: Supposing Him to Be the Gardener (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), 10. 18

Chapter 10

Paul Suffering as a Cosmic Problem T. J. LANG

Humanity is sometimes, extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground To love or not to love suffering, that is the question. How would the Apostle Paul, or any Christian for that matter, respond to Dostoevsky’s “fact” regarding the occasional human attraction to torment? Dostoevsky’s interest is human suffering in the abstract. But within the specific Christian story about the world, suffering is not abstract. Paul maintains that the sufferings of Christ – and the sufferings of those who tell the world about him – are integral to human salvation and the repair of the cosmos. Afflictions endured for the gospel have a specific source and aim. And Paul rejoices in them (Rom. 5:3; Col. 1:24). For the Christian, what’s not to love about suffering – “passionately”, indeed? Dostoevsky’s fact unintentionally formulates one of the greatest challenges Christianity faces in contesting ideas about how to live a life in this world. Friedrich Nietzsche, the formidable nineteenth-century German intellectual, detected this too. Nietzsche views the Christian celebration of suffering as the most perverse mutation of the human “will to power”. Fetishizing suffering, Nietzsche contends, is a cunning strategy the weak use to weaponize their own vulnerability in a desperate grasp for power. In so doing, the weak manifest a suppressed hatred of human life. Responding to Jesus’ maxim that “all who exalt themselves will be humbled and all who humble themselves will be exalted” (Luke 18:14), Nietzsche submits an “improved” translation, appropriate to his diagnosis of the underlying psychology: “He that humbleth himself wants to be exalted.”1 Wants to be exalted. Powerlessness is still all about power, but power perversely conceived. The escapist hope for life after death or the illusion of glory in pain poisons life – this life. The message that something may be gained through suffering and death is, according to Nietzsche’s psychology, the most depraved trick ever played on humanity.2

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human–All too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 48 (§87). 2 These themes resurface in a number of Nietzsche’s works, but especially (and in no particular order) On the Genealogy of Morals, Human–All too Human, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. For Nietzsche’s interaction with Paul specifically, see Abed Azzam, Nietzsche Versus Paul (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 1

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Nietzsche is surely on to something. To applaud suffering as an unqualified good would court abuse in all its manifold evils. (Think of Christian endorsements of chattel slavery, just to kick off a list.) I raise the challenge posed by Nietzsche in a chapter about Paul because I take it to be one the most serious challenges to Christianity itself, and its authenticity in the marketplace of competing ways of living “one true life” in the world.3 If the story of Jesus provides the template for what the Christian confrontation with suffering and death should look like, Paul is the theoretical architect for why this is so. And so to say what needs to be said about Paul with respect to suffering and evil, and to say this most robustly, one must address Nietzsche’s indictment.4 So: What would the apostle who rejoices in his sufferings (Col. 1:24) have to say to Nietzsche’s charge? What does the apostle who wants to leave this world (Phil. 1:23) have to say about its goodness (Gen. 1:31)? How does Paul associate the goodness of life with all the evils opposed to life, including suffering and death? An answer to such questions requires three movements: (1) evil and the cosmos; (2) suffering and the self; (3) and suffering and the problem of evil. A methodological proviso: the “Paul” to whom I refer in this chapter is an amalgamation of the thirteen canonical letters. Given the aims of this handbook, a “canonical Paul” is a far more historically meaningful proposition than any historical-critical reduction of letters attributed to him. The historical-critical enterprise is important, but it is of limited value when one is interested in relating Pauline influence across time. For a dilemma as existentially daunting in Christian theology as suffering and the problem of evil, the Pauline material that the vast majority of Christian thinkers across time have taken to be “Paul” provides a far more interesting contribution to the question.

EVIL AND THE COSMOS Evil is a cosmic problem for Paul. To speak about “evil” in Pauline thought, therefore, it is necessary to talk about Pauline cosmology.5 By “cosmology” I mean understandings of the structure, operation, and demography of the world.6 Everyone has a cosmology. Whether scientifically sophisticated or naively assumed, a cosmology is required for any conscious movement in the world. Paul’s cosmology is especially pessimistic about the On ancient Christianity and ancient rival traditions, see C. Kavin Rowe, One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). For the philosophical seriousness of the Christian “way of life” more generally, see Mark Edwards, ed., The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Philosophy (London/New York: Routledge, 2021). 4 The correctness of Nietzsche’s depiction of Christianity is certainly problematic, though it is not entirely untrue. I side with most of Nietzsche’s criticisms of the version of Christianity he assumes. But it is not a version I recognize. Christians should side with Nietzsche’s entreaty to affirm life and the world. In their best moments, Christians have done this with robust doctrines of incarnation and bodily resurrection, which clearly endorse both body and life. “Otherworldly” Christian emphases are also often misguided when not properly related to the emphasis in Paul on the new creation (2 Cor. 5:17; cf. Isa. 65:17; Rom. 6:4). Any Christian obsession with “God on the cross” that subordinates incarnation, resurrection, and ascension is, as Nietzsche sensed in his own way, theologically disordered. For interesting theological recoveries of Nietzsche, see Bruce Ellis Benson, Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007); Alistair Kee, Nietzsche Against the Crucified (London: Student Christian Movement Press Press, 1999). 5 For “evil” more generally in early Christian and Jewish thought, see Chris Keith and Loren T. Stuckenbruck, eds, Evil in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity (WUNT 2/417; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016). 6 For Pauline cosmology, T. J. Lang, “Cosmology and Eschatology”, in The Oxford Handbook of Pauline Studies, ed. Matthew V. Novenson and R. Barry Matlock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 3

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state of creation. Paul’s world is in bondage and a condition of decay. It swarms with all manner of malign celestial species. Paul’s cosmos is in fact currently under the dominion of these evil, hostile powers. They will not prevail in the end – God will – but they are no less menacing in the present. These non-human heavenly forces are a significant matter of concern for Paul, and they play fundamental roles in his total way of life – and especially in his conception of evil. Because of these forces – Sin included – the current cosmos has been devasted. Because of these forces, humanity and even the whole of creation are in need of rescue and repair. Whereas most Graeco-Roman cosmological theorists regarded the heavenly population positively, Paul’s celestial beings – angels and demons included – are mostly malevolent. And they’re in charge of this world. Even angels are not to be trusted (Rom. 8:38-39; 1 Cor. 6:3; 11:10; 2 Cor. 11:14; 12:7; Gal. 1:8; Col. 2:18). At the top of Paul’s celestial hierarchy is a singular figure: “Satan” (Σατανᾶς). There is precedent in early Jewish literature for a single malevolent arch-antagonist at the summit of a celestial taxonomy of non-human divine beings. Such a figure receives names such as Beliar, Mastema, Azazel, and Beelzebul. The Hebrew satan (“adversary”) is never used like this in the Old Testament (e.g., 1 Sam. 29:4; 2 Sam. 19:23; 1 Chron. 21:1). The satan in the heavenly council of the Lord is not like Paul’s Satan (e.g., Num. 22:22-23; Job 1–2; Zech. 3:1-2). Paul appears to be the first extant author to use the personal name “Satan” for a divine ruler at the top of the demonic population. Paul also refers to this malign celestial agent as “the God of this age” (2 Cor. 4:4), who blinds the minds of unbelievers, and “the Ruler of the power of the air”, which he also identifies as a “spirit” (πνεύμα) (Eph. 2:2). Another Pauline name for Satan is “the Devil” (Διάβολος) (Eph. 4:27; 6:11; 1 Tim. 3:6-11; 2 Tim. 2:26). The most important reference to the Devil is Eph. 6:11-12. This passage also identifies the corps of celestial forces at the Devil’s command: Put on the full armour of God in order to resist the cunning stratagems of the Devil. For our battle is not against blood and flesh but against the rulers (ἀρχάς), against the authorities (ἐξουσίας), against the cosmic powers of the current darkness (κοσμοκράτορας τοῦ σκότους τούτου), against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (πνευματικὰ τῆς πονηρίας ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις. Note again the Devil’s “spiritual” – or “not blood and flesh” – ontology, which is perhaps akin to the resurrected bodies of believers (1 Cor. 15:51-57; cf. Matt. 22:30; Mark 12:25; Luke 20:36). The identification of demonic beings with airy or pneumatic substances is common in antiquity.7 Whatever demons are actually made of, Paul regards them with ontological seriousness. Returning to Satan: his association with evil is clearly highlighted. When Paul directs his audience in Rome to avoid “evil” (τὸ κακόν), he then explains that if they remain on the side of “the good” (τὸ ἀγαθόν) then “the God of peace will soon crush Satan” under their feet (Rom. 16:19-20).8 Opposition to evil in general is thus opposition to Satan in particular. Besides the association with evil, the most prominent character traits of Satan are trickery, deception, and destruction. Writing to the Corinthian assembly regarding a man cohabiting with his father’s wife, Paul issues a decisive directive: “You are to hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh so that his spirit might be saved on the day of the Lord”

See esp. Gregory A. Smith, “How Thin Is a Demon?”, JECS 16 (2008): 479–512. For conquered enemies under the feet of Christ, see 1 Cor. 15:24-28; Eph. 1:20-22; cf. Psalm 110.

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(1 Cor. 5:5; cf. 1 Tim. 1:20). Whatever “destruction of the flesh” might entail, Satan is clearly viewed as lethally serious. Elsewhere Paul highlights the various ways in which Satan interferes with the lives of believers. Satan tempts believers to align with the side of evil (1 Cor. 7:5). Satan also deceives believers with various schemes (2 Cor. 2:11). He will even sometimes disguise himself as “an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14), appearing in the guise of the good but with malign intent. Satan also directs other cosmic creatures to do his bidding, as in the “messenger (ἄγγελος) of Satan” sent specifically to afflict Paul (2 Cor. 12:7). Satan himself took responsibility for repeatedly frustrating Paul’s travel plans (1 Thess. 2:18). As for Satan’s destiny, his deceits will come to an end with the arrival of the eschaton and the return of the Lord. Paul gives his most specific timetabling information about this in 2 Thess. 2:1-12. Much is uncertain here, but what is clear is that Satan will work through an unidentified “man of lawlessness” with signs and false wonders. This will deceive many people for a while, but in the end there will be total destruction (cf. 1 Tim. 5:15). “The Destroyer” is perhaps even a nickname for Satan (1 Cor. 10:10). Much more could be said about Satan and his evil alliance. The point to underscore is the metaphysical seriousness of evil in Paul’s construction of the world. Creation has been “subjected to futility”, to “bondage”, and “decay” (Rom. 8:20-21). Although Christ is currently enthroned “in the heavenly places” and “far above every ruler, authority, power, and dominion” (Eph. 1:21), the cosmos is still a territory governed by “the Ruler of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2) and his ensemble of subordinates (e.g., Eph. 3:10; 6:11-12; Col. 1:16; 2:15). God will prevail and ultimately be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28), but the world remains a very dangerous place with evil reigning as a still potent force. It is crucial to appreciate the ontological gravity of this for Paul. Engberg-Pedersen expresses it well: “The reality and concreteness of Paul’s thinking on angels, demons, and Satan cannot be sufficiently emphasized. These were real beings, most probably at home in the heavenly sphere (possibly in its sublunary part), but also directly influential in the earthly sphere on and in humans in particular.”9 Demons had bodies.10 And they had dominion over vast swaths of the world. Most menacing of all, they might get inside you.11 For believers, resisting evil was very much a matter of combat with powerful spiritual forces, and it required the full “armour of God” (Eph. 6:11-17).

SUFFERING AND THE SELF If a core feature of Paul’s cosmology is a creation subjected to bondage and decay, his sense of selfhood is just as austere – although “in hope”, which is a crucial qualifier (Rom. 8:20). By “sense of selfhood”, I mean Paul’s understanding of the human condition, and especially the condition of believers “in Christ”. This is sometimes described as Paul’s “anthropology”. Suffering is a fundamental feature of Pauline anthropology. Suffering for Paul includes not only the ordinary ailments of life in a devastated cosmos but also (and

Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Cosmology and the Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 93. 10 For more on the bodies of demons, see Lang, “Cosmology and Eschatology”, 11–13; Smith, “How Thin Is a Demon?”. 11 Specific Pauline references to “demons” are restricted to 1 Cor. 10:20-21 and 1 Tim. 4:1. “Demons”, specifically, are also likely implied when Paul associates idols with “so-called gods in heaven or on earth” in 1 Cor. 8:45. Although Paul does not use the “demon” word-group much, I see no mischief in retaining it as a general descriptor for various non-human divine figures. 9

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especially) the specific travails endured by those who give their lives to spread the news of cosmic rescue and repair secured by Christ. Paul’s usual shorthand for this rescue and repair of the cosmos is “salvation”. There are four primary facets to suffering in Paul’s thinking about selfhood: (1) the personal; (2) the christological; (3) the participatory; (4) the vicarious. The personal facet of suffering refers to the ever-present experience of agony in Paul’s life, which is central to his self-identity. The christological facet of suffering refers to the particular way in which Christ’s own sufferings reconfigure Paul’s thinking about suffering in general, but especially suffering that accompanies service for the gospel. The participatory facet of suffering refers to Paul’s understanding of suffering as corporately shared, horizontally with the ecclesial body of Christ and vertically with the ascended body of Christ. The vicarious facet refers to Paul’s commitment to self-giving suffering for the benefit of others. On the personal level, Paul’s familiarity with suffering was extensive. He began his career as a torturer of Jesus’ followers. He was, in his words, “violently persecuting the church of God, trying to destroy it” (Gal. 1:13). He later agonized about this time in his life: “I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God” (1 Cor. 15:9). The suffering he initially perpetrated haunted him forever (Gal. 1:13-14, 22-23; Phil. 3:4-6; 1 Tim. 1:13-15; cf. Acts 7:54-8:3; 9:1-2, 13-21; 22:15, 19-20; 26:4-12). But this man of violence also became an apostle of Christ who would spend the final twenty to thirty years of his life risking everything to advertise the news about the resurrected Christ in every corner of the Roman world (Rom. 15:17-29). He vividly catalogs the imprisonments, countless beatings, and near-death encounters his missionary work entailed in 2 Cor. 11:23-32:12 Five times I have received forty lashes less one from Judeans; three times I was beaten by rod; once I was stoned; three times shipwrecked; a night and day adrift at sea; frequently traveling, with the danger of rivers, danger of robbers, danger of my own people, danger of Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false members, in work and hardship, with many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, frequently without food; in the cold and without sufficient clothing. And apart from other things is the daily pressure on me, the anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak? Am I not weak? Suffering was not just a matter of Paul’s personal experience. He is also one of the great therapists of the suffering life. His great contribution is the christological reconfiguration of human suffering. In this reconfiguration, the human experience of suffering converges with the total story of the crucified and resurrected Christ. Christ’s total story newly determines the human experience. The total story of the crucified and resurrected Christ offers hope that suffering and death will not prevail. Suffering endured in the current world, devastated and enslaved as it is, is temporary and incomparable to the glory that awaits believers in a repaired cosmos (Rom. 8:18). Hope in the midst of suffering is fortified with the confidence that nothing can compromise believers’ security in the love of Christ: “Who will sever us from the love of Christ? Affliction or anguish or persecution or hunger or lack of clothing or endangerment or sword?” (Rom. 8:35). The lengthy answer to this question in 8:35-39 is simple: nothing can separate a believer from Christ’s

See 1 Cor. 4:9-13; 15:32; 2 Cor. 1:8; 6:4-10; 12:10: Phil. 1:29; 3:10.

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love. All suffering in this life is suffering “in hope”. Where suffering abounds, confidence in Christ abounds: “Just as the sufferings of Christ abound for us, so also comfort abounds through Christ for us” (2 Cor. 1:5). This is the therapeutic side of Paul’s christologically determined reconfiguration of suffering. In hardship there is hope in Christ. Now to the participatory and vicarious facets in Paul’s view of the suffering life. As for the participatory facet, Paul ties his communities together by insisting that individual suffering is always corporately shared: “If one member suffers, all members suffer together” (1 Cor. 12:26). This promotes a powerful feeling of social cohesion. Paul further addresses the Corinthian believers with the confidence that they too share in his own sufferings. Paul therefore trusts that, because of this corporate and participatory dynamic with regard to suffering, the Corinthian assembly also shares in his experiences of hope and consolation (2 Cor. 1:17). This is all part of the logic of the ecclesial body of Christ as one body with many members, all of whom belong to each other (1 Cor. 12:1227). But there is more: the participatory nature of suffering among the corporate body of Christ does not only extend horizontally among believers. There is at the same time a vertical factor wherein suffering unites the earthly body of Christ with the heavenly body of Christ at God’s right hand (Rom. 8:34).13 Paul insists that no degree of agony will ever sever believers from Christ’s love – neither “hardship, distress, persecution, famine, lack of clothing, danger, or sword” (Rom. 8:35). But suffering also binds believers to Christ further still. Insofar as believers are “always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake”, this makes Jesus’ own life more visible to all (2 Cor. 4:11). Believers are always “carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies” (2 Cor. 4:10). Paul thus aspires “to know Christ . . . and to experience participation with his sufferings, to be conformed to the pattern of his death” (Phil. 3:10).14 Although such conformity would seem aspirational, in some incredible psychological sense, Paul also regards himself as already conformed to that very pattern: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live” (Gal. 2:20). Finally there is the vicarious facet of suffering. This is Paul’s emphasis on suffering as properly ordered when it is “other-oriented”, or “on behalf of”. Paul never betrays any sense of self-centered masochism. Paul instead insists that the afflictions in his life are for the sake of his communities (Rom. 8:36) and for the extension of the gospel “to every creature under heaven” (Col. 1:23), even to the hostile “rulers and powers in the heavenly places” (Eph. 3:10). In service of this cosmic errand, Paul regards his life as being poured out like a sacrificial libation (Phil. 2:17; cf. 2 Tim. 4:6). Everything he endures, he endures for the ecclesial body of Christ: “If we are afflicted, it is for your encouragement and salvation” (2 Cor. 1:6). In this sacrificial giving of his very being, Paul rejoices. This is Paul’s way of formulating Dostoevsky’s facts about love and suffering. The clearest convergence of vocational calling and vicarious suffering is also one of the most contested sentences in the Pauline corpus: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake as I complete what was lacking in Christ’s afflictions in my own flesh for the

For more on this “vertical factor” and the significance of Christ’s absence in Pauline thought, see T. J. Lang, “A Multiplied Self: Divine Doubles and the Apostle Paul’s Anagogical Realism”, in Talking God in Society: Multidisciplinary (Re)constructions of Ancient (Con)texts; Festschrift for Peter Lampe, vol. 2, ed. Ute E. Eisen and Heidrun E. Mader (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020), 49–66. 14 See the similar participatory logic in Rom. 6:3-11. 13

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sake of his body, which is the church” (Col. 1:24).15 I rejoice in my sufferings. Here Paul’s sufferings and his vocational self-understanding unite. Paul presents the tribulations endured in his missionary endeavors as accomplishing something Christ’s own afflictions did not. There is no reason to take this statement as indicating any deficiency intrinsic to Christ’s afflictions. What is lacking is the distribution of the good news about what Christ has accomplished for humanity. In other words, the deficiency is not in what Christ has done but rather in the conveyance of information that Christ has done it.16 Paul’s sufferings are noteworthy only insofar as they relate to his vocational commission to spread the news about Christ to all creation.17 And this he does with joy. He is indeed a man passionately in love with suffering.

SUFFERING AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL The place to end is with the unlikely pairing with which I began: Nietzsche and Paul. It seems to me they have little to say to one another. Nietzsche misconceives Paul’s world. Paul could never fathom Nietzsche’s. This leaves them as rivals. They cannot both be right. Paul’s cosmic worldview looks forward to a “new creation”. This new world has been inaugurated “in Christ”, but its fullness is still forthcoming (2 Cor. 5:17).18 Paul’s world is one wherein the God of Israel has intervened, definitively, in the person of the Messiah named Jesus. The intervention is to repair a despairing cosmos and rescue humanity from bondage to enslaving forces. Paul’s world is still “the present evil age” (Gal. 1:4) and under the dominion of “the Ruler of the air” (Eph. 2:2), but the beginning of God’s final triumph has commenced. Paul’s world is thus at “the ends of the ages” (1 Cor. 10:11). He can see that “the form of this world is passing away” (1 Cor. 7:31). Paul’s current time is “the time that time takes to come to an end”.19 The era of death is soon to be no more because Jesus was raised from the dead and so conquered it (1 Cor. 15:51-57). To be sure, evil still runs amuck and suffering is an everyday experience. But the ultimate end of evil and suffering is in view.20 Nietzsche’s world has none of this. He

On all thorny issues in this passage and a proposed way through them, see T. J. Lang, “Disbursing the Account of God: Fiscal Terminology and the Economy of God in Colossians 1,24-25”, ZNW 107 (2016): 116–36. 16 For a similar reading, see Bruce T. Clark, Completing Christ’s Afflictions: Christ, Paul, and the Reconciliation of All Things (WUNT 2/383; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015). 17 For the possible association of Paul’s suffering self-identity with Isaiah’s “servants” of the “suffering servant”, see Michael A. Lyons, “Psalm 22 and the ‘Servants’ of Isaiah 54; 56–66”, CBQ 77 (2015): 640–56, esp. 655; Michael A. Lyons, “Paul and the Servant(s): Isaiah 49,6 in Acts 13,47”, ETL 89 (2013): 345–59. If the correlation proposed by Lyons is correct, Paul views himself as a servant commissioned to suffer like Christ, the servant, as “a light to the nations” (Isa. 49:6). The pattern of the “righteous sufferer” in ancient Judaism is certainly an important comparative context for positioning Paul’s self-understanding. 18 For a highly speculative but frequently intriguing account of “last things” in Christian thinking more generally, I recommend Paul J. Griffiths, Decreation: The Last Things of All Creatures (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2014). Although Griffiths’ account is resolutely within a Roman Catholic tradition, his proposals merit the engagement of theologians of all stripes. 19 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 67. 20 Dorothea Bertschmann captures the evil/suffering dynamic at work in Paul’s apocalyptic worldview: “A measure of suffering is the normal fate for those who wish to live in step with the forces of the new age or new creation in the middle of a chaotic and evil cosmos” (“‘What Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stronger’: Paul and Epictetus on the Correlation of Virtues and Suffering”, CBQ 82 (2020): 256–75, 267). 15

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operates with vastly different cosmological assumptions. This is why there will never be a way to broker agreement between Nietzsche and Paul on matters of suffering and evil. So what’s at stake in the stalemate? For Paul, everything. He knew this. He was fully aware that if he was wrong about what Christ has done for the cosmos, he was catastrophically wrong about his whole life. He frankly admits, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is senseless and your faith is senseless. . . . If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiful of all people” (1 Cor. 15:12-19). Equally frank: “If the dead are not raised, ‘let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’” (1 Cor. 15:32). This is Paul’s Dionysian concession. If he is wrong about the world, Nietzsche wins. If Paul is right about the world, perhaps Nietzsche still wins!21 But whatever the case, it’s for the likes of Nietzsche that Paul believes Christ suffered. And so it’s for the likes of Nietzsche that Paul also suffers “to compete what is lacking” by informing the world about what Christ has done for it. It is important to acknowledge that Nietzsche’s criticisms of certain expressions of Christianity are correctly aimed. Loving suffering for the sake of suffering, and not for the sake of others, is misplaced love.22 Self-harm is not Paul’s message. Self-giving love for others is. Seeking death for earthly glory is also not an ambition Paul would endorse. Glory is yet to be revealed (Rom. 8:18), and when it is, it will be manifest in the heavenly Christ (Col. 1:3-4). Glory is God’s. Victims of abusive relationships and other misaligned power dynamics should never be advised to endure ongoing oppression in solidarity with “Christ-like suffering”. This is where suffering and evil meet, but evil is in charge. That linkage of suffering and evil belongs to the cosmos devasted by Sin, not the new creation Paul awaits. Like Christ, Paul suffers to liberate humanity from the oppressive devastation wrought during the reign of evil.23 For Paul, the promise of love and liberation is, as truly precious things are, worth the costs of suffering in the present.24 To love or not to love suffering remains the question.

FURTHER READING Davey, Wesley Thomas. Suffering as Participation with Christ in the Pauline Corpus. Lanham: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2019. Jervis, L. Ann. At the Heart of the Gospel: Suffering in the Earliest Christian Message. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007. Keith, Chris and Loren T. Stuckenbruck, eds. Evil in Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity. WUNT 2/417. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016.

For such hope, see David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2019). 22 For early theological worry about proper approaches to martyrdom (martyrdom “according to the gospel”), see the excellent article by J. Warren Smith, “Martyrdom: Self-Denial or Self-Exaltation? Motives for SelfSacrifice from Homer to Polycarp: A Theological Reflection”, Modern Theology 22 (2006): 169–96. Smith’s essay confronts Nietzsche’s criticism of the Christian “transvaluation” of suffering. 23 There is not space to discuss what is usually called “atonement”, but a notion of ransom from evil forces (and so liberation) is prominent in the Pauline corpus. See, e.g., T. J. Lang, “Sealed for Redemption: The Economics of Atonement in Ephesians”, in Atonement: Jewish and Christian Origins, ed. Max Botner, Justin Harrison, and Simon Dürr (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020), 155–70. 24 For an account of Pauline theology that rightly accents the centrality of love and liberation in Paul’s thought, see Douglas A. Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020). 21

Chapter 11

The Epistle to the Hebrews BRYAN R. DYER

INTRODUCTION The Epistle to the Hebrews was famously described as “a sermon in search of a setting” since so little is known regarding the circumstances of its composition.1 Unlike many of the New Testament letters, there is no epistolary opening identifying the author and audience.2 There is little within the epistle itself to address questions of dating, provenance, or authorship.3 However, this does not mean that Hebrews is a sort of theological treatise floating outside of any situational context. Rather, the text of Hebrews reveals an early Christian community in pain as the author attempts to encourage them and help them make sense of their affliction.4 There is little reflection by the author as to why such suffering exists or how to reconcile the goodness of God with the presence of evil in the world. Instead, Hebrews is grounded in the reality that this community was suffering and were in genuine fear for their lives.5

SUFFERING IN THE COMMUNITY’S PAST AND PRESENT The community addressed in Hebrews were not strangers to suffering. The clearest reference to suffering in the community’s past occurs in Heb. 10:32-36 where the author recalls a difficult time for them. He encourages the community to “remember those earlier days” when they “endured a hard struggle with suffering” (v. 32).6 The author clarifies that this time took place after their conversion (φωτισθέντες) – implying that the suffering may have been a result of their participation in the community. The author describes the community’s sufferings in vivid detail. They were exposed to “reproaches” (ὀνειδισμοῖς) and “afflictions” (θλίψεσιν). The term “reproaches” refers to

William L. Lane, “Hebrews: A Sermon in Search of a Setting”, SWJT 28 (1985): 13–18. I use male pronouns because that is how the author identifies himself in Heb. 11:32. 3 This has not stopped scholars from offering various proposals. Helpful summaries are found in: Harold W. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1989), 1–34; Craig Koester, Hebrews (AB 36; New York: Doubleday, 2011), 41–53; Otto Michel, Der Brief an die Hebräer übersetzt und erklärt, 10th ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1957), 1–33. 4 For a survey of the language of suffering in Hebrews, see Bryan R. Dyer, Suffering in the Face of Death: The Epistle to the Hebrews and Its Context of Situation (LNTS 568; London: T&T Clark, 2017), 77–110. 5 Dyer, Suffering, 111–30. 6 All Scripture citations taken from the NRSV translation unless otherwise noted. 1

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verbal abuse and carries a connotation of shame for those receiving it.7 This is connected to physical abuse (“afflictions”), a term commonly used to describe persecution among the early church (Mark 13:19; John 16:33; Acts 11:19; Rom. 5:3; 1 Cor. 1:4; 1 Thess. 1:6). Members of the community were put in prison (δεσμίοις) while some had their possessions seized from them (ἁρπαγὴν τῶν ὑπαρχόντων) either from an official confiscation or mob activity.8 Looking back, the author praises how the community responded to such hardship. Those not actively suffering were said to be “sharers” or “partners” (κοινωνοὶ) with those who were. Those not in prison showed compassion (συνεπαθήσατε) with those imprisoned. Even when they had their possessions taken from them, they demonstrated a proper response. According to the author, they accepted it with joy (μετα χαρᾶς προσδέξασθε). This was possible because they knew that they had better and permanent possessions that could never be taken from them by an outside force. This time of suffering is clearly in the community’s past, but the text assumes that they were also experiencing suffering in their current context.9 The very reason that the author brings up this difficult time in the community’s history is to encourage them in their present circumstances. Just prior to this passage, the author acknowledges that some in the community had abandoned the group although he does not make clear why they have left (10:25). He is clear, however, about what will happen to those who persist in sin despite having knowledge of the truth. It is not made explicit, but the implication is that those who persist in sin are like, if not the same as, those that have abandoned the community. For them is reserved judgment, vengeance, and a “fury of fire” that will consume them (10:27). Instead of pursuing this path of sin, the author encourages his audience by reminding them of their past endurance in the face of suffering (10:32-36). The descriptions of the community’s responses to their afflictions are illustrations of how they “endured” this “struggle” of suffering (10:32). Endurance in times of suffering was a common praiseworthy attribute in early Christian literature.10 In 10:35, the author brings the audience back into the present: “Do not, therefore, abandon that confidence of yours!” The connection from the audience’s past to their present context is further cemented in 10:36: “For you need endurance.” The community’s present situation calls for the same response from their “earlier days” when they “endured” great suffering. There are other places in Hebrews that suggest a present context of suffering for the original recipients. The most significant passage appears in Heb. 13:3 where the author writes: “Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.” Earlier the audience was praised for how they partnered with those being abused and their compassion to the imprisoned (10:33-34). In their present, some continue to suffer these fates, and the larger community is encouraged to come alongside them. In 12:4, the author identifies that in their “struggle with sin” – sin understood as opposing forces as ἁμαρτωλός is used in the verse prior – they had not yet “resisted to the point of shedding blood”. While this

David A. deSilva, Perseverance in Gratitude: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on the Epistle “To the Hebrews” (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 360; Koester, Hebrews, 459. 8 Koester, Hebrews, 460. 9 See Dyer, Suffering, 44–5; Marie E. Isaacs, Sacred Space: An Approach to the Theology of the Epistle to the Hebrews (JSNTSup 73; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1992), 31. 10 See Rom. 5:3; 12:12; 2 Cor. 1:6; 6:4; 2 Thess. 1:4; James 1:3; 1 Pet. 2:20; Rev. 1:9. 7

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passage can help us limit the severity of the community’s situation – that is, they had not yet had any martyrs – it assumes a certain level of severity. Immediately after this, the author encourages the community to “endure trials” for the sake of “discipline” (παιδεία; 12:7). This passage will be examined later, but it is important to note here that it assumes that the audience was experiencing trials that they needed to endure.

UNDERSTANDING THE REALITY OF SUFFERING The author of Hebrews does not spend any time pondering the origins of evil or suffering, but he does assume certain things about their existence in the world. Like many Jewish writers in the first century, the author of Hebrews draws from apocalyptic thinking – especially the presence of a spiritual realm that impacts the created order. As such, Hebrews assumes a cosmology in which the devil and angels play an active role in the lives of those on earth. Additionally, Hebrews works from the assumption that suffering and death befall all of humanity. In essence, to be human is to suffer and no one – not even God’s Son – escapes suffering. Finally, not only should all humans expect to face suffering, but those in the Christian community should not be surprised when they suffer for that commitment. God’s people have always suffered for their identity (Heb. 11:32-38) and, as the author points out, being a child of God entails suffering in this life.

The Spiritual Realm At several places in the epistle, the author of Hebrews references a spiritual reality that is invisible to, yet influences, the created order. These scenes are typical of Jewish apocalyptic literature, although Hebrews offers its own take on the spiritual and physical realms.11 The author envisions a heavenly realm in which God sits on this throne with Jesus the Son seated next to him (1:3; 8:1; 12:2). This is where the heavenly sanctuary, which served as the model for the earthly sanctuary, exists and where Jesus offered his sacrifice (8:5; 9:11-12, 24). The created world was put under the jurisdiction of humanity and explicitly not of angels (2:5). Angels are understood as spirits that minister to humans (1:14) through whom the gospel message was proclaimed (2:2). Angels are present in the author’s vision of the heavenly Jerusalem (12:22). The author also hints that angels take human form and interact with those on earth (13:2). Evil also exists within the created order. Spiritual maturity, according to the author, includes the ability to discern good from evil (5:14). Believers must constantly be on guard so as not to have an evil heart that is infected by sin and enacted through disobedience to God (3:12; 10:26). All humans are capable of evil, yet Christ’s heavenly offering cleanses an evil conscious (10:22). Suffering and death are often associated with one’s own disobedience and sin is seen as pervasive on earth. Esau, for example, is immoral and godless because of his disobedience (12:16). However, Hebrews also acknowledges forces for evil at work in the world. The devil (διάβολος) is described as “the one who has the power of death” and who has enslaved humanity by their fear of death (2:14).

See Eric F. Mason, “Cosmology, Messianism, and Melchizedek: Apocalyptic Jewish Traditions and Hebrews”, in Reading the Epistle to the Hebrews: A Resource for Students, ed. Eric F. Mason and Kevin B. McCruden (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011), 53–76 (esp. 56–60).

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Suffering as a Part of the Human Experience Hebrews also assumes that suffering and death are a features of the human condition. According to the author, it is inevitable that all mortals will die and then face judgment (9:27). This is one of the shortcomings of the Levitical priesthood – it necessitated numerous priests since “they were prevented by death from continuing in office” (7:23). Suffering is equally inevitable since it is a constant within the human condition. To be human is to experience suffering. Jesus in his humanity participates in suffering, testing, and temptation (esp. 2:9-18). The author is clear that Jesus himself did not sin (4:15), which shows that suffering comes to all humans regardless of their own piety. Rather, for Jesus to “become like his brothers and sisters in every respect” (i.e., become human), experiencing suffering was a crucial component (2:17-18). This idea is encapsulated in Heb. 5:8 when the author uses a popular maxim – μαθεῖν παθεῖν (“to learn [is] to suffer”) – to emphasize Jesus’ humanity. This adage frequently appeared in Graeco-Roman literature to convey a truth about humanity: one learns through suffering.12 The author of Hebrews’ use of this adage is in line with its use by many Greek writers before him, but his application to Jesus conveys the profound truth that the divine Son truly and fully experienced the human condition.13 Suffering, according to Hebrews, is part of the experience of being human. This is not necessarily the result of sin or demonic forces, but rather a reality of the human condition.

Suffering and the People of God Speaking to an early Christian community that was experiencing active suffering, the author of Hebrews makes the case that God’s family has always been marked by suffering. Hebrews 11 recalls numerous figures from Israel’s history who acted in faith despite experiencing great suffering. In language that parallels the audience’s own history with suffering, Moses is praised because he chose “to share ill-treatment with the people of God” rather than “to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin” and he “considered abuse [ὀνειδισμός; used of the community in 10:33] suffered for Christ to be greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt” (11:25-26). In 11:35b-38, the author recounts in general terms the sufferings of other nameless heroes. They experienced torture (τυμπανίζω), mockery (ἐμπαιγμῶν), flogging (μάστιξ), being tied in chains (δεσμός), and imprisonment (φυλακή). They were persecuted (θλίβω) and tormented (κακουχέω) and many were killed in gruesome ways: being stoned to death (λιθάζω), sawn in two (πρίζω), and killed (φόνος) by the sword (μάχαιρα). The author states that these figures were commended for their faith (11:39), but he is also making the point that God’s people frequently suffer. Or, phrased differently, in Hebrews the presence of suffering is not inconsistent with being in the family of God. Rather, being a part of the people of God often entails suffering – sometimes precisely because of that faith commitment. It is significant that Jesus himself suffered greatly during his time on earth (cf. 2:918; 5:7-10; 12:2-3; 13:12). The author frequently connects Christ’s sufferings with his sonship.14 Jesus’ status as God’s υἰός (“son”) did not exempt him from experiencing suffering and death. This is made explicit in Heb. 5:8: “Although he was a Son, he learned See Herodotus, Hist. 1.207; Aeschylus, Ag. 177–8; Sophocles, Oed. Col. 5–7. Bryan R. Dyer, “The Wordplay μαθεῖν-παθεῖν in Hebrews 5:8”, NovT 63, no. 4 (2021): 489–504. 14 On the notion of Jesus’ sonship in Hebrews, see R. B. Jamieson, The Paradox of Sonship: Christology in the Epistle to the Hebrews (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2021). 12 13

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obedience through what he suffered.” In a similar way, Jesus’ sufferings are connected to his sonship in 2:9-18 as the author establishes his sibling relationship with humanity. Familial language is used extensively in this passage to connect Jesus to believers as siblings and to God as children. God is the Father (πατήρ; 2:11; cf. 1:5; 12:9) of many children (“sons”; υἱοί, 2:10). Since they share the same Father, the author writes, Jesus “is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters” (ἀδελφοί; 2:11-12). These “children” (παιδίον; 2:14) share flesh and blood and are alike in every way – including suffering (πάσχω). Just as how Jesus the Son experienced suffering, Hebrews argues that the believer is also to expect to suffer a member of God’s family. The author makes this explicit in Heb. 12:7: “Endure [hardships] for discipline; God is treating you as his children.”15 The next verse indicates that the presence of such discipline is a sign that one is truly a child of God (“if you do not have that discipline . . . then you are illegitimate and not his children”). The point is not to shame the audience for their lack of discipline, but rather to put a positive spin on the harsh suffering that they are facing. When viewed as an opportunity for discipline (a notion to be explored later), it becomes a sign that one truly belongs to God. The family of God has always experienced suffering and even God’s own Son suffered. Therefore, the presence of suffering is not a sign that one had wandered from the family but can function as validation that one is a child of God.

RESPONDING TO SUFFERING AND EVIL One purpose for the composition of Hebrews was for the author to address the suffering family of God and to encourage them in their affliction. He does this in three ways. First, Hebrews offers eschatological hope by pointing to a future reward for those who faithfully endure. Second, the epistle offers a dramatic reinterpretation of suffering as something that is positive and useful for spiritual growth. Third, the author offers models of faithful endurance through suffering. These models often demonstrate an eschatological point of view that sees beyond their circumstances to a spiritual reality. The community too must faithfully endure and actively participate with Christ and the family of God through suffering toward heavenly reward.

Eschatological Hope The author of Hebrews understands the Christian community as living in the “last days” (1:2), that Christ ushered in the “end of the age” (9:26), and that they await the “approaching day” (10:25) and the city “to come” (13:14).16 While the present age is full of suffering, better things await those that faithfully endure. An example of this comes right after the community is reminded of their past sufferings in Hebrews 10: “Do not, therefore, abandon that confidence of yours; it brings a great reward. For you need endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised” (10:35-36). The author then quotes from Hab. 2:2-3 to encourage his audience that “in a very little while, the one who is coming will come and will not delay” (10:37). This promise of future glory for those who remain faithful is repeated

My own translation. I translate υίός (“sons”) using gender-neutral language, although the connection to Jesus being described as a υίός should not be lost. 16 For more on Hebrews’ two-age eschatology, see Scott D. Mackie, Eschatology and Exhortation in the Epistle to the Hebrews (WUNT 2.223; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 29–152. 15

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throughout the epistle (3:6, 14; 4:14-16; 6:11-12; 10:23-25, 35-38; 11:16, 39-40; 12:23, 11, 28; 13:14-16). A consistent theme in Hebrews is the need to firmly hold onto the community’s confession (3:6, 14; 4:14; 6:18; 10:23) while moving forward and not shrinking back (4:1, 16; 6:1; 10:22, 39; 13:13). The community can move forward because of their confidence in their high priest and because of the hope set before them (3:6; 4:14; 6:11, 18-19; 7:19; 10:23). This eschatological hope is connected to the epistle’s emphasis on victory over and new life after death. The community was not only actively suffering but were “held in slavery by their fear of death” (2:16). Through Jesus, however, God has defeated death. The author emphasizes the relevance of Christ’s death for the suffering community. Jesus tasted death for everyone (2:9) and in this he brought God’s children to glory (2:10), became a source of eternal salvation (5:9), and cleansed the consciousness of God’s people (9:14; 10:22) and made them holy (13:12). Further, the author writes that Jesus shared in humanity so that “by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death – that is, the devil” (2:14). As the people’s forerunner, Jesus is presented as alive and in the presence of God after his death. He is presently crowned with glory and honor (2:9), seated by God’s throne (12:2), serves as the people’s high priest (5:10; 7:24-25), and will return to earth (9:28; 10:37). Jesus continues to “live” (7:25), has the “power of an indestructible life” (7:16), and offers a “new and living” way (10:20). Others are presented as avoiding death or continuing to act after death: Melchizedek (7:3), Abel (11:4), and Enoch (11:5). The heroes of faith in chapter 11 looked ahead to a future promise and reward after death. They saw this promise from a distance and acted in faith (11:13, 26, 39).

Growth and Training For Hebrews, one’s response to suffering should not be solely motivated by eschatological reward. Faithfully enduring through times of trial brings benefits in the present life as well. Simultaneous with the motivation of future reward is the author’s emphasis that endurance through suffering is doing “God’s will” (10:36). The author of Hebrews calls his audience to radically reinterpret their sufferings. Again, we can look to 10:32-36 to illustrate this point. How the community responded to the public ridicule and physical abuse that was intended to shame and marginalize them, in the view of the author, illustrates their honor and praiseworthy traits. They should look back at this time not with embarrassment or regret but with esteem and confidence. In this way the author sets up a new “court of opinion” by which the community determines what is honorable and what is shameful.17 To the outside world, suffering is shameful or a sign of divine abandonment, but within the Christian community suffering because of one’s obedience to God is full of honor. Moses chose to suffer for Christ instead of enjoying earthly riches (11:26). Similarly, Jesus endured the “shame” of crucifixion and is now seated at God’s right side (12:2). Jesus’ sufferings in Hebrews are understood as a vital part of the process by which he was perfected (2:10; 5:9). In the epistle, “perfection” (τελειότης) is something that the community should aspire to (6:1) yet it was not obtainable through the Levitical priesthood (7:19; 9:9; 10:1). For the believer, suffering is not presented as part of a process toward perfection as it is with Jesus’ perfection. While Jesus’ endurance and

See David A. deSilva, The Letter to the Hebrews in Social-Scientific Perspective (Eugene: Cascade, 2012), 140.

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suffering provide a model for believers, in Hebrews it is only by Jesus’ offering that believers are perfected (10:14).18 Experiences of suffering are, however, presented as opportunities for growth. This is explicit in the author’s description of suffering as divine παιδεία (“discipline”) in 12:513. In this passage, the community is encouraged to “endure [hardships] for [παιδεία]”.19 The term “παιδεία” and its cognate παιδεύω (used five times in this passage) commonly conveyed the notion of educating youth with various disciplines and chastisement.20 Such “discipline” might involve the correction of an error but the term could also convey “instruction” or “training” apart from the need for correction. It frequently carried the idea of being educated and equipped to help meet a challenge.21 The author of Hebrews plays with this range of meanings in this passage but offers two contexts for understanding hardships as παιδεία: parental discipline and athletic training. In 12:5-6, the author quotes from Proverbs 3, describing it as an exhortation that addresses the audience as “children”. The quotation establishes divine discipline as an indication of God’s love and acceptance. Similarly, according to Hebrews, the community should understand their hardships to be like discipline administered from their heavenly father for their benefit. The author assumes that the audience understands and validates the necessity of parental discipline (12:9). If this is true, then how much more valid is discipline that comes from God the Father? “He disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share his holiness” (12:10). Even though parental discipline in both Greco-Roman and Jewish cultures frequently included corporal punishment, there is not a sense in this passage that the community should view their παιδεία as the result of sin or disobedience.22 Rather, by connecting the community’s hardships to divine παιδεία the author establishes the familial relationship between God and the community and presents such hardships as opportunity for growth and sharing in God’s holiness. The author develops the insight that παιδεία can bring about growth by incorporating athletic imagery in this passage. The opening verse of chapter 12 used the metaphor of a “race” (ἀγών) to encourage the audience to “run with perseverance” (δι’ὑπομονῆς τρέχωμεν). This imagery is picked back up in 12:11 as the author declares that παιδεία is never pleasant at the time, but later yields fruit for those who are “trained” (γυμνάζω, “exercised”) in it. Athletic language continues in the following verses: “Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed” (12:12-13). The comparison of the community’s hardships to παιδεία – depicted as both parental discipline and athletic training – articulates the formative potential of faithfully enduring affliction. Jesus himself “learned obedience” (5:8) and was “made perfect” (2:10) through his sufferings. In the same way, the community is encouraged to reimagine their hardships as opportunities for strengthening and developing their faith. The author of Hebrews knew that the audience of the epistle were facing afflictions and trials. His exhortation to

David Peterson, Hebrews and Perfection: An Examination of the Concept of Perfection in the “Epistle to the Hebrews” (SNTSMS 47; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 174–6. 19 My own translation. “Hardships” is assumed from the context. 20 Georg Bertrand, “Παιδεύω, etc.”, in TDNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 5:596–625. 21 Koester, Hebrews, 527. 22 N. Clayton Croy, Endurance in Suffering: Hebrews 12:1-13 in Its Rhetorical, Religious, and Philosophical Context (SNTSMS 98; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Phillip A. Davis, Jr., The Place of Paideia in Hebrews’ Moral Thought (WUNT 2.475; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018). 18

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endure their trials as divine παιδεία should be understood against this backdrop. Hebrews 12:5-13 is not an encouragement to pursue or seek out suffering for one’s growth but rather exhorts a community already suffering to dramatically reinterpret their hardships from a divine perspective.

Models of Endurance in Suffering Like many ancient writers, the author of Hebrews appeals to various illustrative figures and exemplars to motivate his audience.23 The epistle props up figures from Israel’s story as exemplars of behavior to imitate (or avoid) and groups many of these figures into a lengthy retelling of Israel’s history (Heb. 11). In Hebrews, these exemplars are often praised for their endurance and faith in times of affliction and ability to look past the present – even past death – to an eternal reward. Patience and endurance during times of trial are praised by the author as traits worthy of his audience’s emulation. They are encouraged to be “imitators” (μιμηταὶ) of those that inherited God’s promises through faith and patience (6:12). Abraham is offered as an exemplar of “patient endurance” (μακροθυμέω) that led to receiving God’s promise (6:1315). Moses similarly “persevered” (καρτερέω) after choosing ill-treatment and defying the Pharaoh (11:24-28). The recipients are to run with “perseverance” (ὑπομονή) while looking to Jesus as a model of one who “endured” (ὑπομένω) hardships (i.e., “the cross”). They are explicitly told: “Consider him who endured [ὑπομένω] such hostility against himself from sinners, so that you may not grow weary or lose heart” (12:3). Faith (πίστις) is another praiseworthy response to suffering in Hebrews. Those that inherit God’s promises demonstrate faith in adversity (6:12). The audience is encouraged to remember their fallen leaders and “imitate” (μιμέομαι) their faith (13:7). The wilderness generation, by contrast, are negative exemplars since they did not receive God’s promised rest because they failed to act in faith (4:2). God’s people, the author makes clear, live by faith (10:38) and this is reinforced by his list of key figures from Israel’s past in chapter 11. This chapter moves chronologically through Israel’s history to highlight key individuals that demonstrated faith. While these exemplars are being praised for acting “by faith” (πίστει – a word that is repeated throughout), it is the context of this faith that connects them to the audience of Hebrews. In nearly every case, the exemplars demonstrate faith within a context of suffering or death.24 Abel still speaks beyond death (11:4), Noah built an ark in the face of human extinction (11:7), and Abraham acted in faith even thought he was “as good as dead” (νενεκρωμένου; 11:12). The same is true of Jacob while dying (11:21), Joseph at the end of his life (11:22), and Moses while being mistreated (11:25). Other nameless exemplars were faithful despite being tortured, flogged, and imprisoned (11:35-36). Many exemplars died by brutal means, including being stoned, sawn in two, and killed by the sword (11:37). All of these exemplars, the author points out, “died in faith” (11:13). The list culminates with Jesus who acts as the supreme exemplar of faith in suffering and death (12:2-3). The audience is encouraged to “look to” (ἀφοράω) Jesus, the pioneer and perfector of πίστις, who endured hostility and the cross, disregarded its shame, and is now seated at the right hand of God.

See Dyer, Suffering, 131–74. See Bryan R. Dyer, “‘All of These Died in Faith’: Hebrews 11 and Faith in the Face of Death”, The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 83, no. 4 (2021): 638–54.

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In addition to their faith and endurance, every single exemplar is praised for their ability to look ahead to God’s promises despite their difficult present reality. Jesus endured the cross because of the “joy set before him” (12:2). The exemplars of chapter 11 saw God’s promises from a distance and greeted them (11:13). Abraham looked ahead to a city built by God (11:10) and Moses persevered because he “saw him who was invisible” (11:27). Even though many of these exemplars did not receive God’s promise in their lifetime (11:39), God has prepared something better for them in the afterlife (11:16, 40). The community addressed in Hebrews are themselves presented as exemplars of faithful endurance while looking ahead to heavenly reward. They are reminded of their godly work in 6:10 and encouraged to continue in their diligence so that they might “realize the full assurance of hope to the very end” (6:11). Similarly, in recalling their former time of suffering in 10:32-36, they are praised for their ability to look beyond their present circumstances toward a future reality. They “cheerfully accepted” the plundering of their possessions because they knew that they “possessed something better and more lasting” (10:34). This type of faithful endurance, the author reminds them, “brings a great reward” (10:35) and will result in them receiving what was promised (10:36).

CONCLUSION In the closing chapter of Hebrews the author offers a series of imperatives to the audience, including calls to obey their leaders (13:17), welcome strangers (13:2), and honor marriage (13:4). Among these imperatives is a call for the recipients to follow the example of Christ even though it will likely include suffering (13:13). This exhortation is rooted in exposition concerning the atoning sacrifice of Jesus. The author points out that Jesus suffered and died outside of the city gates just like how sacrificial animals were burned outside of the city after they were sacrificed (13:12). He then writes: “Let us then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured” (13:13). In these verses are key aspects of the epistle’s teaching on suffering. The community is encouraged to continue the path of faith even though it will involve suffering and likely death. Here, again, Jesus serves as an exemplar of walking in faithful obedience despite suffering. Finally, like the many other references to suffering in the epistle, the author’s encouragement to endure is connected to eschatological hope: “For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city to come” (13:14). The Epistle to the Hebrews is a text written to a community that was actively experiencing suffering and were fearful for their lives. The author offers words of hope and encouragement to help them reinterpret their affliction and respond with faithful endurance. Suffering is a reality of the human condition, and being a member of God’s family does not exempt one from hardships. However, God is faithful to reward those that respond to suffering and death with faith. The epistle repeatedly reminds the community of this eschatological hope while offering various exemplars of faithful endurance to encourage them. The author does not explore larger questions of why suffering or evil exists but rather meets his audience in their suffering and offers them hope in Christ.

FURTHER READING Croy, N. Clayton. Endurance in Suffering: Hebrews 12:1–13 in Its Rhetorical, Religious, and Philosophical Context. Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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Dyer, Bryan R. Suffering in the Face of Death: The Epistle to the Hebrews and Its Context of Situation. Library of New Testament Studies 568. London: T&T Clark, 2017. Eisenbaum, Pamela. “The Virtue of Suffering, the Necessity of Discipline, and the Pursuit of Perfection in Hebrews”. In Asceticism and the New Testament. Edited by L. E. Vaage and V. L. Wimbush, 331–53. New York: Routledge, 1999. Stevenson-Moessner, Jeanne. “The Road to Perfection: An Interpretation of Suffering in Hebrews”. Interpretation 57 (2003): 280–90. Talbert, Charles H. Learning through Suffering: The Educational Value of Suffering in the New Testament and in Its Milieu. Collegeville: Liturgical, 1991.

Chapter 12

The Book of Revelation JOSEPH L. MANGINA

INTRODUCTION That the book of Revelation should have something to say about evil and suffering seems self-evident in light of its original Greek name: the Apocalypse. In popular culture, the words “apocalypse” and “apocalyptic” connote damage and destruction on a catastrophic scale, leading to “the end of the world as we know it”. Apocalypse is the stuff of dystopian fantasy and stories of political and social upheaval. To some extent, the book lives up to these expectations. It describes (often in lurid detail) the world as it exists under the sway of various malign agencies: Satan, Death, Hades, the beast whose number is 666. C. S. Lewis, a thinker whose imagination was deeply imbued with apocalyptic themes, once spoke of creation under the conditions of the fall as “enemy-occupied territory”.1 That is not a bad description of the world according to Revelation. The earth is a dark place. Not only is the world occupied territory, but sinful humans – “the earthdwellers”, in Revelation’s parlance – are guilty of collaborating with the enemy forces. In response to this intolerable state of affairs, the LORD has no choice but to visit the earth as its judge – a common enough biblical scenario, but here portrayed with unmatched literary skill and imaginative power. As much as Revelation is a story of judgment, however, it is also a story about wholeness and redemption. God the Creator does not simply act against evil but for the world – human beings in particular. Indeed, one of the challenges in writing about evil in Revelation is that the “reality” of evil can only be grasped as one attends to its positive account of God, creation, and deliverance in Jesus Christ. In what follows, I will adopt a commentary-like approach to unpacking the themes of evil and suffering in Revelation. For convenience2 I divide the text into four major sections: (1) 1:1–3:22, encompassing the Prologue and the letters to the seven churches of Asia Minor; (2) 4:1-11:19, where the visions proper begin, marked by the opening of the seven-sealed scroll and the blowing of the seven trumpets; (3) 12:1–22:5, describing what might be called evil’s last stand, and climaxing with the fall of Babylon and the coming of the New Jerusalem. The book concludes with an Epilogue (with 22:6-21), in which Christ speaks directly to the reader. After this whirlwind tour of John’s visions, I

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (San Francisco: HarperCollins, [1952] 2009), 46. No claim is being made here that this outline represents “the” structure of Revelation. Every commentary has its own proposal. The previous sketch reflects the major breaks in the text at 4:1, 12:1, and 22:6, on which there is broad agreement.

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will offer some concluding remarks on the light Revelation sheds on the mystery of evil and suffering.

THE KEYS OF DEATH AND HADES: JESUS AS VICTOR OVER EVIL (REV. 1:1–3:22) Revelation is a book about Jesus; indeed its title is “the revelation of Jesus Christ”. But Jesus cannot be spoken of apart from the mention of suffering: I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, “Write what you see in a book and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus and to Smyrna and to Pergamum and to Thyatira and to Sardis and to Philadelphia and to Laodicea.” (1:9-11)3 The opening establishes three things. First, John identifies himself as one who stands in solidarity with his readers. Despite his physical separation from them, he is their brother, a co-participant (συγκοινωνὸς) in the threefold reality of “the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance” (ἐν τῇ θλίψει καὶ βασιλείᾳ καὶ ὑπομονῇ). Suffering, here, is not a problem to be speculated about from a safe distance. It is the very reality in which the author and his readers find themselves. The word “θλίψις”, tribulation, may also be translated pressure, affliction, distress. It connotes a condition of fundamental passivity or being out of control; whereas ὑπομονῇ, patient endurance, suggests active perseverance or faithfulness in the midst of suffering. The ὐπομονῇ to which John summons his readers is that which confirms their loyalty to God and Jesus and leads to salvation. Second, the location where John and his readers find themselves is precisely “in Jesus”. Doubtless, there are external factors that could be named as the “cause” of their distress, persecution by Roman or local authorities being one of the most obvious. But these things are secondary. Far more determinative is the fact that θλίψις and ὑπομονῇ are part of the birth-pangs of Messiah and his kingdom. The old world must be unmade before the new one can be born: and this cannot but be a disorienting and painful experience. Third, John received his visions when he was “in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day”, or what the Romans called Sunday, the day when Christians gathered to worship God in the name of Jesus. This brief phrase signals the fundamentally liturgical character of the Apocalypse. It is in worship that the churches of Asia Minor will come to know the truth about themselves, which is the truth of the God who made all things and has redeemed them from every evil power in the person of Jesus. In this sense, Revelation opens with evil already “dealt with”, as is suggested also by the words in which Jesus introduces himself to the prophet: “Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades” (1:17). The sequence of tenses is notable. The speaker was dead, but is alive. Christ is neither ghost nor shade, but a living person who, unimaginably, can speak of his own death as an event in the past. Little wonder, then, that he holds the “keys” of Death and of Hades: there is literally no power in creation of which he is not the lord. Among the Unless otherwise indicated, all scriptural citations are from the English Standard Version of the Bible.

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best commentaries on Revelation from this point of view are those Orthodox icons of the Resurrection that depict Christ reaching down to draw forth Adam and Eve from the depths of Hades.4 But if Christ is the cosmic Lord of all things, he is also the lord of the churches in their very specific situations of distress. The seven churches differ from one another not only with respect to their circumstances but in what might be called their “ecclesial character”. Some of the churches are poor, others rich (or imagine themselves to be such, 3:17). Some assemblies are struggling, others proud. Some are faithful, others have made grievous compromises with their social world. One church is simply and famously mediocre: so disgusted is Jesus by the lukewarm church in Laodicea that he threatens to spit them out of his mouth (3:15). Fully five of the seven communities are called on to repent of their evil ways and return to the Lord. All the communities receive the promise that “the one who conquers” will have a share in the new Jerusalem, receiving a reward commensurate with their patient endurance on earth. What the letters show us, then, is a set of communities living in a world largely beyond their control, a world of false gods (“where Satan’s throne is”, 2:13 – probably a reference to a pagan temple) and practices incommensurable with the life of Christian holiness. The world is full of evil forces. But evil is not fate. One of the more striking aspects of the letters is that they create an atmosphere alive with agency and possibility: possibility enabled by the very speech of the One who is addressing them.

UNSEALING THE SCROLL: DIVINE POWER AND PATIENCE IN A WORLD FULL OF EVIL (REV. 4:1–11:19) There is no evil in heaven. The heavenly liturgy in chapter 4, which commences Revelation’s visions proper, shows the representatives of creation (the four living creatures) and Israel (the twenty-four elders) bowing down in adoration before the LORD’s throne. The characteristic activity of heaven appears to be song: Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created. (4:11) This and the other songs in Revelation may be taken as the liturgical, performative expression of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. One inference traditionally drawn from this teaching is that evil can have no being or substance in its own right. If evil were “real” it would be either a rival deity or a thing created and therefore divinely willed – equally unappealing options for worshipers of Israel’s God. In the realm of earth, however, evil nonetheless “is”; the sealed scroll the LORD holds in his right hand (5:1) suggests as much. From the events that follow, we must infer that the scroll contains the divine answer to the powers that oppress creation. “Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?”, a mighty angel cries (5:2). The entire drama of Revelation hangs on the answer to this question. When no creature all of the cosmos found worthy to open the scroll, the Seer weeps; in this moment, Revelation fleetingly entertains the possibility of a tragic outcome to creation – only to dismiss it. One of the The most famous being the fresco in the Church of St. Saviour Chora in Istanbul.

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heavenly elders commands John: “Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals” (5:5). John turns to see this conquering hero – who can only be Israel’s Messiah – and beholds “a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain, with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth” (5:6). One of Revelation’s favorite epithets for the LORD is ὁ παντοκράτωρ, the All-Powerful One. The divine power is amply demonstrated in the events that follow, a series of terrible events marked by the opening of the seven seals and the blowing of the seven trumpets. We are plunged without explanation into a world of malign powers, which the LORD permits and even uses to carry out his will over creation. The Seer frequently signals the divine permission of evil through the use of passive constructions. We are told, for instance, that the powers of Death and Hades “were given authority” [ἐδόθη αὐτοῖς ἐξουσία] to kill people by sword, famine, and pestilence (6:7). Likewise the mysterious “star” that falls from heaven at the blowing of the fifth trumpet – a fallen angel, perhaps even Satan himself – “was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit” (9:1). Out of this pit emerges a grotesque cavalry of locust-scorpions, who “were allowed” to inflict excruciating pain on the ungodly (9:5-6) – surely one of the more disturbing images in a book that is full of them. Revelation offers its readers neither a theodicy nor a philosophy of history that would help to soften the blow of passages like these. To be human is to suffer; to be a sinner is to suffer under God’s judgment; Revelation offers no apologies either for divine power or for God’s resistance to the human project in the world as we know it. Among the ironies exposed in the book is the strange logic by which human beings suffer at the hands of the very idols and demons to which they have bound themselves (cf. 9:20-21). The LORD’s purpose is to break this cycle, penultimately by speaking a series of “No’s”, ultimately through the utterance of a sovereign “Yes”. That “Yes” is the Lamb. The Lamb is the controlling figure in the Apocalypse, its imaginative center, and its chief alternative to a theodicy. It is the true worship of God, centered on Christ, that promises to break the hold of the idols, and gather human beings into a new community, drawn from all the tribes and languages of the earth. Juxtaposed with the scenes of plague and judgment in Revelation’s early chapters are scenes depicting the gathering of the church, whether viewed as Israel (7:1-11), as a multi-ethnic company of martyrs (7:12-17), or as a company of prophets sent out on mission to the “great city” (11:1-14). Replicating the pattern of Jesus’ own life and death, the church may be seen as the visible display of the divine patience. This helps explain one of Revelation’s more puzzling literary features: that the End is repeatedly delayed, creating time and space for the gathering of the final Community (6:9-11). The blood-soaked solidarity between Christ and his followers is hardly an “answer” to the problem of evil, but it does suggest that God’s ultimate victory will be attained not by force but by suffering love. The only question, perhaps, is how large the company of the Lamb’s followers will be. Revelation wisely leaves that question open, though there are more signs of possible universal salvation than one might expect.5

See M. Eugene Boring, Revelation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox (Press), 1989); Jacques Ellul, Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation, trans. George Schreiner (New York: Seabury Press, 1977).

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UNMASKING THE POWERS: THE FALL OF BABYLON AND THE COMING OF THE NEW JERUSALEM (REV. 12:1–22:5) Commentators have long recognized that Revelation 12 marks something of a fresh start to the narrative. The new set of visions begins with the Seer beholding a great sign in heaven: a “woman clothed with the sun and with the moon at her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars”, groaning in the agonies of childbirth (12:1). She is paired with a mighty opponent, a red dragon with seven heads and ten horns. After sweeping a third of the stars from the sky (!), the dragon sets about to devour the woman’s newborn. But the latter, a “male child, one who is to rule the nations with a rod of iron”, is rapt into heaven, while the woman is delivered to a place of safety in the wilderness (12:5-6). If ever a text of Scripture cried out to be read as an allegory it is this one. The dragon is the devil, “that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world”; this is one of the few instances where Revelation interprets its own symbols (12:9). Her male child is, of course, Jesus. The identity of the woman is more complex. She is first of all Israel or Daughter Zion, the mother who brings forth the Messiah into a world of danger; a secondary reference to Mary cannot be excluded. She is also Eve, mother of all the living, to whom God promises that her “seed” (offspring) would crush the serpent’s head (Gen. 3:15). Her “other seed” are Jesus’ brothers and sisters, the church, pursued by the dragon after his failed attempt on the mother and her son (12:17). What John achieves here is nothing less than the retelling of Jesus’ story as a drama of cosmic scope and import. The conflict between Christ and Satan is no matter of merely local significance. It encompasses all of creation; the issue at stake here is precisely the threatened unity of God with the world, humanity in particular, so rightly Ellul.6 This cosmic scope becomes even more clear in the sequel to this narrative, the story of “war in heaven” that pits the archangel Michael and the heavenly host against the dragon and his angels, resulting in the latter’s being cast out of heaven, where there was “no longer any place for them” (12:8). Reading this account, we ask ourselves: “when is all this supposed to be happening?” Was Satan cast out in some primordial conflict at the dawn of time? – so Milton in Paradise Lost, and any number of Christian writers across the ages. Was he defeated in the incarnation, when the rift between God and the human was decisively healed? (so again Ellul). Or is Satan defeated in the lives of God’s faithful ones? This is suggested by the hymn that celebrates the coming of Messiah’s kingdom, for “the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death” (12:10-12). In fact, there is no need to choose among these alternatives; Revelation is disarmingly cavalier about matters of temporal sequence.7 Clearly it is the “blood of the Lamb” – Jesus’ crucifixion – that is the decisive, we might say constitutive, form of Satan’s defeat. But that victory is anticipated in heaven’s eternal counsels, and reduplicated and confirmed in See Ellul, Apocalypse, 85. A point recognized as early as the fourth century by Tyconius, who pioneered the idea that Revelation’s visions “recapitulate” themselves, rather than representing a strict temporal sequence. See Judith Kovacs and Christopher Rowland, Revelation (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 15–17. 6 7

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the cruciform witness of Jesus’ followers. However we work out the temporal dialectics of the matter, the crucial thing is that “the devil and all his works” have no place in a world where God is the Creator and Jesus is Lord (Book of Common Prayer, Service of Holy Baptism). All of which begs a very large question: Is the devil “real”? There is an obvious fantastic element to Revelation’s imaginative portrayal of Satan in Revelation 12. John no more thinks the devil is literally a dragon with seven heads and ten horns than he believes Jesus to be a grotesque, many-eyed sheep. But the mythic8 form of the depiction does not detract from the reality it represents. Revelation’s Satan must be seen as a real, created antagonist to God the Creator.9 Theologically speaking, there is merit in identifying evil not as mere privation but as a “positive power”, a spirit of spiteful envy arising from within the heart of creation itself.10 Or as another modern theologian puts it, if we think of God as the One who loves the world and values all things, there is also “somewhere in being, somewhere out there and in there and down there, a subjectivity that comprehensively despises the world, that hates all things”.11 It is in the very character of this “subjectivity” that he hides himself under an endless variety of masks, designed to make idolatry seem plausible, even attractive. In Revelation 13, the Seer offers a brilliant description of two such masks. We hear of a beast (θέριον) from the sea and a beast from the land, following the apocalyptic convention of using animal symbols to depict historical powers (as in the book of Daniel). The beast from the sea is the incarnation of sheer, unstoppable force. It is all the more impressive in that it suffered a “mortal wound” and yet miraculously returned to life. People bow down to it in worship, crying “Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?” (13:4). Together, the dragon and the first beast form a pair of evil counterparts to the Father and the Son. “Just as the dragon parodies the Creator, the first beast . . . is a clear parody of Christ.”12 Even if Revelation does not actually call this being “the Antichrist”, as in the Johannine epistles, the name is apt (1 John 2:18, 2 John 1:7). If the first beast is the Antichrist, the second is his prophet, indeed the False Prophet par excellence. He seduces people into idolatry, enticing them to “make an image for the beast that was wounded by the sword and yet lived” (13:14). He is a worker of impressive miracles, giving breath or spirit [πνεῦμα] to the first beast’s image and endowing it with the power of speech. The False Prophet speaks like a dragon (he is a mouthpiece of Satan) but has horns like a lamb (thus mimicking Christ, 13:11). This monster causes people from all social classes to be “marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the [sea] beast or the number of its name” (13:16-17). Together the dragon and the two beasts constitute a veritable anti-Trinity, opposed to Israel’s God, Jesus, and the “Spirit of prophecy” (cf. 1:4-5, 1:10, 19:10). On the mythic background to the imagery in Revelation 12, consult any of the standard commentaries. Boring, Revelation, 149–72, is especially helpful. 9 Sigve K. Tonstad, Saving God’s Reputation: The Theological Function of Pistis Iesou in the Cosmic Narratives of Revelation (London: T&T Clark, 2006), 7–15. 10 Paul Hinlicky, Paths Not Taken: Fates of Theology from Luther through Leibniz (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2009). 11 Robert W. Jenson, “Evil as Person”, in Theology as Revisonary Metaphysics: Essays on God and Creation, ed. Stephen J. Wright (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2014), 138. Emphasis in original. 12 Travis Kroeker and Bruce Ward, Remembering the End: Dostoevsky as Prophet to Modernity (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001), 107. 8

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The “number of the beast” is famously 666, and attempts to treat it as a cipher for this or that historical figure have been legion. If the sea beast is Nero, then his counterpart from the land must be the Roman cult of the emperor. If the sea beast is Hitler, then the land beast is Nazi ideology, and so on. But such decoding exegesis13 is ultimately reductionistic, and underestimates the capacity of evil to infiltrate any human system of power and the beliefs that prop them up. The devil wears many masks. He is both insidious and cunning: politics in itself, after all, is central to being human, while any society depends on the stories it tells about itself, the “liturgies” of everyday life. But in a world under the dominion of the powers both of these become instruments in the hands of the Evil One. Politics becomes the idolatrous pursuit of authority for its own sake, while communal story degenerates into propaganda on behalf of this false god (Ellul 1977: 92-99). In the midst of a catalog of horrors committed by the sea beast, the Seer adds the almost casual note: “Also it was allowed to make war on the saints and to conquer them” (13:7). The beast stands in a relation of radical opposition to the Lamb and his church, which represent an alternative form of sovereignty. Nevertheless, Revelation 13 is far from holding a pessimistic view of the church’s prospects. As William Stringfellow argues, in his moving “Homily on the Significance of the Defeat of the Saints”: Revelation 13:7 contains no melancholy message. It authorizes hope for the saints – and, through their vocation of advocacy, hope for the whole of creation – which is grounded in realistic expectations concerning the present age, enabling the church . . . to confront the full and awesome militancy of the power of death . . . This seemingly troublesome text about the defeat of the saints by the beast is, preeminently, a reference to the accessibility of the grace of the Word of God for living now. To mention the defeat of the saints means to know the abundance of grace.14 The third great figure of evil who appears in the second-half of Revelation is rather different from the two just described. She is “Babylon the great, mother of whores and of earth’s abominations . . . drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of the witnesses to Jesus” (Rev. 17:5-6). She is pictured riding astride her paramour, the land beast. An empirically minded reading will view the beast as the Roman empire, while the whore is the city of Rome herself, a place of both fabulous wealth and rapacious exploitation. In the great lament over the city’s downfall in chapter 18, the city’s merchants mourn the loss of the goods that once helped to fill their coffers: purple and scarlet, spice and frankincense, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, but also “slaves and human beings” (καὶ σωμάτων καὶ ψυχὰς ἀνθρώπων, 18:13). This surprise ending to the merchants’ catalog of wares sums up the truth about Babylon, that form of human social organization in which all is commodified, in which there is no thing and no body that cannot be had for a price. The unflattering portrait of Babylon epitomizes Revelation’s overall strategy of unmasking and exposing the forms of evil. The book functions as a kind of “critical theory” in visionary mode, helping to dispel whatever illusions its readers may still harbor concerning the social order, whether Rome’s or any other. To be sure, the practical conclusions we draw from such wisdom cannot be anticipated in advance. Revelation’s primary contribution to Christian ethics is the gift of vision. Seeing the world rightly is

Kovacs and Rowland, Revelation, 7–11. William Stringfellow, Conscience and Obedience: The Politics of Romans 13 and Revelation 13 in Light of the Second Coming (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, [1977] 2004), 111.

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the first step toward being able to act responsibly in a world ruled by God yet dominated by structures of malice and injustice. There is no humanly constructed “way” that leads from Babylon to Jerusalem: the two cities are utterly incommensurable. Revelation therefore has no place for a progressivist philosophy of history, in which human beings build utopia in a spirit of enlightened good will.15 When the heavenly city finally comes, it will not be by human agency but by divine gift: the city descends out of heaven “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (21:2). The bride’s nuptials mean the coming of God’s new creation, in which evil simply has no place: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away” (21:3-4, KJV).

CONCLUSION I said earlier that Revelation has no theodicy to offer. This is, perhaps, a disturbing realization. We might have expected the last book of the Christian Bible to provide an explanation for evil and suffering, somewhat in the way detective novels offer a satisfying resolution to the puzzles set forth in their pages. But nothing like this is forthcoming. Instead, we are given dazzling visions of the Last Things interspersed with disturbing images of the things that are next to last, the world under the dominion of the powers. Why there should be these powers, why God permits them to wreak havoc on earth, why the saints in particular should be made to suffer – this we are not told. If Revelation fails to answer such questions, perhaps it is because it is less a detective story than a love story. There are some crucial hermeneutical clues to this effect early in the book. Jesus is extolled as “the one who loves us”, while the churches are praised or criticized depending on how much they love (Rev. 1:5, 2:4, 19). Revelation – in this sense a fitting culmination to Scripture as a whole – may be read as a love song on the part of the Creator who fiercely desires communion with his creatures, and will do whatever is necessary to get them back. No explanations are given; perhaps none is possible. But what is given is the promise that if readers will only hold out, exhibiting ὑπομονῇ in the midst of θλίψις, they may participate in the consummation of creation when all things will be made new. Revelation’s nuptial imagery is not just a pretty metaphor but comes very close to being the heart of the work. Revelation’s chief display of the divine love is the Lamb: Jesus as the Crucified. It is he and no other who is worthy to open the seven-sealed scroll. The meaning of history, in other words, with all of its appalling evils, will ultimately be determined by the loving patience of God. This event sets the pattern for the church’s own resistance to evil. To resist evil – to refuse the idolatries of life in Babylon – does not mean that the church can expect to “win” in the short term. As J. R. R. Tolkien once stated in a letter: “I am a Christian, indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’. At the most, there may be a few ‘samples and glimpses’ of God’s final victory along the way.”16 This sounds remarkably like Stringfellow’s “defeat of the saints”. Yet surely one reason Revelation concludes the Christian canon of Scripture is to affirm Fyodor Dostoevsky’s critique of nineteenth-century liberal utopianism was shaped in part by a profound engagement with the Apocalypse; see Kroeker and Ward, Remembering the End. 16 Cited in George Hunsinger, “Barth and Tolkien”, in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Karl Barth, ed. George Hunsinger and Keith Johnson (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), 700. 15

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the truth of that final victory, beyond all present appearances. In the New Jerusalem, there will no longer be “anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever” (22:3-5).

FURTHER READING Bauckham, Richard. The Theology of the Book of Revelation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Mangina, Joseph. Revelation. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2011. Minear, Paul. I Saw a New Earth: An Introduction to the Visions of the Apocalypse. Washington, DC: Corpus Books, 1968. Wainwright, Arthur W. Mysterious Apocalypse: Interpreting the Book of Revelation. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993.

PART TWO

Historical and Contemporary Figures

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Chapter 13

Irenaeus and Origen MARK S. M. SCOTT

SOUL-MAKING THEODICY’S PATRON SAINT: IRENAEUS OR ORIGEN? While the Enlightenment coined the term “theodicy” and intensified interest in it as a pressing philosophical problematic, reflection on the possible divine reasons for human suffering extends back to the ancients: the task predates the terminology. As tributaries of the Greek patristic theological tradition, Irenaeus (120–202 ce) and Origen (185–254 ce) offer two distinct yet related perspectives on suffering that ultimately flow into the soulmaking theodicy pioneered by the influential philosopher of religion John Hick (1922– 2012). In this chapter, I will entertain the question: Who best serves as the patron saint of soul-making theodicy, Irenaeus or Origen? I will argue that while Hick himself and later theodicists refer to soul-making as an “Irenaean theodicy”, Origen is much better suited for Hick’s theological and philosophical purposes.1 John Hick delineates his signature soul-making theodicy in his landmark study Evil and the God of Love (1966). In it and related publications, he refers to his theodicy as an “Irenaean Theodicy”, that is, as tracing its origin to the Greek theological tradition, beginning with Irenaeus.2 Hick pits Irenaeus against Augustine, from which he outlines two contrasting theological narratives. “The Augustinian approach”, he contends, represents the “majority report” in Christianity, while his preferred “Irenaean approach” represents the “minority report”.3 Whereas the Augustine paradigm sees Adam and Eve as historical figures and the Fall as a terra-degrading, DNA-resequencing catastrophe (Gen. 3:14-19), Irenaeus, Hick argues, sees Adam and Eve as “children” and “the fall” as a childish error: unfortunate, but necessary.4 As children must learn through (sometimes very painful) mistakes and missteps, so humanity must internalize their inherit capacity for goodness

See Mark S. M. Scott, “Suffering and Soul-Making: Rethinking John Hick’s Theodicy”, Journal of Religion 90, no. 3 (2010): 322–32. For an extended refutation of Hick’s employment of Irenaeus, see David Hionides, Against “Irenaean” Theodicy: A Refutation of John Hick’s Use of Irenaeus (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2019). 2 John Hick, “An Irenaean Theodicy”, in Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, ed. Stephen T. Davis (1981; Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001 [reprint]), 38–72. Scholars frequently repeat the designation. See, for example, Michael L. Peterson, ed., The Problem of Evil: Selected Readings, Second ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), ix; Barry L. Whitney, ed., Theodicy: An Annotated Bibliography on the Problem of Evil, 1960–1991 (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University, 1998), 115. 3 Hick, “An Irenaean Theodicy”, 39. 4 Ibid., 41: “Irenaeus himself could not, however, in the historical knowledge of his time, question the fact of the Fall, though he treated it as a relatively minor lapse – a youthful error – rather than as the infinite crime and cosmic disaster that has ruined the whole creation.” 1

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and growth through centuries of taxing trial and error. The fall, then, is the starting point for humanity, not the end point. It marks where we are in our development, not where we are going. Hick’s theodicy has a positive eschatological orientation: perfection lies at the end of the journey of spiritual maturation, not the beginning. Based on that hermeneutical shift, Hick anoints Irenaeus as his patron saint. Even though Irenaeus did not construct his own theodicy, his insipient notions of the fall provide the theological groundwork for Hick’s soul-making theodicy.5 It signals, he argues, the “immense gap” between humanity’s created potential for and actualization of divine likeness.6 Suffering, then, bridges the gap by enabling growth through the imperfect exercise of freedom in adverse conditions. As humans face challenges, make mistakes, and encounter obstacles, they slowly actualize their innate capacity for divine likeness. A painless, frictionless environment would arrest our moral, intellectual, and spiritual growth: “Rather, this world must be a place of soul-making. And its value is to be judged, not primarily by the quantity of pleasure and pain occurring in it at any particular moment, but by its fitness for its primary purpose, the purpose of soul-making.”7 Hick’s recasting of the creation-fall narrative through an Irenaean lens forms the basis of his fundamental soul-making theodicy thesis: that God permits suffering for our growth. Irenaeus, however, does not develop his own theodicy, as Hick readily concedes.8 Nevertheless, Irenaeus does describe Adam and Eve as “Children in Paradise”: “But the man was a young child, not yet having a perfect deliberation (βουλή), and because of this he was easily deceived by the seducer.”9 They were innocent, inexperienced, “childlike”, and therefore susceptible to beguilement.10 Hick, in my view, over-interprets the theological significance of Irenaeus’ idiosyncratic and undeveloped notion of Adam and Eve as moral and biological children.11 As the patristic cornerstone of soul-making, he fails to sustain its theoretical structure. First, Hick fairly states that Irenaeus affirms the historicity of Adam and Eve and the literal creation narrative. At the outset, then, he stands at variance with Hick’s evolutionary framework. Moreover, Irenaeus, the bane of heretics, would never endorse Hick’s explicit universalism: “And it seems to me a

Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 215: “Irenaeus was the first great Christian theologian to think at all systematically along these lines, and although he was far from working out a comprehensive theodicy his hints are sufficiently explicit to justify his name being associated with the approach that we are studying in this part.” 6 Hick, “An Irenaean Theodicy”, 41. 7 Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 259. 8 Hick, “An Irenaean Theodicy”, 40: “Irenaeus himself did not develop a theodicy, but he did – together with other Greek-speaking Christian writers of that period, such as Clement of Alexandria – build a framework of thought within which a theodicy becomes possible ”; see Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 215. 9 Irenaeus, On the Apostolic Teaching, 12 (p. 47). See John Behr’s apt heading “Children in Paradise”, 48. 10 Irenaeus, On the Apostolic Teaching, 14 (p. 48). For other explicit references to Adam and Eve as children, see Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III:22:4, III:23:5 (ANF 1: 455, 457; for the online version see: https://ccel​.org​/ccel​/ irenaeus​/against​_heresies​_iii​/anf01). On these and other references, see John Behr’s endnote p. 104, ft. 39. See also, Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 212, 216. 11 Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III:22:4: “But Eve was disobedient; for she did not obey when as yet she was a virgin. And even as she, having indeed a husband, Adam, but being nevertheless as yet a virgin (for in Paradise ‘they were both naked and were not ashamed’, inasmuch as they, having been created a short time previously, had no understanding of the precreation of children: for it was necessary that they should first come to adult age, and then multiply from that time onward), having become disobedient, was made the cause of death, both to herself and the entire human race” (emphasis mine). See A. Cleveland Coxe’s gloss on this passage: “This seems quite a peculiar opinion of Irenaeus, that our first parents, when created, were not of the age of maturity” (ANF 1, p. 455, ft. 4). 5

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reasonable expectation that in the infinite resourcefulness of infinite love working in unlimited time, God will eventually succeed in drawing us all into the divine Kingdom.”12 In his theoretical orientation, creation theology, and eschatology, Irenaeus sits uneasily on his patron-saint throne. Do these discrepancies demand his dethronement? Origen, conversely, explicitly engages the question of theodicy directly and deeply. He frames it in terms of the unjust distribution of happiness: good and bad fortune seem random and indiscriminate, devoid of any providential rationalization.13 Moreover, he widens the scope of the problem to cosmic disparity, including the order of angels.14 In his solution – his cosmic theodicy – Origen posits a providential arrangement to all the apparent chaos, randomness, and disorder.15 Souls, he argues in an elaborate Neoplatonic-Christological cosmological narrative, fell from God in a pre-existent realm and were thrust into the cosmos at the precise location of their spiritual defection. Hence, all rational creatures – angles, humans, demons – find themselves exactly where they belong, based on their pre-existent sin. The world, then, is a stage for souls to journey back to God, that is, to return to their state of pre-existent bliss. While Origen’s Neoplatonic cosmology fails to translate into Hick’s contemporary scientific framework, Origen’s theological and philosophical instincts match Hick in several salient ways.16 First, he sees suffering as productive insofar as the soul undergoes various purgations to return to God. Second, he conceives of the cosmos as benevolently designed for the soul’s amelioration. Third, he views God as a Teacher, Father, and Physician who employs painful remedies for the soul’s ultimate salvation. Fourth and finally, he posits a radical eschatological resolution when God will be “all in all”, which mirrors Hick’s universalism.17 In his philosophical sophistication, theological inventiveness, and eschatological daring, Origen anticipates Hick’s innovative and influential theodicy, despite historical differences. John Hick, in a generous and illuminating email correspondence with the author, engaged the question of which Church Father, Irenaeus or Origen, makes the best patron saint for soul-making. His thoughtful response, befitting a scholar of his stature, merits quotation in full: I think you demonstrate that in many ways Origen is a stronger precursor than Irenaeus of the soul-making theodicy. Irenaeus understands the fall literally, although he negates it by reducing it to a childish mistake: he actually, in his Proof of the Apostolic Teaching, describes Adam and Eve as children. Origen is better here in seeing the metaphorical character of the narrative; but on the other hand he is eccentric in teaching the pre-existence of souls. Again, he does have a presumably literal fall, but in the soul’s pre-existent state. Both Irenaeus and Origen teach the gradual development of souls towards perfection, but Origen more explicitly. And Origen teaches eventual universal salvation. So in several ways he is nearer to a modern soul-making theodicy. But on the other hand, Irenaeus was earlier, and Origen can be seen as developing the basic idea further and more fully. Again, considered as “patron saints”, Irenaeus has Hick, “An Irenaean Theodicy”, 69. Origen, On First Principles 2.9.5. (p. 124). 14 Origen, On First Principles 1.81. (p. 67). 15 See Mark S. M. Scott, Journey Back to God: Origen on the Problem of Evil (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012 [paperback 2015]). 16 Scott, “Suffering and Soul-Making”, 322–32. 17 Origen, On First Principles 3.6.3 (pp. 224–5). 12 13

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the advantage of having been a bishop and now a saint, whereas Origen, although the greater thinker, has the disadvantage of having been declared a heretic. So I am inclined to stick with Irenaeus as providing the earliest-known foundation of a soulmaking theodicy and as, from a PR point of view, a more suitable patron saint. But I nevertheless see your focus on Origen, who is much more studied today than Irenaeus, as very useful. There is room in any discussion of theodicy for both of them.18 Hick’s adjudication of the debate focuses on (1) hermeneutical compatibility: their respective interpretations of Genesis, particularly the fall of Adam and Eve; (2) theological compatibility: the process spiritual maturation (through suffering); (3) eschatological compatibility: universalism; (4) chronology; and (5) reputation/legacy. In a head-to-head contest with Irenaeus, Origen ties the first, wins the second and third, and loses the fourth and fifth. On Hick’s scorecard, Irenaeus edges out Origen in a close title match.

CONCLUSION As the founder and fashioner of soul-making theodicy, it is Hick’s prerogative to select Irenaeus as his patron saint. He bases it primarily on Irenaeus’ conception of Adam and Eve as “children” who must grow through experience, which aligns with his foundational claim that the universe serves as the site for humanity’s moral, intellectual, and spiritual maturation, a process that requires suffering. From that perspective, Irenaeus’ status as the patron saint of soul-making theodicy is encased in amber, and it has a clear – albeit narrow – textual basis. Nevertheless, the standard scholarly description of his theodicy as “Irenaean” raises historical and theological questions about the defensibility of the designation that invites investigation. Origen, with his speculative bent, allegorical hermeneutics, theoretical orientation, and implicit universalism fits far better with Hick’s theodicy than Irenaeus, the staunch defender of orthodoxy. From that perspective, Origen would function much better as the patron saint of soul-making theodicy. Hence, for compelling historical and theological reasons, the designation of Hick’s soul-making theory as an “Irenaean theodicy” must be finally dismissed as unsustainable. So who is the real patron saint of soul-making theodicy? Perhaps, echoing Hick, “both”.

FURTHER READING Irenaeus. On the Apostolic Preaching. Translated by John Behr. Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997. Origen. On First Principles, A Reader’s Edition. Translated by John Behr. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Hick, John. Evil and the God of Love. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1966 [2007]. September 9, 2008; see Scott, “Suffering and Soul-Making”, 333, ft. 124. In a hitherto unpublished email from Hick to the author on the publication of his “Suffering and Soul-Making” article, Hick writes, with characteristic generosity and insight: “I think it does all the four things it sets out to do. When you have offprints, I should be glad to have one. Certainly the ‘soul-making’ theodicy could be traced back to Origen at least as legitimately as to Irenaeus, or quite possibly more so. Many of the ideas were around in the Greek theology of the time. But nevertheless I still prefer Irenaeus as a ‘patron saint’ because of his greater ecclesiastical respectability. Irenaeus was a bishop, Origen a suspected heretic because (among other things) of his teaching of a life pre-existent [to] this one. But I have no objection to Origen’s replacement of him in the eyes of scholars, if you can get that established” (June 3, 2010).

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Scott, Mark S. M. Journey Back to God: Origen on the Problem of Evil. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012 [paperback: 2015]. Scott, Mark S. M. “Suffering and Soul-Making: Rethinking John Hick’s Theodicy”. Journal of Religion 90, no. 3 (2010): 313–34. Hionides, David. Against “Irenaean” Theodicy: A Refutation of John Hick’s Use of Irenaeus. Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2019.

Chapter 14

Gregory of Nyssa ALEXANDER L. ABECINA

GREGORY OF NYSSA’S ON INFANTS’ EARLY DEATHS Why do some children enter the world only to “breath the air with one gasp, and die”?1 Around 381 ce, St. Gregory of Nyssa offered a speculative response to this most difficult of questions, which, according to him, even Plato said was “too great for the human power of reasoning”.2 Aiming not so much for a pastorally sensitive answer as a philosophically defensible one, Gregory situated the issue of infant deaths within a broader understanding of human salvation, divine justice, and divine providence, according to which “a random and irrational occurrence can never be the work of God”.3 He asks: If the reward of good things is assigned according to justice, in what class shall he be placed who has died in infancy without having laid in this life any foundation, good or evil (κακόν), whereby any reward according to his deserts may be given to him?4 For Gregory, a person who has lived long enough will almost certainly become mingled with the “pollution of evil” (ὁ τῆς κακίας μολυσμός). The blessed future life may still be attained, but not without the “sweat” and “hard work” of virtuous living in the present.5 By contrast, the one who continues in a “life of evil” (τὴν ἐν κακίᾳ ζωήν) will justly receive “painful recompense”.6 What then of the soul of the infant who has died prematurely? Does such a soul receive the same reward as the virtuous, without any effort or for no reason at all, as some of Gregory’s contemporaries claimed? If so, how does this preserve God’s justice? And furthermore, would this not imply that the undeveloped human state of “unreason” is preferable to that of acquiring the reason of a fully formed, virtuous adult?7

De infantibus praematura abreptis, Opera Dogmatica Minora, Pars II, Gregorii Nysseni Opera III/2, ed. J. Downing, Jacobus A. Kenneth, S. J. McDonough, and Hadwiga Hörner (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 67–97, 72.14-15 (=GNO III/2). English translations with occasional modification from “On Infants’ Early Deaths”, trans. William Moore and Henry Austin Wilson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Select Writings and Letters of Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers II/5 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 372–81, 373 (=NPNF). 2 GNO III/2.70.6-10; NPNF, 373. 3 GNO III/2.72.20; NPNF, 373. 4 GNO III/2.81.25-82.2; NPNF, 376. 5 GNO III/2.75.6-9; NPNF, 374. 6 GNO III/2.75.14-15; NPNF, 374. 7 GNO III/2.75.18-20; NPNF, 374.

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The response to the problem posed by the death of infants, according to Gregory, must begin from ontological first principles. God is the “first cause” of all created things,8 divided, on the one hand, between that which is seen, intelligible and bodiless and, on the other hand, that which is not seen, sensible and embodied.9 Human beings are a mixture of both an earthy body of flesh and an intellectual substance of the “soul”.10 The human soul, having been made in God’s image, naturally possesses the activity of looking toward God, by which it receives the nourishment of his life through participation in God.11 By becoming ignorant of God, the true rays of God’s light are prevented from entering the human soul, and therefore, by failure to participate in the divine life, the soul’s life ceases altogether.12 Gregory therefore views ignorance of God as “the worst of evils” (τῶν κακῶν τὸ ἔσχατον).13 Importantly, in this particular treatise, Gregory makes no attempt to explain the origin of the evil of ignorance, and for good reason. Since knowledge is, ontologically speaking, merely a type of “relation” (τὸ πρός τί) which therefore lacks real “substance” (οὐσία), then ignorance, which is only the negation of the activity of knowing, is even further removed from substantial reality. In this way, evil-as-ignorance is said not really to exist at all.14 It is possible, however, by looking to the “evangelic mystery” (probably a reference to baptismal identification with Christ’s death and resurrection), to be cured of the evil of ignorance. Yet, argues Gregory, this is not to be understood as a reward in the usual sense.15 Rather, the soul’s activity of looking toward God is like the eye’s natural activity of seeing ordinary objects. Eyesight simply follows necessarily when the eye is unobstructed.16 By analogy, the soul that looks upon God will necessarily receive the life of blessedness in a manner that is completely natural to it.17 One may, of course, freely “choose” (προαιρέσεως) to cleanse one’s soul of the pollution of evil (again, probably a reference to the virtuous life that follows baptism), but since the resulting enjoyment of divine light follows necessarily, it may be called a reward only by “a misuse of the word”.18 It follows, then, that the soul of the infant, which was never obstructed by the evil of ignorance in the first place, will also receive its participation in light,19 though not as a reward in return for virtuous living, but simply in accord with its very nature.20 Nevertheless, Gregory envisages a difference between the enjoyment of blessing of the virtuous adult and that of the infant soul. Indeed, there is no likeness in their enjoyment since they are not on the same level at all.21 Those who have nourished the forces of their souls by a course of virtue will experience a greater proportion of participation in divine delight, while the infant soul will, at first, only enjoy what it is capable of receiving,

GNO III/2.77.4-5; NPNF, 375. GNO III/2.1-5; NPNF, 375. 10 GNO III/2.78.19-23; NPNF, 375. 11 GNO III/2.78.25-79; NPNF, 375. 12 GNO III/2.80.4-10; NPNF, 376. 13 GNO III/2.80.26; NPNF, 376. 14 GNO III/2.80.13-24; NPNF, 376. 15 GNO III/2.81.8-10; NPNF, 376. 16 GNO III/2.81.15; NPNF, 376. 17 GNO III/2.81.18; NPNF, 376. 18 GNO III/2.82.13-17; NPNF, 376. 19 GNO III/2.83.1; NPNF, 377. 20 GNO III/2.82.28-2.83.4; NPNF, 377. 21 GNO III/2.85.9-10; NPNF, 377. 8 9

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“having never caught the disease of evil (τῇ τῆς κακίας νόσῳ) from the beginning”. In due course, however, it too will grow in its capacity for participation in divine life.22 Is justice upheld in Gregory’s account of the destinies of both the virtuous adult and the infant who knew neither good nor evil? Apparently so. By reconceptualizing the notion of reward in terms of the soul’s natural capacity for participation in God, Gregory ensures that neither success nor failure with respect to the virtuous life has any bearing on the qualitative reality of divine blessing in the hereafter. Nevertheless, Gregory recognizes that the mature soul and that of the infant do not participate in God on an equal footing – the subjective enjoyment of this reality has a quantitative difference. For Gregory, the lived experience of overcoming the pollution of evil through the free choice to pursue the life of virtue during one’s earthly existence does not count for nothing in the end, but rather (justly) increases the capacity of the adult soul to enjoy the divine blessing all the more. At the same time, that the infant soul was never afforded the opportunity to acquire virtue through a full adult life does not (unjustly) disqualify it from eventually enlarging its capacity for participation in the divine life in due course. It remains, however, for Gregory to address the question of theodicy proper: “Do you, then, in consequence of this, ask about grace when so and so, quite tender in age, is quietly taken away from amongst the living?”23 Gregory’s response deals only with those infants who have been nurtured by their parents and yet still succumb to some sickness. So committed is Gregory to God’s governance of all things that even such tragic circumstances are said to reveal “the perfection of providence” (τελείας ἐστὶ προνοίας).24 He argues that since God “knows the future equally with the past”, God is able to hinder the advance of an infant to complete maturity, in order that the evil (κακόν) may not be developed which his foreknowledge (προγνωστικῇ) has perceived (κατανοηθέν) in his future life, and in order that a lifetime granted to one whose evil dispositions will be lifelong may not become the actual material for his evil (ὕλη κακίας).25 The argument is aided by an illustration of a banquet whose host accurately knows “the particular nature” of each one of his guests.26 For the sake of order, the host may use his authority and intimate knowledge of his guests to expel certain ones whom he knows in advance will give in to their disposition toward drunkenness and evil. If only the ejected guests could know what the host knew, they would not accuse him of lacking bad judgment but, rather, would feel grateful to him for having removed him before falling into debauchery.27 Likewise, God does not only cure human evils through baptism and virtuous living but, in a loving act of providence, acts to hinder them before coming into existence.28 For Gregory, “he who does all things by reason withdraws the materials for evil (τῆς κακίας τὴν ὕλην) in his love toward humanity”.29

GNO III/2.84.22-23; NPNF, 377. GNO III/2.87.16-18; NPNF, 378. 24 GNO III/2.88.1; NPNF, 378. 25 GNO III/2.88.3-8; NPNF, 379. 26 GNO III/2.88.12; NPNF, 379. See Paul J. Alexander, “Gregory of Nyssa and the Simile of the Banquet of Life”, Vigiliae Christianae 30, no.1 (1976): 55–62. 27 GNO III/2.89.4-5; NPNF, 379. 28 GNO III/2.90.14; NPNF 379. 29 GNO III/2.90.13-18; NPNF 379. 22 23

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THEODICY AND MIDDLE KNOWLEDGE Evidently, Gregory’s theodicy of infants’ early deaths requires that God possess “middle knowledge”, a notion most often associated with molinism, named after the sixteenth-century Jesuit theologian, Luis de Molina (1535–1600). Molinism rests on an understanding of divine providence and human freedom whereby God not only has socalled “natural knowledge” of necessary truths, and “free knowledge” of the contingent truths that he has willed to bring about but also “middle knowledge” of what individuals would freely choose to do were they to be placed in certain situations.30 According to Hasker: the theory of middle knowledge holds that, for each possible free creature that might exist, and for each possible situation in which such a creature might make a free choice, there is a truth, known to God prior to and independent of any decision on God’s part concerning what definite choice that creature would freely make if placed in that situation.31 If God is the host of the banquet of life, Gregory portrays him as one who has so perfectly ordered earthly affairs that he knows precisely who would commit evils even more horrendous than those actually committed in history, and thereby cuts short their lives in an act of divine love. If allowed to live it is reasonable to believe “they would have plunged into an evil life (τοῦ κατὰ κακίαν βίου) with a more desperate vehemence than any of those who have actually become known for their wickedness (πονηρίᾳ)”.32 The argument is certain to be found wanting by contemporary readers, not only those who, on philosophical grounds, deny the very possibility of divine middle knowledge, but perhaps especially those who demand that the grievous reality of infants’ deaths be handled with the appropriate pastoral sensitivity. While there might be some consolation in knowing that the infant soul ultimately enjoys an ever-growing participation in the divine life, on Gregory’s terms this comes at the cost of having to imagine what kind of monster the child would otherwise have become. Moreover, while Gregory limits his theodical account to the specific issue of the early death of infants, it seems impossible, on his own terms, to resist applying the same logic to every other instance of life cut short. Perhaps Gregory would want to remind us that the merely possible existence of persons, who would have been extremely evil, lacks any substantial reality. Who they are in actuality – souls loved by God and who enjoy the divine blessing – is all that matters. But, of course, the future blessedness of infant souls already follows from Gregory’s ontological first principles; it does not require a theodicy to further substantiate it. Was it the need to uphold the ascetical ideal of virtue, or perhaps an attachment to the notion of the cosmic balance of justice, that meant Gregory could not conceive of unworthy infant souls as beneficiaries of divine love and heavenly delight without invoking the grotesque opposite as their alternative destiny? Gregory may have done better to follow Plato by exercising greater circumspection on this question “too great for human reasoning”, just as he refrained earlier on in the treatise from speculating about the origins of evil.

Thomas P. Flint, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 41–6. William Hasker, God, Time and Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 20. 32 GNO III/2.93.1618; NPNF, 380. 30 31

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FURTHER READING Anderson, Kirsten H. Gregory of Nyssa on Evil and Freedom. PhD diss., University of Notre dame, 2021. Boersma, Hans. “‘Numbed with Grief ’: Gregory of Nyssa on Bereavement and Hope.” Journal of Spiritual Formation and Soul Care 7, no. 1 (2014): 46–59. Moreschini, Claudio. “Goodness, Evil and the Free Will of Man in Gregory of Nyssa.” In Fate, Providence and Moral Responsibility in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Thought, Ancient and Medieval Philosophy 1, vol. 49, edited by Pieter d’Hoine and Gerd Van Riel, 343–56. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2014. Mosshammer, Alden. “Nonbeing and Evil in Gregory of Nyssa.” Vigiliae Christianae 44 (1990): 136–67.

Chapter 15

Augustine LYDIA SCHUMACHER

SIN AND THE ORIGINS OF EVIL To explain how suffering and evil entered the world, Augustine (354–430 ce) appeals to original sin, that is, the sin that was supposedly committed by the first man and woman. According to Augustine, this sin consisted in concupiscence, which involves confusing the ordinary goods, which are the immediate objects of our knowledge or desire, with the source of all that is good, namely, God. As Augustine elaborates, concupiscence leads us to equate “this good and that good with the Good” (The Trinity 8.3.5) and thus to reduce the greater to the lesser good (Free Choice of the Will, 1.4.8). In the case of Adam and Eve specifically, concupiscence involved eating from the fruit tree, which they believed would give them knowledge like God’s of good and evil. As a result of this original sin, Augustine affirms, all human beings descended from these first two persons inherited the tendency to treat ordinary things rather than God as the chief source of their happiness (City of God, 6.1-4). That is not to say that every human being is responsible for Adam’s sin of eating the forbidden fruit. In Augustine’s view, we only inherit through our parents, and specifically, the father, the disposition to sin, which each of us inevitably actualizes in our own way. The personal sins we commit as a result of original sin are ones for which we alone are responsible. The first and foremost consequence of original sin was to sever humanity’s relationship with God. This in turn disrupted the human ability to assess and deal appropriately with all persons and circumstances in the world. To appreciate why, it is important to understand the fundamental distinction Augustine draws between things that should be enjoyed or loved for their own sake and things that should be used or loved for the sake of something else. In his view, the only being that should be loved for its own sake is God. This is because God is the creator and source of everything that is good in the world. For this reason, there is nothing more desirable or worthy of love than him. According to Augustine, all other things should be used as a means to enjoying God (Confessions, 10.23). In the past, some theologians have taken this claim to imply that the things of this world, such as human relationships and experiences, have no value for Augustine, or in his view, for God. As a matter of fact, however, the point of Augustine’s use/enjoyment distinction was precisely to help us appreciate the value that the goods God created have for our lives. This is something we cannot do if we treat ordinary goods as the ultimate source of our happiness. As Augustine stresses, such goods are limited in the satisfaction they can provide for us, and no one of them can make us completely happy. For instance, I might find my job tremendously fulfilling, but it cannot replace the need for human relationships and

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family, without which I may still feel unsatisfied. Furthermore, the things I find satisfying are transient and will not always be available to me: close friends may move away, and someone I love may die. For this reason, we set ourselves up for disappointment if we stake our hopes for happiness in the things of this world. As Augustine intimates, these things are largely out of our control, so if our happiness depends upon them, we will never be truly happy. That is why Augustine insists we must stake our hopes for happiness in God alone. The failure to do this, in Augustine’s account, does not simply ensure that we make life miserable for ourselves; it also causes us to inflict misery on others, not least by treating them as the key to our happiness that they simply cannot be. For example, if I feel I cannot survive apart from my relationship with a particular person, I am likely to behave in a controlling, manipulative, or demanding way toward that person. Ironically, this kind of behavior only tends to alienate others and thus has a counterproductive effect when it comes to securing the benefit of the relationship that is desired.

FREE WILL This discussion of sin and its effects bears heavily on what Augustine means when he talks about the freedom of the will. For Augustine, we do not, strictly speaking, use “free will” when we sin (Free Choice of the Will, 2.1). This is because sin, as I have been describing it, basically enslaves us to desires that are bound to be frustrated: it places conditions on our happiness that prevent us from finding contentment with our lot in life. For this reason, Augustine argues that evil is not a legitimate option in its own right but a privation or deficiency of the good (City of God, 12.7-8). In the past, certain theologians have argued that Augustine’s view of evil fails sufficiently to recognize the real damage that evil can do to human lives. However, Augustine was under no illusions regarding the severity of evil. His privation theory of evil simply seeks to emphasize that evil robs us of our potential, and the good God intended for us, wreaking havoc in our lives that he never intended to occur. On this basis, Augustine concludes that we are only strictly speaking “free” when we will what is good. To will what is good, moreover, is to desire God first and foremost – to enjoy him alone. When the love of God shapes how we think about things other than God, on his account, we become able to deal with our experiences in ways that are consistent with our own well-being and that of others; and thus, we become truly free.

NATURAL EVILS AND SUFFERING According to Augustine, original sin did not merely destroy our relationship with God and others; it also caused disruption for the rest of creation. This is because human beings were designed to oversee and administer all of creation: to care for animals and the planet.1 In Augustine’s view, we are suited for this work because we have a nature that is both physical and capable of bodily sensation as well as rational, or suited to thinking about and organizing the objects of our knowledge. When the rational capacity became detached from God, consequently, Augustine argues that the order and integrity it provided for the physical realm was lost as well. Suddenly, our bodies became susceptible to sickness,

See Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 2 vols, trans. John Hammond Taylor (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), 11.

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suffering, and ultimately death. Moreover, all creatures became subject to damage and annihilation through earthquakes, tornadoes, fires, and other natural disasters. These forms of suffering were impossible prior to the Fall, when sensory beings were capable of touch and taste and so on, but nevertheless could not incur damage from the outside world. Thus, Augustine claims that before the Fall, Adam could have fallen into a thorn bush without being pricked. Because his body was incapable of deteriorating, he was also unable to die. His destiny instead was to live out his life on earth until he realized his full potential as a human being. On achieving this state of maturity, he would have been immediately transported into the eternal presence of God, who is always the best version of himself. The fact that Adam physically died was entirely a consequence of the Fall.

AUGUSTINE AND EVOLUTION Augustine’s view of sin as the cause of natural and not merely moral evil has recently come into question on account of the discoveries in evolutionary biology. This presumes that human beings evolved quite late in the history of the planet, which in turn has always been subject to natural disasters. Thus, evolutionary biology precludes the notion that human sin is responsible for natural evils, including suffering, sickness, conflict, and death. At the same time, it queries the idea that sin is hereditary, highlighting instead our hardwired tendency to seek our own survival even at the cost of others – to put a lesser in place of a greater good in the way Augustine described. This tendency is one we are bound to actualize, given that we are changeable and will thus inevitably demit from the good for which God made us in his own unchanging goodness. Although evolutionary biology therefore calls into question Augustine’s account of how evil entered the world, his account of the nature of sin and how to overcome it seemingly remains plausible. As Augustine shows in his The Trinity, among other works, belief in God remedies sin by reminding us that God is the only being of absolute significance in our lives: the only one we should pursue as though he is the be-all and end-all of our existence and the key to our happiness. For Augustine, we have seen that enjoying God alone in this way does not mean we must lose interest in or denigrate the world around us. Rather, it provides us with the resource we need to check the sinful tendency to treat things other than God as though they could serve as complete sources of happiness and fulfillment. In doing so, belief in God helps us to appreciate temporal goods in terms of the accurate and limited value that they can actually have for us. This however raises the question of the role of evil in our lives and why God permits us to be affected by it. On this score, Augustine is absolutely clear that evil is not a good or any part of it. However, he acknowledges that, just as a bad use can be made of good things, so a good use can be made of evil by those who refuse to allow their sufferings to detract from the happiness they find in God (Free Choice of the Will 1.15.33). These evils are as finite and fleeting as the ordinary goods we enjoy in our lives. As such, their capacity to hurt or harm us is limited. This is something that can be easy to forget when our sufferings are weighing upon us. For Augustine, however, belief in God helps us to put our ordinary experiences, including the experience of evil or suffering, into a larger perspective in which all circumstances can in some way enhance our ability to enjoy him. Although Augustine thus explains how evil can serve the purposes of the good, this still begs the question why a good God would allow us to live in a world rife with evil

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or even create such a world in the first place. The original Augustinian solution evaded this problem by identifying the origins of evil, both moral and natural, in human sin, or the abuse of God’s good gift of free will. In rejecting this position, the theory of evolution re-invigorates the basic question of theodicy: how to reconcile the goodness of God with the reality of evil, suffering and death. A possible answer to this question that is compatible with evolutionary biology might posit that God can only make a world that is other to himself in nature, which is therefore changing and imperfect.2 The process of evolution, though painful, is the means to achieving the worthwhile perfection he intended for creation. This conclusion obviously cannot be verified short of the end of time, when God’s new and perfect order will presumably be established. For that reason, it may not seem like a satisfactory justification for all the suffering, death, and waste that occurs in the present, and for God’s apparent willingness to let us undergo such trials without giving us a choice in the matter. From the Augustinian point of view, however, there is arguably relief for the present circumstances to be found in the knowledge that the things of this world cannot make or break our happiness, since this is ultimately found in God.

FURTHER READING Augustine. City of God. Translated by G. R. Evans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Augustine. On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings. Translated by Peter King. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Knell, Matthew. Sin, Grace and Free Will: A Historical. Survey of Christian Thought, Volume 1: The Apostolic Fathers to Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. McFarland, Ian. In Adam’s Fall: A Meditation on the Doctrine of Original Sin. Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2010. Schumacher, Lydia. Divine Illumination: The History and Future of Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

See Mark Harris, The Nature of Creation: Examining the Bible and Science (London: Routledge, 2013).

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Chapter 16

Thomas Aquinas BRIAN DAVIES

Proponents of theodicy argue that God has good moral reasons for allowing suffering and human moral failure. Critics of theodicy typically argue that God cannot be morally excused for permitting the evils in the world. Yet Thomas Aquinas (1225–74 ce) never engages in theodicy. He does not attempt to defend God morally in the light of evils since he does not think of God as what people these days take to be a moral agent. Aquinas is certain that God is perfect and good (see Summa Theologiae, 1a, 4 and 6), but he does not suppose that God has human virtues as understood, for example, by Aristotle (384–323 bce). Nor does he think that God has moral duties to which he should conform. When it comes to God and evil, Aquinas’ key questions are “What is the causal relationship between God and evil?” and “Do we have reason to assert that God is good?” Aquinas’ answers to these questions inform his view of God and evil.

GOD, GOODNESS, AND BADNESS Aquinas maintains that what we know of God by philosophical reasoning (as opposed to what we might believe on the basis of divine revelation) depends on what we can rightly infer by causal reasoning based on sensory experience.1 Aquinas also thinks that God, without being in time, causally accounts for there being something rather than nothing at all times.2 This is how Aquinas understands the claim that God is the creator of all things “visible and invisible”.3 Aquinas does not think that God has to create.4 But he does think that it is only because of what God has created and is continually creating that people can know, as opposed to merely believe, that God exists; and in developing this claim Aquinas concludes that God does not make or create badness as something that has actual existence (esse). For Aquinas, God only creates that which truly has being (esse), whether as an actually existing substance (such as a cat), or as something inhering in such a substance as something positive and actual (such as whiskers). When it comes to goodness, Aquinas’ view is that “good” is what Peter Geach calls an attributive adjective rather than a predicative one.5 Aquinas denies that “good” is an adjective like “brown” (which Geach would refer to as a predicative adjective). I know exactly what you mean when you tell me that something you have is brown, even if I do See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, 2,1 and 2. See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, 44,2. 3 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, 44 to 47. 4 See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, 19,3. 5 Peter T. Geach, “Good and Evil”, Analysis 17, no. 2 (1956): 32–42. 1 2

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not know what it is you are calling brown. But do I know exactly what you mean if all you tell me is that something you have is good? Hardly, since I will naturally need to ask “A good what?”. Conscious of the force of this question and the need to raise it, Aquinas accepts that “good” and “bad” are relative (though not subjective) descriptions since what it takes for something of one kind to be good might not be what it takes for something of another kind to be good (or, indeed, perfect). We might commend certain people for being good opera singers while also condemning them for being bad parents, and so on. On this account, the goodness of something has to be determined with respect to the kind of thing to which we attribute it. Yet Aquinas also holds that there is a sense in which one can think of goodness in general terms. Following Aristotle,6 he argues that anything good is somehow desirable, and that goodness is attributable to something if it possesses what it needs so as to flourish as what it is by nature.7 Hence, for example, he would say that a squirrel possesses goodness if it is healthy, lively, and so on. Aquinas also holds that things display goodness simply by existing, even if they are less good than they could or should be.8 In Aquinas’ judgment, even morally wicked people display goodness insofar as they are able to think and act. For Aquinas, even Satan, though no human agent, is not all bad since he at least succeeds in being a functioning angel.9 When it comes to badness, however, Aquinas’ view is that this is always a matter of privation, a lack of some positive good, not something having what he calls esse.10 Aquinas does not mean that badness is an illusion (see Summa Theologiae, 1a, 48,1 and 2). He accepts, for instance, that a sick or sinful person is truly in a bad way. But he does not think of badness as some kind of substance, or as a positive property which goes to make up what something actually is.11 Instead, he thinks that something comes to be bad, not by acquiring some positive and actually existing way of being, but by coming to lack such a way of being. For Aquinas, badness is the gap between what is actually there and what could and should be there but is not. So he will say, for example, that though blindness is bad for a human being, and though blindness exists in the sense that we can truly say “Some people are blind”, blindness is only an absence of sight or a failure to see on the part of an animal that ought to be able to see, given the kind of animal it is. For Aquinas, neither blindness nor any other deficiency affecting something has esse or is being caused to exist by God. Yet Aquinas has distinguishable approaches concerning evil and God’s causality. Aquinas distinguishes between two kinds of evil. Some things are thwarted by what inflicts them in the course of nature. Aquinas refers to this as malum poenae (which we might render into English as “evil suffered” or “naturally occurring evil”). Then there are people who aim at bad ends. Aquinas says that these display malum culpae (“evil done” or “moral evil as attributable to a rational agent”). With this distinction in mind, Aquinas holds that evil suffered is always accompanied by a concomitant good that is made to exist (to have esse) by God. For example, he thinks that when I suffer from influenza, that is because some other existing thing is thriving –

See Aristotle, Ethics I,1, 1094a3. See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, 6,1. 8 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, 5,1 and 2. 9 See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, 48,4. 10 See Aquinas, De Principiis Naturae, 1. and Aquinas, De Ente et Essentia, 1. 11 See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, 48,1. 6 7

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the flu germ or whatever is causing me to be sick. Aquinas takes evil suffered always to have a scientific explanation in terms of which some things are diminished because of the well-being of other things acting as they do. But Aquinas finds no concomitant good when it comes to evil done. He thinks that nothing benefits (except accidentally) from me acting badly. As with the badness in evil suffered, however, Aquinas denies that God is creating the badness in my failing to be good. For Aquinas, the evil in evil done is ascribable, though not creatively, to people who turn their backs on certain goods for which they should aim. Aquinas agrees that one can aim at what one takes to be good when doing what is objectively wrong. He also agrees that one’s actions when doing so are created by God since he thinks that God is creatively at work in all that actually exists (all that has esse). Aquinas thinks that my act of wrongly punching you on the nose is as real as Mount Everest, and therefore has to be caused to exist by God. But he denies that God creatively causes the badness in evil done.12 For Aquinas, such badness is always an absence of goodness and is, therefore, not something creatable by God. Hence, Aquinas would say that if I wrongly punch you on the nose, you come to lack something while I succeed in doing something positive while also failing to be morally good. For Aquinas, my wrong assault on you amounts to me inflicting evil suffered on you as I make myself guilty of evil done.

WHY THINK OF GOD AS GOOD? Aquinas frequently denies that God is good just because God benevolently accounts for the existence of good things.13 Aquinas certainly thinks that we can thank God for good things that we receive from him. But he also holds that God is good essentially, not just because there happen to be created things enjoying well-being in various ways. He also thinks that arguing that God is good simply because God creates good things commits us to the absurdity of concluding that God is, say, wooden because God creates wooden things.14 Yet Aquinas also argues that God is good by reflecting on the notion of God as Creator.15 He claims that, in seeking their good, creatures, whether they realize it or not, are effectively seeking what God intends for them as making them to be what they are. On this idea, the goodness of creatures is in God before it is in them, as a kind of blueprint reflected in creatures that aim and succeed in being good. For Aquinas, “every creature, just in naturally tending to its own goodness, is seeking God as what ultimately intends it, as its maker”.16 For Aquinas, God is the maker of all creaturely goodness and also the end at which creatures (whether rational or not) aim in seeking what is good for them. Their goodness and their aiming at what is good for them is God at work in them, meaning that God somehow contains the perfections of all things, though without being a particular good thing belonging to some natural kind. Aquinas’ basic thought when reasoning in this way is that one cannot give what one does not have, though what the given receives might not fully represent all that is in the giver.17

See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a2ae, 79,1 and 2. See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae,1a, 13,2. 14 See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, 13,2. 15 See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, 6. 16 Herbert McCabe, Faith within Reason (London: Continuum, 2007), 118. 17 See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 13, 5. 12 13

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THE “MORALITY” OF GOD When trying to understand how Aquinas thinks of God and evil, it is also important to note that his basic line on our understanding of God is, “We do not know what God is”.18 In saying this, Aquinas does not mean that we cannot provide true statements concerning God, such as “God is good” or “God is omnipotent”. He means that God is not a spatiotemporal individual and, therefore, not subject to classification in terms of genus and species. For Aquinas, if God accounts for there being something rather than nothing, then God is not an existing thing as creatures are existing things; God is the maker of all such things. So, Aquinas argues that God is not material, not something changeable and existing in time, not something belonging to a class of which there could be many members of the same kind, and not something whose existence and nature could derive from something else.19 Aquinas does not think that God plus the universe add up to two distinct things. Our ability to add things up depends on them having some nature in common, or on them belonging to the same class. We can add to a collection of cats because what we are adding is a cat. But Aquinas does not think that God can be listed together with anything else in this kind of way. He takes God to be the inscrutable mystery from which all that we categorize or describe derives. As he says in one place: “God’s will is to be thought of as existing outside the realm of existents, as a cause from which pours forth everything that exists in all its variant forms.”20 This thinking of Aquinas is what explains why he does not spend time trying to justify God on moral grounds. For Aquinas, moral agents, as far as we understand them, are spatio-temporal creatures who engage in practical reasoning under certain moral obligations and in need of certain moral virtues in order to flourish as what they are. For Aquinas, it would be ludicrous and idolatrous to suppose that God is a moral agent with morally justified reasons for acting or not acting as he does. Aquinas is convinced that God is good, but not by standards that we employ when evaluating human beings from the moral point of view. And Aquinas’ reasons for not engaging in theodicy, as most people tend to understand it, present a serious challenge to people who think about God and evil on the assumption that God, if God exists, is the best-behaved person around. For why should one suppose that God is a well-behaved person if it is God that makes the difference between there being something (including persons as we understand them) rather than nothing at all?

FURTHER READING Baldner, Steven E. and William E. Carroll, eds. Aquinas on Creation. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1997. Davies, Brian. “The Summa Theologiae on What God Is Not”. In Aquinas’s “Summa Theologiae”: A Critical Guide. Edited by Jeffrey Hause, 47–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Davies, Brian. Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Davies, Brian and Eleonore Stump, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Aquinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. McCabe, Herbert. God and Evil in the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. London and New York: Continuum, 2010. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, 3, prologue. See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, 3. 20 Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s ‘De Interpretatione’, I, XIV. 18 19

Chapter 17

Dante RACHEL TEUBNER

To speak of Dante’s theology of evil and suffering presents two dramatic challenges. The first of these is dramatic in genre: for the Commedia – arguably Dante’s central contribution on the subject – is dramatic, rather than dogmatic, in its theological explorations. Dante’s theology of evil and suffering is expressed through the genre of poetry, for example, through dramatic narrative, dialogue, and imagery. Even the most explicitly doctrinal statements found within the Commedia must be recognized hermeneutically as speech issuing from a character, rather than taken at face value: for the “ideology” of poetic form often seems to complicate, interrogate, or even contradict its ideological content.1 Readers of the Commedia have nevertheless continually embraced the project of interpreting the poem’s theological perspectives: not only of evil, suffering, and theodicy, the centering concerns of this volume, but also of sin, divine justice, and the freedom of the will, among many others. Dante’s approach to such issues is profoundly miscellaneous and syncretic, for theological ideas, even seemingly contradictory ones, are embodied within the poem in many different ways.2 How the poem “thinks” about evil and suffering, then, must always be a matter of interpretation, open to diverse approaches and yielding divergent readings. The second of these challenges is dramatic as a matter of degree, for Dante’s representation of evil and suffering is often celebrated as a special achievement of Inferno, where evil and suffering manifest in particularly dramatic character performances. Thus the first canticle of the three-part Commedia remains the locus classicus for the poet’s explorations of both evil and suffering. A richer account of both evil and suffering, however, emerges from a reading of the poem’s three canticles, which chart Dante’s pilgrimage through the three realms of the afterlife: hell (Inferno), purgatory (Purgatorio), and heaven (Paradiso). All three canticles explore issues of theodicy, reflecting a developing perspective on the causes of evil and the purposes of suffering.

See Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 1–19; “Reading Against the Grain: Musings of an Italianist, from the Astral to the Artisanal”, in Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 1–20. 2 Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne, eds, Dante’s Commedia: Theology as Poetry (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010); Claire E. Honess and Matthew Treherne, eds, Reviewing Dante’s Theology, 2 vols (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013); Poesia e Profezia Nella Commedia: Atti del Convegno internazionale di Studi, Ravenna, 11 Novembre 2017, ed. Giuseppe Ledda (Ravenna: Centro Dantesco dei Frati Minori Conventuale, 2019); Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy, 3 vols, eds George Corbett and Heather Webb (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016–18). 1

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What follows thus presents an interpretation of the Commedia’s perspectives on evil and suffering, in dialogue with moments in the poem’s vivid embodiment of evil and suffering across its three canticles. For even as it varies and develops in its presentation of these two theological loci, the Commedia can be read to offer a narrative of evil’s ultimate void and of suffering’s divine significance.

INFERNO The word often translated into English as “evil” is simply the Italian “male” (bad), a term that marks many of hell’s structures and inhabitants. “Male” are the shades that throw themselves into the river, crossing into upper hell (2.116). “Male” is the evil done by the fraudulent in hell’s depths (11.25): Dante’s guide, the poet Virgil, explains that they must accustom their senses before they descend further (11.10-11). In lower hell’s Malebolge (“Evil Pouches”), shades are clumped into ten distinct pits or bolge, according to the variety of fraudulent evil that marked their earthly lives. “Male” are the devils of the fifth bolgia, who continually push the barrators into boiling vats of pitch with their grapplehooks (21–23.57). In name and action, the devils are implicitly compared to animals, called by such names as “Evil Claws” (Malebranche) and “Evil Tail” (“Malacoda”). The effect of such scenes is often to expose the spectacular folly of evil. Engaged in a slapstick cat-and-mouse game of chasing the barrators, the poets, and each other, the devils are ribald and unruly, tripping and tricking each other even as they attempt to deceive their actual enemies: the divine and the human. Dante’s representation of evil in such examples is often parodic, as though to demonstrate evil’s ultimate meaninglessness. In Augustine’s Confessions, a text often privileged as an interpretive key to the Commedia,3 evil comes to be understood as a privation of the good, void of its own meaning. Within this interpretive framework, Dante’s understanding of evil can be read as an Augustinian perversion of the good. In the person of Lucifer, at hell’s bottom, we find the most dramatic embodiment of this perversion: Lucifer can be understood to parody Christ’s cruciform goodness, for in hell he is deprived of any meaning, save that which he set out to defy. Virgil introduces Lucifer with a revised excerpt of Fortunatus’ hymn to the Cross – “Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni . . .” – that alludes at once to Lucifer’s rivalry with Christ and to Christ’s victory over the fallen angels. When Virgil then instructs Dante to begin climbing down Lucifer’s body, the two poets experience a startling reorientation. This reorientation has been described as signaling the Pauline stumbling block of the cross and the paradox of conversion – a paradox already present in exegetical traditions that read Satan’s crux diabolicus as signaling Christ’s triumph.4 Hell, the poets discover, is upside-down, and they are climbing not down but up: the figure of Lucifer, mutely languishing in the depths created by his expulsion from heaven, has become an exit plank out of hell. Aspiring to surpass God, Lucifer has instead become profoundly subject to God’s cosmic order.

See John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Elena Lombardi, The Wings of the Doves: Love and Desire in Dante and Medieval Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012), and “Augustine and Dante”, Reviewing Dante’s Theology, vol. 1, 175– 208, 194–9. 4 Freccero, “The Sign of Satan”, 167–79, and “Infernal Inversion and Christian Conversion: Inferno XXXIV”, 180–5, in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion. 3

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Suffering, too, appears in Dante’s hell as a dramatic principle, named in passing as “contrapasso” (“counter-suffering”, 28.142). Dante’s “contrapasso”, an Italianization of Aquinas’ “contrapassum” (STh II-II q. 61 a. 4), draws on medieval and biblical traditions of retributive justice and punishment. As a principle of suffering, however, Dante’s staging of “contrapasso” emphasizes that sin and suffering are freely chosen: thus the monster Minos does not actually sentence sinners, but rather sends them where they belong, according to their freely elected sins.5 Thus in Dante’s Inferno, shades endure torments that have been forged by their earthly existences. Suffering in hell is imagined as simulating sin and its natural consequences. Hence in hell’s first circle the lustful, who abandoned themselves to erotic tumult in their lives, endure an eternal whirlwind; the heretics in the sixth circle, who in their earthly lives denied the continuance of life beyond the grave, now live on eternally in the grave. In these cases, the dramatic effects of contrapasso seem to emphasize the resilience of human dignity and charm, even alongside the endurance of sin-induced torments: for the lustful and the heretics, both dignity and suffering are elements of hell’s fixed existence. Yet in other cases, its effects are almost comic: in the second pit of Malebolge, the flatterers, linked by their cloying lies, memorably appear in a scatological swamp, wet with human waste (18). Perhaps the worst part of hell’s suffering – whether tragically or comically rendered – is to be, in this sense, “stuck with oneself”.6

PURGATORIO The poets’ arrival in purgatory ushers in a set of new reflections on both evil and suffering. If in hell evil manifests as deprived of all meaning, in purgatory evil is given a rational explanation. Evil, Virgil claims, is caused by a perversion of love; it results when humans direct their love toward unworthy objects. Beginning in the central canto of Purgatorio (17), Virgil explains that both all of the good and all of the evil in the world are caused by love, which in its best and worst forms remains the seed of action (17.103-105). But in purgatory, souls are in the process of being restored to God, learning to direct their love to the highest good. Even after all of the evil wrought by misdirected love, humans may learn, in an Augustinian mode, to love rightly, finding a way out of evil and into a rightly ordered love for the highest good.7 We see many examples of love, in better and worse forms, on display throughout the terraces of purgatory; and it is an essential part of the penitent souls’ rehabilitation to reflect on the evil they have caused or experienced in their lives. Thus the voices of invisible spirits on the terrace of envy remind the penitent to “love those who have done Lino Pertile, “Contrapasso”, in Dante Encyclopedia, ed. Richard Lansing, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 220; Vittorio Montemaggi, “3. The Bliss and Abyss of Freedom: Hope, Personhood and Particularity”, in Vertical Readings in Dante’s Commedia, ed. George Corbett and Heather Webb, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016). 6 Teodolinda Barolini, “Inferno 14: Sunt lacrimae rerum”, in Commento Baroliniano, Digital Dante (New York: Columbia University Libraries, 2018), par. 18. 7 Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, 1.3.3–1.7.7, in Teaching Christianity, trans. Edmund Hill, Works of St. Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century Series (Hyde Park: New City Press, 1996); Oliver O’Donovan, “Usus et Fruitio in Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana I”, Journal of Theological Studies 33, no. 2 (1982): 361–97; Rowan Williams, “Language, Reality and Desire: The Nature of Christian Formation”, in On Augustine (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 41–58; Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 319–50. 5

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them evil” (“male”, 13.36), while the envious Sapia confesses to Dante the perverse joy that, in life, she took in the suffering of others (13.110). Indeed, throughout the terraces of purgatory, penitent souls are presented with notorious examples of the evil caused by the vice they committed in their lives, and offered new models of exemplary virtue as though to inspire them to love rightly. Evil in purgatory is not on display, as it is in hell; instead it becomes a point of reflection and repentance for souls enduring the pain of purgation. Suffering in purgatory, however, is dramatized everywhere as a practice of putting one’s old loves behind, of putting evil behind and training oneself in a new, divine love of the good. For souls in the middle realm, unlike the fixated shades of hell, are on pilgrimage: like Dante, they are engaged in a transformative process and a journey. Suffering in purgatory is no longer endless torment, but rather a practice of penitential transformation that leads to salvation, and to suffering’s eventual reprieve. Here pain is a salutary form of contrapasso that brings about spiritual maturation: souls engage in productive exercises of pain through which the soul regains its lost likeness to Christ, forging a newly Christic identity and anticipating the recovery of its own flesh at the general resurrection.8 Certain souls whom Dante encounters now approach him in joy, with “a sense of health and excitement in the refining fire”.9 Thus the princely Manfred, whom we meet among the excommunicate souls in Ante-Purgatory, smiles as he points to his death wounds (3). The illuminator Oderisi, whom Dante encounters on the terrace of pride, verbally celebrates the lessons in humility that he is learning through the exercise of lowliness, for the prideful carry heavy stones on their backs that force them into a bent, humble posture (11). On the terrace of lust, both homosexual and heterosexual souls pass through fire, pausing briefly to exchange a holy kiss as they meet: their exercise of pain is united with an exercise of holy affection, so that they are simultaneously being purged of lust and transformed by the practice of love (26). Suffering in purgatory is thus marked by a holy purpose: it is therapeutic and salvific. As in hell, suffering has been freely chosen; but in purgatory, it is undertaken with a sense of joy, and with the expectation of healing and restoration.

PARADISO Dramatically figured in hell, and prompting penitent reflection in purgatory, evil in paradise is presented as a casualty of earthly existence: the blessed can no longer suffer from evil’s harm (20.55-60). Piccarda Donati compassionately describes those who kidnapped and abused her as accustomed to evil more than good (3.106): evil for Piccarda is deceptive but ultimately impotent, incapable of embittering the radiant goodness of celestial beatitude. In the heaven of Venus, Charles Martel suggests that he might have prevented much evil, had he not died so young (8.49-51); yet Charles ultimately celebrates the provision of divine providence on behalf of all creation and its welfare (8.94-114). Even as evil is shown to have lost its sting, its perversions serve as a provocation to the church to continue the work of Christian love for God and neighbor. In the Heaven of the Fixed Stars, St. Peter’s allusion to the perversions of the church under the papacy

Manuele Gragnolati, Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture (William and Katherine Devers series in Dante studies; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 89–135, 135. 9 Peter Hawkins, “Crossing Over: Dante and Pilgrimage”, in Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination, Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture series (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 247–64, 254. 8

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of Boniface VIII causes the entirety of heaven to redden (27.31-36, 54); commentators have interpreted this reddening as a blush of shame that represents a “passion” of the church, reenacting quasi-liturgically the participation of the blessed in Christ’s suffering for human sin.10 On earth, evil may serve as a goad for the church and its members to suffer with and for Christ through the pursuit of Christian work. Thus Dante’s ancestor Cacciaguida speaks of the good work that Dante may accomplish by taking up the poetic mantle as he returns to earth; and thus Dante speaks of his writing of the Commedia as a form of askesis that has made him “lean” (25).11 Suffering finds a newly anointed purpose in paradise: as in hell and in purgatory, suffering is elected, but in paradise it is also outward-looking, taken up in the joyful spirit of Christian vocation and divine love. The poem itself is said to make its author suffer, as though in imitation of the cruciform suffering that Christ is said to have endured for the joy set before him (Heb. 12:2). The passionate, infectious character of divine love that is manifest in paradise – love that multiplies among the saints, “l’uno e l’altro” (10) – can be read ultimately to be united to suffering, as it was in Cistercian traditions of passion mysticism: in paradise, love is both rapture and torment, and suffering and passion are one.12 That evil is ultimately void is one of the great dramatic principles of Inferno. But the poetry of Purgatorio and Paradiso presents us finally with a vision of suffering that is joined to the transformative purposes of divine love. Thus the soul suffers as it makes its journey to God; thus Dante suffers, in his pilgrimage and in the very writing of the Commedia, for the sake of the good news, of his own transformation and of the restoration of all humans to God and to each other. Thus while evil is finally reduced to absurdity, suffering is celebrated as productive pain and as unitive passion, reuniting the soul and the communities of the living and the dead to the One who draws them continually into love and being.

FURTHER READING Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy, 3 vols. Translation and commentary by Robin Kirkpatrick. London: Penguin, 2006–8. Freccero, John. The Poetics of Conversion. Edited by Rachel Jacoff. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Hawkins, Peter. Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination. In Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture series. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Montemaggi, Vittorio. Reading Dante’s Commedia as Theology: Divinity Realized in Human Encounter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Teubner, Rachel. Dante and the Practice of Humility: A Theological Commentary on Dante’s Commedia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (forthcoming in 2023).

See Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez, “Notes to Paradiso 27.31-36”, in The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling; introduction and notes by Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez, 3 vols (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996–2011), 548. 11 See Robin Kirkpatrick, “Polemics of Praise: Theology as Text, Narrative, and Rhetoric in Dante’s Commedia”, in Dante’s Commedia: Theology as Poetry, ed. Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 14–36. 12 See Erich Auerbach, “Passio as passion” (1941), in Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, ed. James I. Porter, trans. Jane O. Newman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 165–87. 10

Chapter 18

Julian of Norwich RACHEL MUERS

[We] see evil deeds done and such great harm inflicted that it seems impossible to us that any good could ever come out of this. And we witness this, sorrowing and grieving over it, so that we cannot repose in the blessed contemplation of God as we should do. (Revelations of Divine Love, 80) In formulating theological responses to suffering it is easy to be caught between two extremes: the solution to the problem of suffering that denies suffering’s magnitude or minimizes its surd-like character, and the non-solution that is simply a restatement of the problem. The first type of answer may seem to come from a position of relative detachment, the view from nowhere that distances itself from particular experiences of suffering and its challenge to Christian faith; the second type of answer embraces a position in the midst of suffering. The response of Julian of Norwich (1343–after 1416 ce) to suffering comes literally and figuratively from a third place – from an enclosed space that allows her neither to escape from the daily encounter with suffering and evil, nor to become absorbed in dealing with particular situations of crisis. As an anchoress she was both solitary and immersed in the life of fourteenth-century Norwich as a listener, counselor, and intercessor.1 Moreover, her text in both its form and its content explores ways to hold together the large-scale story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration – in which suffering and evil are problems affecting humanity in general – and the recognition of particular located struggles with suffering and evil. When Julian writes about the “great harm” inflicted by sin we should understand it in concrete terms as a reflection on her daily experience – not only her own life history but the life of her city. Her theology emerges from the heart of a city experiencing the aftermath of the Black Death, witnessing civil unrest and religious dissent violently suppressed, and suffering both acute and chronic damage to the social body.2 Understanding her context means we have even less reason to dismiss Julian, either as an overoptimistic resolver of the problem of evil or as an ivory-tower-dweller cut off from real life. In reading the quotation given earlier, the reader should pause for a long time at the end of the first sentence. Julian includes herself in the “us” to whom it seems impossible that any good should come out of the horrors that she sees around her, who cannot repose in the

On Julian’s place at both the margin and the center, see Denys Turner, Julian of Norwich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 13. 2 On Julian’s context, see Grace Jantzen, Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1988); Amy Laura Hall, Laughing at the Devil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). 1

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contemplation of God, and who cannot fully make sense of the revelation of divine love in the midst of evil.3 If this is right, Julian’s famous affirmation that sin is “behovely”, that is, fitting or apposite – and that “all manner of thing”, that is, every thing in particular (not just the grand scheme of things) shall be well4 – cannot be a way to deny the seriousness of suffering. Nor can Julian’s (almost) equally famous affirmation that she sees no wrath in God be taken to minimize the gravity of sin.5 So how are these affirmations to be understood? The range of perspectives offered in recent scholarly accounts of Julian not only offers insights into the basic features of her thought but also indicates the wider questions that her approach raises. For example, Julian refers to a future, and as yet unseen, “great deed” that God will do, in which God will “make well all that is not well”;6 and this “great deed”, “ordained of our Lord God from without beginning”, provides assurance that sin and suffering will be overcome. From passages such as this, Ian McFarland has argued that Julian adopts a “God’s-eye view” that allows her to regard sin and suffering as, in the final analysis, illusory; conversely, Karen Kilby has argued that the as-yet-unknown – and unknowable – “great deed” allows Julian to leave the struggle with suffering and evil genuinely unresolved.7 For another example, Julian’s christocentrism – and her vision of the suffering Christ enduring all human sin and evil8 – leads Turner to the conclusion that Julian’s complete theological “answer” to the suffering and the problem of evil is found in the cross of Christ; by contrast, Kilby argues that the unknown “great deed” suggests an incomplete and open-ended wrestling with the problem of suffering.9 One helpful way to engage with the tensions in Julian’s response to suffering and the problem of evil is through the extended parable of the lord and the servant, which she first presents as a vision granted to her in response to unresolved questions. Julian is troubled because in her visions she sees neither blame nor wrath in God – and her concern is not only that this contradicts the teaching of “Holy Church” but also that it contradicts her own sense of the gravity of sin and the blame it deserves. The narrative vision that responds to Julian’s questions is quite simple – a lord sends a servant on an errand; the servant runs and falls into a pit, suffering injury and distress and unable to get out or help himself; the lord, meanwhile, regards the servant with compassion and promises the servant a great reward.10 Julian’s many-leveled Christological rereading of the story – in which the movement of the servant, away from and back to the fellowship of the lord, is both the fall and restoration of humanity and the incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ – allows her to see the fall primarily as a source of intense suffering and an occasion of compassion, but also as leading to the great reward given to the servant at his return. The movement of the servant – who, Julian makes clear, is both

On Julian’s response to “horrors”, see Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 162–5. 4 Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Barry Windeatt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 74. 5 See ibid., 100, 103–4. 6 Ibid., 80. 7 See Ian McFarland, “Sin and the Limits of Theology: A Reflection in Conversation with Julian of Norwich and Martin Luther”, International Journal of Systematic Theology 22, no. 2 (2020): 147–68; See Karen Kilby, “Julian of Norwich, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the Status of Suffering in Christian Theology”, New Blackfriars 99 (2018): 298–311. 8 See Julian, Revelations, 66–7. 9 Turner, Julian of Norwich, 207–17; Kilby, “Julian of Norwich”. 10 See Julian, Revelations, 106–15. 3

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Christ and Adam – both occasions his fall and draws him out of his fallen state. Moreover, the movement of the servant, no less than the “sitting” of the lord, is characterized by and as love. If this story seems to do precisely what I said Julian did not do – make light of the great harm of sin – it is important to remember where Julian finds herself in the story. She, together with her readers, is the helpless servant struggling in the pit, suffering the painful effects of the fall and unable to see the face of the lord. The dramatization of the problem of evil that Julian provides, far from allowing the readers to take a shortcut to the end of the story, encourages them to reflect more deeply on the situation of being caught in the middle.11 From where Julian finds herself, the gaze of divine love, under which all manner of thing is well – the steadfast, compassionate, and joyful gaze with which the lord regards the servant – is mostly obscure, held in faith and glimpsed in puzzling but persistent visions. A striking feature of the story of the lord and the servant is that it does not narrate the resolution; although the reunion of the lord and the servant is foreseen, we do not see the servant emerging from the pit and returning to the lord. Perhaps even more striking, given Julian’s willingness to ask questions about all her visions, is that she does not even ask how the servant gets out of the pit; she seems to take it for granted that she and her readers are in the middle of the story, not able to escape the present situation of suffering and obscured vision. Julian does, however, commit herself to the task of puzzling out the story; she is strikingly unwilling to allow the contradictions and tensions within her visions, and between these visions and her theological inheritance, to stand without question. In contemplating her parabolic/narrative vision she insists repeatedly – it would seem, against her own expectations – that the lord does not and cannot blame the servant for falling; the conclusion stands that it is impossible for God to be wrathful. As has often been observed, Julian without explicitly expressing it in these terms takes up the Augustinian account of evil as privatio boni.12 Sin, and everything that goes along with it – including divine wrath – is nothing. This does not mean that it is unimportant; it is an agonizing lack and deprivation, expressed for example in Julian’s repeated images of the “dryness” and “thirst” of the crucified Christ. Theologically, God’s lack of wrath is explained (for Julian) by the fact that wrath is itself a lack – a departure from love, joy, and peace, which, were it found in God, would be an “impossible” departure from God’s own nature.13 In terms of the economy of salvation, Julian argues that God judges every saved soul according to the “substance” that is eternally united with Christ – the “godly will” that never consents to sin, and which cannot be affected or touched by sin.14 Given the priority of the “substance”, or the “godly will” that never consents to sin, in God’s relation to saved humanity, the condition of estranged and suffering “sensualite” – human life caught up in evil deeds and great harm, and the state of the servant in the pit – invites not wrath but only compassion.15 Moreover, the condition of the “substance”, eternally united with God, invites not compassion but rather ceaseless joy and delight; in Julian’s

On Julian and drama, see Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Body Politic of Christ (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1999). 12 See for example Turner, Julian of Norwich, 62–5. 13 See Julian, Revelations, 100. 14 See ibid., 87. 15 See ibid., 124–5. On “sensualite”, translated by Windeatt as “sensory being”, see also Turner, Julian of Norwich, 167–204. 11

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parable, the lord looks at the servant with outward compassion and inward joy. There is no dynamic of forgiveness or blame in God, just as there is no dynamic of estrangement and reconciliation in God. An obvious worry here is that the separation of substance and “sensualite”, and the identification of the former with the truth of the human being’s identity in relation to God, amounts to a flight from embodiment and history – and indeed from human particularity. Is the price of making sin “nothing” in the sight of God the reduction of embodied life to “nothing”? This would be a strange result for such a thoroughly Christocentric theologian. The response to sin and suffering that emerges from the Revelations as a whole combines an absolute assurance that God makes “all things well” because nothing else is compatible with the nature of God or with the nature of creatures, with a persistent attention to the present, real, effects of sin and suffering – for which God provides present help. What Julian seeks is not the escape from “sensualite” but rather the union of “sensualite” with substance; we are to become, through time, what in God’s eyes we have always been, and this is the effect of the movement of divine love in history. This movement is itself understood in a Christocentric key; Christ as “mother” educates, nourishes, and cares for humanity precisely in the midst of the condition of sin and suffering. It is worth emphasizing, moreover, that Julian does not contradict or criticize the church’s ascription of wrath (and mercy and forgiveness) to God. This is not easily attributable to a simple fear of being accused of heresy; after all, she goes to some pains to draw attention to the tensions between her visions and the teaching of “holy church”. Rather, the “lower” judgment of the church – within which we find the economy of blame, wrath, repentance, and mercy – is the appropriate response in via to the pervasiveness of sin and evil. Indeed, the recognition of the “higher” judgment of God – in which sin is nothing and the soul is loved simply according to its “substance” – is seen in Julian’s text to enable an effective pastoral and educative response to the daily reality of sin, one that is sensitive to particular relationships and needs. So, for example, Julian and all her fellow Christians are equally united to Christ as regards their substance and equally mired in sin as regards their sensualite; the theological answer to the problem of evil is the same for all of them. However, Julian concludes that she – by which is meant not her “own singular person”, the anchoress of Norwich, but everyone in the first person – should reflect on her own sin in order to bring about humility, and on the sins of others (her “evin Cristen”, fellow Christians) only in order to give them comfort and help.16 In her wrestling with her visions and in the writing of the Revelations, then, Julian herself as a member of “holy church” becomes part of the response in via to the problem of sin and suffering. She negotiates the gap between the present suffering of the servant of God and the unshakable conviction that “all manner of thing shall be well”, with the help of her central vision of divine compassion.

FURTHER READING Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love. Translated by Barry Windeatt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

See Julian, Revelations, 157–8.

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Bauerschmidt, Frederick Christian. Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Body Politic of Christ. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1999. Hall, Amy Laura. Laughing at the Devil: Seeing the World with Julian of Norwich. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Turner, Denys. Julian of Norwich: Theologian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

Chapter 19

Martin Luther SIMEON ZAHL

No magisterial Reformer wrote more about the theology of suffering than Martin Luther (1483–1546), and no magisterial Reformer had a greater influence on later Protestant pastoral theological reflection on the subject.1 For Luther, one of the clearest distinguishing marks of the Christian faith is a particular attitude to suffering. Although Luther did not believe suffering could ever be meritorious (in contrast to many of his late medieval forebears), he consistently understood suffering to be a kind of divine medicine in Christian life that strips away human delusions and renders true faith possible. The Christian sees God at work in their suffering.

DEVELOPMENT OF LUTHER’S THEOLOGY OF SUFFERING Luther’s theology of suffering emerged out of late medieval theologies of humility, with their emphasis on contemplation of Christ’s passion and corresponding vision of suffering as helping to effect a spiritually necessary diminishment of the sinful self. German mystical writers like Johannes Tauler and the author of the Theologia Germanica, in particular, provided the initial soil out of which Luther’s theology of the cross grew.2 Luther’s first major work, the Dictata super Psalterium (1513–15), is substantially continuous with trajectories in late medieval theology of humility. Salvation comes not from “our own powers or by the world’s resources, but in humility . . . being fully aware that we possess absolutely nothing of salvation in ourselves” (LW 10:250; WA 3:301). It is because suffering produces this humility that for Christians “suffering is salutary” and “there is more salvation than destruction in sufferings” (LW 11:404; WA 4:269). This idea is extended in the Lectures on Romans (1515–16), where Luther describes the importance for spiritual life of “suffering of conscience and spirit, wherein all of one’s self-righteousness and wisdom . . . is devoured and done away”. The purpose of such sufferings is to teach us that the saving gift of the Holy Spirit comes “not of ourselves and of our own powers” but is rather a gift “given by the Holy Spirit” (LW 25:293; WA 56:306).

See Ronald K. Rittgers, The Reformation of Suffering: Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 85–6. 2 See Volker Leppin, Die Fremde Reformation: Luthers mystische Wurzeln (München: C.H. Beck, 2017); Berndt Hamm, The Early Luther: Stages in a Reformation Reorientation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), ch. 1; and Rittgers, The Reformation of Suffering, chs. 3 and 4. 1

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In these early works, reflection on how God uses suffering in Christian lives paves the way for Luther’s developing theology of justification by faith. Suffering is a school for disillusioning Christians of their soteriological efficacy. Highlighting their powerlessness, it causes them to turn to God who alone has the power to save. It is thus in Luther’s theology of suffering that we see one of the clearest links between the theology of the Reformation and the preoccupations of late medieval theology, especially late medieval mystical and pastoral theology.

THE FUNCTION OF SUFFERING IN LUTHER’S THOUGHT Luther’s early reflections on suffering reach their influential culmination in the 1518 Heidelberg Disputation. Here Luther develops the famous distinction between the theologian of glory and the theologian of the cross in part through reflection on God’s relationship to suffering. The theologian of glory thinks in worldly terms: “he prefers works to suffering, glory to the cross, strength to weakness, wisdom to folly, and, in general, good to evil.” In this he has failed to learn the great lesson of the crucifixion, that “God can be found only in suffering and the cross”. The theologian of glory thinks that God is constantly scanning the world for righteousness and religious success in order to reward it, when in fact “the love of the cross, born of the cross . . . turns in the direction where it does not find good” precisely in order to “confer good upon the bad and needy person” (LW 31:53, 57; WA 1:362, 365). Just as we encounter God’s grace not in our righteousness but in our sin, so we come to understand and experience God’s love not in our joys but in our sufferings. Luther thus calls God’s relation to suffering a “theological paradox” (LW 31:39; WA 1:353). Here we see several key features of Luther’s mature theology of suffering. The first is that Luther views Christian suffering – a category that for him can encompass pain and physical illness, religious persecution, grief, and existential sufferings like guilt, anxiety, and terror of death – as often performing a function analogous to the condemning function of God’s law. Suffering reveals our true situation before God, that we stand in need of divine rescue. In our pain we learn to see ourselves clearly for the first time, and we are driven to cry out to God. Here Luther is building on Augustine’s anti-Pelagian theology of desire, where it is only through the painful “stimulus of the commandment” that sinners learn to despair of themselves and come to “take flight through faith to justifying grace”.3 In this sense suffering joins the law in providing a vital and necessary medicine of the will. Implicit in this is a particular view of human nature. Luther takes it for granted that the desire to avoid suffering is closely related in sinful human beings to a desire for independent power and control over their lives at the expense of trust in God and his purposes for them. Suffering can be a powerful medicine in Luther’s view because it reveals the lie of human control, undermining our default attitude of self-sufficiency and highlighting its idolatrous character. It is in this context that Luther’s well-known reflections on his Anfechtungen or spiritual afflictions are to be understood. As a monk Luther suffered through periods of intense psychological and spiritual torment, and he later described the attacks of his theological and ecclesial enemies as likewise a form of Anfechtung. Eventually, with the help of his Augustine, Spir. et litt. 10.16 (English: Answer to the Pelagians I [New York: New City Press, 1997], 153).

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confessor and superior Johann Staupitz, Luther came to see these experiences of affliction as catalysts for theological and personal insight into the grace of God. In an influential late work, the 1539 preface to the Wittenberg edition of his German writings, Luther described “tentatio, Anfechtung” as one of the three ingredients that make you a good theologian and exegete (the others are prayer and meditation on the Word). Affliction, Luther writes, is the “touchstone which teaches you not only to know and understand, but also to experience how right, how true, how sweet, how lovely, how mighty, how comforting God’s Word is, wisdom beyond all wisdom” (LW 34:286-287; WA 50:660). These reflections stand in remarkable continuity with comments Luther made twenty-five years earlier, in the Dictata super Psalterium: “in tribulation [in tribulatione] [the exegete] learns many things which he did not know before; many things he already knew in theory he grasps more firmly through experience. And he understands Holy Scripture better than he would without trials [tentatione]” (LW 10:49; WA 3:44). What Luther seems to have particularly in view here is the idea that affliction causes us to see just how reliable and consoling God’s Word is. It is one thing to look at a life preserver and believe in principle that it will float; it is quite another to experience it as all that is keeping you alive while adrift in heavy seas. Suffering thus does not just strip human beings of their illusions of religious autonomy. It also provides opportunity to learn to trust more deeply and fully in the goodness of God and in the efficacy of His saving work.

THEODICY AND GOD’S AGENCY IN SUFFERING In making these kinds of arguments about human experience of affliction, a feature of Luther’s account that a modern reader cannot help but notice is his disconcerting willingness to speak of the suffering we experience as actively caused by God. “Because men misused the knowledge of God through works, God wished again to be recognized in suffering” (LW 31:52; WA 1:362); “[God] crucifies and kills so that He may revive and glorify. Thus He does a work that is alien to him [alienum opus eius ab eo] so He may do His own work” (LW 11:451; WA 4:331). For Luther, God does not just meet us in our afflictions. It is important to Luther to be able to say also that God actively brings them upon us. Such claims require some explication. First, in describing God’s role in these afflictions as an “alien” rather than proper work of God, Luther is acknowledging that there is a paradox here. To call suffering “alien” to God is to recognize that it is not good in itself, that it is “alien” to the God whose entire end in relation to human beings is to console, to redeem, to liberate, and to save. Suffering can be called good only in the same paradoxical sense that Christ’s passion can be called “good”, as we do on Good Friday. By calling this God’s “alien” work, Luther is describing not where suffering comes from but how God acts in the context of an already fallen world. Just as God created the world from nothing, so God also “creates” good out of the evil of affliction and creates holiness out of sin. To put the same point slightly differently, it would be a mistake to read Luther’s comments on God’s active role in human suffering as a theodicy in any traditional sense. Indeed, Malysz rightly points out that Luther’s approach to theology is a deeply anti-speculative one that considers theodicy to be an “impossible” question.4 Luther’s

Piotr J. Malysz, “Martin Luther’s Trinitarian Hermeneutic of Freedom”, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, May 22, 2017. http://religion​.oxfordre​.com​/view​/10​.1093​/acrefore​/9780199340378​.001​.0001​/

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theology is highly pastoral and contextual in its impulses. He is interested in suffering as Christians actually experience it and the relation of that suffering to the logic of the crucifixion. Why there ever came to be suffering in the world at all, given the goodness of God, is just the sort of speculative question that arouses Luther’s theological suspicion. The final qualification to make about Luther’s willingness to describe God as in some sense the author of our sufferings is that although the dynamics I have been describing do convey Luther’s primary innovation and main emphasis in the theology of suffering, they do not represent all that he had to say on the subject. In his sermons and in his pastoral letters, Luther constantly gives advice on how to alleviate suffering and how to find meaningful consolation in it; indeed he states in unequivocal terms that it is a divine command that we “avoid harm and trouble where we can” (Letters of Spiritual Counsel, 234). He exhorts suffering friends to enjoy food, beer, and the company of others and not to dwell so much on their sorrows (86). He urges Christians to maintain hospitals and take medicines for plague and other illness, and excoriates those who eschew the help of doctors out of a misguided sense of faith (234–7). He waxes eloquent on the power of personal confession and Bible reading to bring meaningful consolation to troubled consciences and to alleviate existential sufferings (103, 87). It is only the sufferings that God has not otherwise provided relief for that need to be understood in terms of God’s “alien” and paradoxical work to save and to transform.

CONCLUSION Martin Luther’s theology of suffering can seem highly countercultural today, in a world where one of the few moral goods that still commands wide agreement is the good of alleviating and minimizing human suffering. Reading Luther it soon becomes clear that while the alleviation of suffering is important for him and very much to be sought, for Luther it also seems to occupy a different place in the ecology of human goods than it does for modern readers. Although he was no stranger to physical suffering (he suffered from a range of painful illnesses throughout his life), Luther clearly seemed to find existential and spiritual suffering to be more excruciating and more problematic than physical suffering. Agitations of conscience, fear of death, and anxiety about God’s goodness and love are the human plights that Luther experienced as most urgent and most important. If suffering was in some way necessary or helpful in bringing about the alleviation of these problems, then that is a price Luther was clearly willing to pay. What Luther’s reflections on suffering draw out with particular clarity today is the fact that for Luther, as for many late medieval and early modern Europeans, it is religious realities that are the matter of supreme concern in human life. Indeed, Luther no doubt would find modern attitudes to suffering shallow and thin insofar as they fail to see the fundamental priority of religious matters over purely physical well-being. This is a point that should not be moved past too quickly. In an era where human suffering is increasingly medicalized, where we are more likely to bring our personal pain to a psychiatrist than to

acrefore​-9780199340378​-e​-355. See also Simeon Zahl, “Non-Competitive Agency and Luther’s Experiential Argument against Virtue”, Modern Theology 35, no. 2 (2019): 199–222, 217–18. For a contrary view based in Luther’s treatise The Bondage of the Will, see Paul R. Hinlicky, Paths Not Taken: Fates of Theology from Luther through Leibniz (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 271–2.

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a priest, and where we are quick to reduce powerful feelings of meaningless and alienation to problems with serotonin levels, we may have more to learn from Luther than we think.

FURTHER READING Luther, Martin. “Heidelberg Disputation.” In Career of the Reformer I. Luther’s Works 31. American Edition. Edited by Harold J. Grimm, 39–70. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1957. Luther, Martin. Lectures on Romans. Luther’s Works. American Edition, vol. 25. Edited by Hilton C. Oswald. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1972. Luther, Martin. Letters of Spiritual Counsel. Edited and translated by Theodore G. Tappert. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006. Rittgers, Ronald K. The Reformation of Suffering: Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Chapter 20

John Calvin JAMES N. ANDERSON

John Calvin (1509–64) stands alongside Luther and Zwingli as one of the most influential leaders of the Protestant Reformation. Calvin is best known for his magisterial Institutes of the Christian Religion, and the Institutes provide the most systematic presentation of Calvin’s perspective on evil and suffering. In addition, Calvin authored several treatises defending his teachings on divine providence and predestination, wrote commentaries on almost every book of the Bible, and delivered thousands of sermons from his Genevan pulpit. Although he never produced a commentary on the book of Job, Calvin preached 159 sermons on Job in the years 1554–5 that shed further light on how the French reformer understood the role of suffering and evil in God’s purposes and in the lives of believers.1 Calvin himself was no stranger to trials and afflictions. His ministry faced vehement opposition on multiple fronts, and he endured an array of physical afflictions throughout his life. Nevertheless, he strove to build his theology of suffering on the foundation of divine revelation rather than human experience. We can consider here only a summary of Calvin’s views.2 We begin by reviewing five points where Calvin stands firmly within mainstream historic Christianity, before turning to five points where Calvin takes a more distinctive (and for many, more controversial) stance regarding God’s relationship to suffering and evil. (1) Calvin is committed to classical Christian theism, which holds that God is a transcendent self-existent Being who alone possesses all perfections (Inst. I.1.1-3; I.10.12; I.14.3). Thus, any account of evil that implies some imperfection or limitation in God’s righteousness, wisdom, or power is excluded from the outset. (2) Calvin likewise affirms the traditional Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo. Everything other than God was created out of nothing by God, and everything was originally created good. Calvin therefore rejects any Manichean dualism or Platonist notion of a deity who had to create out of a pre-existent substance that resisted his efforts (Inst. I.14.1-3, 20–22). Evil is a latecomer to the cosmos. It is an intrusion into God’s creation and exists only as a corruption or degeneration of an original goodness. (3) Calvin holds to the traditional Christian view of the Fall, as depicted in Genesis 3. Adam and Eve were historical individuals – the first human couple – endowed with moral agency and the freedom to obey or disobey God’s commands (Inst. I.15.8). They Derek Thomas provides an invaluable study of the dominant themes of Calvin’s sermons on Job; see Proclaiming the Incomprehensible God: Calvin’s Teaching on Job (Fearn, Ross-shire: Christian Focus Publications, 2004). 2 In-text references are abbreviated as follows. Inst. refers to Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559); citations by book, chapter, and section. SPG refers to The Secret Providence of God (1558); citations by page number in the Crossway edition. 1

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freely chose to rebel against their Creator, thereby plunging all humankind into a state of corruption and inviting a divine curse upon the earth (Inst. II.1.4-11). Human death and so-called natural evils are the just consequences of an original Adamic sin. Yet this was not the first instance of evil in the cosmos, for the fall of humankind was preceded by the fall of the devil (Inst. I.14.16). Adam’s transgression was incited by a satanic tempter. (4) Calvin teaches – again in continuity with Christian tradition – that the final solution to the problem of evil and suffering is found in the person and work of Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, who took on a human nature, was born of the virgin Mary, offered himself as a perfect atoning sacrifice for human sin, rose victoriously from the dead, and ascended into heaven to reign eternally at the Father’s right hand. Christ has triumphed over the enemies of God and of his people, having decisively conquered sin, death, and the devil (Inst. I.14.18; II.15.3-4). (5) Lastly, Calvin affirms the Christian eschatology reflected in the ecumenical creeds. Whereas the first coming of Christ established his victory over sin and death, the final defeat of God’s enemies awaits his glorious second coming at which the general resurrection will take place and Christ will render judgment on “the living and the dead”. This climactic event will be followed by the New Heavens and the New Earth, where sin, suffering, and death will be permanently banished and the redeemed will enjoy the perfect blessedness of eternal fellowship with God (Inst. II.16.17; III.25.1-10). Besides these five common points, Calvin expresses and defends some distinctive positions regarding divine sovereignty and human corruption, positions that came to characterize the subsequent Calvinist/Reformed tradition. (1) An unswerving commitment to God’s absolute sovereignty over his creation may be the best-known (and most pilloried) aspect of Calvin’s theology. Calvin affirms meticulous divine providence: everything that takes place in the world, down to the smallest detail, has been foreordained by God (Inst. I.16.1-4; SPG, 62). God has a comprehensive plan for his creation, and that plan will be infallibly executed. The divine decree, in the nature of the case, encompasses even the free choices of creatures. God’s sovereign will cannot be frustrated by the wills of his creatures; on the contrary, even when creatures rebel against God’s righteous commands and commit evil acts, they unwittingly serve his wise and holy purposes (Inst. I.14.17; I.18.4; SPG, 81). The paradigmatic instance of this dynamic is the crucifixion of Christ: the incarnate Son of God was put to death at the hands of wicked men, yet this was foreordained by God for the salvation of his people (SPG, 89; cf. Acts 4:27-28). It follows that while some events may appear to us to be random or fortuitous, due to our limited perspective, there is strictly speaking no such thing as fortune, chance, or fate (Inst. I.16.2, 8). Whatever happens, happens for a divine reason, whether or not we can discern that reason. While Calvin is open to speaking of God’s “permission” of evil, he emphasizes that this should not be regarded as a “bare permission” but rather a “willing permission” (Inst. I.18.1; SPG, 80–81). God is not merely standing back and letting events proceed under their own steam, as it were, with no divine hand on the wheel. Furthermore, while Calvin maintains that God is the ultimate cause of all things, he is no occasionalist. There are real secondary causes, including the human will, and God in his providence normally accomplishes his purposes by means of these secondary causes. For the same reason, Calvin takes pains to distinguish divine providence from pagan fatalism that imagines events will turn out a certain way regardless of our actions (Inst. I.16.8; I.17.9). God coordinates the ends and the means, such that secondary causes play determinative roles in his providential plan. Divine sovereignty does not negate human

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responsibility or invite recklessness (Inst. I.17.3-5). Indeed, it is God’s providence that secures the benefits of prudence. Calvin is well aware that his doctrine of providence is vulnerable to the charge of making God the “author of sin”. If God ordains the evils in the world, does that not impugn his holiness and righteousness? Calvin repudiates the charge and rebuts it in various ways: by distinguishing between “remote” and “proximate” causes, by distinguishing between God’s righteous intentions and the perverse motivations of humans, by emphasizing that God ordains evil only to accomplish his greater good purposes, and by exposing the inconsistencies of those who reject divine foreordination while affirming divine foreknowledge and “mere permission” (SPG, 73–74, 78–87, 91–92, 101). He also appeals to Augustine for support, whom he quotes extensively – far more than any other church father. In the end, however, Calvin rests his case on the authority of the Bible (Inst. I.18.4; SPG, 97). If Scripture declares God’s sovereignty over his creation, including the sins of his creatures, that settles the matter. (2) As noted previously, Calvin traces the entrance of evil and suffering to an Adamic fall, preceded by an angelic fall. Adam possessed free will in the sense that he was able to obey or disobey God’s command; to resist the satanic temptation or succumb to it. As a result of Adam’s sin, however, humankind has lost free will in that original sense (Inst. II.2.1-9). In keeping with his Augustinianism, and following Luther’s lead, Calvin affirms “the bondage of the will” (Inst. II.3.5). Our corrupted hearts are bent toward evil, and thus we are unable to will what is truly good and pleasing to God. We retain so-called freedom of spontaneity – we’re free to do what we want to do – and thus we can be held accountable for our actions. God does not incite or coerce us to sin. But what we want is not what God desires for us: to love God above all, and to love others as we love ourselves. For Calvin, this doctrine of human depravity largely explains why there is so much evil in the world. Fallen human nature, Calvin memorably remarks, is a “perpetual factory of idols” (Inst. I.11.8). On the question of original sin and free will, Calvin takes issue with many of the church fathers (Inst. II.2.4, 9). But as he sees matters, this sober assessment of human corruption only serves to promote humility and cultivate an appreciation for divine grace. (3) Calvin does not go to great lengths to develop a full-blown theodicy. Given his account of meticulous divine providence and his commitment to divine perfection, Calvin is content to insist that God must have his good reasons for allowing any instance of evil, even if (as is frequently the case) we cannot discern those reasons (Inst. I.17.1; SPG, 64). Thus, for Calvin, there can be no gratuitous evils: evils that are not necessary to accomplish some higher divine purpose. Nevertheless, Calvin does gesture toward some partial theodicies in the explanations he offers for the afflictions experienced by believers and unbelievers: God’s righteous punishment of the wicked and his fatherly discipline of his children; the participation of believers in the sufferings of Christ; the cultivation of the fruit of the Spirit, along with a deeper knowledge of God and of ourselves; the manifestation of God’s attributes in his acts of justice and mercy; even hints of the “O Felix Culpa” view of God’s permission of the Fall (Inst. I.15.8; SPG, 78). If there is any unifying theme, it is simply that God sovereignly works all things – evil and suffering included – for his own glory. (4) In keeping with his aversion to theological speculation beyond what God has revealed, Calvin often appeals to divine incomprehensibility regarding God’s relationship to evil.3 As we have noted, Calvin thinks that God’s reasons for allowing particular evils

See especially Thomas, Proclaiming the Incomprehensible God.

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are mostly concealed from us, and thus he routinely speaks of God’s “hidden will”, “unsearchable counsel”, “secret providence”, and the like. Believers must live by faith, not by sight. Similarly, the apparent conflict between God’s secret will and his revealed will that arises from Calvin’s position – namely, that God decrees the very sins he forbids – is also explained in terms of God’s incomprehensibility and his accommodation to the limitations of human thought and language. Although the divine will is ultimately unified and harmonious, it nevertheless appears diverse and manifold to us, due to our limited understanding and perspective (Inst. I.18.3; SPG, 79, 93–97). (5) Despite the difficulties that attend his doctrine of divine providence, Calvin believes they are more than outweighed by the scriptural support the doctrine enjoys, the degree to which it exalts God’s wisdom, power, and majesty, and the precious pastoral comforts that follow from it (Inst. I.17.6-11). Whatever good or ill believers experience in their lives, they can be assured that all things come from the hand of God and are therefore directed toward his glory and their ultimate blessing. Prosperity invites gratitude, while adversity invites patient perseverance. Nothing befalls us by chance. Consequently, Christians who embrace this outlook can live free from anxiety and with a joyful trust in God’s providence.

FURTHER READING Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Edited by John T. McNeill. Translated by Ford Lewis Battles. 2 vols. London: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960. Calvin, John. The Secret Providence of God. Edited by Paul Helm. Wheaton: Crossway, 2010. Helm, Paul. John Calvin’s Ideas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Thomas, Derek. Proclaiming the Incomprehensible God: Calvin’s Teaching on Job. Fearn, RossShire: Christian Focus Publications, 2004.

Chapter 21

Richard Hooker PAUL DOMINIAK

Richard Hooker (1554–1600) was an Elizabethan Reformed theologian often credited as being “unquestionably the greatest Anglican theologian”1 and the “inventor of Anglicanism”.2 His surviving work only seems to deal cursorily with suffering and evil. His writing offers neither a sustained theodicy nor a critical anti-theodicy, despite scholarly recognition of his theological comprehensiveness. Given the polemical and ecclesiological focus of Hooker’s writings, this is perhaps unsurprising.3 His major work On the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity primarily served to offer the first vernacular apology for the established laws and customs of the post-Reformation Elizabethan Church against radical puritan detractors. Hooker’s sermons (ten published posthumously, and three more recently rediscovered fragments) concerned various matters of faith but were similarly enmeshed in the political, ecclesiastical, and theological controversies of the late Elizabethan period.4 Yet, surfaces can be deceptive. Hooker makes it clear at the beginning of the Lawes that he also writes for “posteritie” (Pref. I; FLE 1:1:2). Accordingly, Hooker’s work reflects on theological matters beyond the immediate polemical fray in order that his wider vision of a universe saturated with divinity will not pass “away as in a dreame”. As such, we can extract three themes that emerge across Hooker’s works which together point toward what Bethany N. Sollereder has labeled a “compassionate theodicy” where “the intellectual problem of evil forms a crucial part of the resolution of the practical problem of evil”.5 These three themes are participation, worship, and conscience. These themes signal a type of moral theology that exhibits a pastoral character ultimately concerned with hope and human flourishing amidst the vicissitudes of life.

Paul Avis, Anglicanism and the Christian Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2002), 31. Peter Lake, “‘The Anglican Moment?’ Richard Hooker and the Ideological Watershed of the 1590s”, in Anglicanism and the Western Christian tradition, ed. Stephen Platten (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2003), 99, 116. 3 See W. Brown Patterson, “Elizabethan Theological Polemics”, in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. Torrance Kirby (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 89–120. 4 See Laetitia Yeandle, textual ed., “Tractates and Sermons”, in The Folger Library Edition of The Works of Richard Hooker, vol. 5, gen. ed. W. Speed Hill (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1990), esp. 1–3, 59–60, 83–4, 299, 634–48. 5 Bethany N. Sollereder, “Compassionate Theodicy: A Suggested Truce Between Intellectual and Practical Theodicy”, Modern Theology 37, no. 2 (2021): 382–95, 386 (original italics). 1 2

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PARTICIPATION Hooker’s Lawes describes a universe “drenched with deity”.6 Creation is intrinsically good insofar as it participates in God, rendering evil and suffering as fundamentally unnatural. Welding together a Neoplatonic framework with Aristotelian notions of causality, Hooker unpacks in Book One of the Lawes the natural and supernatural laws that participate in God’s eternal law, suspending all of creation from God’s primary causality and providence.7 Hooker’s participatory framework ultimately describes an arc spanning from creation through to redemption. On the one hand, God undergirds all that exists: “God hath his influence into the very essence of all things, without which influence of Deity supporting them their utter annihilation could not choose but follow.”8 As such, all creatures “covert more or lesse the participation of God himselfe” as the first and final cause of participable goodness (Lawes, 1.5.1-2; FLE 1:72.27-73.10). On the other hand, Hooker recognizes that sin interrupts this natural desire for union with God and represents a failure of participation (Lawes, I.11.3; FLE 1:112.25-113.7). Even here, however, God’s providence retains its sovereignty: “There are two forms of government: that which would have been, had free creation not lost its way; that which is now when it has lost its way” (Predestination, in FLE 4:87.16-17). Appealing to an Aristotelian premise, Hooker asserts that God would not create a natural desire that could be frustrated, and so fulfills it through a “way mystical and supernaturall . . . [which] God in himselfe prepared before all worldes”, namely Christ (Lawes, I.11.6; FLE 1:118.15-23). Participation in Christ elevates believers into a new supernatural finality of personal union with God (Lawes, III.8.6; FLE 1:1:223.26-29). When Hooker turns to his theory of human action in the Lawes, given his insistence on the integral goodness of the created order, evil is unsurprisingly cast in an Augustinian sense as a privation of the good (privatio boni). Hooker asserts a scholastic, faculty-based anthropology in which the human will naturally moves the person toward the cognizable good prescribed by reason, and so to God as unrestricted goodness (Lawes, I.7.3; FLE 1:78.15-26). As such, Hooker argues that people cannot desire evil per se, but the human will nevertheless freely chooses evil because of “the goodness that seemeth to be joyned with it”.9 Like Augustine, Hooker casts this failure of participation in cataclysmic terms since it represents a rebellion against God and nature.10 This failure causes “ruine both to itselfe, and whatsoever dependeth on it”; a Hookerian rendering of Luther’s concept of the turning inward toward self (homo incurvatus in se) away from the relationships with God and others that socially perfect human nature.11 As such, Hooker has a realistic but sanguine theological anthropology, emphasizing the capacity of human beings for God

C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 459. 7 Lawes, I.2.3; FLE 1:60.28-61.6. For a detailed exploration of the systematic significance of participation in Hooker’s thought, see Paul Dominiak, Richard Hooker. The Architecture of Participation (London: T&T Clark), 19–33, 191–7. 8 Lawes, V.56.5; FLE 2:236.7-13; cf. Lawes, I.2.3-4; FLE 1:60.1-2; 1:61.6-8. 9 Lawes, I.7.6; FLE 1:80.3. See Nigel Voak, Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology: A Study of Reason, Will, and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 68–91. 10 See Lawes, I.4.3, I.9.1; FLE 1:72.14-17, 1:93.18-29. 11 Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans, esp. Rom. 5:4, in Luther’s Works: Vol. 25. Lectures on Romans, Glosses and Scholia, ed. Hilton C. Oswald, trans. Walter G. Tillmans and Jacob A. O. Preus (St Louis: Concordia, 1972), 245, 291, 313, 345, 351, 513. 6

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(capax Dei), the brokenness of sin, and God’s loving mercy as the “sea of goodness” that fulfills human nature with the final “supernaturall passions of joye peace and delight” (Lawes, I.11.3; FLE 1:112.25-113.23).

WORSHIP The architecture of participation in the Lawes offers a theoretical framework with which to grasp a practical tension around the apparently contradictory lived experiences of goodness, evil, and suffering. In the Lawes, Hooker attends to worship as a space in which this tension can be performatively held in prayer by a community moving toward union with God, through participation in Christ. Hooker argues that worship affords “mutuall conference and as it were commerce to be had betwene God and us”, crafting “holie desires” through which believers can affectively cling to God’s goodness known and felt in Christ, even amidst the vicissitudes of earthly life (Lawes, V.18.1; FLE 2:65.7-8). Deborah Shuger labels this as a “participatory consciousness” that “assumes the primacy of desire in the act of knowing” and which enchants human experience so that it might “reflect the supernatural order and symbolize transcendence”.12 For Hooker, worship helps our “imbecillitie and weakness” by referring the “affection of harte” to God (Lawes, V.25.1; FLE 2:113.19-26). Doctrine and prayer orient the believer to God as “supreme truth” and “soveraigne good”, abducting them toward the certainty of God’s care, even when otherwise faced with doubt and uncertainty (Lawes, V.23.1; FLE 2:110.7-16). Hooker’s account of public worship deals with the humanity assumed by Christ in such a way that the humanity of each believer – including the experience of evil and suffering – is incorporated into Christ’s incarnation. Hooker accordingly defends the intercessory practices of praying for delivery from adversity (Lawes, V.48) and for soteriological mercy for all (Lawes, V.49) as both Christ’s human soul was naturally troubled at Gethsemane and God’s “generall inclynation . . . is that all men might be saved” in Christ (Lawes, V.49.3; FLE 2:204.29-32). Just as troubled believers can cleave to Christ’s example and God’s mercy, sacramental participation in Christ takes on an intensely erotic and reciprocal character as a mystical and “inherent copulation” between believer and Christ (Lawes, V.56.1; FLE 2:234.29-31). Sacramental grace unites the believer with Christ’s ecclesial body, the totus Christus.13 With an emotionally charged prosopopoeia, Hooker describes how the believer yields to a visceral, intimate, and proleptic union with the suffering Christ in the Eucharist: “in the woundes of our redeemer wee there dip our tongues . . . [and] our hunger is satisfied and our thirst forever quenched” (Lawes, V.67.12; FLE 2:343.7-31). It is in this act that the entire experience of believers is held, not so much to dissolve the tension between goodness and evil, but rather to signal the fidelity of God’s goodness and how believers can trust that “by being unto God united we [will] live as it were the life of God” (Lawes, I.11.2; FLE 1:112.20).

12 Debora Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 43–6. 13 Lawes, V.56.10-11; FLE 2:242.6-243.23. See Paul Dominiak, “An Augustinian Sensibility: The Whole Christ in Hooker’s Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity”, in Christ Unabridged. Knowing and Loving the Son of Man, ed. George Westhaver and Rebekah Vince (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 2020), 118–33.

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CONSCIENCE The pastoral concern for assuring the agonized conscience links Hooker’s Lawes and collected sermons. In both cases, we see again a type of compassionate theodicy where some theoretical framework speaks into a practical dilemma occasioned by the failure of participation. In the Lawes, Hooker affirms a participatory vision of God’s abundant goodness for those whose consciences are filled “with infinite perplexities, scrupulosities, doubts insoluble and extreme despaires” (Lawes, II.8.5; FLE 1:189.25-190.19). His sermons are similarly concerned with promoting holistic self-understanding and human flourishing, speaking to the “sufferings of an utterly theocentric psyche”, namely “souls longing for God and shattered by their own failure to believe or feel His presence and often haunted by a suspicion that they are unloveable or God is unloving”, as Debora Shuger suggests.14 The sermons offer a theological framework that offers a way to hold the immediate dilemma at hand, always referring believers back to the personal experience of the merciful goodness of God since “so wide are the bowels of his compassion enlarged” (Justification, 8; FLE 5:116.27-28). In Certaintie, for example, Hooker uses Hab. 1:4 to address the problem of anxiety, spiritual agony, and despair (FLE 5:80.9-19), even when certainty and perseverance should be signs of salvific election, a common pastoral issue within early Reformed orthodoxy.15 Hooker introduces a distinction drawn from Aquinas between the “certainty of evidence” and the “certainty of adherence” in order to hold the tension between the contrary experiences of God’s goodness and the doubt occasioned by evil (FLE 5:69.27-71.15). In a similar manner to the Lawes, Hooker argues in Certaintie that a believer can navigate such doubt and enjoy the assurance of faith if they cultivate a desire for God. While God remains the most intrinsically certain object of knowledge, God nevertheless remains less evidentially certain than “thinges sensibly or naturally perceived”, occasioning doubt and even despair. Yet, the experience of God’s goodness evokes a certainty of adherence that recalls the encomium of eucharistic reception in the Lawes V.67.12: “having once truly tasted the heavenly sweetnes thereof all the world is not able quite and cleane to remove him from it but he striveth with him selfe to hope even against hope to beleeve against all reason of beleeving . . . [This] lesson remayneth forever imprinted in his hart, it is good for me to cleave unto god.” The experiential truth of God’s goodness transcends evidential uncertainty. Hooker’s compassionate theodicy refuses abstraction and remains enmeshed within the language and practice of actual Christian life. In his sermons (as in the Lawes) Hooker accordingly directs his listener to participate in Christ as they are faced with the paralyzing consequences of evil or suffering. He concludes a funeral sermon, for example, with the assurance of God’s fidelity: “Where should the frighted childe hide his head, but in the bosome of his loving father? Where a Christian, but under the shadow of the wings of Christ his Saviour?” (Remedie; FLE 5:377.7-9). Indeed, faced with the turbulence of life, Christians can share in the cruciform life of Christ and receive hope amidst tribulation (Remedie; FLE 5:371.22-26). In prayer, believers find their “affections many tymes distracted” by suffering and are so “apte prone and redy to forsake god” (Justification, 17, 26; FLE 5:115.18-19, 140.2-3). Yet, in his sermons, Hooker turns the Reformed soteriological insistence on solus Christus into a pastoral affirmation since “that which linketh Christ to us is his mere mercy and Shuger, Habits of Thought, 73. See Andrea Russell, Richard Hooker, Beyond Certainty (London: Routledge, 2017), 107–80.

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love towards us” (Jude, 1.11; FLE 5:25.21-22). This love is known and felt through incorporation into Christ’s body, the Church, and its spiritual practices (Jude, 1.11; FLE 5:25.17-18). The compassionate theodicy that Hooker’s work represents, then, revolves around offering a vision of God’s fidelity and goodness. Hooker offers this vision to help believers experientially retain their trust and hope within a Christian community as it participates in Christ, even in the apparently senseless darkness of the failure of participation.

FURTHER READING Hooker, Richard. The Folger Library Edition (FLE) of the Works of Richard Hooker, Vols 1–5. Edited by W. Speed Hill. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1977–90; Vol. 6, Binghamton: Belknap Press, 1993; Vol. 7, Tempe: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1998. Dominiak, Paul. Richard Hooker. The Architecture of Participation. London: T&T Clark, 2020. Russell, Andrea. Richard Hooker, Beyond Certainty. London: Routledge, 2017. Shuger, Debora. “Faith and Assurance”. In A Companion to Richard Hooker. Edited by Torrance Kirby, 221–50. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Voak, Nigel. Richard Hooker and Reformed Theology. A Study of Reason, Will, and Grace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Chapter 22

G. W. F. Leibniz ALEX ENGLANDER

In a brief early text, Kant wrote that Leibniz (1646–1716) did not mean to claim anything original in maintaining that we inhabit the best of all possible worlds. Rather, his originality lay in the use to which he put this idea; namely, “to cut the knot, so difficult to untie, of the difficulties relating to the origin of evil”.1 There is much one might challenge in Kant’s claim, including the implication that Leibniz sought to address only inherited, traditional “difficulties”, rather than to formulate a novel problematic. Yet it is certainly misleading to suggest that explaining the origin of evil was Leibniz’s central task. In this regard, two related peculiarities of his theodicy are worth mentioning: first, Leibniz’s coinage “theodicy” (derived from ϑεός = God and δική = justice) itself betrays his primary concern regarding the problem of evil: while he does of course discuss evil’s nature and origin, he does so in the course of fulfilling his motivating task, which is to defend God against the charge of injustice. Driving Leibniz’s project is not, for example, a puzzle about the very intelligibility of evil in a world that reflects divine goodness. Instead, the existence of evil is a given datum of his enquiry, and the pressing worry is the justice of its distribution. Perhaps, for example, the wicked should suffer; but physical evil becomes a problem when the innocent suffer instead. Second, this juridical conception of the business of theodicy goes hand in hand with Leibniz’s uncompromising rationalism and intellectualism. The standards by which the goodness of creation is to be assessed – and thus by which God is to be convicted or acquitted – are accessible to any rational intellect, divine or human. The defense of God must be a rational one, and this precludes any fideistic recourse to an affirmation that the world is good, without our understanding how it counts as such (if not in detail). Further, should theodicy rely at any point on faith or revelation, their truths must be consonant with those of reason; God acts in light of his understanding, and the truths of the divine understanding cannot contradict those of our own. The charge of injustice is twofold: on the one hand, God would be unjust if creation were not law-governed. It is important to note that this threat is much broader than an unjust correlation between moral and physical evil: it encompasses disorder, disharmony, and imperfection across a number of further dimensions. On the other hand, given his role as creator, the presence of evils threatens God’s holiness: God appears to be causally responsible for worldly evils. Of course, these two kinds of injustice are connected: if God is causally responsible for sin, this undermines human liberty and renders the sinner’s

Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, trans. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 2:29.

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punishment unlawful (eradicating any harmony between the kingdoms of nature and grace). Hence securing “the freedom of man” is a central theodical task. Leibniz never provides a definitive list of the criteria guiding God’s choice of the best world, but the most prominent are perhaps the maximization of variety within order and of both moral and physical goodness (pleasure). Scholarly debate abounds as to whether Leibniz assigns different weightings to these criteria, especially whether and how there have to be trade-offs between securing the happiness of minds on the one hand and the order and regularity of nature on the other hand. It is worth noting, however, that he is often at pains to stress both how the maximization of any good can be understood in terms of the maximization of metaphysical goodness or the world’s overall quantity of essence, and how such maximization is conducive to the word’s harmony, a property especially pleasing to minds. Indeed, Leibniz often seems to place a premium on rational satisfaction. Reflecting on how God’s creative choice maximizes goodness has at least a threefold theodical significance: First, the worlds between which God chooses, which are collections of compossible perfections, are not creations of his will but realities he finds in his understanding. The goodness of his choice is thus a function of its being for the best, the most perfect world available, so to speak, which comes with evils already built in. That even the best world contains metaphysical evil, however, is not simply a brute fact we just have to accept: the cost of an absolutely perfect world would be its identity with God, that is, Spinozism and the loss of the divine will (see Theodicy, §167; §215). Further, while Leibniz’s insistence that God is subject to constraints in creation puts him at odds with Descartes (for whom all possibilities are subsequent to the divine will), it also puts him at odds with those who maintained that God could have created a better world were it not for these constraints. Rather, the constraints are criteria of perfection, meaning there is no sense in which there is a better world God could have created: the world may not be absolutely perfect, but it is absolutely the best. Second, although worlds with less sin and suffering are certainly possible – worlds with no minds at all, to take an obvious example – their creation would have involved sacrificing other perfections and exhibited a lower grade of perfection overall. For one thing, worlds with no or fewer minds would have contained less scientific endeavor, moral striving, and other activities by which humans imitate God, such as artistic creation, which mirrors his creative activity in miniature. Leibniz frequently deploys aesthetic analogies to make this point: evils are to the multiple harmonies that constitute the world’s perfection what shade is to a painting or dissonance to a piece of music, that is, necessary conditions of the perfection of the whole (see Theodicy, §§11–12). Third, to make us think twice before accusing God of injustice, Leibniz reminds us of our necessary epistemic limitations as creatures. Not, recall, that we have limited insight into good and evil themselves; rather, the world is such a highly complex construction of interdependent parts that we fail to appreciate how the absence of a given evil would place so many parts out of joint as to compromise the perfection of the whole. This sounds like a variation on Leibniz’s quasi-aesthetic considerations, but a peculiarity of Leibniz’s metaphysics means the point cuts much deeper. For, to speak of interdependent parts dramatically under-describes a situation in which the identity of any individual is determined by their complete concept: everything one can truly predicate of an individual is contained in its subject concept, and every monad (the immaterial representing substances that are Leibniz’s basic metaphysical units) expresses the entire universe.

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Thus, one cannot, for example, think of this world having a particular individual it does but who commits fewer evil deeds, without this impacting upon the identity of another individual whom we should like to keep as they are. Consequently, Leibniz has the tools to argue that when we take ourselves to be speculating about this world being better than it actually is, we may not really be imagining what we like to think we are. Our complaints against creation may be not only unjustified but incoherent. It was perhaps this notorious aspect of Leibniz’s thought Kant had in mind when referring to the originality of Leibniz’s appeal to possible worlds to solve the problem of evil. To address the threat to God’s holiness, Leibniz appeals to a distinction between God’s antecedent will, which considers each good qua good separately, and his consequent, executive will, which arises from the conflict between all antecedent wills; God antecedently wills the good and consequently the best, meaning he does will all goods and to prevent all evils insofar as doing so is compatible with the greatest possible harmony (see Theodicy, §23; §119). Insofar as an evil is part of the best world, he does not will its prevention, so to speak; he permits it (see Theodicy, §§3–33). Moreover, since God does not will each ingredient of the world separately, his consequent will instead actualizing the whole world in a single, global act, it cannot be said that he wills what he only permits. That said, one must bear in mind the distinction between physical and moral evil: suffering is something God does occasionally have to will (as a matter of moral, rather than metaphysical necessity to be sure), be it as just punishment or as a positive means to greater moral or physical perfection. As such, they can be classed as relative goods and direct objects of God’s consequent will. The same can be said for those metaphysical imperfections that are conditions of creation’s rich variety within order. Sin, by contrast, is an entirely different matter. God cannot will this under any aspect, but he is obliged to permit it to the extent that his goodness and wisdom oblige him to create the best. Furthermore, Leibniz came to accept that evil is privation, meaning God creates nothing that is not good. Opposing any kind of Manicheanism, Leibniz conceives of evil not as a positive force, but more on the model of reluctance, as a kind of inertia that is the condition of sin, but does not necessitate its actuality. Evidently, therefore, the claim that God creates the best of all possible worlds bears upon both of the aforementioned kinds of injustice: if the justice characterizing the orderliness of the best world justifies God’s creative act, it also justifies him permitting the evils that inevitably belong to it, leaving his holiness intact. Turning to human freedom: man being created in the divine image, the sense of “freedom” as applied to humans is the same as that applied to God, the difference being more one of degree than of kind. It consists in (1) intellect, that is, a grasp of the value or goodness of different options (paradigmatically God’s understanding the relative goodness of each possible world); (2) spontaneity, that is, actions having their causal source in the individual and stemming from an internal principle; (3) contingency, that is, the exclusion of metaphysical necessity (see Theodicy, §75; §288). Despite what the spontaneity condition might at first suggest, it needs to be borne in mind that Leibniz thought the danger to human freedom lay not, as we usually think today, in causal determinism, but in the “determination” of our actions by God’s knowledge and by necessary truths. Consequently, the greatest puzzles about human freedom – which Leibniz calls one of the two “labyrinths” of the human mind (see Theodicy, §55) – concern contingency. The problem is aggravated for a reason mention earlier; namely, Leibniz believes each individual substance has a complete concept and he has a concept-containment theory of truth, meaning that anything one might truly predicate of a substance is already contained in its subject concept.

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Leibniz’s responses to this problem are various and much debated. Yet one thing that is clearly vital to his case for human freedom is how the issue devolves upon that of divine freedom. It is the contingency of God’s choice that makes other worlds real possibilities rather than mere fictions and thus releases the events of this world from the grip of metaphysical necessity. A great deal turns, therefore, on Leibniz’s success in forging a third way between the voluntarism of Descartes, for whom God’s will is not constrained by any prior truths at all, and Spinoza’s necessitarianism, whereby everything follows of necessity from the divine nature, meaning the actual world is the only possible one. Leibniz insists both that a God not constrained by eternal verities would be an absurdity and that he is at best morally, and not metaphysically, necessitated to create the best (see Theodicy, §234). In light of the necessary goodness of God, this may seem a distinction without a difference. A common response is that of course God must create the best, but only provided he creates at all: the possibility that he does not preserves the contingency of the world and thus human freedom. Given this possibility, though, one might still wonder, together with many of Leibniz’s successors, whether one shouldn’t therefore condemn God for creating a world at all, given the horrors contained in even the very best.

FURTHER READING von Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil. Edited with an introduction by Austin Farrer. Translated by E. M. Huggard. London: Routledge and Paul, 1952. Rateau, Paul. La question du mal chez Leibniz: fondements et élaboration de la théodicée. Paris: Champion, 2008. Jorgensen, Larry M. and Samuel Newlands, eds. New Essays on Leibniz’s Theodicy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Riley, Patrick. Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence: Justice as the Charity of the Wise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Rutherford, Donald. Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Chapter 23

Immanuel Kant ALEX ENGLANDER

Kant’s (1724–1804) reckoning with the problem of evil followed a clear and drastic trajectory: while certain early texts show him sympathetic to a theodicy in the tradition of his great rationalist predecessor Leibniz, his late essay “On the Miscarriage of all Philosophical Trials in Theodicy” of 1791 outlines his rejection of the entire history of philosophical theodicy. The intervening period, of course, saw the publication of his major works of “critical” philosophy, which sought to demonstrate that putative cognition of God or the soul involves illegitimate extensions of the categories of the human understanding. Yet his abandonment of speculative theology did not mean he was unconcerned with the topic of evil per se. On the contrary, his late writings on religion and human nature are in great part driven by an occupation with this theme, and his discussions often suggest ongoing debts to ways of thinking he purports to have left behind. In the 1750s, while broadly sympathetic to Leibniz’s enterprise of justifying God in light of the apparent inadequacy of creation, Kant perceived two related shortcomings in the Leibnizian approach.1 The first is methodological: theodicy should demonstrate the reality of a good and omnipotent supreme being from the perfection of his creation. Instead, he complains, Leibniz simply presupposes God and his traditional attributes and merely excuses him with the contention that, for all its flaws, this world is the best possible. Second, Kant therefore criticizes how Leibniz conceives the relation between God’s perfection and the world. Essential to Leibniz’s view is that God finds all possible worlds in his intellect and his consequent (creative) will is directed to the best. For Kant, this just postpones rather than provides a solution to the problem of evil, leaving us wondering why the eternal forms have the limitations they do. The world, he worries, is thus both dependent and independent of God, and so reflects the goodness of his will only indirectly. Kant instead advocates a theodicy that proceeds like a teleological proof and shows how each element of the world contributes to the perfection of the whole, thus obviating the need to excuse rather than justify God; what we class as evils have their rightful place as such contributions to the overall scheme of creation. Over thirty years later, the “Miscarriage” essay expresses a fundamentally different outlook. Attempting to infer divine purposes from nature is now the principal characteristic of “doctrinal” theodicy, the very enterprise to which Kant intends to put a definitive end. Like Leibniz, he characterizes theodicy in juridical terms, specifically

See Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 1755–1770, trans. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 67–85.

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as the attempt to defend God in light of “counter-purposiveness” in the world. The appearance of counter-purposiveness seems incompatible with a God who creates and maintains the world with the end of promoting moral and physical goodness: moral evil must compromise his holiness, suffering his benevolence, and the lack of correspondence between virtue and happiness his justice. It is important to distinguish two strands in Kant’s assault on theodical speculation. The first is theoretical: he draws on his critical epistemology to remind us that human reason can enjoy no insight into the unity of God’s “artistic” wisdom qua designer of the natural order and his “moral” wisdom qua one who governs the world in accordance with moral criteria.2 We cannot comprehend how God can create a world of free, morally responsible creatures, whose wills are not subject to natural determination and yet whose actions unfold in a nature subject to causal laws, all such that creation as a whole (eventually) realizes the highest good, a condition in which virtue and happiness correspond. Kant’s anti-theodicy, however, is by no means an anti-theism. Our lack of insight into the connection between God’s artistic and moral wisdom precludes our knowing that there is no such connection just as much as it precludes theodical speculation about how divine purposes are, despite appearances, manifest in the order of things. More positively, Kant argued that belief in God and the immortality of the soul are justifiable, indeed necessary, on practical grounds: moral commitment requires hope both that we can achieve moral perfection through endless progress and that the world has an omnipotent, just governor. On these matters theoretical philosophy can have no positive say; as Kant famously put it, he had to deny knowledge to make room for faith. Secondly, Kant also rejects doctrinal theodicy on practical grounds. One of these is strictly in the tradition of Leibnizian rationalism: it is simply out of the question that God operates according to different moral standards, such that what we judge as contraventions of the moral law are justified by God’s higher wisdom. Other considerations, such as Kant’s rejections of defenses of God against “relative” counter-purposiveness, that is, suffering, are markedly unleibnizian and perhaps betray a more contemporary sensibility. For, he finds these exculpations of God morally inexcusable. For example, responding to the idea that pains are the inevitable result of limitations inherent to human nature, Kant cites the legendary response of an “Indian woman” to Genghis Kahn: “If you will not protect us, why do you then conquer us?”3 More interesting, however, is Kant’s moral critique of the very motivation behind doctrinal theodicy as such. He provides a reading of the book of Job, casting Job as an advocate of the “authentic” theodicy Kant prefers and Job’s friends as typical doctrinal theodicists.4 The latter, motivated by fear and an obsequious desire to please God, end up explaining away the reality of evil, or at least its counter-purposiveness, and thereby suppress the verdict of their own moral judgment. The true problem with theodicy, therefore, is not that it presupposes a transgression of the limits of human reason, but that it is conducted insincerely, in bad faith, and compromises the trust in one’s own practical reason that is so central to Kantian autonomy. Job, by contrast, is honest: he acknowledges his epistemic limits and the inscrutability of God’s purposes, avoids spurious pseudo-moral explanations for his See Immanuel Kant, “On the Miscarriage of all Philosophical Trials in Theodicy”, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8:263. 3 Ibid., 8:260. 4 See ibid., 8:274–67. 2

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misfortunes, obeys the voice of practical reason, and has a simple, morally motivated faith in a purposive divine guidance of the world. Nevertheless, several discussions of evidently theodical themes can be found in Kant’s lectures on philosophical theology of the 1780s, in several shorter pieces on politics and history, and in the Appendix of the Critique of Judgment (1790) – though it is an intriguing question whether what they advocate is “authentic” theodicy. In the lectures, Kant’s immediate reason for thematizing evil is the classic problem of defending God’s holiness against charges that he is causally implicated in the world’s evil. Kant provides a version of the idea that evil is mere limitation, insisting that humans have no “germ” [Keim] to evil, no disposition to develop inclinations to the immoral.5 Man is a perfect creation, born with a disposition to the good alone. Nevertheless, his natural inclinations are in need of cultivation, otherwise they may develop in directions that tempt him to immoral courses of action. Disciplining the inclinations, however, can be our responsibility alone, and we are guilty if we fail to do so. Kant’s political and psychological (“anthropological”) writings elaborate on the cultivation of the inclinations and moral personality, placing them within an essentially social context.6 On Kant’s notorious thesis of the “unsocial sociability” of humanity, the formation of individual character occurs through various competitive social dynamics, whereby individuals, driven by egoistic self-seeking [Selbstsucht], try to satisfy their sense of self-worth via favorable comparisons with others – a process both conducive to and destructive of social unity. At the level of nation-states, the same root antagonism is responsible for war. At the same time, Kant’s discussions of the social dimensions of evil also develop what one might well call his socio-historical theodicy. For, “this splendid misery” wrought by the “culture of skill” inevitably has beneficial historical consequences: it encourages the development of both the natural predispositions of human beings and a political order in which each submits to laws guaranteeing a sphere of individual freedom, wherein each can pursue their own welfare and cultivate their talents and worldview.7 By thus laying the foundations for enlightenment, the processes of mutual antagonism that promote humanity’s natural predispositions set the enabling conditions for a cultivation of its moral predisposition. These historical speculations are not supposed to have the status of predictions; rather, our pursuit of moral ends legitimates us in viewing the natural and human world as though it is a purposively arranged whole. Kant’s definitive account of evil, however, is contained in his 1793 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. While deploying the conceptual apparatus of his developed practical philosophy, it is continuous with his earlier lectures insofar as Kant still maintains that all human predispositions [Anlagen] are good and that evil is something for which the individual alone bears responsibility.8 Yet he now describes humanity as radically evil, positing a universal, self-incurred propensity [Hang] to prefer the incentives of self-love

See Immanuel Kant, “Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion”, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 28:1078ff. 6 See especially the essays “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” and “Conjectures on the Beginnings of Human History”, in Kant: Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 7 See especially, Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §83. 8 Immanuel Kant, “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason”, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 6:26–8. 5

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to those of morality, to make one’s own happiness the condition of action in conformity with the moral law. Volition, for Kant, involves the adoption of subjective principles of action, “maxims”, and the acquisition of an evil disposition thus involves inverting the rightful order of incentives in one’s superordinate maxim. It thus remains vital for Kant that the inclinations themselves are not evil and that evil does not consist in a corruption of practical reason: knowing oneself to be bound by the law is a condition of accountability and humans are evil through the use of their freedom alone. The law, however, demands moral perfection, a will for which the representation of the law is itself sufficient for action and which does not experience the law as a constraint on its choices. Our ongoing experience of resistance to the law reflects our radically evil nature, a nature that cannot be overcome merely through a gradual reformation of our behavior; instead, we must effect a “revolution” in our wills, which amounts to the restoration of an originally good disposition.9 Kant not only deploys biblical language to describe this conversion (as, for example, “the putting off of the old man and the putting on of the new”), but suggests that given the “infinite” gap between the holy disposition we need to effect and our always deficient deed, this revolution requires a justification of the human being, whereby a “righteousness which is not our own” is imputed to us.10 Though his exact position is a matter of controversy, Kant seems to suggest that man’s radical inadequacy to the moral law, manifest in their falling short of holiness at any moment in time, means that the revolution that puts us on the path of righteousness itself requires divine aid: we must hope that our (apparent) continuous progression in virtue is counted by God as amounting to holiness, to the attainment of a good will.11 Kant is often said to have developed the first secular theory of evil. Evil is universal but cannot be inherited: each subject must bring it upon herself. Nor is it the subversion of an external divine law: rather, it consists in treating as conditional the unconditional law to which every rational being is subject simply insofar as they have a free will. And to the extent to which each individual bears a debt of guilt, it is not one they owe to a higher being, but a debt incurred purely through a failure to live up to the standard they necessarily legislate for themselves. At the same time, however, it is difficult not to wonder about Kant’s own debt to irreducibly theological ideas. Not only does he find hope in a quasi-providential story, in which evils have their place in an overall narrative of moral progress, but his deep sense of the inadequacy of the human will to the demands of the law also leads him to think that we can fulfill our moral vocation only thanks to divine grace.

FURTHER READING Wood, Allen W. Kant’s Moral Religion. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970. DiCenso, James J. Kant, Religion, and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Anderson-Gold, Sharon and Pablo Muchnik, eds. Kant's Anatomy of Evil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Kant, “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason”, 6:47. Ibid., 6:66. 11 Ibid., 6:66–7. 9

10

Chapter 24

Friedrich Schleiermacher SHELLI M. POE

Schleiermacher’s (1768–1834) view of suffering and the problem of evil is not for the faint of heart or mind. Standing in the Reformed tradition and going beyond some of its foremost representatives, he acknowledges the existence of creaturely pain and suffering and identifies God as the responsible party. God ordains that created life is full of limitations, illness, and death, along with human sin and the evil that results from it. And yet, Schleiermacher also maintains that God ordains sin only in relation to redemption, that evil is connected to sin only as a corporate deterrent, that redemption severs the moral connection between sin and evil, and that the Christian community works unceasingly in its resistance to sin. This is by no means an answer to the problem of evil. Rather, in response to the existence of great suffering, Schleiermacher denies both the cognitive and consoling power of theodicies, and simply affirms his trust in the wisdom and love of God the Creator-Redeemer.

SIN, EVIL, AND SUFFERING Schleiermacher maintains that sin is a conflict of flesh against spirit.1 By this he means that sin is anything that hinders the development of a Christian’s consciousness of her relation of absolute dependence upon God.2 Sin only exists in relation to this consciousness. Because Christians come to a full and consistent consciousness of their relation to God only through Jesus Christ, they also lack a complete knowledge of sin until they recognize “the Redeemer’s utter lack of sinfulness and his absolute strength of spirit”.3 For Schleiermacher, humanity is by nature susceptible to sin, and this susceptibility is “a complete incapacity for good” that can only be removed through gracious redemption.4 It is best represented as the “collective act and collective fault of the human race”.5 By framing “original sin” this way, Schleiermacher is underscoring the fact that although each human being is to blame for their own actual sin, they also participate in larger structures of sin that encompass and precede them. Schleiermacher explains: “What appears from birth as the susceptibility to sin of a generation is conditioned by the susceptibility to sin

See Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christian Faith: A New Translation and Critical Edition (=CF), ed. Catherine L. Kelsey and Terrence N. Tice, trans. Terrence N. Tice, Catherine L. Kelsey and Edwina Lawler (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2016), §66, 401; “einen positiven Widerstreit des Fleisches gegen den Geist”. 2 See CF, §66.1, 402. 3 CF, §68.3, 413. 4 CF, §70, 418. 5 CF, §71, 425. 1

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of earlier generations and itself conditions the susceptibility to sin of generations yet to come.”6 Humankind’s susceptibility to sin did not first occur as the result of an alteration in human nature by, say, the first human beings.7 In part, that is because of the “difficulty of bringing to mind the emergence of the first sin without any underlying susceptibility to sin”.8 For Schleiermacher, human susceptibility to sin leads to actual sin, and actual sin results in evil.9 Schleiermacher defines evil as persistently working “causes that hinder one’s life”.10 However, because of the connection between evil and sin, he does not consider illness, disability, and natural death, which are not associated with sin, to be evil.11 Rather, the pain associated with these events and conditions are “stimuli toward an unfolding of the human spirit”.12 Evils are evil because they either diminish “the fullness of stimuli through which the development of a human being would be advanced” or they limit “the world’s adaptiveness by means of human activity”.13 Like other thinkers, Schleiermacher divides evil into two types: natural evil, which he describes as being “in more or less dire need and deficiency” (e.g., poverty), and social evil, which is being “in more or less dire hardship and adversity” (e.g., political oppression).14 Just as Schleiermacher conceives of sin as the collective fault of humanity, so too does he conceive of evil as a collective punishment for human sin, though only social evil is a direct punishment.15 In any case, “on no account may the evils that affect an individual be referred to that individual’s sin as their cause”.16 Sometimes “another person endures evil that has no connection with that person’s sin”.17 Such “vicarious suffering” does not make satisfaction for sin.18 Schleiermacher is careful to point out that the relationship between sin and evil means neither that Christians ought to “require a passive endurance of evil on account of sin” nor that Christians ought to “call forth evil because of sin or get rid of evil, viewed in and of itself”.19 Instead, Schleiermacher maintains that Christians should work against sin, since sin is the cause of evil.

GOD’S RELATION TO SIN, EVIL, AND SUFFERING Schleiermacher forthrightly states that God is the originator of sin, though only in relation to redemption and never in and for itself.20 God ordains “sin’s being with and alongside grace”.21 Schleiermacher maintains this position in order to safeguard the gracious

CF, §71.2, 429. See CF, §72, 434. 8 CF, §72.2, 438. 9 See CF, §73, 454. 10 CF, §75, 473; “beharrlich wirkende Ursachen von Lebenshemmungen”. 11 See CF, §75.1, 474. 12 CF, §76.2, 481. 13 CF, §75.2, 476. 14 CF, §75.2, 476. 15 See CF, §76, 478. 16 CF, §77, 483. 17 CF, §104.4, 659. 18 CF, §104.4, 664. 19 CF, §78, 486. 20 See CF, §79, 489. 21 CF, §80, 491. 6 7

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character of redemption.22 He argues that if one does not claim that God ordains sin alongside grace, then a fundamental dualism between God and evil would be set up that would cast doubt on the Christian’s awareness of her absolute dependence on God (i.e., Manicheanism). Likewise, if one does not claim that God ordains sin only in relation to redemption, then Christians may doubt whether they have an original susceptibility to sin that requires God’s gracious redemptive activity. Instead, Christians may come to believe that the fullness and strength of their awareness of their relationship of absolute dependence upon God are independent of the divine indwelling of Jesus of Nazareth (i.e., Pelagianism). Schleiermacher wants to avoid both of these positions. Moreover, he argues that if one wants to attribute sin to human freedom, one must also clearly state that “God has ordained that dominion by the Spirit has not yet come to pass” wherever sin and evil arise.23 For Schleiermacher, sin occurs in view of “a gradual and incomplete development” of humanity’s awareness of their absolute dependence upon God, which is divinely ordained.24 Likewise, God ordains that evil is a collective punishment for collective sin. God ordains evil neither as a way to improve humanity25 nor as a result of divine vengefulness.26 Rather, God ordains evil as a way to deter people from sinning by “being induced to fear the prospect of” punishment.27 In this way, divine ordination of evil checks sinful habits so that they do not become “overweening”.28 Schleiermacher provides no positive answer as to why God created humanity with “a gradual and incomplete development” of their consciousness of God. Rather, he maintains simply that God could do nothing different based on who God is. In fact, Schleiermacher argues that the contrast between freedom and necessity does not apply to God. There is not some range of possibilities that God is free to enact, in contrast to certain possibilities that God must enact of necessity. If that were so, “in God there would appear to be, eternally and imperishably, a mass of rejected thoughts”.29 This would presuppose a deliberative process in God, by which God decides to do some things rather than other things. Instead of this unduly anthropomorphic view, Schleiermacher holds that if an analogy between God and humans is going to be used, “it would have been far safer to transfer over to God the surety of the consummate artist, albeit complete and shorn of limitation. Such an artist”, he explains, “would think of nothing else, nor would anything else be offered, than what this artist is actually bringing forth”.30 As such, he holds that “what is possible outside what is real cannot be an object of God’s cognitive activity”.31 Likewise, Schleiermacher does not offer reasons for the divine ordination of human pain and suffering that are part of created life and heightened with the Christian’s recognition of evil as a divinely ordained collective punishment for collective sin. Importantly, however, his system of doctrine also refuses to give human suffering, including Jesus’ suffering, pride of place. In fact, when he gives an account of Christ’s redeeming and

See CF, §80.1, 491–2. CF, §81, 497; §82, 510. 24 CF, §81.4, 510. 25 See CF, §84.3, 530. 26 See CF, §84.3, 503. 27 CF, §84.3, 531. 28 CF, §84.3, 531. 29 CF, §55.2, 325. 30 CF, §55.2, 326. 31 CF, §55.2, 327. 22 23

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reconciling activity, “Christ’s suffering is not mentioned at all”.32 For him, Christians are redeemed and reconciled to God by being “taken up into community of life with Christ”, which is done apart from his suffering and death.33 Indirectly, however, Christ’s suffering is important insofar as it is bound together with his sympathy and compassion for sinful humanity as he carried out his redemptive task.34 Despite the resistance he faced, Christ displayed “unfailing perseverance” in his love of humanity.35 He experienced suffering throughout and at the end of his life simply because he was human. As part of humanity, Christians, too, will continue to suffer. Schleiermacher writes: “Restraints in life will not be removed, as if one who is redeemed ought to be or could be without pain and free of suffering. For the same reason, even Christ had pain and suffered pain.”36 Schleiermacher does maintain, however, that “being taken up into community of life with Christ removes the interconnection between evil and sin, in that morally the two are not related to each other any longer”.37 That is to say, Christians experience forgiveness of sin. Put positively, they become children of God as Christ lives in them.38 Sin therefore loses its power and becomes something that is always diminishing as the Christian acts against it. In this way, “one’s consciousness of deserving punishment must, in part, already be disappearing”.39 Morally speaking, evil and sin are then related “solely to the task of the new life”, as indicators of what is to be done in resisting sin.40 A poignant and heartbreaking example of Schleiermacher’s approach to suffering can be seen in his sermon at the graveside of his beloved son, Nathanael, who died at the age of nine in 1829. In that sermon, Schleiermacher gives thanks for his happy household, for the pursuit of his vocation, and for his friends. And yet he admits that the death of his son has “shaken [his] life to its roots”.41 As Schleiermacher reflects on the loss of his son, his grief is palpable: “the friendly, refreshing picture of life is suddenly destroyed; and all the hopes which rested upon him lie here and shall be buried with this coffin! What should I say?”42 Schleiermacher does not take consolation in the idea that his son has been spared from the difficulties of life and is now in heaven, since Schleiermacher believes that “the blessings of the Christian community would be confirmed” in his son,43 and because images of an afterlife create more questions than they provide answers.44 He tells his listeners that his only comfort and hope is in the words of Scripture that point to both the mystery of the future and humanity’s enduring communion with God.45 In closing, Schleiermacher prays: “for me and all of mine let this communal pain become wherever possible a new bond of still more intimate love, and let it issue in a new apprehension of

CF, §101.4, 634. CF, §101.4, 634. 34 See CF, §104.2, 655; §104.4, 660. 35 CF, §104.4, 661. 36 CF, §101.2, 630. 37 CF, §101.2, 630. 38 See CF, §109, 710. 39 CF, §109.2, 714. 40 CF, §101.2, 630. 41 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Servant of the Word: Selected Sermons of Friedrich Schleiermacher, trans. Dawn De Vries (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), 209. 42 Ibid., 211. 43 Ibid. 44 See ibid., 212. 45 Schleiermacher cites 1 John 3:2, John 17:24. 32 33

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thy Spirit in all my household.”46 In this heart-wrenching sermon, we see Schleiermacher’s approach to the problem of evil. He acknowledges that tragic death and suffering do occur, and at the same time he professes faith in God’s love, wisdom, and power to “snatch away”. He does not offer a solution. Instead, he prays for his pain to become an occasion for the growth of love and a new apprehension of God’s Spirit. Schleiermacher’s approach to sin, evil, and the suffering that goes along with them stands in stark contrast to other theories. He does not offer a solution to the problem of evil. Indeed, he clearly states that God is responsible for sin, evil as its consequence, and suffering. Even so, Schleiermacher maintains that God ordains sin only in connection with redemption, and God ordains evil as a consequence of sin only to deter humanity from becoming overwhelmed by their sinful habits. In this way, he holds out a vision of God’s relation to sin and evil that retains the Christian view of God as the loving and wise ultimate Source of creation.

FURTHER READING Schleiermacher, Friedrich. On the Doctrine of Election. Translated by Iain G. Nicol and Allen G. Jorgenson. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2012. Pedersen, Daniel J. Schleiermacher’s Theology of Sin and Nature: Agency, Value, and Modern Theology. New York: Routledge, 2020. Vander Schel, Kevin. “Friedrich Schleiermacher”. In T&T Clark Companion to the Doctrine of Sin. Edited by Keith L. Johnson and David Lauber, 251–66. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Wyman Jr., Walter E. “Sin and Redemption”. In Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher. Edited by Jacqueline Marina, 129–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2005.

Schleiermacher, Servant of the Word, 214.6.

46

Chapter 25

Søren Kierkegaard SEAN TURCHIN

Anyone familiar with the autobiographical aspects of Kierkegaard’s authorship knows why he is referred to as the “melancholy Dane”. Born on May 5, 1813, in Copenhagen, Denmark, and the youngest of seven children, Søren Kierkegaard would suffer much throughout his life. His life was a semi-tragic one, full of personal angst, depression, and guilt. His father, Michael, had been married before when he was younger to a distant cousin. During this time, the housemaid was one Ane Lund, who later became Michael’s second wife and the mother of all seven of his children, Søren Kierkegaard being the youngest. Upon the death of Michael’s first wife, it was strange to many in the town that his maid bore a child nine months later.1 The scandal brought personal shame to Michael Kierkegaard, who was a deeply religious Moravian pietist. Michael suffered already from mental illness and depression because of a belief that God had cursed him in his youth. As a boy, he cursed God for the state of his living condition as a poor sheepherder in the country of Jutland. Because of his cursing God, Michael believed that he would see all of his family die before him as punishment for his sin. With little consideration, he disclosed his belief to his youngest son, Søren, which later proved to contribute to Kierkegaard’s own depression and religious anguish. By the year 1835, Kierkegaard, his older brother Peter, and their father would be the only remaining members of the family; his mother and all five of his other siblings had died.2 Kierkegaard suffered personally to such a degree that he would later end his engagement to his beloved Regina Olsen. His relationship with her was tragic and is noted today as one of the most moving love stories of all time. Although wanting to be with her, he felt that his life goals and melancholy perspective would cause her great suffering. He did not want her to endure his temperament. Not long after they were engaged in 1840, he broke off the engagement a year later; Regina was devastated. Having lived a life of personal and social turmoil, Kierkegaard one day collapsed in the streets of Denmark. He entered the hospital on October 2, 1855, and remained there until his death on November 11 of that same year. Given his own personal and existential experiences, it is no wonder Kierkegaard spoke so much on the concept of individuality, personhood, and existence. His discussion of suffering relates to his own experiences and reflections, namely, as to what it means to suffer and whether there is a purpose or advantage to suffering at all. Principally,

Alistair Hannay, Kierkegaard: A Biography (London: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 30. Ibid.

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Kierkegaard’s understanding of suffering relates to its significance for human existence. He does not discuss suffering in terms of natural evil or even in terms of the consequences of sin. Rather, he takes suffering to be an aspect of human existence that draws one closer to God. In doing so, his discussion of suffering relates to the various stages of our existence, what Kierkegaard calls the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. It is in understanding the quality of life in these various stages that suffering must be considered in terms of its importance for the individual and his existential transformation. In sum, as we shall see, individual suffering moves from affecting minor change in the aesthetic way of life, of some importance in the ethical pathos and ultimately to the utmost importance for the religious way of life. How suffering affects us depends on the context of the sufferer’s life, the orientation of how we live and what he or she desires in this life. Suffering, then, possesses the power to redirect our focus from our external circumstances and concerns to that of inward reflection and change.3 According to Kierkegaard, we are creatures of immediacy and find it easy to focus on things that are external and relative to us. Therefore, we rarely focus on personal change or transformation, an idea Kierkegaard calls “inwardness”.4 From the aesthetic way of life, an individual is not changed by suffering, because the aesthetic pathos of an individual is one that is with solely concerned external change. This breed is rarely affected by what possible changes suffering could bring to better them. From an aesthetic perspective, suffering has no real purpose or significance, because this type of person lives primarily for pleasure. However, from the vantage point of an individual concerned with personal change, suffering has great value in serving to bring about “transformation of existence”.5 The person who lives an existential pathos focuses on being in relation “absolutely to the absolute telos and relatively to relative ends”.6 It is to the individual who lives to learn from life and its challenges (existential pathos) that Kierkegaard introduces two subcategories of living according to the existential pathos – these being the ethical and ethical-religious life. Those who live specifically within the ethical and ethical-religious life desire to be transformed by suffering because they seek to relate themselves to the absolute or eternal.7 That the goal of existential pathos is to bring about personal transformation, an inward change is a pathos Kierkegaard ties specifically to the religious way of life. Thus, for an individual who lives within the religious stage of life, suffering is not only essential but also crucial to change the individual for the better. Even more, suffering is given with the intention of changing us, because God seeks this change so that we may be in relation to Him. Sin has fractured our relation to God. Hence, according to Kierkegaard, “The fundamental relation between God and a human being is that a human being is a sinner and God is the Holy One”.8 He continues this thought by saying: As sinner, man is separated from God by the most chasmic qualitative abyss. In turn, of course, God is separated from man by the same chasmic qualitative abyss when he Søren Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 256. 4 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 432. 5 Ibid., 431. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, 285. 3

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forgives sins. If by some kind of reverse adjustment, the divine could be shifted over to the human, there is one way in which man could never in all eternity come to be like God: in forgiving sins.9 Sin has birthed a fallen and sinful world. The self is in opposition to God and must suffer through the purification of the self by trial. That God allows suffering does not mean, however, that He does not love us, for God is love.10 Though at times, suffering may cause us to doubt God’s love. “What does doubt about God’s love want? It wants to reverse the relation (between God and humanity), wants to sit quiet and safe, judging, and to deliberate upon whether God is indeed love.”11 For Kierkegaard, when we trust that God is love and has a purpose for our suffering, “The more all that is selfish is removed, rooted out, and the more obedience replaces it as the receptive soil in which the eternal can take root”.12 Since the religious way of life realizes that “all human beings are suffering”,13 the suffering of the religious is not momentary but is, in this life, continuous.14 Even though everyone suffers, Kierkegaard holds to the lesson that suffering teaches only those who are looking inward and are seeking to grow. He states, “The person who learned what he learned from what he suffered and learned the good from what he suffered, gained not only the best learning but what is much more – the best instructor”.15 Kierkegaard is quite clear that God is the instructor who not only strengthens us in suffering but also, at times, tests us with spiritual trials.16 When we realize that God allows us to suffer and learn from this suffering, we are “strengthened in our inner being”.17 Embracing that God allows us to suffer in order to draw us closer to Him is a point in which our understanding balks. That God allows us to suffer in various ways and spiritual trials is because, according to Kierkegaard, God loves us. It follows that in times of suffering, it is then when we must hold onto God’s love for us. Kierkegaard writes, “For him [the one being tested] the spiritual trial served as a strengthening in the inner being; he learned the most beautiful thing of all, the most blessed – that God loved him, because the one God tests he loves”.18 In our trials, testing, and suffering, God desires always what is good. “What is the good? It is God”, writes Kierkegaard.19 Kierkegaard reminds his readers of the length to which God tests us by recalling the life of Job in the Old Testament. He states, “It is true that I myself have not been tried, but still my mind has often become grave at the thought of Job and the idea that no one knows the time and hour when the messages will come to him, the one more terrible than the other”.20

Søren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 122. 10 Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, 274. 11 Ibid., 273. 12 Ibid., 259. 13 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, 436. 14 Ibid., 445. 15 Søren Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 95. 16 Ibid., 98. 17 Ibid., 95. 18 Ibid., 98. 19 Ibid., 134. 20 Ibid., 124. 9

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For Kierkegaard, the religious life and its relation to suffering is explicitly understood and fully elucidated in terms of the Christian narrative. Why? Because it is in Christ that we see the greatest example of one who suffered. It is His example that extends to true Christian living. For Kierkegaard, Christ is God.21 God became man, but not just any man. Although being God, “He took the form of a lowly servant”.22 As a lowly servant, Christ traveled the road of suffering, a road that culminated in crucifixion. Thus, the Christian life is one that must imitate the life of Christ. It is a life of anguish, hardship, and toil.23 Like Christ, the Christian life should expect nothing but suffering. It is a daily walk of pain, “to deny oneself . . . to walk the same road Christ walked in the lowly form of a servant, indigent, forsaken, mocked, not loving the world and not loved by it”.24 As stated earlier, if suffering is viewed within the context of what God has suffered with the belief that this suffering draws us closer to Him, then the suffering is worth it. Kierkegaard summarizes this thought by saying: But if Christ came into the world not to take away suffering, so that we can be comfortable, but to bring new suffering, does not this supposition make his coming futile? Not at all. He came into the world to remake men in such a way that all these human sufferings would become childishness to be reckoned as nothing.25 As suffering shapes us inwardly, the individual trusts God that He is in control regardless of the degree of our suffering.26 For Kierkegaard, Christian suffering is not in vain. The one who suffers as Christ suffered is evidence that he is on the right path to “eternal safety”.27 Temporarily, the burden of life never loses its weight; it never ceases to be difficult. However, the difficulties we encounter in this life must be, according to Kierkegaard, judged from an eternal perspective rather than within the context wherein they occur. Only with an eternal mindset can temporal suffering be seen, not as a difficulty but rather as a necessity whose transformative aspects make it worth the pain and struggle. “That the heavy suffering is beneficial – that must be believed; it cannot be seen”, wrote Kierkegaard.28 As we suffer, we do not see how such suffering could be beneficial; nevertheless, Kierkegaard exhorts us to continue and persevere in our trials. Those who become impatient in affliction demonstrate they do not have faith and lack the ability to believe both the existential and redemptive purpose of suffering.29 Only faith can make sense of Christianity’s dialectic of human suffering; namely, that it is in suffering we find joy. Left solely to human reasoning, only doubt or blatant rejection results from the Christian concept of suffering. Quoting 2 Cor. 4:17, Kierkegaard reminds us, “Our

See Søren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 125. 22 Søren Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses: The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 224. 23 Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, 224. 24 Ibid., 223. 25 Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers: Vol. 3, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), 191. 26 Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, 257. 27 Ibid., 227. 28 Ibid., 235. 29 Ibid., 238. 21

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hardship, which is brief and light, procures for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure”.30

FURTHER READING Kierkegaard, Soren. Philosophical Fragments. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Podmore, Simon D. Kierkegaard and the Self Before God: Anatomy of the Abyss. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010. Rose, Tim. Kierkegaard’s Christocentric Theology. England: Ashgate Publishing, 2001. Stewart, Jon. A History of Hegelianism in Golden Age Denmark, 3 Vols. Tome I: The Heiberg Period: 1824–1836; Tome II: The Martensen Period: 1837–1842; Tome III: Kierkegaard and the Left-Hegelian Period: 1842–1860. Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 2007. Turchin, Sean. “Suffering”. In Kierkegaard’s Concepts, Tome VI: Salvation to Writing. Edited by Steven Emmanuel, William McDonald, and Jon Stewart, 115–19. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, Vol. 15. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014. Walsh, Sylvia. Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an Existential Mode. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, 308.

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Chapter 26

Abraham Joshua Heschel C. K. MARTIN CHUNG

He who accepts this world as the ultimate reality will, if his mind is realistic and his heart sensitive to suffering, tend to doubt that the good is either the origin or the ultimate goal of history. To the Jewish mind, evil is an instrument rather than an iron wall; a temptation, an occasion, rather than an ultimate power. God in Search of Man, 376. Best known for his works on the prophets, the “divine pathos”, and for his social engagements alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. against racism and militarism,1 Heschel (1907–72) inherited and embodied venerable Hasidic traditions from Eastern Europe. Narrowly escaping the Shoah, in which his mother and three sisters perished together with other “martyrs of 1940–45” (The Prophets, dedication), he saw himself as a “brand plucked from the fire”,2 who was to tell the world time and again that “indifference to evil is worse than evil itself ”, and that “some are guilty, but all are responsible” (Moral Grandeur, xxiv, 224). Yet the problem of evil and man-made sufferings does not occupy a central place in the thoughts of the professor of Jewish Ethics and Mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Indeed, in the entire introductory chapter by Fritz A. Rothschild, which succinctly presents his revered teacher’s philosophy of religion in a systematized manner, “evil” appears only once (in the context of divine pathos) and is nowhere near the key terms or themes that recur in Heschel’s vast writings in multiple languages (Between God and Man, 12–13, 25). In the ordained rabbi’s characteristic theocentric turning:3 “Evil is not man’s ultimate problem. Man’s ultimate problem is his relation to God” (God in Search of Man, 376), the one with “ultimate power”.

THE TRIDIMENSIONALITY OF EVIL To understand Heschel’s apparent “downplaying” of evil, one needs to recall the basic “triangular” structure of the way a person of faith sees the world and all the wonders as well as problems in it. “Religious observance has more than two dimensions; it is more than an act that happens between man and an idea. The unique feature of religious living See Susannah Heschel, “A Different Kind of Theo-Politics: Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Prophets and the Civil Rights Movement”, Political Theology 21, no. 1–2 (2020): 23–42. 2 Edward K. Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel: Mind, Heart, Soul (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2019), 134, 230, 287–8. 3 Ibid., 173. 1

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is in its being three-dimensional. In a religious act man stands before God.”4 “He does not take a direct approach to things. It is not a straight line, spanning subject and object, but rather a triangle – through God to the object” (The Prophets, 29). Hence in his most direct exposition on the subject,5 Heschel proceeds by asking how the biblically minded, the prophets, and the Psalmist see the problem of evil and comes to the conclusion that they share neither the naiveté of the ignorant nor the callousness of the “modern man”, but, in horror and trembling, raise the question of theodicy: “Where is the God of justice?” (Mal. 2:17). Elsewhere, Heschel explicates that “[s]een from God, the good is identical with life and organic to the world; wickedness is a disease, and evil identical with death. For evil is divergence, confusion, that which alienates man from man, man from God, while good is convergence, togetherness, union”.6 The problem for humanity is to heal that tridimensional and tri-relational alienation – that is, divine-human and interhuman – in the aftermath of evil done. The primary source of divine insights into our problems is the Bible; it is “God’s anthropology rather than man’s theology” (God in Search of Man, 412). Two biblical terms undergird the proposition of evil as “temptation and occasion”. Yetzer or (evil) drive/inclination (Gen. 8:21, Ps. 103:14) and ra or evil/calamity (Deut. 31:29, Ps. 34:14) refer to the human heart as the gate through which evil enters history. “Evil in the heart is the source of evil in deeds” (God in Search of Man, 364). Evil, once externalized in relationships and societies, not only calls for action against it but also serves as an occasion for repentance. “If a man has beheld evil, he may know that it was shown to him in order that he learn his own guilt and repent; for what is shown to him is also within him.” Quoting the Baal Shem, Heschel admonished his contemporaries to fight modern dictatorship not with a self-righteous but a repentant heart (Between God and Man, 255f.). Both are created by God, the human being is nevertheless not destined to bring evil into the world, as the biblical message unambiguously reiterates (Gen. 4:7). The power to choose life rather than death, or good over evil, is within human reach (Deut. 30:11-20). “It is an act of evil to accept the state of evil as either inevitable or final”, declares Heschel (The Prophets, 231). Thus in tridimensional vision, what characterizes man’s relationship with evil is his being recurrently tempted but having the occasion and ability to overcome his evil drive to do mitzvot or God’s commandments. Either would be a mistake to see no evil or have an undue fascination with it. “A good conscience is the invention of the devil.”7 So is, of course, one that indiscriminately accuses both the righteous and the wicked. An obsession with evil, on the other hand, as something “magnificent” or “full of indescribable majesty” – often found among the faithful – lies at the other end of the danger.8 Therefore, a theocentric view of evil, which

Abraham Heschel, Man’s Quest for God: Studies in Prayer and Symbolism (New York: Scribner, 1954), 133. See Abraham Heschel, “The Problem of Evil”, in God in Search of Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 367–81. 6 Abraham Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1951), 120. 7 Abraham Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human Existence (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 61. 8 Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 160. 4 5

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sees evil in coexistence with the good in confusion,9 brings the problem in perspective and directs one’s gaze to where it matters: to oppression, unjust wars, racism (as “unmitigated evil”),10 and callousness to the various manifestations of evil in society. Hence Heschel’s exposition on evil often ends with an appeal for social concern and action (God in Search of Man, 375).

HUMAN SUFFERING AND DIVINE PATHOS Indifference to evil as human affliction of one another is thus worse than evil itself, for while evil exists as temptation and occasion, as God’s “instrument” (Jer. 18:11, 26:13), the key question and task for human beings remains: What do they do about it? Do they remain unmoved as long as the suffering victims of evil in history are the “others”? Or do they become “sensitive to suffering” and, out of that sensitivity, arise from self-interest and fear to do what is within their power to stop or alleviate that suffering? The God of the prophets is not the Unmoved Mover of the philosophers, but the “Most Moved Mover” (Between God and Man, 25). He is not the detached God of self-sufficiency, but “concern and involvement characterize His relation to the world” (The Prophets, 302f.). Going beyond the prophets, Heschel draws from post-biblical Judaism to affirm that “God’s need”, “zoreh gavoha”11 – a “self-imposed concern” – is served by the righteous.12 Such a God demands an answer. He demands sympathy (The Prophets, 393). Just as the sensitivity to human suffering characterizes the God of pathos, so does the sensitivity to divine suffering define prophecy (The Prophets, 402). Vulnerability is not a disadvantage but a quality. Divine concern for human existence “finds its deepest expression in the fact that God can actually suffer. At the heart of prophetic affirmation is the certainty that God is concerned about the world to the point of suffering” (Between God and Man, 120). As such, Heschel rejects the view that religion is primarily about symbols: “We do not suffer symbolically. We suffer literally, truly, deeply. Symbolic remedies are quackery” (Moral Grandeur, 129). The religious who take human suffering seriously do not content themselves with symbolic solidarity but, through prayer, fasting, and public engagement with civil affairs, seek to reduce suffering in the world.13 Reading the prophets helps counter “the systematic liquidation of man’s sensitivity to the challenge of God”, which, according to Susannah Heschel, defines the purpose of her father’s efforts.14 Heschel himself, who refused to accept the praise of being a prophet despite being widely considered as such by his Christian admirers,15 explained that the

Heschel, Insecurity of Freedom, 127. Ibid., 86. 11 See Heschel, “A Different Kind of Theo-Politics”, 33: “Heschel’s understanding of divine pathos continues a long tradition of Jewish thought, going back to the rabbinic teaching of ‘zoreh gavoha’, divine need, that was further elaborated in Kabbalistic and Hasidic teachings regarding God’s responsiveness to mitzvot and God’s need for redemption.” 12 Man Is Not Alone, 242f. “Self-imposed” is important here to explain the apparent contradiction in speaking of the need of God who is “bedürfnislos” or “without need” in the context of demanding human obedience. Abraham Heschel, Die Prophetie (Kraków: Verlag der polnischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1936), 165. 13 See Kaplan, Heschel, 299, 322. As an establishment, however, religion must remain separated from the government. 14 Susannah Heschel, “Reading Abraham Joshua Heschel Today”, in Thunder in the Soul: To be Known by God, ed. Robert Erlewine (Walden: Plough Publishing House, 2021), xxii–xxxiv, here xxiii. 15 See Kaplan, Heschel, 226, 356. 9

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revision of his doctoral dissertation on the prophets for publication in English in the early 1960s had convinced him that he must be “involved in human affairs, in human suffering” (Moral Grandeur, xxiii). His very active and public involvement in the civil rights movement and the peace movement during the Vietnam War – though not at all appreciated by some of his contemporaries – is a testament to his teaching on divine and prophetic concern. In his own life, Heschel suffered not only irreparable personal loss in the Shoah but also disappointment with his unsuccessful advocacy. Confiding to a close associate, he lamented that he was unable to mobilize his new compatriots in the United States to do more for European Jewry. “I was a stranger in this country. My opinion had no impact.”16 It is precisely at such moments of helplessness – from both the hiding God and indifferent fellow men and women – that evil threatens to bring its divisive work to completion. For when the interhuman relationship is injured by the act of commission or omission, the two divine-human dimensions of the triangular relationship are damaged as well: for the perpetrator or bystander, the sympathy with divine concern is broken; what is evil in the sight of the Lord is not evil in the sight of man. For the victim, faith in a just God is also shattered by the apparent divine absence. Heschel reminds us that not only human lives were exterminated on the altar of Satan, but also “many people’s faith in the God of justice and compassion” (Moral Grandeur, 235). By tenaciously holding on to faith, survivors and victims of atrocities defy the disintegrative power of evil. The aggrieved Heschel refused to give in to despair, for the assured divine concern for the innocent and scorn for the wicked comforted him (Ps. 2:4).17 This resilience of the powerless is due in no small part to the prophetic tradition in Judaism. “The prophet is prepared for pain. One of the effects of his presence is to intensify the people’s capacity for suffering” (The Prophets, 228). What meets the eye as an unjust affliction in the two-dimensional world is recognized tridimensionally as God’s wrath (Between God and Man, 118). “Though the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide Himself any more” (Isa. 30:20; The Prophets, 233). Like evil, then, suffering can also be an occasion for learning, if the afflicted wills to be taught, even as evildoers shall answer for their misdeeds nonetheless. For the faithful, no amount of evil and suffering in the world negates the justice of God’s deeds (Deut. 32:4).18 Humanity itself is also not without sparks of holiness: “There are good moments in history that no subsequent evil may obliterate.”19 In partnership with the God of pathos, the righteous and the faithful sanctify “the earth that is given into the hand of the wicked” (Job 9:24). Evil is real and those who are sensitive to suffering know it. “But we also have the aid of God, the commandment, the mitzvah” (God in Search of Man, 374).

Kaplan, Heschel, 131f. Ibid., 95, 322. 18 Ibid., 230. 19 Heschel, Insecurity of Freedom, 143. 16 17

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FURTHER READING Heschel, Abraham Joshua. God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. Heschel, Abraham Joshua. The Prophets, Perennial Classics edition. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Heschel, Abraham Joshua and Susannah Heschel. Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996. Heschel, Abraham Joshua and Fritz A. Rothschild. Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism. New York: Free Press, 1975. Kaplan, Edward K. Abraham Joshua Heschel: Mind, Heart, Soul. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2019.

Chapter 27

Simone Weil STEPHEN J. PLANT

In March 1942, Simone Weil (1909–43) met Joë Bousquet in the Languedoc town of Carcassonne. In 1918, a German bullet struck Bousquet’s spine, paralyzing him from the waist down: Weil wanted to pick his brains about his experience. Though they never met again, their conversation opened the door to brief, intense correspondence culminating in a letter in which Weil wrestled with suffering and evil:1 I believe that the root of evil, in everybody perhaps but certainly in those whom affliction has touched and above all if the affliction is biological, is day-dreaming. It is the sole consolation, the unique resource of the afflicted . . . It has only one disadvantage, which is that it is unreal. Weil then adds something astonishing: you are infinitely privileged, because you have war permanently lodged in your body . . . Fortunate are those in whom the affliction which enters their flesh is the same one that afflicts the world itself in their time . . . I am convinced that affliction on the one hand, and on the other hand joy, when it is complete and pure commitment to perfect beauty, are the two keys which given entry to the realm of purity, where once can breathe: the home of the real. But each of them must be unmixed: the joy without a shadow of incompleteness, the affliction completely unconsoled. To fathom what Weil is trying to say in these remarks will take us some distance toward understanding her thinking about evil and affliction. What we will learn is that for Weil, suffering has no meaning and that God neither wants nor needs vindication for the existence of evil. Before proceeding, a word is in order about a difficulty in reading Weil. A significant proportion of the writings for which she is known were published posthumously in excerpts from notebooks written between 1933 and 1943, shortly before her death. Some passages take the form of brief aphorisms or pensées; some are reflections on her reading; other longer passages are in a dense, annotated form not intended for publication. To the notebooks may be added a small number of unpublished essays. Because of the form her writing takes, reading Weil can be like making a “thought-collage”, in which a coherent pattern must be carefully assembled from many smaller parts. The largest “fragment” in a

1 Their meeting is reported by Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 465. Weil’s letter of May 12, 1942, is printed in Simone Weil: Seventy Letters, trans. R. Rees (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 135–42.

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collage concerned with suffering and evil is the essay written before May 1942 (possibly prompted by her conversation with Bousquet?) on “The Love of God and Affliction”2 (hereafter LGA). Weil’s opening gambit is to distinguish suffering from affliction (or “woe”; in French, Malheur, a word with etymological roots in the notion of an “evil hour”, that she believed held has no equivalent in other languages). Affliction must certainly include physical suffering, but it is possible to feel pain without also being afflicted. Affliction is a uniquely complete and acute experience that can last many years, and which, crucially, affects the whole of a person’s being: Affliction is an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death, made irresistibly present to the soul by the attack or immediate apprehension of physical pain. If there is complete absence of physical pain there is no affliction for the soul, because thought can turn itself away in any direction. (LGA 171) Weil is careful to indicate that events such as grief or humiliation are “akin to physical pain” (LGA 170). In addition to suffering as one essential component in affliction, for Weil, it must also include social exclusion or humiliation: “The social factor is essential. There is not real affliction where there is not a social degradation or the fear of it in some form or another” (LGA 171). The example she gives is slavery, but other examples of degrading social attitudes are readily available, are also possible, such as sexism or racism, physical impairment, or even the debilitating effects of bereavement. What each of these has in common is their capacity to reduce people to things. So routine are such forms of humiliation that there is, indeed, something miraculous in a person who sees beyond affliction to the person: unless one sees an afflicted person through the eyes of Christ, it is, in a way, normal to despise and turn away from her. Affliction is also personal in the sense that “The same event may plunge one human being into affliction and not another” (LGA 171). The existence of affliction as part of the human condition raises, for Weil, a series of difficult questions. Since Christ looks with compassion on the afflicted, “it is surprising that God should have given affliction the power to seize the very soul of the innocent and to possess them as sovereign master” (LGA 172). The answer is to be sought in a true understanding of creation and of the natural forces that operate in the created order. For Weil, “nature is at the mercy of the blind play of mechanical necessities” (LGA 172). This “blind necessity” which causes it (in Jesus’ words) to rain on the just and the unjust alike, is as much a part of the creation God has ordered as gravity. Embracing metaphor and analogy as the only ways to articulate profound and paradoxical truths, Weil imagines creation as God’s withdrawal from time and space in order to allow all that is not God to come into existence. Far from being an act of indifference or even malice, God’s withdrawal from creation is God’s deepest act of love. This may be considered first in relation to the inner life of God: in creating the universe it is as though the Father sets the Son at the other end of the universe, allowing creation to come into being between them: Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. The infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing

See Simone Weil, “The Love of God and Affliction”, in On Science, Necessity and the Love of God, ed. and trans. Richard Rees (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 170–98.

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apart, this incomparable agony, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion. Nothing can be further from God than that which has been made accursed. (LGA 174–5) To be afflicted is to encounter the harsh reality of creation as an experience of God’s absence, indeed “Affliction causes God to be absent for a time” (LGA 172, my emphasis). For the human being who experiences creation as affliction there are, then, two contradictory aspects to necessity. On the one hand, it is experienced as a pitiless cruelty that breaks one’s being into pieces; but it may also be a way of an encounter with the love of God, who lovingly makes the world one in which necessity operates. Certainly, for the avoidance of doubt, Weil makes clear that “It is wrong to desire affliction; it is against nature and it is a perversion; and moreover, it is the essence of affliction that it is suffered unwillingly” (LGA 184). But what if one should choose to obey necessity, even to consent to it? To do so would be to see God’s providential hand behind the blind mechanism of necessity, to see one’s painful longing for God in affliction as a longing for God’s love – just as longing for an absent friend testifies to the reality of one’s love for them. To consent to necessity is, as Weil imagines it, like grasping with affection the outstretched hand of the friend whose grip is so tight it hurts. It is to place oneself close to Christ, whose own consent to drink the cup of suffering on the cross is, for Weil, the truest evidence of his divinity. To deny affliction, to seek distraction from it, to turn one’s eyes away from one’s own or another’s affliction is then to deny God one’s consent: it is to sin. It is for this reason that Weil believed Bousquet to be privileged by his wound: his affliction offered him a chance to say “yes” to the universe God’s love has made, by consenting to the necessity of war in his body as an apprentice accepts the scars on his hands as his trade entering his body. To consent or not to consent is the only choice the necessity of affliction allows. Unalloyed affliction is not the only way in which, Weil thought, consent to necessity may be invited and given: unadulterated joy, too, can do this. Giving oneself completely to love beauty, or a friend, or liturgy can work in a person in the same way, by making the consenting subject “transparent”, allowing the love of God to flow through them without interruption. Weil elsewhere describes this as “decreation”, giving oneself up so that the time and space God withdrew from to allow creation to come into being may once again be filled by God. It is the human vocation to consent to be decreated. Yet this consent, it is crucial to grasp, is only the first of two movements, and the second is recreation. As she would write later: “It is necessary to be changed back into water, so that the Spirit may turn that water into blood. Become nothing but complete passivity, corpse-like inertia, and let the Spirit of God create life out of this energy.”3 Once again for the avoidance of doubt, Weil does not intend to say to Bousquet, or anyone else, that affliction is God’s way of teaching them a valuable lesson. To believe this is to give a meaning and purpose to affliction that, by definition, it cannot have. For affliction truly to be affliction it must not be in any sense “a divine educational method” (SNLG 181). Neither can affliction be in any way relieved by hope: the early Christian martyrs who hoped in their death for salvation were not, she thinks, truly afflicted precisely because of their hope. Meaning would be a further way in which the total destruction in affliction would be relieved. This brings Weil to the startling conclusion that

Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks: Supernatural Knowledge, trans. Richard Rees (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 1970), 343.

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There is a question which is absolutely meaningless and therefore, of course, unanswerable, and which we normally never ask ourselves, but in affliction the soul is constrained to repeat it incessantly like a sustained, monotonous groan. This question is: Why? Why are things as they are? The afflicted man naively seeks an answer, from men, from things, from God, even if he disbelieves in him, from anything or everything. (LGA 196) Quite simply, there can be no answer to the “Why” of the afflicted, “because the world is necessity and not purpose” (LGA 197). Jesus’ cry from the cross, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” is thus at the same time a cry of dereliction and a complete expression of love that articulates “the essential link between the Cross and affliction” (LGA 195). This, for Weil, is redemption: on the cross, Christ suffers with compassion for all human affliction concentrated in himself. His compassion makes possible our own participation in the supernatural process of charity: “[t]he man who sees someone in affliction and projects into him his own being brings to birth in him through love, at least for a moment, an existence apart from his affliction” (LGA 190). After Weil left Vichy, France, for London, via Casablanca and New York, she exchanged no further letters with Bousquet. But perhaps, after a period of working for De Gaulle’s Free French, she found her own way to imprint war into her body. Rightly or wrongly the coroner at the inquest into her death recorded a verdict of suicide because she declined to eat the calories needed to recover from her tuberculosis. She told friends that she would not eat more than she believed her French compatriots had to eat. As her sense of her own love of God deepened, she had considered whether to be baptized, but determined against it. When she died, with unintended irony, the priest from London engaged to conduct her funeral got lost en route and a colleague read the service by her grave at Ashford Cemetery in Kent. Is her thinking about affliction and the love of God, necessity and obedience, gravity, grace, and the redemptive power of Christ’s cross Christian or not? Does her thinking, like her body, lie just outside the fellowship of the baptized members of Christ’s body? It seems to me that Christ’s resurrection changes everything, and that because of what God has done in raising Christ it is possible to be convinced that “neither life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39).

FURTHER READING Weil, Simone. “The Love of God and Affliction”. In On Science, Necessity and the Love of God. Edited and translated by Richard Rees, 170–98. London: Oxford University Press, 1968. Plant, Stephen. The SPCK Introduction to Simone Weil. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2007. Vetö, Miklos. The Religious Metaphysics of Simone Weil. Translated by J. Dargan. New York: University of New York Press, 1994.

Chapter 28

Hannah Arendt PHILIP WALSH

Hannah Arendt’s writings are framed by two conceptions of evil: as radical and as banal. Arendt (1906–75) never resolved the tension – even, perhaps, the contradiction – between the two conceptions, although she modified her views of both in the course of her life. Radical evil was a central theme that emerged from her Origins of Totalitarianism (1951); the banality of evil appeared once in the text and in the subtitle of her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), but has become one of the most contested concepts in social theory of the last sixty years. The two works bookend a series of highly influential writings, which continue to influence and inspire academics working in fields of moral philosophy, political theory, the social sciences, and beyond. The Origins of Totalitarianism has been rediscovered in recent years and is today often lauded as a founding work in postcolonial theory for its strikingly prescient identification of the roots of twentieth-century totalitarianism in nineteenth-century imperialism. Alternatively, it is sometimes hailed as a “field guide” for understanding totalitarian phenomena in politics, from populism to ochlocracy. But this pruning of its insights risks losing sight of some of the philosophical concerns at the heart of the book. Of these, the idea of radical evil is central. The term “radical evil” derives from Kant, who uses the term to describe actions that are driven solely by self-interest in violation of the moral law.1 It stands at the head of a range of philosophical theories that equate evil with wrongdoing and with intentional harm to others. These theories tend to be individualistic and action-based: that is, evil is considered to consist in a wrong carried out by an actor, usually with intent to harm and, perhaps, the taking of pleasure in it. Such accounts have been elaborated in various ways but face challenges in distinguishing mere wrongdoing from actual evil, instantiated in actions like torture, enslavement, and other atrocities. There is ongoing debate about how these distinctions might be formulated. For example, the distinction might be drawn in quantitative terms, whereby evil comprises explicitly intended acts that are exceptionally harmful, or in qualitative ones, where evil acts are those that make life unendurable for those who suffer them. But Arendt’s adoption of Kant’s term is accompanied by a wholesale rejection of the adequacy of this style of moral philosophy in coming to terms with the evil represented by twentieth-century totalitarianism. Her point is bound up with a broader one: that totalitarianism explodes all the traditional categories within which political and moral

Immanuel Kant, “Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason”, in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 83.

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actions have been understood. Tyrannies, autocracies, one-party dictatorships, and other forms of despotism – however egregious, violent, or maladapted – still fall within boundaries of understanding and behavior that have been acknowledged, by both political theory and common sense, as continuous with the spectrum of observed human behavior. But totalitarian regimes fall outside this range; they represent something new, an unprecedented challenge to both understanding and to the moral categories that have hitherto guided action, law, and conceptions of criminality and justice. Above all, the concentration and death camps in which “experiments in total domination” (Essays in Understanding, 240) were carried out represent an insuperable challenge to our categories of understanding. The establishment and maintenance of the camps, carried on in defiance of all utilitarian or interest-based considerations – for the most part in a time of warfare – Arendt argues, negates the applicability of concepts that have hitherto been used to describe and understand moral and political action. In their irrationality, anti-utilitarian ethos, in the monstrous machinery by which they transform the “human person . . . into a completely conditioned being” (ibid.), the camps exemplify the unprecedentedness of totalitarian regimes and expose the inadequacy of previous theories in coming to terms with them. It was in her consideration of the meaning of the concentration and death camps, and their role within totalitarian regimes, that Arendt’s reflections on radical evil come to the fore. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, and other writings from the period, she suggests that one of the most striking features of the radical evil of the camps was the fact that the SS guards primarily responsible for their maintenance were motivated by neither cruelty nor sadism, but were, in fact, “completely normal” (239), and their overseers “job holders and good family men” (338). Neither willful pleasure in harm nor motivated enthusiasm in carrying out “duties” were dominant features of their personalities (although, as the 1965 Auschwitz Trials in Frankfurt revealed, there were important exceptions to this). Indeed, the radical evil of the camps was partly rooted in the fact that the motivations of the individuals involved were neither good nor bad but irrelevant. Arendt’s conception of radical evil, then, in contrast to the tradition of moral philosophy, eschews an individualistic, action-based approach. It might be said to be institutional, since the camps themselves were the “central institutions” of totalitarian regimes (Essays in Understanding, 236), although Arendt was always wary of the sociological vocabulary that such terms implied. To speak of “institutions” is to withdraw attention from the practices, thoughts, and responsibilities of the persons who inhabit them, and to foreground processes and collective entities. Arendt was deeply suspicious of such styles of thinking, which, she thought, too easily dead-ended in notions like collective guilt. To acknowledge that “[w]ithin the setting of Auschwitz, there was indeed ‘no one who was not guilty’” (Responsibility and Judgment, 244) was very far from considering everyone equally guilty. Arendt later backed away from the notion of radical evil. In correspondence with Gerschom Scholem, she suggested that evil “could not be radical, only extreme”; and in letters exchanged with the philosopher Karl Jaspers, she acknowledged that naming evil as “radical” risked romanticizing it.2 This retreat from the concept of radical evil was connected with Arendt’s characterization of Eichmann’s evil as banal.

2 Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt-Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926–1969 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992).

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The “banality of evil” thesis in Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) has become so over-referenced, it now borders on cliché. Nevertheless (or perhaps because of this), much of the commentary on the book and this central concept from it is steeped in misunderstanding, much of which can be traced to over-investment in individualistic and action-based traditions of moral theory. The book was originally written as a series of articles, published in the New Yorker magazine, documenting the trial of Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi official responsible for many of the logistical operations in which Jews were rounded up and shipped to concentration camps in the period 1939–44. After the Second World War, he managed to escape to Argentina and lived there with his family until he was kidnapped in 1961 by the Israeli Secret Service, flown to Israel and put on trial and charged with crimes against the Jewish people. He was found guilty and hanged. From the beginning, the trial attracted huge attention, becoming a worldwide spectacle and a symbolic statement on the part of the state of Israel. But Arendt was impatient with the terms within which both the trial and the commentary on it were conducted. Eichmann’s defense that he was an unimportant cog who had, in accordance with the laws and mores of his society, simply done what he was told to, and the prosecution narrative, that he was a uniquely motivated ideologue who was personally responsible for the deaths of millions, missed the point, she thought. Eichmann was certainly responsible for his crimes, and Arendt was glad to see him hanged. Yet Eichmann himself was, she thought, a peculiarly “thoughtless” personality; an apparently unprepossessing person who, when he spoke, invariably made use of hackneyed phrases and empty formalisms. This led her to the view that Eichmann was banal because he was incapable of thinking about the meaning of his own actions, and, as such, “never realized what he was doing” (Eichmann in Jerusalem, 287). Immersed in a shallow egoism, he was guided by judgments about what would advance his own career, what would appease his superiors, and how he could most effectively “do his job”. Eichmann’s banality was rooted in his shallowness, Arendt thought, but this did not mean that he was unintelligent, nor did it mean that he was “normal”. Indeed, she thought him unusual, someone who – as she later reflected – refused to be a person. This led her to further conclusions about banal evil that were formulated in her later philosophical writings. There she notes that [t]he greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies . . . [human beings] who refuse to be persons. Within the framework of this conceptualization, we could say that wrongdoers who refuse to think by themselves what they are doing and who also refuse in retrospect to think about it, that is, to go back and remember what they did (which is tushvah or repentance), have actually failed to constitute themselves as somebodies. By stubbornly remaining nobodies they prove themselves unfit for intercourse with others, who, good, bad or indifferent, are at the very least persons. (Responsibility and Judgment, 111f.) Whether Eichmann was a sadistic individual, motivated by a willful desire to commit harm, or a passive desk-murderer who was personally repelled by violence and suffering, was not, for Arendt, the true crux of the issue. Rather, his evil and his banality stemmed from each other. The meaning of evil as banality was therefore to be sought in Eichmann’s refusal to think. Even a cursory review of the subsequent commentary on Arendt’s banality of evil thesis is beyond the scope of this contribution. However, it is worth noting that Arendt was almost certainly mistaken in her evaluation of Eichmann’s own personality. As David

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Cesarani and Bettina Stangneth have both shown, Eichmann was a committed Nazi ideologue whose personal investment in his role was far greater than he had pretended at his trial.3 He was also an avid participant in a circle of ex-Nazi conspirators during his years in Argentina, and therefore someone to whose actions more traditional conceptions of evil as consisting in willed, wicked acts with terrible consequences for victims could be more usefully applied. Nevertheless, many have argued that this does not obviate the banality of evil thesis. While Eichmann was hardly banal in the sense that Arendt implied in her description of him, he nevertheless did exemplify certain traits that have proven important in coming to terms with forms of evil that defy more traditional philosophical understandings. Elizabeth Minnich, for example, has drawn attention to how the incapacity to comprehend others’ points of view, or imagine how one’s actions may impact them, is associated with evil deeds.4 Susan Neiman also defends the idea that banality is a useful concept in coming to terms with acts with catastrophic consequences that are far removed from their authors, such as those placed within bureaucratic settings.5 Arendt’s thinking about evil was hardly systematic and attracted both criticism and ire from her contemporaries. Nevertheless, it remains an important source for contemporary understanding of the topic.

FURTHER READING Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1951. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. London and New York: Penguin, 1963. Arendt, Hannah. Essays in Understanding: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books, 1994. Arendt, Hannah. Responsibility and Judgment. New York: Schocken Books, [1994] 2003. Baehr, Peter and Philip Walsh. The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt. London and New York: Anthem, 2017.

3 See David Cesarani, Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer” (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2007); Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem (New York: Knopf, 2014). 4 See Elizabeth Minnich, The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). 5 See Susan Neiman, “Banality Reconsidered”, in Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, ed. Seyla Benhabib et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 305–15.

Chapter 29

Karl Barth PAUL DAFYDD JONES

The life of Karl Barth (1886–1968), like many privileged Swiss men of his generation, might appear to stand in an awkward relationship to the concerns of this volume. On the face of it, Barth did not suffer as acutely as many of his peers. He was born into a relatively prosperous family; he enjoyed fulfilling relationships with a wide range of friends, inside and outside the church; he produced a body of work that distinguished him as one of the most brilliant theologians of the twentieth century. His encounters with evil, equally, were indirect. As a citizen of a neutral nation, he did not fight in the Great War; as an academic in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, he was not subjected to antiJewish and antisemitic prejudice, and his opposition to the Nazi regime did not lead to violence against him or his family; as a professor at the University of Basel, from 1935 to 1962, he enjoyed a comfortable existence. True, Barth’s was not an entirely charmed life. He lost a sibling when he was young and a child when he was an adult; he caused and endured pain in a difficult marriage and in an intimate extramarital relationship; his uncompromising politics made him the target of criticism around the world. And he certainly lived in the orbit of evil. The terrible losses of the two world wars, the advent of Nazism and the depravity of the Shoah, and the scandal of nuclear stockpiling affected Barth’s life in varying degrees. Even so, if it is the case that, as Paul Ricouer puts it, “it is to the least elaborate, the most inarticulate expressions of the confession of evil that philosophic” (and theological!) “reason must listen”, and if it is the case that, as Gustavo Gutiérrez argues, the “scorned of this world” ought now to take center stage in reflections about evil and suffering, one can legitimately wonder if Barth provides much insight.1 Wouldn’t it be better to look elsewhere? Granted that Barth’s work evinces little of the inarticulacy and marginality that Ricouer and Gutiérrez bring to the fore, this chapter argues for its continuing significance. It makes its case in three steps, reckoning with (a) the theological program of the second edition of Barth’s famous Epistle to the Romans (1922), with (b) the analysis of the “shadow-side” of creation and radical evil in the Church Dogmatics, then (c) concluding with general remarks about suffering and evil in light of the saving history of Jesus Christ and the challenges that attend theological inquiry into these matters today.

Paul Ricouer, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 4; and Gustavo Gutiérrez, On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1987), xii.

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EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS (1922) Like much literature written during and after the Great War, the second edition of Barth’s commentary bears the marks of a traumatizing global conflict. The rhetoric of war pervades the text; Barth writes frequently about “assaults” and “attacks” and seems eager to evoke memories of trench warfare, modern weaponry, and aerial bombardment. (It is not unreasonable, in fact, to imagine that some readers would find themselves re-traumatized by this book.) Such rhetoric, however, is not deployed in service of a narrowly political critique. It is used to dramatize the force of God’s judgment against sin. No matter their severity, discrete instances of wrongdoing and suffering may not be treated as ultimate realities. They must be viewed as symptoms of humanity’s hostility toward God, which God meets with a fierce, devastating No. This theological frame, I hurry to add, does not strip Barth’s analysis of specificity. It simply ensures that Barth’s critiques of the modern nation-state, Western capitalism, middlebrow culture, and ecclesial-theological conventions are set within a theological frame. “Religion”, in fact, is singled out as a peculiar problem. In contrast to many liberal Protestants, Barth refuses to treat it as a bridge connecting Christian faith to “modern” ideals. Absent God’s justifying and sanctifying grace, religion is simply an assemblage of sinful practices, habits, and intellectual conventions, the function of which is to obscure and compound our alienation from God and each other. Indeed, since it is the “the supreme possibility” to which human beings cling, “with a bourgeois tenacity”, one can only say: “religion must die” (RII: 238). Precisely because religion dies through Christ’s solidarity with sinners, however, humankind is granted the brightest possible future. This death announces the reality of salvation – a reality grounded in nothing apart from God’s determination to relate graciously to us; a reality that accords humankind, now and forevermore, the status of a “new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17), animated by the risen Christ. “In Him”, Barth insists, “we behold the faithfulness of God in the depths of Hell. The Messiah is the end of mankind, and here also God is found faithful . . . By His death He declares the impossible possibility of our redemption” (RII: 97 and 105). If one is to understand both the evil and the suffering that besets us, then, one must understand that God has always-already engaged and overcome it, in Christ, in the power of the Spirit.

CHURCH DOGMATICS III/3 (1950) In general, the Church Dogmatics strikes a different tone from Romans. The earlier text is jarring, restless, bewildering; the later, measured, nuanced, sometimes aristocratic. Yet many intuitions found in Romans remain operative, even as they are developed and extended. To elaborate this point, it is useful to focus on Church Dogmatics III/3. Having offered an account of providence that foregrounds God’s intensive governance of history, §50 argues that radical evil (das Nichtige, nothingness) seriously threatens God’s ways and works. It is an “alien element” in the world, “not only inimical to the creature . . . but above all to God Himself and His will and purpose” (CD III/3, 290). Three more particular claims follow. First, Barth claims that Christian faith and thought are undone by das Nichtige. While it haunts the scriptural witness, life in the church, and the broader world, one cannot comprehend or grasp it. It defies analysis. As such, it casts doubt on some axiomatic

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beliefs: that God has no real rival; that God’s creation is inherently good; that God governs the course of history; that, despite sin, God effortlessly realizes God’s purposes. A dogmatic analogue to Kant’s treatment of evil in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, then? Certainly. But Barth is also offering a modification of the Augustinian tradition’s tendency to think of evil in terms of ontological privation. Evil is not merely the absence of good; evil is an attack on the good. Second, Barth disaggregates nothingness from creation’s “shadow-side”: those moments and phases of misfortune, decay, bewilderment, loss, and suffering that checker human life. True, evil often takes hold when human beings negotiate the more ambiguous regions of creation. It is here, in our fragility and vulnerability, that we make the mistake of combining sin with the shadow-side; and it is because of that mistake that nothingness finds purchase in our world. But it is vital to uphold a sense of creation’s inherent goodness, and to avoid an uncritical identification of das Nichtige with the negativities of existence. It is vital to recognize that das Nichtige, the “real adversary” (CD III/3, 299), is much, much worse, given that its “local” depredations bespeak a concerted attack on God as such, and thus on the basic structures of creation. Third, Barth complicates two axiomatic claims, noted earlier: that God has no real rival and that God effortlessly realizes God’s purposes. One complication arises as Barth describes the genesis of das Nichtige as a (pseudo)reality, alternative to God and creatures, that “exists” as a reflex of God gracious Yes to the world. His idiosyncratic reasoning runs as follows: since God elects humankind for grace, what “God renounces and abandons in virtue of His decision is not merely nothing” (CD III/3, 352); it exists, albeit in a parasitic and ontologically peculiar way, because of this renunciation and abandonment. Humankind then realizes this “virtual” possibility, embracing what God rejects and opening the way for das Nichtige to infiltrate creation and challenge God’s rule. Another complication arises when Barth argues, once again, that Christ reasserts God’s No to das Nichtige. On the cross, Christ draws sin into God’s own life, so that sin – and, crucially, the power of the nothingness that grounds it – is defeated, cancelled, and killed off. But none of this happens without consequences. Quite the contrary: Christ’s death is an occasion in which God “lets a catastrophe which might be quite remote from Him approach Him and affect His very heart” (CD III/3, 357). Yet with these complications, Barth ends up reaffirming both axioms. On one level, God shows that das Nichtige is not, ultimately, a match for God. Through his life, death, and resurrection, Christ neutralizes the threat, setting it behind us and assuring us of God’s sovereignty and favor. On another level, Barth argues that the (ostensible) remaining power of das Nichtige must not be overrated. Whatever standing it has, it has by dint of God’s permission; whatever havoc it may cause, it does so under notice that God will eventually make evident, for all creatures, the present and future victory of Jesus Christ.

CONCLUSION The shortcomings of this perspective are perhaps already evident. On one level, it is apt to ask if the Dogmatics loses sight of the “brokenness” of theological reflection. Does not the triumphant finale to §50, which acclaims God’s unqualified control over das Nichtige, end up obscuring Barth’s sense that Christian thought is genuinely undone by evil and suffering? Ought Barth not to have tarried with outbreaks of evil, identifying them as surd-like events that chafe against, and perhaps even raise doubts about, Christ’s ongoing

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reign? On another level, one might ask if Barth should have added more detail to his account of evil and suffering. One way for theology to manifest “brokenness”, arguably, is to direct attention to the consequences of evil and to accord space – disruptive, painful space – to those who attest to its effects. If the horrors of the Shoah could have been a focus for Barth, the broader tradition of liberation theology demonstrates what it might mean to take up this challenge today. This tradition refuses to allow evil and suffering to be treated abstractly, insisting that the voices of those often rendered voiceless – women subjected to sexual violence, communities of color laboring under the weight of racism and colonialism, workers impoverished by the depredations of late modern capitalism, communities minoritized and maltreated on the basis of sexual identity and orientation, non-human creatures caught up in the vicious, stupid violence of the Anthropocene, and so on – resound across diverse dogmatic loci. Still, none of this allows one to discount the profundity of the Dogmatics. The high points of its treatment of evil and suffering hold fast: a refusal to grant evil and suffering meaning apart from an affirmation of God’s sovereignty and love; an account of God’s solidarity with those who suffer from and perpetuate sin; and, last but not least, an insistence that Christians are obliged to “hope for what we do not see” and “wait for it with patience” (Rom. 8:25). The question for contemporary thinkers, then, is whether a more textured witness to the persistence of tragedy, unevenly and unjustly distributed as it is, might be embedded within a comparably assured account of God’s victory. The question is whether one can imagine a dogmatic performance that acclaims Christ as the pivot around which salvation turns, while reckoning, in a concentrated and sustained way, with the ongoing scandal of evil and suffering, too often visited upon the “weak and the orphan . . . the lowly and the destitute” (Ps. 82:3).

FURTHER READING Barth, Karl. Epistle to the Romans. Translated by Edwyn Hoskyns. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968. Cited as: RII. Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics III/3. Edited by G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance. Translated by G. W. Bromiley and R. J. Ehrlich. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960. Cited as: CD. Krötke, Wolf. Sin and Nothingness in the Theology of Karl Barth. Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary, 2005. Tietz, Christian. Karl Barth: A Life in Conflict. Translated by Victoria J. Barnett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Chapter 30

Dietrich Bonhoeffer MICHAEL P. DEJONGE

THE THEODICY PROBLEM SOLVED IN THE CROSS Bonhoeffer (1906–45) strikingly claims, “The question why there is evil is not a theological question”. Why? Because, he says, the question “presupposes that it is possible to go back behind the existence that is laid upon us as sinners. If we could answer the question why, then we would not be sinners”.1 The question “why evil?” is, in other words, a speculative philosophical question posed from an existential position of sovereignty over the world and God. In contrast, theological questions about suffering and evil must come from the position of the redeemed sinner. In ruling out “why evil?” from theology, Bonhoeffer applies a favorite distinction between philosophical and theological reflection.2 In refusing “why evil?” as a theological question, then, Bonhoeffer does not ban the topic of suffering and evil from theology. Indeed, he offers some of the twentieth century’s most influential theological reflections on suffering. Rather, he insists on approaching the topic in a particular way: “The theological question is not a question about the origin of evil but one about the actual overcoming of evil on the cross.”3 The cross of Christ is the place where evil is overcome and where the sinner’s existential position is transformed into that of a redeemed sinner. So, theological reflection on suffering starts at the cross. Bonhoeffer’s approach is therefore resolutely a theology of the cross. This is so in the straightforward sense that his thinking about suffering takes its orientation from the cross. Beyond this, his thinking about suffering is a theology of the cross because its prototype is Martin Luther’s theologia crucis. As Luther puts it in the Heidelberg Disputation: “That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened. He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.”4 Following Luther, Bonhoeffer argues that theologians do not speculate toward conclusions about suffering but rather begin their reflection with the cross and its suffering.

1 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, ed. John de Gruchy, trans. Douglas Bax (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004), 120. 2 See Christiane Tietz, “Bonhoeffer on the Uses and Limits of Philosophy”, in Bonhoeffer and Continental Thought: Cruciform Philosophy, ed. Brian Gregor and Jens Zimmermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 31–45. 3 Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 120. 4 Martin Luther, “Heidelberg Disputation”, in Career of the Reformer, ed. and trans. Harold Grimm (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1957), 52.

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In another context, Bonhoeffer goes so far as to say, “The theodicy problem [is] solved in the cross”.5 To see what he means, we need to follow his theological reframing of the theodicy question. The question is not about God’s goodness in the face of human suffering and evil. Rather, “How can God be defended against the accusation of being unrighteous, if God enters into a relationship with sinners? How can the sinner be righteous and God still remain righteous?”6 The theological context is justification: If God declares sinners righteous, does this count against God’s own righteousness? Is not the justification of sinners an affront to God’s holiness, bringing God’s own righteousness into question? It is this version of the theodicy problem, originating in God’s gracious justification of sinners, that Bonhoeffer says is solved in the cross. How so? On the cross, “God kills the Son of God who bears our flesh; and with the Son, God kills everything that bears the name of earthly flesh. Now it is evident that no one is good but the triune God, that no one is righteous but God alone. Now, through the death of God’s own Son, God has supplied the terrible proof of the divine righteousness”.7 God’s own righteousness, which comes into question when God freely justifies sinners, is proven on the cross where God’s Son bears the punishment for sin. In this sense, the theodicy problem is solved in the cross.

COSTLY GRACE In treating the cross as the solution to the theodicy problem, Bonhoeffer also provides a framework for understanding at least some of the suffering in the Christian life. This is because God’s self-justification on the cross provides the background for God’s justification of the sinner. “The theodicy problem [is] solved in the cross. Our gaze is directed to the cross that we might recognize: God alone is righteous; if we recognize that, then we ourselves are justified. If we allow God alone to be justified, then we are justified.”8 That is, the sinner’s justification is effective only if the righteousness it grants is true righteousness, which can only be the case if it comes from a God who is truly righteous. The proof of God’s own righteousness on the cross, then, is also the proof of the sinner’s righteousness in justification. Seeing how the cross provides a framework for understanding Christian suffering further requires recognizing that, with this dynamic of God’s self-justification and God’s justification of the sinner, Bonhoeffer provides the theological backing for his famous treatment of cheap and costly grace. God’s self-justification on the cross shows that God’s grace for sinners is not cheap; it comes at the cost of divine suffering. Furthermore, God’s self-justification on the cross shows that, in the dynamics of God’s grace, the need for obedience in the face of God’s righteousness is not set aside. So, the justification God offers sinners on the basis of God’s self-justification, while freely given, requires repentance and ongoing obedience to God’s commands. And this is the very definition

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Theological Education at Finkenwalde: 1935–1937, ed. H. Gaylon Barker, and Mark Brocker, trans. Douglas Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 345–6. 6 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, ed. Geffrey Kelly, and John Godsey, trans. Barbara Green, and Reinhard Krauss (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 254. 7 Ibid., 255. 8 Bonhoeffer, Finkenwalde, 345–6. 5

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of costly grace: a grace which freely justifies but nonetheless includes the obligation for repentance and obedience.9 Here the other, more familiar sense of costly grace comes into focus: grace is costly not only for God but also for the believer. The believer remains faithful to God’s commandments, even unto suffering. Bonhoeffer concisely captures this understanding of Christian suffering in a letter to a brother-in-law. Either I determine the place where I want to find God, or I let him determine the place where he wants to be found. [. . .]. But if it is God who says where he is to be found, then it will probably be a place that is not at all commensurate with my own nature and that does not please me at all. This place, however, is the cross of Jesus. And those who want to find God there must live beneath that cross just as the Sermon on the Mount demands.10 Beginning with the epistemological principle derived from the theology of the cross, Bonhoeffer draws the conclusion regarding Christian suffering. This completes the logic of the “theodicy problem”, as Bonhoeffer understands it. We begin by asking about the origin of evil, often asking why we suffer if God is good. Bonhoeffer directs this question to the cross, reframing it theologically as a question about God’s goodness in light of justification. The cross not only proves God’s goodness but also reveals the divine cost of justification. The human cost of justification, then, consists in the obedience and suffering that accompanies it. This logic does not answer all speculative questions about evil and God’s goodness, but it tells a story of divine and human suffering centered on God’s self-revelation on the cross.

ONLY A SUFFERING GOD CAN HELP While later imprisoned, Bonhoeffer again wrote on suffering and the cross, generating the provocative and influential claim that “only the suffering God can help”.11 The starting point for his thinking about the suffering God is again the distinction, familiar from the theologia crucis, between the philosophical or metaphysical God we imagine, and God as revealed in suffering on the cross. In Letters and Paper from Prison, Bonhoeffer describes the philosophical God as the God desired by human religiousness, the “God of the gaps” who swoops in as the all-powerful “deus ex machina” when humans are at their weakest. The revealed God of a religionless Christianity, on the other hand, appears in the powerlessness and suffering of the cross.12 Bonhoeffer’s description of God as suffering seems to follow directly from the ancient Christian conviction that Jesus of Nazareth, who suffers on the cross, is fully God. But, in fact, most of the Christian theological tradition resisted drawing the conclusion that God suffers. This majority position rests on two ideas. First is what Bonhoeffer would criticize as a philosophical conception of God as immutable and impassible so that suffering is incompatible with God’s perfection. Second is a model of the incarnation in which certain of Jesus’ actions and attributes can be referred to his human nature while See Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 45–52. Bonhoeffer, Finkenwalde, 168. 11 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. John de Gruchy, trans. Isabel Best et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010), 479. 12 Ibid. 9

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others can be referred to his divine nature. Accordingly, the majority position refers Jesus’ suffering exclusively to Christ’s human nature, thus protecting the impassibility of the divine nature and resisting the conclusion that God suffers. An important minority voice in the tradition was Luther, who saw in the idea that “the Deity surely cannot suffer” the influence of “the old witch, Lady Reason”. He challenged this position on its Christology, arguing against the tendency to refer Christ’s actions and attributes to the one nature or the other, insisting that “the divinity and the humanity are one person in Christ”.13 Because Christ is one person or agent, his suffering is the suffering of both his human and divine natures. Bonhoeffer’s own Christology pursues Luther’s single-agent logic.14 With appeal to Luther, he emphasizes the unity of natures in the person: “We say of this man, Jesus Christ, that he is God.”15 This means, for him, that we cannot “begin with the two natures in isolation, but rather with the fact that Jesus Christ is God”.16 Bonhoeffer’s prison reflections on the suffering God can thus be seen as an overcoming of the dominant, impassible position in two steps. First, following the logic of a theology of the cross, he begins not with a philosophical conception of God but with God as revealed in the suffering of the cross. Second, he replaces a Christology of two natures acting in one person with a Christology of one divine-human person or agent, thus clearing the chief theological obstacle to the conclusion that God suffers. How does such a suffering God help? Bonhoeffer suggests at least two ways.17 First, a suffering God helps by disabusing us of a God of the gaps who drops from heaven to solve our toughest problems. A suffering God, instead, urges us into the “worldliness” of life with the conviction that God is present there. “Before God, and with God, we live without God.”18 That is, we live without the metaphysical God but before and with the suffering God. Second, if God suffers, paradoxically enduring even the agony of Godforsakenness, then there is no human suffering foreign to God. For the suffering God, omnipotence and perfection are not the inability to suffer but rather the ability and willingness to suffer all that humans endure and more. Such a God wills to be present in the depth of human suffering. The suffering God helps, then, not by answering the question “why evil?” but by carrying that question alongside suffering humanity.

FURTHER READING Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Creation and Fall. Edited by John de Gruchy. Translated by Douglas Bax. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. Edited by John de Gruchy. Translated by Isabel Best, Lisa Dahill, Reinhard Krauss, and Nancy Lukens. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010. DeJonge, Michael. Bonhoeffer’s Reception of Luther. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Martin Luther, “Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper”, in Word and Sacrament III, ed. and trans. Robert Fischer (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1961), 210. 14 Michael DeJonge, Bonhoeffer’s Reception of Luther (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 42–76. 15 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Lectures on Christology”, in Berlin: 1932–1933, ed. Larry Rasmussen, trans. Isabel Best, David Higgins, and Douglas Stott (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), 353. Translation altered. 16 Ibid., 350. 17 See Christiane Tietz, “Der leidende Gott”, Panorama 23 (2011): 107–20, 112–15. 18 Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers, 479. 13

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Tietz, Christiane. “Bonhoeffer on the Uses and Limits of Philosophy”. In Bonhoeffer and Continental Thought: Cruciform Philosophy. Edited by Brian Gregor and Jens Zimmermann, 31–45. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Tietz, Christiane. “Der leidende Gott”. Panorama 23 (2011): 107–20.

Chapter 31

Hans Urs von Balthasar RICHARD MCLAUCHLAN

The Swiss Roman Catholic theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–88), is often taken as an intellectual guide in studies that seek to negotiate the difficulties surrounding suffering and evil from a Christian perspective. This is partly because, as Karen Kilby has written, “one can detect a kind of fascination with suffering at nearly every level in his writings”.1 Donald Mackinnon, referring to Balthasar’s famous Theo-Drama, put the matter in these terms: [T]he nervous tension of the whole argument bears witness to the author’s passionate concern to present the engagement of God with his world in a way that refuses to turn aside from the overwhelming, pervasive reality of evil. It is not that Balthasar indulges in any facile cult of pessimism . . . It is rather that he insists on a vision that can only be won through the most strenuous acknowledgement of the cost of human redemption. Inevitably, Balthasar’s commitment to this outlook resulted in certain claims or ideas that have lent themselves to disagreement. There are three prominent debates that emerge frequently in the voluminous secondary literature. They arise out of Balthasar’s conviction that the Son’s incarnate mission extends to the very ends of all that is not God, especially in his descent into Hell. Balthasar takes this as an indication that the Trinitarian life has the capacity to draw into itself all differences – including the extremes of suffering, sin, and divine abandonment (though all is then “burnt up” in the fire of God’s love, which “will not tolerate anything impure but must be burnt away”2). If Jesus has suffered through on the Cross the sin of the world to the very last truth of this sin (to be forsaken by God), then he must experience, in solidarity with the sinners who have gone to the underworld, their (ultimately hopeless) separation from God,

Karen Kilby, “Julian of Norwich, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the Status of Suffering in Christian Theology”, New Blackfriars 99, no. 1081 (2017): 302. 2 Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The Scapegoat and the Trinity”, in You Crown the Year with Your Goodness: Radio Sermons through the Liturgical Year, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 84–5. This also raises the question of the ontological status of evil in Balthasar’s thought. For an inventive discussion of this, see Craig W. Giandomenico, “A Disease of Being: The Ontological Status of Sin in the Theology of Hans Urs Von Balthasar”, Th.D. Dissertations 8 (2017), https://digitalcommons​.lasalle​.edu​/religion​_thd​/8. My thanks to Rev. Dr. Aidan Nichols OP for pointing me to this thesis and for his other insights during the preparation of this chapter. 1

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otherwise he would not have known all the phases and conditions of what it means to be unredeemed yet awaiting redemption.3 In light of such a claim, the first debate concerns whether or not it is still acceptable to speak of divine impassibility and immutability. Balthasar maintains that the Son’s temporal kenotic mission is grounded in, and made possible by, an eternal kenosis within the Trinity. He thereby hopes to avoid any sense that God is somehow externally conditioned by his creation. The Father’s sending of the Son unto death, and the Son’s reciprocal obedience unto death and his return to the Father in resurrection and ascension (the Spirit maintaining their unity-in-difference), are the translation of the inner movement of selfgiving love within the Trinity onto the dimensions of the created world.4 Does this uphold divine impassibility and immutability or compromise them?5 The second debate revolves around whether or not Balthasar is justified in the first place to speak of Christ’s descent in the manner that he does. His theology of Holy Saturday is strikingly different in presentation from the tradition of the church to which he belonged, and this raises the question of the extent to which the content differs too. Can Balthasar’s depiction (which owes much to the mystical experiences of his friend Adrienne von Speyr) of the passivity and loneliness of Christ in the grave be reconciled with the classic, and some argue authoritative, statements of scripture and tradition suggesting that Christ’s descent was more like an active preaching mission to the underworld? If it is not possible to reconcile the two, then it may undermine Balthasar’s claim to operate within the context of scriptural and ecclesial obedience. If it is more than simply different, and is in fact wrong, then it undermines his theological project more generally, as so much hinges on his vision of the Triduum’s second day.6 The third debate asks whether or not Balthasar ties love and suffering together without appropriate qualification. Balthasar thinks all human suffering is capable of participating in Christ’s redemptive suffering, and thus of taking on a positive, teleological character.7 Does this lead to “a masochistic distortion of Christianity”?8 Some would argue that

Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Descent into Hell”, in Explorations in Theology, Volume IV: Spirit and Institution, ed. Hans Urs von Balthasar, trans. Edward T. Oakes (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1995), 395. 4 These ideas are developed from volume II onwards in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, volumes I–V, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1976–83) but are expressed most succinctly in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter, trans. Aidan Nichols (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990). A good introduction to, and interrogation of, Balthasar’s Trinitarian thinking can be found in Rowan Williams, “Balthasar and the Trinity”, in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. Edward T. Oakes and David Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 37–50. 5 For an example of the debate in action, see the following series of publications: Gerard F. O’Hanlon, The Immutability of God in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Kevin Duffy, “Change, Suffering, and Surprise in God: Von Balthasar’s Use of Metaphor”, Irish Theological Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2011): 370–87; Gerard F. O’Hanlon, “A Response to Kevin Duffy on von Balthasar and the Immutability of God”, Irish Theological Quarterly 78, no. 2 (2013): 179–84. 6 This debate was sparked by the publication of Alyssa Lyra Pitstick’s critical assessment Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic Doctrine of Christ’s Descent into Hell (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007). For a recent response to Pitstick, see Riyako Cecilia Hikota, And Still We Wait: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology of Holy Saturday and Christian Discipleship (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2018). 7 See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama II, 120, for a concise statement of Balthasar’s position. 8 Karen Kilby, Balthasar: A (very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 119. 3

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Balthasar’s scheme too readily resolves complex issues around abuse and injustice.9 Others consider it adequate to that complexity.10 Clearly, these are not issues purely of scholarship. Balthasar’s theology has pastoral implications that demand attention. The scholarly debates matter for us as humans, and therefore matter for the church and its mission. But so much has already been written on them that it is perhaps more helpful in this context to shine some light, albeit briefly, on an area where details are lacking: that is, the problems and possibilities opened up by the connection Balthasar makes between human suffering and our understanding of revelation. In the first volume of the Theo-Drama, Balthasar writes: “God’s revelation is not an object to be looked at: it is his action in and upon the world, and the world can only respond, and hence ‘understand’, through action on its part.”11 But in Balthasar’s thinking it is the passion and death of Christ that form the ultimate expression of God’s being. The deed or action required of the believer in order to understand that expression is to open oneself to suffering and to endure it sacrificially with and in Christ. The suffering of the believer thereby takes exclusive primacy in the Christian life: “Only through the experience of suffering does man acquire true knowledge of God and of himself.”12 It should be noted that Balthasar’s friend Adrienne von Speyr experienced “a landscape of pain of undreamt-of variety” every Holy Week from 1941 until her death in 1967, mystically united (it is claimed) to the passion and death of Christ.13 Balthasar, who lived with von Speyr and her husband, witnessed her paschal sufferings and believed they granted his friend a profound insight into the divine life. His own experience of suffering – especially his leaving of the Jesuits in 1950 and the church’s subsequent marginalization of him – must have informed his views further. This makes sense of Balthasar’s tendency to give the intensities of life a dominant role – one reason, perhaps, that he thought in dramatic terms. There is a “fierce plenitude” to his theology and it leaves the reader wondering what part the everyday or quotidian aspects of existence have to play within God’s plan for his creatures.14 Kevin Taylor has argued that Balthasar “valorizes our losses, making them meaningful above the cacophony of the immediate, mundane and quotidian”.15 Could these latter aspects not also act as rich repositories of revelatory insight? The irony here is that there were few theologians of the twentieth century who stressed the Son’s full assumption of our human state more than Balthasar.

For a helpful summary of the issues, see Boram Cha, Suffering, Tragedy, Vulnerability: A Triangulated Examination of the Divine-Human Relationship in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Rowan Williams, and Sarah Coakley, Durham theses, Durham University, 2019, 63–5, http://etheses​.dur​.ac​.uk​/13372/. 10 See especially Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001); Adam T. Tietje, Toward a Pastoral Theology of Holy Saturday: Providing Spiritual Care for War Wounded Souls (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2018). 11 Balthasar, Theo-Drama I, 15. 12 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Volume I, Seeing the Form, ed. Joseph Fessio and John Riches, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), 263. 13 Hans Urs von Balthasar, First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2017), 62. 14 The phrase “fierce plenitude” is taken from Ben Quash’s “Real Enactment: The Role of Drama in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar”, in Faithful Performances: Enacting Christian Tradition, ed. Trevor A. Hart, and Steven R. Guthrie (London: Ashgate, 2007), 20. 15 Kevin Taylor, “Hans Urs von Balthasar and Christ the Tragic Hero”, in Christian Theology and Tragedy: Theologians, Tragic Literature and Tragic Theory, ed. Kevin Taylor and Giles Waller (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 144. 9

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While one could criticize Balthasar for neglecting the quotidian, it is possible to be more constructive and discover within his thinking a useful framework for developing a theology of the revelatory potential of everyday life. Balthasar’s theo-dramatic approach is made feasible by his strong doctrine of participation. Within the drama of Christ, every human fate is deprivatised so that its personal range may extend to the whole universe, depending on how far it is prepared to cooperate in being inserted into the normative drama of Christ’s life, death and Resurrection.16 The inclusion here of the word “life” is important, for that life obviously involved many of our most humdrum activities: eating, drinking, working, and so on. Are we not capable, then, of entering into “the normative drama” when we enjoy, say, a good meal with friends (Matt. 9:10; Mark 2:15; Luke 7:34-36 and 24:29-31; John 12:2 and 21:12) or carry out our work conscientiously (Mark 6:3) or, tired after a journey, sit down for a cool drink (John 4:6)? When we remember that Jesus, too, was engaged in such run-of-the-mill activities, it surely has something to teach us about what his incarnation actually means. Moreover, it opens us to a much broader range of possibilities for participating in the life of Christ. Balthasar would not have denied these possibilities, but he was clearly preoccupied by suffering to an extent that obscures this expansive vision of life’s revelatory potential. Balthasar once wrote (with an uncharacteristic glibness perhaps): suffering prompts countless people to engage in acts of love of neighbour . . . People must go hungry so that others may have compassion and selflessly give them bread. People must be sick or in prison so that others may hit upon the idea of visiting them . . . In the drama between heaven and earth, therefore, human suffering is in many ways an element contributing to the gravity of the action.17 We might employ this logic in another direction: the quotidian is what makes the dramatic possible, it contributes inherently to life’s movement and tempo. It may even be that in order consciously to be affected by suffering, to be aware of the intensities of existence, we have to know at least something of what it is to be without pain, to have known the feeling of being at ease. Both the dramatic and the mundane can tell us of the God who became incarnate. In reading Balthasar on suffering, let us not forget that God in Jesus Christ became fully human.

FURTHER READING Brotherton, Joshua R. “God’s Relation to Evil: Maritain and Balthasar on Divine Impassibility”. Irish Theological Quarterly 80, no. 3 (2015): 191–211. Friesenhahn, Jacob H. The Trinity and Theodicy: The Trinitarian Theology of von Balthasar and the Problem of Evil. New York and London: Routledge, 2016. Papanikolaou, Aristotle. “Person, Kenosis, and Abuse: Hans Urs von Balthasar and Feminist Theologies in Conversation”. Modern Theology 19, no. 1 (2003): 41–65. Steck, Christopher. “Tragedy and the Ethics of Hans Urs von Balthasar”. Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 21 (2001): 233–50. Sutton, Matthew Lewis. “Does God Suffer: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology of Holy Saturday”. In On Suffering: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue on Narrative and Suffering. Edited by Nate Hinerman and Matthew Lewis Sutton, 171–83. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Balthasar, Theo-Drama IV, 50. Ibid., 192.

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Chapter 32

Jürgen Moltmann MATTHIAS REMENYI

THEOLOGY IS BIOGRAPHY Theology is always also biography. Jürgen Moltmann (1926–) is a prime example of that. Growing up in a liberal, upper-middle class, and rather non-religious home, he experienced the horrors of the Second World War first-hand. At the end of July 1943, he barely survived the destruction of his hometown Hamburg by the air raids of the British Royal Air Force. The bomb killed his friend, but he survived. That is the experience that will lead him to study theology while being a war prisoner, and that will shape and permeate his theology: Why did I survive and not he? And above all: Where is God considering the suffering in the world? The theme of his theology is prefigured here: How can the phenomenon of evil in the world be reconciled with the idea of God’s good and just governing of the world? This is the classic question of theodicy: How can the existential claim that a good and almighty God exists be sustained, given the suffering in the world? The theology of Jürgen Moltmann can be read as a constant, ever-new attempt to work on this question.

THE SUFFERING GOD Moltmann became famous for his Theology of Hope (1964). Later follows, no less programmatic, The Crucified God (1972). Here, Moltmann places the Christian faith under the perspective of the cross. This is – according to the subtitle – the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. The book wants to deepen the Theology of Hope with the help of a theologia crucis and ground it given the suffering of the respective present. It offers the most crucial figure of theodicy in Moltmann’s theology: the suffering God. Moltmann finds his answer to the question of where God is given the horrors of Auschwitz in Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s account about the boy the Nazis hanged. The boy struggles with death for half an hour. For Wiesel, as for Moltmann, God himself hangs on the gallows and dies an agonizing death. But while Wiesel’s faith shatters, for Moltmann, this thought of the suffering God is the only possible answer theology can give to the problem of theodicy after Auschwitz: “Any other answer would be blasphemy. There cannot be any other Christian answer to the question of this torment. To speak here of a God who could not suffer would make God a demon” (CG, 274). For Moltmann, this scene in Auschwitz is an image of what takes place on Golgotha. For him, the theological consequence is: the classical doctrine of apathy, which emphasizes God’s impassability and immutability, is to be abandoned in favor of God’s ability to suffer. The understanding of God’s omnipotence as potentia Dei absoluta is to be

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transformed into the concept of a God who allows himself to be touched by the misery of his creatures and suffers in solidarity with them. This does not lead to an undifferentiated and ecclesiastically rejected modalistic theopaschitism or patripassianism, but a so-called patricompassianism, because Father and Son are each involved differently in the event of the cross: “The Son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son” (CG, 243). The cross on Golgotha is an “event between God and God” and marks a “deep division in God himself” (CG, 243). The death of Jesus is not to be understood undifferentiated as the death of God but as “death in God” (CG, 207). The cross stands “at the heart of the trinitarian being of God” (CG, 207). It “divides God from God to the utmost degree of enmity and distinction” (CG, 152) – yet unites Father and Son in deep conformity of will, expressed in both giving themselves into suffering this death or dying. The Trinitarian doctrine becomes the “shorter version of the passion narrative” (CG, 246), for the cross is the material content of the Trinitarian doctrine, and the doctrine is the formal principle of the event of the cross. However, the point of Moltmann’s theodicy of the theology of the cross lies in soteriology: only when suffering, when even nothingness and absolute death are annulled in God, there is nothing left separating us from complete communion with God. The inner-Trinitarian dialectic outlined here becomes the heart of the wider Trinitarian history of God with the world.

THE TRINITARIAN HISTORY OF GOD WITH THE WORLD In The Crucified God, this theological metanarrative of a Trinitarian history of God with the world is illustrated with the help of Paul’s eschatological vision in 1 Corinthians 15: only when Christ has handed over the kingdom to the Father and God has become “all in all” (v. 28), “the completion of the Trinitarian history of God and the end of world history, the overcoming of the history of man’s sorrow and the fulfilment of the history of hope” (CG, 278) is signaled. “God in Auschwitz and Auschwitz in the crucified God” (CG, 278), as Moltmann concluded The Crucified God in 1972, is the reason for a “hope which embraces . . . the world” and a “love which is stronger than death” (CG, 278). The eschatological panentheism hinted at here ties in with the universal perspective of hope in his early Theology of Hope. Simultaneously, Moltmann forms the central theological concept that would shape his systematic contributions from then on. This concept is linked to a theodicy of a theology of creation. The guiding principle is the Jewish Kabbalah’s (Isaac Luria, 1534–72) idea of the Tzimtzum, a self-contraction of God at the beginning of his work of creation. To give space to the finite, the infinite must first contract into itself. This creates a space that is literally godforsaken, into which creation can then take place ex nihilo. This serves as a demarcation from a pantheistic union of God and world, but also as a theodicy – because the dialectical entanglement of God and nothingness, which occurs in the theology of the cross, reappears here in the doctrine of creation. The creatio ex nihilo is – pejoratively – a creatio in nihilo; it is placed in the nothingness of death and godforsakenness: “Creation is therefore threatened, not merely by its own non-being, but also by the non-being of God its Creator – that is to say, by Nothingness itself.”1

Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation. The Gifford Lectures 1984–1985, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1985), 78.

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Nevertheless, it is true that God in his world-transcendent creative power comprises and carries the world and sustains it in being, and permeates it in the Spirit: “Creation exists in the Spirit, is molded by the Son and is created by the Father. It is, therefore, from God, through God, and in God. The Trinitarian concept of creation binds together God’s transcendence and his immanence.”2 In this context, Moltmann repeatedly speaks of a perichoresis, that is, a mutual indwelling or interpenetration, referring not only to the intra-Trinitarian relations but also to the God-world relationship. Thereby, the world-immanence of God in the Spirit is always kenotic as a mode of God’s humble self-restraint. For even in the Trinitarian history of God with the world and a messianic Christology integrated into this history, it remains that God must be thought of as a suffering God: “God and suffering belong together . . . The question about God and the question about suffering are a joint, a common question” (TKG, 49). Central metaphors to illustrate this are the Shekinah, God’s dwelling on his earth as a symbol of the real presence of God in space, and the Sabbath, symbol of the presence of divine eternity in time. But everything remains dependent on the eschatological self-redemption and self-justification of God in his new creation, when all tears have been wiped away, and death is no more – in short: when God finally is “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28): Even the universal salvation of the new creation is not yet in itself the goal but serves the justification of God – that is, the glorifying of God, the Father of Jesus Christ . . . But God only arrives at his rest in the sabbath of his new creation. Only then will the theodicy trial – which is also a theodicy process – be finished. (WJC, 182–3) This process can rightly be called eschatological theodicy. It goes hand in hand with chiliastic concepts, which strengthen an eschatological hope for this earth and for bodily resurrection in somatic identity. And it is carried by the expectation of universal salvation or reconciliation of victims and perpetrators (apokatastasis panton).

CRITICISM Moltmann has occasionally been accused of being a pantheist. But this allegation is unsubstantiated. Moltmann neither negates a personal image of God nor a presuppositionless act of creation by God, nor does he identify God and the world. Inquiries to his Trinitarian doctrine are more critical, such as whether, like other social Trinitarian doctrines, it is not in danger of lapsing into tritheism. One can also ask whether the “Trinitarian inversion” of the theology of the cross does not imply a “binitarian” rather than a Trinitarian model of God since the role of the Spirit remains unclear. Critical questions can also be directed at the relationship between the economic and immanent Trinity: Is it not the case that in his theory the immanent relations of the Trinity are first constituted on the cross? But even if Moltmann cannot avoid some tritheistic nuances due to conceptual imprecision, he is undoubtedly not a tritheist. And even if the thesis of the self-constitution of the Trinity on the cross is found in the early Moltmann (see CG, 245), he later differentiated well between a noetic-epistemic and an ontological level with regard to the relation of immanent and economic Trinity (see TKG, 153).

Moltmann, God in Creation, 98.

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However, the criticism of his reception of the doctrine of the Tzimtzum is justified: God and the world are not symmetrical, competing entities, so God would have to become smaller for other things to exist alongside him. On the contrary, God’s omnipotence is shown in being able to will, affirm, and release the other of himself. And the nihil of creatio ex nihilo does not mean a mystical-empty primordial space but is merely a conceptual cipher for the presuppositionlessness and freedom of divine-primordial working. The doctrine of the Tzimtzum inadmissibly ontologizes and hypostatizes the concept. The integration of suffering in God presented in The Crucified God is also subject to criticism. The parallelization of Auschwitz and Golgotha is rejected as inadequate and appropriating. Auschwitz cannot be understood Christologically or integrated into a theological model. Dorothee Sölle’s criticism focused on the concept of God, seeing in Moltmann a sadistic God at work who abandons and sacrifices his Son.3 Moltmann dismissed this as a “misunderstanding” and “legend” (WJC, 197). The accusation persists, especially in feminist theology, that Moltmann uses violent metaphors in his speech about the crucified God and legitimizes human suffering by integrating it into God instead of fighting and ending it. Karl Rahner criticized Moltmann’s suffering God and argued for a rightly understood immutability and impassibility of God – for soteriological reasons. God can only be thought of as a saving and redeeming God if He is not powerlessly subjected to suffering but remains the almighty Lord of history. “[I]t does not help me . . . to get out of . . . my despair just because things are going just as badly for God”,4 Rahner says. A core problem of the theological debates on the question of theodicy becomes clear: Whoever limits the omnipotence of God for the sake of theodicy runs the risk of gambling away the redemptive capacity and eschatological saving power of God. A powerless God entirely subjected to history can hardly be thought of as the redeemer and savior of this very history. Or vice versa: Whoever wants to hold on to the eschatological theodicy, meaning that God justifies himself at the end of history, as well as to God’s redeeming power of salvation, needs to attach this God to suffering and atrocity in history. At least one needs to permit such an attachment indirectly.

CONCLUSION Despite all the criticism, it should be noted that Moltmann’s theology is biographical and takes its starting point from his experiences in war and captivity. It revolves around the questions of suffering and God’s justification in the face of suffering. It has no selfpurpose but serves to justify the hope of faith in this God, so it is ultimately soteriologically motivated: Is this God the salvation of the world? Is he the saving, redeeming, justifying God who knows how to create life and home even where everything seems dead and lost? Who can set a new beginning in the end? Moltmann’s theology is not consistently spelled out as a closed system draft. Nor did he ever intend to present such a theological system. Some things remain contradictory and are allowed to be. Nevertheless, his theology is an impressive testimony to the existential and intellectual radiance of a life-saturated reflection on faith. He essentially offers three

Dorothee Sölle, Leiden (Stuttgart: Kreuz-Verlag, 1973), 32–9. Karl Rahner, Im Gespräch. Band 1: 1964–1977, ed. Paul Imhof and Hubert Biallowons (Munich: Kösel, 1982), 246.

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theodicy figures: the theology of creation (Tzimtzum), the Christological or theology of the cross (the suffering God), and the eschatological one (God, all in all, see 1 Cor. 15:28). The failure of these theodicy figures in no way signifies the failure of Moltmann’s theology. The question of theodicy is theoretically insoluble because every suffering is unique – it cannot be integrated into any larger systemic whole. Instead, it is the thorn in the flesh of every theology, repeatedly referring it back to practice. No one recognized this better than Moltmann himself: No one can answer the theodicy question in this world, and no one can get rid of it . . . The question of theodicy is not a speculative question; it is a critical one. It is the all-embracing eschatological question. It is not purely theoretical . . . It is a practical question which will only be answered through experience of the new world in which ‚God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. It is not really a question at all . . . It is the open wound of life in this world. It is the real task of faith and theology to make it possible for us to survive, to go on living, with this open wound. (TKG, 49)5

FURTHER READING Moltmann, Jürgen. The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Translated by R. A. Wilson and John Bowden. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993. Cited as: CG. Moltmann, Jürgen. The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993. Cited as: TKG. Moltmann, Jürgen. The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993. Cited as: WJC. Bauckham, Richard. The Theology of Jürgen Moltmann. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995. Remenyi, Matthias. Um der Hoffnung willen. Untersuchungen zur eschatologischen Theologie Jürgen Moltmanns. Regensburg: Pustet, 2005.

This chapter was translated by Melanie Freund.

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Chapter 33

Johann Baptist Metz MATTHIAS GREBE

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES Roman Catholic priest Johann Baptist Metz (1928–2019) was considered to be one of the most influential and important German Catholic theologians after the Second Vatican Council. With Jürgen Moltmann and Dorothee Sölle, Metz inaugurated a political theology that he later named a “new political theology” (Neue Politische Theologie), which is an attempt to speak of God facing the world, with a strong emphasis on compassion, memory, hope, narrative, and solidarity. His thoughts influenced the emergence and development of Latin American liberation theology. Metz’s theology cannot be understood except in the context of his own experience in his teenage years, which shows similarities to that of Protestant theologian Jürgen Moltmann (born in 1926). In 1944, at the age of sixteen and toward the end of the Second World War, he was “snatched out of school and conscripted in the army”,1 later to be captured by the Americans and sent for seven months to prisoner-of-war camps on the East Coast of the United States. This experience, which he describes as a “fissure” [Riss] of his childhood dreams, naturally impacted his later life and theological approach shaping his specific theodicy-sensitive response to the question of the suffering of others in God’s world.2 As Metz writes, this “biographical background shines through all my theological work”.3 His theological path, like that of Moltmann, was led toward a political theology of direct confrontation with the traumatic events of the War and the horrors of the extermination of the Jews during the time of National Socialism. After the War and his return to Europe, Metz began his studies in 1948 in philosophy and theology in Germany and Austria. In Innsbruck he found a place in the close circle of Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner (1904–84), whom he called “my father in faith”. Metz was ordained priest in 1954 and worked for several years in ministry. It was at the University of Münster, where he worked as Professor of Fundamental Theology from 1963 to 1993, that he developed his Theology after Auschwitz.4 Johann Baptist Metz, “Johann Baptist Metz”, in How I have Changed: Reflections on Thirty Years of Theology, ed. Jürgen Moltmann (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1997), 31. 2 See Johann Baptist Metz, A Passion of God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity, trans. and introduced by J. Matthew Ashley (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 2. See also Johann Baptist Metz, “Ein biographischer Durchblick: Wie ich mich geändert habe”, in Zum Begriff der neuen Politischen Theologie 1967–1997 (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1997). 3 Metz, A Passion of God, 2. 4 See J. Matthew Ashley, “Introduction: Reading Metz”, in Metz, A Passion of God, 7–21, 11: “For Metz, as for so many who lived through those dark years, one of the great questions is how the Germany of Goethe, Kant, 1

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Metz was part of the so-called Paulus-Gesellschaft, a society that brought Christians and progressive Marxists into dialogue. Here his thoughts were influenced particularly by people of the Frankfurt School such as Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor W. Adorno, as well as by the political ideas of Ernst Bloch. These conversations with Marxists were, according to Metz, debates with “the social-critical dramatization of the theodicy theme”,5 bringing together politics and theodicy as he challenged what he saw as bourgeois society and Christianity, that is, a Christian message that he saw as less believable as it had become intertwined with bourgeois apathy. In opposition, Metz’s political theology seeks to show the trustworthiness of the Christian message as Good News in the modern world, despite historical catastrophes and political struggle, and pointing to the transformative power of the memoria passionis, mortis et resurrectionis Jesu Christi.6

MAIN CONCEPT Metz’s “theology as theodicy” is at its heart a mystical and a political theology in narrative form.7 Mystical, because as human beings after Auschwitz, we are called to a “mysticism of open eyes”, open to the suffering of others. Political, because the heard cry of the victims leads to protest in the face of suffering and evil and asks the question: “How long, oh Lord?” The key motif here is that of a theology of com-passion as an ethical virtue, a compassion of God or a passion for God, a sensitivity for the suffering of others in the world. He describes this suffering as a suffering unto God [Leiden an Gott], which he correlates closely with questioning God [Rückfragen an Gott]. In light of this insistent questioning of God, suffering onto God implies both a passive and an active dimension, the passive experience of suffering as well as the active task of remembering the sufferings of the past. Both kinds of suffering drive the individual closer toward God; in crying out to God, by questioning, and finally in protesting against it. The theological leitmotif in Metz’s Christology and ecclesiology is the memoria passionis8 as a “remedy for the growing forgetfulness and demise of the person as responsible historical agent [. . .] and a remedy for the decline into a gentle, anesthetized ‘second immaturity’”.9 Thus, for Metz, the “remembrance of the suffering of others as a basic category of Christian discourse about God”10 always entails the question of theodicy. This question, or rather cry (often a silent and wordless cry!) – “Why, God, suffering?” – cannot be silenced in the here and now by smoothed-out eschatology of Christian redemption. This does not mean that Metz denies the importance of hope, but always sees it as a “threatened hope”, a “hope against all hope”.11 Likewise he does not deny Beethoven and Planck, could become the Germany of Hitler, Himmler and Eichmann.” 5 See Metz, A Passion of God, 3. 6 See J. Matthew Ashley, “Johann Baptist Metz”, in Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, ed. P. Scott and W. Cavanaugh (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 247. 7 Metz maintains, “the beginning and the end can only be discussed in narrative form”, in Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, trans. with an introduction and study guide by J. Matthew Ashley (New York: Herder & Herder, 2007), 206. 8 See Johann Baptist Metz, Memoria Passionis: Ein provozierendes Gedächtnis in pluralistischer Gesellschaft (Freiburg: Herder, 2006). 9 Ashley, “Introduction”, 15. 10 Metz, A Passion of God, 5. 11 See Metz, Faith in History and Society.

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God’s presence in the world, but he does emphasize that memory functions as a safeguard in order that the cries of the suffering in the world are heard and not ignored. In this way, Metz advocates an “anamnestic reason”, a reason that is open to constant interruptions for the sake of the suffering of victims. For Metz, Christ’s memoria passionis is a “dangerous memory” (the dangerous memory of Jesus Christ or anamnesis as the story of Christ’s passion) because it unites Christ with the narrative of the suffering of the victims in history. This becomes central to his theology of the Eucharist and the Order of the Mass, especially the words “in remembrance of” [Eingedenken]. This understanding highlights that the Eucharist, “which traditionally has had only ritual meaning, now has its socio-political meaning through the memory of the victims in history”.12 Metz’s own theological journey is marked by this same “dangerous memory” of his being a young soldier whose childhood was shattered by the brutality of modern war. In light of this we realize that Metz’s understanding of “theology as theodicy” never tries to solve the “question of suffering” [Leidensfrage] in the sense of a rational justification of God, but is instead intended to resist our human tendency to forget and to move us to hope in the face of suffering, by prompting us to remember the saving deeds of God. For him the key question is “how can we talk about God at all in the face of the history of suffering in the broken world?” It is the task of the Church to safeguard the memoria passionis and foster a humanization of the world in light of its eschatological completion and redemption by God. Drawing on Bloch and Benjamin, he articulated an apocalyptic sensibility and understanding of temporality,13 which informed his “advocacy of an apocalyptically bounded time”.14 Like Elie Wiesel, who says, “The reflective Christian knows that it was not the Jewish people that died in Auschwitz, but Christianity”,15 Metz contends that Auschwitz was an end for Christianity. Nevertheless, it can also be seen as a turning point for Christian theology, though only if Christians after Auschwitz “understand their identity [. . .] in the face of the Jews”.16 A theology without the memories of the catastrophes in history becomes “trivial or irrelevant, and Christian faith a banalised reflection of the prevailing social consensus”.17 As much as anything, “political theology can no longer be situationless and subjectless. After Auschwitz, every theology that is unrelated to remembering concrete subjects must cease to exist, because Auschwitz does not only present a question of theodicy but also of anthropodicy”.18

Joas Adiprasetya, “Johann Baptist Metz’s Memoria Passionis and the Possibility of Political Forgiveness”, Political Theology, 18, no. 3 (2017): 233–48, 238. 13 See Metz, Faith in History and Society, especially chapter 10; see also Johann B. Metz, “Plädoyer für mehr Theodizee-Empfindlichkeit in der Theologie”, in Wovon man nicht schweigen kann: Neuere Diskussionen zur Theodizeefrage, ed. W. Oelmüller (München: Fink Verlag, 1992), 107–60. 14 Ashley, “Introduction”, 14. 15 See Metz quoting Wiesel in “Theological Interruptions”, in Hope against Hope: Johann Baptist Metz and Elie Wiesel Speak out on the Holocaust, ed. Ekkehard Schuster and Reinhold Boschert-Kimmig (New York: Paulist Press, 1999), 12–18, 17. 16 Johann B. Metz, “Facing the Jews: Christian theology after Auschwitz”, in The Holocaust as Interruption, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and David Tracy (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1984), 26. 17 Ashley, “Johann Baptist Metz”, 245. 18 Adiprasetya, “Johann Baptist Metz’s Memoria Passionis”, 229. 12

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To engage more deeply with Metz’s thought on the history of suffering,19 faith, memory, and solidarity more deeply in “a shared world”,20 especially a history as catastrophic as the Holocaust, we need to understand how he sees this history in relation to the wider biblical narrative of God and the world within the conversio ad passionem. Metz gives both Job in the Old Testament and Jesus’ passion in the New as models of faith in response of suffering – they dared to protest.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS We saw that for Metz the horrors of suffering found in history caused a certain eschatological restlessness, shaping his entire theological approach toward a new political theology. Both his major works and several pithy and emphatic writings clearly seek to convey a particular message, often using a certain polemical rhetoric to challenge the reader. Never is he trying to advance a closed theological system, but he consciously thinks openly, constantly confronting the challenges posed by modern society and offering theological answers to these questions. Thus, his overall theology is fundamentally a practical one which gives priority to orthopraxis over orthodoxy, inhabits a deep social and political tone, and calls for radical Christian discipleship. This primacy of orthopraxis is also seen in his dealings with the question of theodicy, which he regarded not as a cognitive problem to be solved, but as a challenge to the Church to act in solidarity and compassion with the victims. He never tried to solve the tension between the question of suffering [Rückfrage an Gott] in the world and the eschatological hope. It is only in this tension that, according to Metz, Christian theology can overcome the “culture of apathy” with regard to suffering.21 Therefore, Metz demands that the “Why” question of suffering is replaced with “How long?”. This human cry and invocation of God needs to be heard and the Church must be called into action. Ultimately, Metz wants to show that faith and suffering are not in contradiction, as it is only by faith in God to that the human cry can respond to suffering with protest.

FURTHER READING Metz, Johann B. Theology of the World. Translated by William Glen-Doepel. New York: Herder & Herder, 1969. Metz, Johann B. Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology. Translated with an introduction and study guide by J. Matthew Ashley. New York: Herder & Herder, 2007. Metz, Johann B. A Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity. Translated and introduced by J. Matthew Ashley. New York: Paulist Press, 1998.

He writes: “To see the world not as a cosmos, not as nature interpreting itself, but as history, to see it in its relation to man, as mediated by him, means to interpret the world in its formal anthropocentricity”, in Johann B. Metz, Theology of the World (New York: Herder & Herder, 1971), 54. 20 Metz’s understanding of “a shared world” is central in his book Theology of the World (London: Burns & Oates, 1968). 21 Metz, Faith in History and Society, 62. 19

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Metz, Johann B. and Elie Wiesel. Hope Against Hope: Johann Baptist Metz and Elie Wiesel Speak Out on the Holocaust. Edited by Ekkehard Schuster und Reinhold Boschert-Kimmig. Translated by J. Matthew Ashley. New York: Paulist Press, 1999. Ashley, J. Matthew. “Johann Baptist Metz”. In Blackwell Companion to Political Theology. Edited by Peter Manley Scott and William Cavanaugh, 236–49. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Chapter 34

Paul Ricœur CHRISTOPHER KING

The question of suffering and evil emerges as a recurrent theme over the decades of Paul Ricœur’s philosophical writings. The thesis of his heralded The Symbolism of Evil, that our experiences of evil are mediated through the symbols that express them, forms the basis for his subsequent critique of the classical project of theodicy, understood as the rationalization of evil in the service of justifying God. Ricœur will argue that our response to evil and suffering should not be a theoretical exercise in explaining why God allows evil, but rather it should be a practical engagement in the struggle against evil. In this chapter, I introduce Ricœur’s thought in the context of his philosophical background, and then I raise the major themes of his reflections on evil as they develop through the sequence of his writings.

RICŒUR’S PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND Paul Ricœur (1913–2005) studied philosophy under the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel and devoted significant study to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, publishing a translation of Husserl’s Ideas I into French, which he had prepared in a German prison camp during the Second World War.1 Ricœur’s philosophical origins in existential phenomenology were also read through the lens of his Christian confessional identity. For the post-Kantian continental tradition that he inherited, human consciousness is not separate from or disinterested in the world it observes but rather is conditioned by historical and social contexts.2 In this vein, Ricœur set out in the decade between 1950 and 1960 on an ambitious philosophy of the will. He intended it to be unfolded over three volumes, beginning with Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary. In his second volume, Finitude and Guilt, containing the two works Fallible Man and The Symbolism of Evil, Ricœur found that he could not “go behind” the language used to describe the evil will to explain the deviation of the will itself into evil. In this respect, Ricœur took a “hermeneutic detour”, never completing the third volume. He found that consciousness of evil, as well as consciousness more broadly speaking, is conditioned by the language used to express what is found in experience. This insight, that consciousness

See Walter Lowe, “Introduction”, in Fallible Man, ed. Paul Ricœur, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), vii–xxix. 2 See Paul Ricœur, Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology, trans. Edward G. Ballard and Lester E. Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 202–33. 1

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is never fully available to itself, is in part what motivates Ricœur’s later criticisms of rational explanations of evil.

THE SYMBOLS AND MYTHS OF EVIL The Symbolism of Evil serves as the transition from a phenomenology of the fallible human being to an understanding of the possibility of moral evil. Ricœur begins from the language of the confession of evil found in religious consciousness. The language of defilement, sin, and guilt expressed in the confession of evil are symbolic in that they signify through imagery a matrix of meanings that are both cosmic and existential. They speak of one’s identity and “assimilate us to that which is symbolized without our being able to master the similitude intellectually”.3 The symbol gives meaning in a manner irreducible to simple correspondence. What these symbols express is that evil both comes from within a person (sin and guilt) and from outside of a person (stain, defilement). Ricœur calls this the paradox of the servile will, which ultimately “signifies that seduction from the outside is ultimately an affection of the self by the self, an auto-infection, by which the act of binding oneself is transformed into the state of being bound”.4 Ricœur sees myths as the narrative vehicles for these primary symbols and develops a fourfold typology of myths that narrate the origins of evil in our world. In different ways myths of chaos, myths of tragedy, and Platonic/Orphic myths present evil as prior to or outside of the control of human agency. The Adamic myth from the Hebrew tradition incorporates the idea of evil as preceding human agency (in the form of the serpent), yet its advance on the other myths in Ricœur’s view is its willingness to see evil as having its origin within its protagonists. Ricœur concludes that the symbolic expressions of evil cannot be reduced to straightforward explanations but rather themselves remain the dense starting points for our reflection on the enigma of evil.5

THE CRITIQUE OF ORIGINAL SIN On the basis of his account of our indeterminate experience of evil through symbols, Ricœur proceeds to criticize accounts of evil that offer a rationalized explanation of the origin and persistence of evil. The doctrine of original sin, as formulated by Augustine, serves as an early model of this kind of rationalization of evil. Ricœur affirms both Augustine’s move away from the reification of evil in Manichaeism and his move toward locating evil in the operation of the will. However, to the extent that Augustine attempts to explain evil by implicating every human will in the guilt of Adam and Eve, Ricœur maintains that “the concept of original sin is anti-Gnostic in its basic purpose but quasiGnostic in its articulation”.6 By explaining evil as internal to the human being and yet as the inheritance of the will of the primeval pair, original sin attempts to know the origin of evil.7 Ricœur grants that Augustine’s concept of original sin, problematic as it is, still preserves the core feature of the Adamic myth: however involuntary, evil must always Paul Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 16. Ibid., 156. 5 See ibid., 347–57. 6 Paul Ricœur, “‘Original Sin’: A Study in Meaning”, in Conflict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde, trans. Peter McCormick (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 271. 7 See ibid., 280. 3 4

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remain our own doing. Hence, Ricœur calls original sin a rationalized myth, claiming to clear away mystery through speculation.

CRITICISM OF THEODICY Ricœur takes the project of theodicy, as exemplified by Leibniz and Hegel, to be the attempted rationalization and coherentization of evil in light of one’s religious or mythological commitments. In theodicy, evil as an enigmatic experience is replaced by evil as a logical problem to be solved. Theodical language is direct and propositional, seeking to reconcile divine attributes with the existence of evil. Ricœur finds at least two problems with this project. First, it seeks to justify one’s own belief in God through an apologetic by justifying God himself. Second, it neglects the real pain of those who are suffering. By offering a logical explanation for evil, evil itself is justified in its existence, and the effort to practically respond to evil is diluted.8 If it turns out that evil serves purposes for the greater good, the suffering that calls out to be alleviated is silenced by theoretical explanation.

PRACTICAL RESPONSES TO EVIL Ricœur offers four practical responses to evil and suffering, which transcend the limitations of rational explanation. The first type of response is embodied in the wisdom tradition, which proposes the transformation of one’s own desires rather than logical solutions. Referencing the book of Job, Ricœur writes that wisdom functions to transform, practically and emotionally, the nature of the desire that is at the base of the request for explanation. To transform desire practically means to leave behind the question of origins, toward which myth stubbornly carries speculative thought, and to substitute for it the question of the future and the end of evil. For practice, evil is simply what should not but does exist, hence what must be combated.9 Wisdom knows that it cannot unearth the origin of evil, but it can work toward the alleviation of suffering. Ricœur sees value in this overlap with the Buddhist tradition, which works to end suffering through the cessation of desire. Ricœur’s address, “The Memory of Suffering”, delivered at an interfaith Holocaust memorial service, highlights the role memory and narrative play in responding to evil. Narrative retelling of the story of the evil as experienced in the Holocaust functions to reveal and maintain the horror of evil without sanitization in order that such evil be marked in our memory and that it never happen again. Our task in response to evil “is to preserve the scandalous nature of the event, to leave that which is monstrous inexhaustible by explanation”.10 By retelling the memory of incomprehensible evil, we combat its reemergence both in the present and in the future.

See Paul Ricœur, “Evil, A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology”, in Figuring the Sacred, ed. Mark I. Wallace, trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 254–8. 9 Paul Ricœur, “Evil”, in Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Lindsay Jones, Mircea Eliade, and Charles J. Adams (Detroit: McMillan, 2005), 2904. 10 Paul Ricœur, “The Memory of Suffering”, in Figuring the Sacred, ed. Mark I. Wallace, trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 290. 8

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As a third response, the voice of lament found in Hebrew literature leads to a protest against evil in the name of the good. Far from seeking to justify God, the voice of lamentation tends to accuse God in protest of the suffering that has occurred. Lament reveals a faith that God can act even while questioning or accusing God. Indignation in God suggests a faith that appeals to God for change.11 It expresses the “impatience of hope”.12 If evil is the ultimate challenge to philosophy and theology because it brings them to their limits, for Ricœur, hope is the inverse threshold and boundary.13 Finally, Ricœur offers forgiveness as a possibility for responding to evil, although it is in the realm of the “exceptional and extraordinary”, rather than in the realm of the “normal, or normative, or normalizing”.14 While forgiveness cannot be required of the victim of evil, it can function to restore the perpetrator of evil to a condition that interrupts the cycle of violence. Ricœur writes, “Under the sign of forgiveness, the guilty person is to be considered capable of something other than his offenses and his faults”.15 Forgiveness is that difficult response to evil that exceeds the logic of exchange and the order of the rational, yet as such it paves the way for hope in a future that has been better than the past.16

CONCLUSION Ricœur thus wagers that evil can be resisted through the transformation of desire, narrative retelling, lament, and forgiveness, and that these practices constitute a more cogent response to evil and suffering than any rational explanation ever will. Two concluding points by way of an evaluation of Ricœur’s approach are in order. First, it is not clear that his rejection of theodicy as a rational explanation à la Leibniz and Hegel also rejects all forms of reasoning with respect to the question of suffering. Giving some reasons that offer provisional explanations for evil is compatible with the recognition of the inexhaustibility of the human understanding of evil. Second, while his writings verge on theological territory, they nevertheless refrain from offering the claims of faith as anything more than a possibility. One may question Ricœur’s resistance to offering or developing theological insights that would respond to the problem of evil within the veil of faith. Ricœur is nevertheless insistent on his role as mere philosopher. For him, hope in the overcoming of evil may take the form of faith in God, despite evil. However, an explanation of evil is not required in order to believe in God, in Ricœur’s view, nor does God serve as the rational guarantor of evil’s dissolution. While human finitude prevents reason from arriving at final answers with respect to evil, it also reveals a capacity for resistance and for hope in the overcoming of evil.

See Ricœur, “The Memory of Suffering”, 293. See B. Keith Putt, “Indignation Toward Evil: Ricoeur and Caputo on a Theodicy of Protest”, Philosophy Today 41, no. 3 (1997): 460–71, 463. 13 See Paul Ricœur, “Hope and the Structure of Philosophical Systems”, in Figuring the Sacred, ed. Mark I. Wallace, trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 216. 14 Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, and Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 469. 15 Ibid., 493. 16 See Richard Kearney, “On the Hermeneutics of Evil”, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 2 (2006): 197–215, 214–15. 11 12

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FURTHER READING Ricœur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil. Translated by Emerson Buchanan. Boston: Beacon Press, 1967. Ricœur, Paul. Figuring the Sacred. Edited by Mark I. Wallace. Translated by David Pellauer. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995. Simms, Karl. Paul Ricoeur. London: Routledge, 2003. See particularly Chapter 1 “Good and Evil”, 9–30. Kearney, Richard. “On the Hermeneutics of Evil”. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 50, no. 2 (2006): 197–215. Dauenhauer, Bernard P. “Responding to Evil”. The Southern Journal of Philosophy 45, no. 2 (2007): 207–22.

Chapter 35

John Hick CHAD MEISTER

John Hick (1922–2012) was a British theologian and philosopher of religion in the angloanalytic tradition. He made several notable contributions to these fields, including his work on religious pluralism, Christology, eschatology, and theodicy.1

HICK’S SOUL-MAKING THEODICY In Hick’s work on theodicy, he develops an approach that is often contrasted with the Augustinian free will theodicy. Hick’s approach can be traced back to the early Christian theologian Irenaeus (c.130–202 ce). Utilizing his insights, as well as those from the nineteenth-century German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hick develops what he calls an “Irenaean soul-making” theodicy. It utilizes free will (libertarian free will) as a central premise, but Hick argues that his theodicy provides a more plausible approach than the Augustinian one given contemporary sensibilities in science and the most upto-date scholarship in religion, the history of religion, and other disciplines. The central difference between the two approaches is that the Augustinian theodicy focuses on the past, in particular the Fall of humanity due to the misuse of human free will, whereas the Irenaean soul-making theodicy focuses on the future with regard to God’s unfolding plan for the evolution of human beings.2 On Hick’s view, God did not create a paradisal world with morally innocent humans who then misused their free will and which brought about a grand moral and metaphysical defect in the universe. Rather, God created the world billions of years ago as a good place – a place of value, purpose, and meaning – for developing morally and spiritually mature creatures. Unlike Augustine’s approach, for Hick this world was not created as a paradise that “fell”. Rather, it was created such that through the grueling processes of mutation, natural selection, predation, and survival of the fittest – “nature red in tooth and claw”, to use Tennyson’s poetic words – conscious and morally aware creatures could evolve “up” out of inert, impersonal matter to become morally and spiritually advanced. The earliest of these beings would manifest brute selfishness and self-centeredness in their plight to survive. Yet they would eventually have opportunities, through struggle and hardship, Two of Hick’s most significant works are An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, 2nd ed. (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2004) and Evil and the God of Love, 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Hick provides an account of his own life and works in John Hick: An Autobiography (Oxford: Oneworld, 2002). For a concise overview of Hick’s life and work, and approved by Hick, see David Cramer, “John Hick”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://iep​.utm​.edu​/hick/. 2 Hick, Evil and the God of Love. 1

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to advance to higher states of moral and spiritual awareness and maturity, evolving into creatures who are more God-like and reflect the virtues of the kingdom of God. On this view, then, the world is a soul-making environment, a space where moral and spiritual advance can occur, and where moral and spiritual giants may be formed. The problem with a paradisal world, such as the one depicted in the Garden of Eden story in which there is no possibility of struggle – no pain, no suffering, no hardship – is that saintliness seems to be unattainable in such an environment. Challenge and struggle appear to be necessary components of moral advance. As Hick put it, in a paradise world, No one would ever injure anyone else; the murderer’s knife would turn to paper or his bullets to thin air; the bank safe, robbed of a million dollars, would miraculously become filled with another million dollars; fraud, deceit, conspiracy, and treason would somehow always leave the fabric of society undamaged . . . The reckless driver would never meet with disaster. There would be no need to work, since no harm could result from avoiding work; there would be no call to be concerned for others in time of need or danger, for in such a world there could be no real needs or dangers.3 In an environment of no real needs, dangers, or difficulties, many virtues such as courage, compassion, and generosity would be completely absent and unattainable. In order to bring about creatures who embody virtues, evil, it seems, would be a necessary component. Philosopher Peter Van Inwagen concurs with Hick’s thesis: Only in a universe very much like ours could intelligent life, or even sentient life, develop by the non-miraculous operation of the laws of nature. And the natural evolution of higher sentient life in a universe like ours essentially involves suffering, or there is every reason to believe it does. The mechanisms underlying biological evolution may be just what most biologists seem to suppose – the production of new genes by random mutations and the culling of gene pools by environmental selection pressure – or they may be more subtle. But no one, I believe, would take seriously the idea that conscious animals, animals conscious as a dog is conscious, could evolve naturally without hundreds of millions of years of ancestral suffering. Pain is an indispensable component of the evolutionary process after organisms have reached a certain stage of complexity. And, for all we know, the amount of pain that organisms have experienced in the actual world, or some amount morally equivalent to that amount is necessary for the natural evolution of conscious animals.4 Evil, then, on the soul-making theodicy, is not the result of perfect persons choosing to sin but rather is a necessary element of an environment for developing conscious individuals of mature moral character. By placing malleable, free, moral beings in the demanding, unpredictable environment of our world, through moral struggle and decision-making, they have the opportunity to develop into the mature persons that God desires them to be, exhibiting the virtues that God desires them to have. Both moral and natural evil, then, play a central role in soul-making. This soul-making theodicy includes free will as an essential element, as the Augustinian theodicy does, yet its significance is placed in the decision-making of billions of imperfect individuals evolving over eons of time rather

John Hick, Philosophy of Religion, 4th ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1990), 45–6. Peter Van Inwagen, “The Problem of Evil, of Air, and of Silence”, Philosophical Perspectives 5 (1991): 135–65, 147. 3 4

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than in two perfect persons who made one decision that brought about the bulk of pain and suffering found in the world. An important objection to this theodicy, which Hick acknowledges, is that while it may be true that a soul-making environment cannot be a paradise, the degree and extent of pain and suffering experienced in the world seem to be unjustified. Need the world contain the more extreme and crushing evils which it in fact contains? Are not life’s challenges often so severe as to be self-defeating when considered as soul-making influences? Man must (let us suppose) cultivate the soil so as to win his bread by the sweat of his brow; but need there be the gigantic famines, for example, in China, from which millions have so miserably perished?5 Could not morally and spiritually mature persons be developed without the kinds of horrors and great evils we find in the world? Furthermore, some evils seem to be characterdestroying rather than character-building. Some individuals do not improve through the hardships they endure; oftentimes the difficulties in one’s life cause it to end in utter tragedy. Think of a young child with a debilitating disease who suffers excruciating pain and then dies at a very young age; or a woman who is tortured, brutally raped, and then murdered; or a village that is poisoned by volcanic ash in which all of its inhabitants suffocate and die. Do not such examples of dysteleological evils, evils that are horrific and apparently gratuitous and not necessary for soul-making purposes, count against this theodicy? Hick grants that seemingly dysteleological evils are a problem and that the world would be better without them. Nevertheless, he argues that God created the world to appear as if there is no God, and that evil – sometimes great evil – has a function in doing so.6 He argues that apparently pointless evils are not, in fact, without purpose and merit after all. Virtues such as sympathy and compassion, for example, that are evoked from such seemingly indiscriminate and unfair miseries are very great goods in and of themselves – goods which would not arise without the miseries appearing as unfair and indiscriminate. Even though God did not intend any particular evils to occur for soul-making purposes, God did need to create an environment where such evils were a real possibility. So, while each individual instance of evil may not be justified by a particular greater good, the existence of a world where evil is possible – even great evil – is necessary for a world where soul-making occurs. Hick includes another premise in his theodicy. While there are situations in which the pain and hardship in certain individuals’ lives may breed bitterness, anger, fear, selfishness, and a general diminishing of virtuous character, in an afterlife the process of soul-making may continue until such persons have been able to advance and develop a mature, compassionate, loving character. Thus, soul-making would be incomplete without some form of an afterlife where soul-making processes could continue beyond the earthly experiences of this life. For those individuals who do not achieve an appropriate degree of moral and spiritual maturity by the time of their death, the divine goal of soul-making is not thwarted. God will continue to provide individuals with opportunities for engaging in love, selflessness, and trust until everyone finally reaches a state of moral and spiritual

Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 329–30. Ibid., 327–31.

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perfection and so be brought into a full and proper relationship with the infinitely good and loving God. Hick’s soul-making theodicy has been challenged on a number of fronts, including that it treats animals as means to human ends, that the human race does not appear to be advancing morally, that it would entail a tremendous amount of waste that cannot be undone or redeemed, and various challenges to theological and philosophical concerns of universalism.7 Hick himself later moved away from understanding his soul-making theodicy as a literal theodicy – a justification of an omnipotent, omniscience, omnibenevolent, personal God, given the existence of evil, and of a theodical plan established by God to morally and spiritually advance God’s creatures – to a metaphorical soteriology, an approach that includes his revised view of the divine, his pluralistic view of religions, and his adoption of reincarnation as a post-world development for human creatures.8 Nevertheless, the Irenaean soul-making theodicy continues to be an influential approach by theists providing a justification of God, given the vast amounts of pain and suffering experienced in this world.

FURTHER READING Geivett, R. Douglas. Evil and the Evidence for God: The Challenge of John Hick’s Theodicy. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. Hick, John. An Autobiography. Oxford: Oneworld, 2002. Hick, John. “An Irenaean Theodicy”. In Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy. Edited by Stephen T. Davis, 38–72. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. Hick, John. Evil and the God of Love, 2nd edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Meister, Chad and Paul K. Moser, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Peterson, Michael. “Soul-Making Theodicy”. In The History of Evil from the Mid-Twentieth Century to Today. Edited by Jerome Gellman, Chad Meister, and Charles Taliaferro, 120–36. New York: Routledge, 2018.

For a concisely crafted version of Hick’s theodicy by Hick himself, along with critiques and rejoinders, see Stephen T. Davis, ed., Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy (Louisville: Westminster John Knox (Press), 2001). See also R. Douglas Geivett, Evil and the Evidence for God: The Challenge of John Hick’s Theodicy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), which includes an Afterword by Hick. 8 On Hick’s development from soul-making theodicy to soul-making soteriology, see Marilyn Adams’ forward to the 2007 publication of Hick’s Evil and the God of Love. For more on Hick’s rethinking of God, salvation, and reincarnation, see John Hick, Death and Eternal Life (Louisville: Westminster John Knox (Press), 1994). 7

Chapter 36

Marilyn McCord Adams SHANNON CRAIGO-SNELL

Marilyn McCord Adams (1947–2017) was a prominent American philosopher and theologian; she was also a priest in the Episcopal Church. Her writings on the problem of evil changed the terms of contemporary discussions of theodicy in several ways, including introducing and defining the category of horrendous evils, self-reflectively introducing biblically based faith claims into philosophical discussions, asserting that God is not only good but good to each person, and using friendship with God as the primary mechanism of horror-defeat. Embracing an understanding of God as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, McCord Adams argues that traditional theodicies are inadequate. Free Will Defenses ignore the metaphysical size gap between God and humanity. If a parent put a toddler in a dangerous situation and the toddler was injured, the blame would fall squarely on the parent due to the adult’s greater capacities for understanding and preventing danger (Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, 39). The difference between human and divine capacities is far greater than that between a toddler and a parent. Best of All Possible Worlds theodicies settle for a generic account that justifies the existence of evil over all of history, even though that history would include the suffering of many persons. McCord Adams, explicitly drawing on her own Christian faith, expects God to be good to each person. She writes, I desire to flatter Divine resourcefulness by interpreting good (as Augustine does only sometimes) to mean that Divine government can and will accomplish the utopian integration of cosmic excellence with the good of individual persons in such a way as to insure the defeat of evil or, at least evils of horrendous proportions within the context of each individual’s life. (43) Instead of starting her inquiries by asking why God would create a world in which evil and suffering exist, McCord Adams questions how God will defeat evil and make good on suffering – how God will make each person’s life good to them (55). This is the topic of her book, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. She asks, “what would it take for Divine power and agency to be able to guarantee created persons lives that are great goods to them on the whole, and to defeat their participation in horrors not just globally, but within the context of their individual lives?” (80). McCord Adams focuses on “horrendous evils”, meaning “evils the participation in which (the doing or suffering of which) constitutes prima facie reason to doubt whether the participant’s life could (given their inclusion in it) be a great good to him/her on the whole” (26). This definition moves away from morality as a way to define or lay

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blame for evil. The victim, the perpetrator, and the bystander of injustice all fall within this definition, as does the careful parent who checks twice before backing out of the driveway and still runs over their beloved child (28). Morality is a vital element in human relationships, but it is too flimsy a category to address relationships between a human person and the creator of the universe. The definition of horrendous evils is “objective but relative to individuals”, meaning that it addresses concrete events and conditions while recognizing that what counts as horrendous varies from person to person, culture to culture (Christ and Horrors, 33). The particular way that horrendous evils render a participant’s life prima facie not worth living is by destroying that person’s attempts to make positive meaning of their life (Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, 28). A theodicy that addresses horrendous evils must account for how positive meaning is made for each participant in horrors. Humans are, in McCord Adams’ account, personal, meaning-making beings who are also animals who develop over time. This “metaphysical mismatch” makes humans radically vulnerable to horrors (Christ and Horrors, 38). Our need for meaning-making as persons is easily thwarted by threats or harms to our well-being as animals. Conversely, difficulties that befall us as animals take on greater destructive power as we attempt, often unsuccessfully, to make meaning. McCord Adams identifies the conjunction of animality and personality as inherently difficult, indeed, as the root of human “non-optimality” (37). Our psycho-spiritual powers are tied to a developmental life cycle that includes immaturity, which slowly moves toward higher functioning and then declines toward death. Our meaning-making capacities are not strong enough from the beginning to handle challenges, including inadequate caretakers, pain, chemical imbalances, hostility from others, and disease (38). In McCord Adams’ analysis, the basic problem with humanity is not that we are sinful, but that we are metaphysical straddlers. McCord Adams’ account of how God defeats evil has three stages. Stage I is the incarnation. In Jesus, God becomes vulnerable to evil and becomes a horror-participant. This is an act of divine-human intimacy that cancels the dishonor of the human condition and removes the defilement. Horrors cannot be a mark of separation from God if God shares them with us. Stage II is where this reality is appropriated by the person. It is the stage where someone becomes aware of, and accepts, the intimate relationship God offers. Recognizing the shared suffering – that Jesus, too, suffered horrors – allows experiences of suffering to be points of contact. McCord Adams rejects the notion that evil and suffering are needed for salvation in any form. She argues, however, that horrendous evils can become integrated into a relationship with God such that their meaning changes. In Stage II horror-defeat, a person realizes that God was always present with them and always loved them. Eventually, the positive meaning of friendship with the infinite goodness of God in Jesus swamps the meaning-destroying power of the horrors. The worst moments become part of the larger narrative of steadfast love and loyal friendship; they gain meaning as instances encompassed by a relationship of intimacy with God. Many people are unable to appropriate God’s offer of friendship in this earthly life. Humans are too vulnerable and evil too horrendous. McCord Adams contends that Stage II horror-defeat continues in post-mortem life. This view includes two contested points: there is an afterlife, and salvation is universal (Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, 162). McCord Adams embraces post-mortem life as a setting for healing and meaning-making, in which one can perceive more clearly that God was present even in the midst of the horrors of ante-mortem life. The final stage of horror-defeat, Stage III, is

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entirely post-mortem, when humans are no longer vulnerable to horrors and the goodness of friendship with God becomes permanent, fully known, and inviolable. McCord Adams states, “from the vantage point of heavenly beatitude, human victims of horrors will recognize those experiences as points of identification with the crucified God, and not wish them away from their life histories” (167). McCord Adams’ theology acknowledges that God, creating humans as metaphysical straddlers in a world of real and perceived scarcity, sets us up for horrors. While McCord Adams begins with the question of how God defeats horrors, she later addresses why God creates humans vulnerable to horrors. Her work on this question is primarily found in her book, Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology. Drawing on Richard of St. Victor, Bonaventure, and others, McCord Adams employs analogy with intra-human friendship to understand the Trinity. Friendship then becomes an explanatory metaphor for God’s aim in creation. God desires to expand the (sufficient unto itself) circle of friendship that is the Trinity. God’s project, which McCord Adams cashes out more precisely in assimilative and unitive aims, is fundamentally a desire for new friends. McCord Adams proposes that “God must love material creation with a love that dual-drives towards assimilation and union” (Christ and Horrors, 39). This involves some sub-hypotheses bases on biblical faith claims. First, God loves material creation. Second, McCord Adams contends that God is personal (49). As a personal Godhead, profitably understood as the Triune friendship of infinite benevolence, God wants other persons to love, and particularly material friends. God’s long-term project includes assimilation (“God wants matter to be as Godlike as possible while still being itself”) and union (God desires to unite with creation) (Christ and Horrors, 40). God’s assimilative aim of making matter as God-like as possible results in humanity – personal animals who have significant agency. Further, the incarnation is not an emergency response to sin but vital to fulfillment of God’s unitive aim. In McCord Adams’ reading, God has taken on a very strange project, and the Divine assimilative and unitive aims put humanity directly in harm’s way. We are vulnerable to evil. McCord Adams does not take evil lightly, nor is she willing to consider human experiences of evil as sufficiently justified if they are necessary to God’s long-term project. In sharp contrast to theodicies that are satisfied with some possibility that evil is necessary for God’s cosmic intentions, McCord Adams’ work demands that if God put us in the path of evil, God can and will defeat the evils we encounter. She writes, “My claim is that Divine love would not subject some individual created persons to horrors simply for the benefit of others or to enhance cosmic excellence. Divine love would permit horrors only if God could overcome them by integrating them into lives that are overwhelmingly good for the horror-participants themselves” (Christ and Horrors, 45). The only goodness sufficient to swamp horrendous evils is the infinite goodness of God; intimate friendship with God is how horrors are defeated. True friendship involves reciprocity – both parties choosing relationship – thus “God aims for divine–human friendship in which there is finally enough to us psychologically and spiritually to take the initiative, consciously and deliberately to enter into reciprocity, to choose life together” (274). Divine–human friendship is always asymmetrical due to the metaphysical size gap, so it looks different than human friendship. It is, in fact, far more intimate. While McCord Adams values the psychological growth necessary to become an “autonomous ego with adult competences”, she argues that it would be mistaken to imagine that as the pinnacle of human development. God intends more for us. Human

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persons only function at our best when “friendship with God becomes the functional core of who we are” (275). Given the size gap, it takes practice and discipline for us to gain awareness of God’s presence and still more to respond with “friendly gestures” of our own (275–6). When we do this, we “consciously and deliberately consent” to allowing “our adult selves to be restructured, to tangle us up with the divine life, so that our functional core is not a ‘solo’ (the isolated ego) but a duet or – considering that God is a Trinity – a quartet” (275). In addition to McCord Adams’ scholarly volumes on philosophy and theology, she also published sermons and prayers that reflect her ecclesial life. As a priest, McCord Adams focuses on Stage II horror-defeat, intending to help people recognize and respond to God’s presence in their lives, to make meaning and to practice the disciplines of prayer, ritual, and faithfulness that consent to reciprocal friendship with God. In a sermon for Easter Sunday, McCord Adams asks each member of the congregation to think back on the worst moments of their lives, when they were sure they could not survive the physical, emotional, or psychological pain. McCord Adams says, “But here you are, risen from the bed! You’ve got yourself to church on Easter Sunday, more or less clothed and in your right mind!” (Wrestling for Blessing, 70–1). It is tempting to imagine the pain was overestimated, but McCord Adams encourages the congregation to accept their initial assessment: they could not survive the horrors. The blunt fact that they did survive is evidence of Divine presence and help (71). “The first step to Easter joy is explicit recognition . . . a chosen intimacy with that power at work within us all along . . . Not immediately but little by little . . . we will relax into loving co-operation with our Lord Jesus” (71–2). One of the characteristics of friendship is the sharing of likes and dislikes, idem velle, idem nolle (Christ and Horrors, 162). When people open themselves to friendship with God, this “makes us vulnerable to sympathetic vibration with God’s own passions: with divine delight in Truth and beauty, with God’s hunger and thirst for joyful life together with all created persons, with God’s blessed rage for justice, with God’s apoplectic intolerance of human cruelty and degradation” (Prayer as the “Lifeline of Theology”, 279). This means Stage II horror-defeat, ante-mortem, includes acts of compassion and work for social justice. In McCord Adams’ life, her advocacy for LGBTQ rights was integral to her own friendship with God.

FURTHER READING McCord Adams, Marilyn. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. McCord Adams, Marilyn. Wrestling for Blessing. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 2005. McCord Adams, Marilyn. Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. McCord Adams, Marilyn. “Prayer as the ‘Lifeline of Theology’”. Anglican Theological Review 98, no. 2 (2016): 272–4. McCord Adams, Marilyn and Robert Merrihew Adams, eds. The Problem of Evil. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Chapter 37

Eleonore Stump GEORG GASSER

INTRODUCTION Eleonore Stump was born in 1947. After studying at Grinnel College, Harvard University, and Cornell University, she taught at various universities before becoming the Robert J. Henle chair of philosophy at Saint Louis University, where she has taught since 1992. Her philosophical research focuses on medieval philosophy, philosophy of religion, and metaphysics, with the problem of evil occupying a prominent role.

ON THE WAY TO A NARRATIVE THEODICY Major features of Stump’s account to the problem of evil can already be found in her early paper “The Problem of Evil” (1985): due to the Fall human beings are determined by a defective will with a strong tendency “to will what they ought not to will” (406). Therefore, they are incapable of achieving the ultimate purpose of human life, namely heavenly unity with God for which a correspondence of the human will with the divine will is required. For such a correspondence, it is first of all necessary to recognize one’s own imperfection and sinfulness and to ask God for respective help in the realignment of the will. According to Stump, both natural and moral evils could be “the only effective means” (409) to induce man to seek God’s help for salvation. This also applies to extraordinary virtuous people such as Job, who may be considered impeccable in the light of human standards but whose will is also affected by the “spiritual cancer” (“Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job”, 340) due to the Fall. In this context it must be emphasized that certain agent-centered restrictions ought to be observed. According to Stump’s Thomistic-inspired metaethics it is not permissible to use a person suffering from evil as mere means for higher goods conferred to a third party.1 The higher good realized due to suffering has to benefit first of all the suffering person herself. A broadening of the account developed so far marks the paper “The Mirror of Evil” (1994). Stump explicitly refers to the importance of (biblical) narratives and interpersonal relationships as decisive elements for answering the problem of evil. She emphasizes that an unbiased view of the manifold moral evils in human history illustrates what human beings

See Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, “Being and Goodness”, in: Divine and Human Action. Essays in the Metaphysics of Theism, ed. Thomas V. Morris (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 281–312.

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are capable of. This fright at the abysses of man could, however, induce a sensitization to hope for the good and to strive for its realization more vigorously. Such hope can be found specifically in biblical narratives, which reveal the enduring goodness of a personal God despite the evils in the world. Stump compares those who have experienced divine goodness with a child weaned from its mother’s breast: the child does not know why the mother now refuses the breast but since he has experienced himself as loved by the mother, the child can build up a trusting and intimate relationship with his mother despite this painful weaning phase. Additionally, the weaning phase is necessary for the child to deepen his relationship with the mother by being able to perceive her as a loving person directed toward him instead of a mere means for satisfying his needs (Mirror of Evil, 244). Stump elaborates these considerations further in her “Second-person Accounts and the Problem of Evil” (2001). Central for a Christian understanding of suffering due to evil is the belief that God as a person maintains a personal and caring relationship with his creation in general and with human creatures in particular. Believers have a twofold experiential access to this insight: on the one hand, personal religious experiences are a kind of second-person experience of God. On the other hand, through biblical narratives we can relate to the experiences of others and thus appropriate them as, for instance, the book of Job about Job’s personal struggle with God illustrates (757). These various explorations of the problem of evil find their systematic culmination in Stump’s magisterial work Wandering in Darkness, to which I turn now in more detail.

WANDERING IN DARKNESS In Wandering in Darkness (2010), Stump aims at arguing that even terrible suffering is, under certain circumstances, the only possible means of attaining ultimately communion with God. Since man is essentially a relational being, man also finds his deepest fulfillment in interpersonal relationships – first and foremost the relationship with God. In order to do justice to this fact, it is necessary to reflect on “the complex, nuanced thought, behaviour, and relations of persons” (25). This substantive thesis leads to the methodological claim that an adequate philosophical treatment of the problem of evil must take into account narratives in addition to an analytic-argumentative discourse because narratives are able to grasp and communicate the second-personal dimension of interpersonal relationships. In light of these reflections, Stump distinguishes between a “Franciscan” and “Dominican” form of cognition. “Dominican” cognition generates discursive, propositional knowledge acquired from a third-person perspective. It is transmitted by clear and precise language. “Franciscan” cognition, instead, generates knowledge from the first- and second-person perspectives, which cannot be fully represented propositionally but is transmitted by narrative and poetic language. Consequently, if a response to the problem of evil has to do with interpersonal relationships, it must include “Franciscan” in addition to “Dominican” knowledge. The larger framework of Stump’s response to the argument from evil is largely based on reflections inspired by Thomas Aquinas. In this context an important role is given to the explanation of the Thomistic conception of love. In love, the desire for the well-being of the beloved person is combined with the desire for real communion with that person. This presupposes that a truly loving person is not divided within herself but inwardly

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integrated, and as such the will is directed toward the good. The postlapsarian human condition, however, is characterized by a division of the will, egocentrism, and, thus ultimately, loneliness. Stump underlines: “On Aquinas’s view, all human beings have a sort of latent disease in the will. In the right circumstances, it blows up into moral monstrosity; in all circumstances, it sooner or later eventuates in moral wrongdoing of some sort or another” (155). Therefore, man in this condition is unable to attain the highest good – community with God and others. By wanting man’s well-being, God responds to this tragic situation. God’s healing of the human will takes place in the two-stage process of justification and sanctification. Sanctification is the process in which God cooperates with and fulfills the second-order human desire to direct one’s will toward goodness and thus to integrate one’s personality. However, in the postlapsarian state, man is not able to form this higher-order will for sanctification by himself. Therefore, man has to give up his resistance to God’s grace, so that it can work in him and make him capable of forming the will for sanctification. Justification consists in this formation of the desire for sanctification. Suffering is part of the process of justification and sanctification, since allowing suffering is God’s best means of overcoming man’s inner disintegration. Suffering therefore serves to prevent the greatest possible evil for man (complete separation from God) and to promote man’s greatest good (eternal communion with God). Once sufferers understand the nature of the good they receive through their suffering, they accept this good as intrinsic compensation for their suffering. Here is the argumentative structure of Stump’s account:

1. Man’s greatest possible evil is permanent separation from God; the greatest possible good is permanent communion with God.



2. Man in the postlapsarian state is divided within himself and cannot overcome this division by himself.



3. This division has the consequence that man is separated from God.



4. Thus, man in the postlapsarian state is in danger of being permanently separated from God. (from 1, 2, and 3)



5. Man in the postlapsarian state can only overcome this inner division through the two-step process of justification and sanctification.



6. The integration of the psychic structure around the good is a necessary condition for a lasting communion with God and other persons.



7. Thus, only justification and sanctification lead to the realization of the greatest possible good and the avoidance of the greatest possible evil. (from 1, 5, and 6)



8. The two-step process of justification and sanctification necessarily involves suffering.



9. Thus, suffering is a necessary means to realize the greatest possible good or to prevent the greatest possible evil. (from 7 and 8)

10. The use of a means to achieve a goal is only morally permissible if the goal to be achieved at least compensates for the use of the means or surpasses it in terms of added value. 11. The evil of earthly suffering is less than the value of the greatest possible good (or the negative value of the greatest possible evil) since earthly suffering is finite but the greatest possible good or the greatest possible evil is infinite.

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12. Therefore, God is morally justified in allowing suffering as a means to realize the greatest possible good or to prevent the greatest possible evil for the suffering person. (from 9, 10, and 11) The link between this “Dominican” account and the required “Franciscan” knowledge for comprehending this argument more fully in its second-personal dimension is formed by Stump’s interpretation of four biblical narratives of suffering people and the impact of their suffering on the relationship with God: the story of Job, the binding of Isaac, Samson’s capture and blinding by the Philistines, and Mary’s mourning for her brother Lazarus and disappointment at Jesus’ apparent inaction. The skillful interpretation of these stories puts “Franciscan” flesh on the “Dominican” bones of the previously developed argument and represents the main focus of Stump’s response to the problem of evil. Here the distinction between desires of heart and flourishing of a person plays an important role. A desire of the heart is a particular kind of attachment of the person to something that has great value for her not by itself but because of the person’s individual concern for it. Unlike the category of flourishing, desires of the heart are subjective. Evils undermine or destroy that about which a person is centrally concerned, thereby affecting the flourishing of the person. Since suffering is essentially about what the sufferer cares for, the good that is a morally sufficient reason for God’s allowing suffering must itself be something about which the sufferer cares. Stump distinguishes between superficial and deep desires of the heart. The deepest desire of human beings is God. Therefore, not only the greatest objective but also the deepest subjective suffering is separation from God. This does not make, however, the fulfillment or non-fulfillment of less deep desires of the heart irrelevant. The suffering person ought to regain at least some of her lost desires of the heart, possibly in a transformed manner because less deep desires can only be fulfilled in a way that is compatible with the fulfillment of the deepest desire of the heart. Thus, the suffering over the original frustration of desires of the heart is not simply extinguished but it changes its character and is integrated in a modified form into the structure of the deepest desire of the heart. Allowing suffering is, under these circumstances, the best means of fulfilling the suffering person’s desires of the heart and enabling her to will God to be close to her. For instance, according to Stump’s view the story of Job highlights that despite the loss of his wealth, family, social position, or health and despite the strained relationship with his wife and friends, Job continues to hold on to God and expects justice and goodness from Him. He is not willing to accept his suffering simply because man is sinful and therefore deserves punishment. Job’s protest is rather an expression of a profound adherence to divine goodness and justice, which deepens his relationship with God despite his suffering and ultimately culminates in the divine speeches in an intense second-personal experience of a caring and loving God. The divine speeches “show God in second-personal connection to all his creatures. He relates to everything he has made in this second-personal way; and, in such second-personal interaction, God deals as a parent with his creatures” (Wandering in Darkness, 190). However, we have to be clear that under earthly circumstances a person does not perceive in full awareness what constitutes her flourishing and desires of the heart. Suffering and the goods realized through it are not transparent to us. Therefore, we are unable to see clearly the salvific personal presence of God through suffering in the here and now. We are not prevented from wandering in darkness.

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Her latest monumental work Atonement (2018) can be seen as a consistent continuation of these reflections in Christological and soteriological terms.2 The central motif remains the question of how God possibly accomplishes establishing true unity between God and man in the postlapsarian state.

FURTHER READING Stump, Eleonore. “The Problem of Evil”. Faith and Philosophy 2, no. 4 (1985): 392–423. Stump, Eleonore. “Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job”. In Reasoned Faith. Essays in Philosophical Theology in Honor of Norman Kretzmann. Edited by Eleonore Stump, 328–57. Ithaca: Society of Christian Philosophers, 1993. Stump, Eleonore. “The Mirror of Evil”. In God and the Philosophers. The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason. Edited by Thomas V. Morris, 235–47. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Stump, Eleonore. “Second-Person Accounts and the Problem of Evil”. Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 57, no. 4 (2001): 745–71. Stump, Eleonore. Wandering in Darkness. Narrative and the Problem of Suffering. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010.

Eleonore Stump, Atonement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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Chapter 38

The Origin of Evil MATTHIAS GREBE

INTRODUCTION The question Unde malum? is one of the most perplexing in Christian theology, and one of the strongest charges leveled against theism. In a world marked by poverty, war and genocide, racism, abuse of power, and corporate greed, most people do not find the idea of “evil” difficult to grasp. And yet, a theological impasse is often reached when trying to define evil and its origin: What exactly is evil and where does it come from? A related conundrum is often posed as part of the trilemma of theodicy: Why, if God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, is there evil, sin, and suffering in the world?1 Some theologians argue that the entire enterprise of theodicy – trying to solve the problem of this logical contradiction – is ultimately a fruitless activity, as it is not easy to define evil and those who try to seek it only point people in the wrong direction. Yet it is equally difficult to escape evil.2 Many scholars, not only in the Christian tradition, see evil as something all humans have experienced – whether through our own actions or those done to us by others – and argue that the effects of evil can linger long after the deed is done.3 And of course, we have all seen how evil begets evil as it sets up a vicious cycle that entraps humans. So why bother revisiting this ancient conundrum? This chapter asserts that (1) theology can provide a helpful framework in which to account for evil, sin, and suffering, and that (2) a person’s particular doctrine of evil, and thus their understanding of its origin, is central to their particular theology; doctrinally, evil is a key theological determiner. We might even say that the role “evil” plays in a theological “system” reveals more about an individual’s understanding of theology, anthropology, and God than almost anything else, as almost none of the classic Christian doctrines make sense without outlining an understanding of the piece evil plays in the wider puzzle. In many systematic theologies we see a tripartite structure of Creation, Fall, Redemption, and within this structure we encounter three main theological loci – God, Creation (that which God wants), and Evil (that which God does not want) – which cover the central theological topics. If God is the first major biblical theme and Humanity/Creation the second, then Sin is part of the third theme of Scripture, under the larger umbrella of evil.

See Ingolf U. Dalferth, Malum: A Theological Hermeneutics of Evil, trans. Nils F. Schott (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2022), 8–12. 2 See ibid., 65–82. 3 See ibid., 14–32. 1

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This chapter loosely follows this tripartite structure, by looking at God, Creation, and Evil. The main interlocutors will be the German Protestant theologian Jürgen Moltmann on God’s Zimzum (self-contraction) in Creation, the Russian Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov on human perfection before and after the Fall, and the British philosopher Richard Swinburne on the redemptive process of soul-making. After defining the doctrine of evil, and looking at God and the preconditions for evil, the chapter will conclude after a consideration of perfection, freedom, and the Fall, and an assessment of human free will, suffering, and soul-making.

DEFINING THE DOCTRINE OF EVIL Ian McFarland, in his essay “The Problem with Evil”, not only argues that any “Christian account of evil is inseparable from the doctrine of creation” but also challenges his reader to define evil precisely, reminding us to use the term with caution.4 For any essay on the origin of evil, it is therefore mandatory to define from the very outset what is meant by “evil” in order to articulate the scope of what will be discussed.5 Following McFarland, this chapter will define “evil” as moral failure and rebellion against God. More specifically, within the Christian framework of creation, McFarland defines evil as “that which is against God’s will”; “that which God does not want” and “that which threatens or inhibits creatures’ flourishing as the beings God intends them to be”.6 In light of this, God might be said to permit evil but never to cause it, as “God’s attitude towards evil is always to oppose and condemn it”.7 McFarland challenges Leibniz’s coinage of “metaphysical evil” – the idea that “created being as such, on the grounds that everything that is finite suffers an ontologically intrinsic privation of the infinite goodness that pertains to God alone” – for calling it “evil”.8 The privation that is intrinsic to every creature (by virtue of the fact of being a creature and not God) should not be called evil, that is, as human beings we cannot fly, but this privation is not evil. Flying is not a particular feature of what it means to be human. On the other hand, if someone has a broken leg due to somebody else inflicting an injury, we call this act evil. He takes an identical issue with what Leibniz defined as “natural evil” – earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis.9 These events are not rooted in the willingness of created agents, and therefore to use the language of evil here is problematic. God has created a material world of changeable things, in which it is, arguably, necessary that things grow, die, and decay.10 If that is the case, then what Leibniz calls “natural evil” need to be seen in a larger cosmic context. As far as we can tell, natural evils are necessary features of the Ian A. McFarland, “The Problem with Evil”, Theology Today 74, no. 4 (2018): 321–39, 323. “The problem of Evil (in the singular) does not exist; there are only many problems concerned with many instances of evil”, Dalferth, Malum, 9. 6 McFarland, “The Problem with Evil”, 323f. For the second definition, McFarland refers to it in footnote 6, see Robert W. Jenson, The Triune Identity: God According to the Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1982), 174. 7 Ibid., 325. 8 Ibid., 326. See also Dalferth, Malum, 173–6. 9 See McFarland, “The Problem with Evil”, 329–34. 10 See Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, Volume 2: The Works of God (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 330f. Jenson highlights the difference between the Creator and the finitude of creatures, noting that it is our flesh that naturally corrodes and eventually dies, and that this is part of the human condition rather than a result of sinfulness. 4 5

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ecosystem and result from the natural laws of the physical universe. They should not be called evil, since it is impossible to assign responsibility for these events to a created will. What Leibniz defined as “moral evil” encompasses actions that are freely willed by creatures and contravene the will of God – that is what the Bible calls “sin”. Here the language of evil, according to McFarland, is properly used to name sin.11 Thus, most of the further study in the following paragraphs will focus on the origins of “moral evil”, in light of God’s love, human freedom, and the path to perfection.

GOD, CREATION, AND THE PRECONDITION FOR EVIL When thinking about evil, the following questions come to mind: If it is the case that creation was made “good” and God did not create evil, where then did it come from? How did evil enter the world? Does evil exist as an independent principle of being, as a “substance”, alongside good? What exactly is moral evil? And why does an omnipotent God allow it? The Russian theologian Bulgakov argues that the “philosophers of antiquity, the church fathers, and the scholastic theologians all unanimously answered this question in the negative: evil does not exist alongside good as an independent principle, a principle that competes with and is parallel to good” (BL, 147). Evil is not a substance but a “state of creaturely being” (ibid.). Thus, following Augustine, evil is the absence of good – privatio boni.12 This means that, for Bulgakov, evil has no ontological reality; it does not exist (i.e., it is “non-being”), but is privation, “an accident, a parasite of being” (ibid.). How are we supposed to understand evil as the absence of good in light of evil’s destructive force in creation? With all the suffering in the world, it is legitimate to ask how we are to understand moral evil as privation and whether this is sufficient as a definition. Furthermore, if evil does not exist, that is, has no being in itself, but is rather a state of being, how did this particular state become possible? What then is the “precondition” for evil, providing the possibility for it to exist or occur?

Zimzum and creatio ex nihilo Before we look at evil and its “precondition”, let us turn to the doctrine of God, the concept of Zimzum, and the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. With regard to the idea that evil is privation, Jürgen Moltmann, in a post-war resurgence of theodicy, asks a probing question: “How can God create out of ‘nothing’ when there cannot be such a thing as nothing, since his essence is everything and interpenetrates everything?”13 Moltmann answers his own question by picking up the thought of Hans Jonas and the Jewish teaching of Zimzum,14 which is discussed by Isaak Luria in his teaching

See McFarland, “The Problem with Evil”, 327–9. On evil as privatio boni, see Augustine, The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, 3:11. See also Dalferth, Malum, especially “II.1 Malum as privatio boni”, 105–19. 13 TKG, 109f. See also Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation. The Gifford Lectures 1984–85, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1985), 86: “If there were a realm outside God, God would not be omnipresent. This space ‘outside’ God would have to be co-eternal with God. But an ‘outside God’ of this kind would then have to be ‘counter’ to God.” 14 For more on “Zimzum”, see Christoph Schulte, Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 2014) and essays in Tsimtsum and Modernity: Lurianic Heritage in Modern Philosophy and Theology, ed. Agata Bielik-Robson and Daniel H. Weiss (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021). 11 12

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of God’s Shekhina. This teaching explains the mystical primordial space, the nihil or vacuum, into which God created the universe. Moltmann writes that “Zimzum really means ‘concentration’ or ‘contraction’, a withdrawal into the self . . . God’s concentrated inversion for the purpose of creating the world. The ‘existence of the universe was made possible through a shrinkage process in God’” (TKG, 109). He goes on to explain: In other words, every act outwards is preceded by an act inwards which makes the “outwards” possible. This is to say that God continually creates inwards and outwards simultaneously. He creates by withdrawing himself, and because he withdraws himself. Creation in chaos and out of nothing, which is an act of power, is also a self-humiliation on God’s part, a lowering of himself into his own impotence. Creation is a work of God’s humility and is his withdrawal into himself. God acts on himself when he acts creatively. His inward and his outward aspects therefore correspond to one another and mirror one another.15 What Moltmann explains in this condensed paragraph is that God has created the world not outside himself (because there is no realm outside God who is “all in all”) but in Godself. For Moltmann, the “very first act of the infinite Being was therefore not a step ‘outwards’ but a step ‘inwards’, a ‘self-withdrawal of God from himself into himself’, as Gershom Scholem puts it; that is to say, it was a passio Dei, not an actio” (TKG, 110). In God’s very first act of creating, God acted on himself. Withdrawing into himself to make space for something new (the world) he could then fully give himself by entering into a covenant relationship with the world (see TKG, 111). Therefore it is, according to Moltmann, only “God’s withdrawal into himself which gives that nihil the space in which God then becomes creatively active” (TKG, 109). Creation “out of nothing” must therefore be seen through the lens of God’s humility: his kenotic act of self-humiliation. An understanding of kenosis, as rooted in the life of God itself, conceptually explains how the infinite God makes “room” for the finite to exist alongside him, and in doing so, how “God permits an existence different from his own by limiting himself” (TKG, 118). It goes beyond the scope of this chapter to fully address the relationship between the immanent and the economic Trinity in God’s work of creation and redemption.16 However, in light of the previous discussion, we have to ask whether Zimzum can be seen as part of an intra-divine kenosis within the immanent Trinity. This would make “kenosis constitutive of God himself”,17 a “primordial kenosis – an Ur-kenosis – that consists in the Father’s eternally emptying himself in giving his Son all that he has and all that he is”,18 and would see the incarnation as the actualization in time of an eternal determination.

TKG, 110. For more on Moltmann’s consideration of “Zimzum”, see TKG, especially “IV. The World of the Trinity: §2. The Creation of the Father: 2. God’s Self-Limitation”, 108–11, as well as “IV God the Creator: §3. Creation out of Nothing”, in God in Creation, 86–93. 16 Moltmann’s explanation of God’s inward and outward acts corresponding and mirroring one another align with Barth’s rule when talking about the relationship between the immanent and economic Trinity. As Barth writes, “statements about the divine modes of being antecedently in themselves cannot be different in content from those that are to be made about their reality in revelation”, Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–75), I/1, 479. 17 John R. Betz, “The Humility of God: On a Disputed Question in Trinitarian Theology”, Nova et vetera 17, no. 3 (Summer 2019): 769–810, 779. 18 Ibid., 770. 15

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In any case, Zimzum, as understood as a form of divine kenosis, not only highlights the self-abasement of God for the sake of others but also reveals something about the very being of God: God “chose a form of existence that did not correspond to his being, but underlined the character of his being”.19

The Nihil and the Precondition for Evil Returning to our question of the precondition: How does the nihil in creation explain the “precondition” for evil? We saw in our discussion on Moltmann that before creating the world, God made “space” in himself by withdrawing himself in order to make creation possible. Important here is to grasp that God’s creative activity outwards is preceded by his divine humble inward self-restriction. What emerges is a nihil, which does not yet “contain the negation of creaturely being (since creation is not yet existent)”.20 As we will see later, the nihil only acquires its “menacing character through the self-isolation of created beings”,21 but this is nevertheless a space in which the threat of non-being is a reality, as the boundary of nothing, the nihil out which humans are created, remains a passive resistance in this world. What transpires is that there is a certain “precondition” in the nature of creatures and the world, which allows “space” for evil which, in itself, is not (yet) evil but nevertheless provides the possibility for it.22 As Moltmann writes: “As a self-limitation that makes creation possible, the nihil does not yet have this annihilating character; for it was conceded in order to make an independent creation ‘outside’ God possible.”23 What follows is that God’s self-limitation implies the possibility for evil in creation. How are we to understand this? This “precondition” might best be described as the separation of potentiality and actuality in the creaturely realm. Whereas God is infinite freedom and in God is fullness (God is actus purus, i.e., God is fully actual, pure potentiality and pure actuality are one in God; God’s essence is his existence), creatures have finite freedom for God (and for others),24 in whom this fullness (i.e., God’s plan and purpose for creation) needs to be actualized.25 While God is one, and in God every duality comes to an end (see also coincidentia oppositorum in Nicholas of Cusa) – that is, beginning and end, promise and fulfillment, this world and the next coincide in God – human beings live in a world of duality, of time and space, and are composite beings, who are divided into two parts, not only of body and soul, but also of potentiality and actuality (essence and existence), in which the state of potentiality precedes that of actuality, that is, beings who have potentiality of self-realization that is not yet actualized.26 19 Christoph Schwöbel, “The Generosity of the Triune God and the Humility of the Son”, in Kenosis: The SelfEmptying of Christ in Scripture and Theology, ed. Paul T. Nimmo and Keith L. Johnson, 267–88 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022), 283. 20 Moltmann, God in Creation, 87. 21 Ibid., 88. 22 For a more detailed analysis, see BL, chapter 3 on “Evil”, 148–64. 23 Moltmann, God in Creation, 88. 24 See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3, ed. John W. de Gruchy, trans. Douglas S. Bax (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 60–7. 25 See Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, three volumes in one (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), II, 31. 26 Tillich writes that “being a creature means both to be rooted in the creative ground of the divine life and to actualize one’s self through freedom. Creation is fulfilled in the creaturely self-realization which simultaneously

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This division and duality is part of the finite human nature and necessary for growth. In order for humans to develop they need time and space. The state of limitedness, innate to all finite (i.e., created and therefore contingent) beings, coupled with creaturely finite freedom bestowed by the Creator (which will be discussed further later), allows for the process of becoming in the creaturely realm (i.e., potential, possibilities, and ideas can be actualized). Change, demarcation, and finitude are therefore part of human existence and essential for development. More will be said about creaturely finitude and freedom later when we look at the path to perfection and soul-making, but the risk involved in creating creaturely life is that humans can make not only positive (life-enhancing) but also negative (life-destroying) choices with their given freedom.

The Triune God of Love and the Imago Dei There is one additional aspect to be considered with regard to the “precondition” for evil, further problematized by the Creator-creature relation. Human beings are created in (or as) the image of God (Gen. 1:27),27 who is undivided yet differentiated. God’s self-giving nature in creation needs to be understood in light of his eternal self-election and selfdetermination, which constitutes God’s triune being pro nobis – an eternal act that points “in both an inward and outward direction at the same time”.28 As already mentioned in our discussion on Zimzum and kenosis, more could be said about God’s self-constitution and the relationship between the immanent and the economic Trinity in creation and redemption, but I would like to focus on the nature of the triune God – God is difference in unity – in whose image human beings are created. Creedal Christianity holds the belief that God reveals himself as the Trinity and that the essence of the triune God is love. According to Eberhard Jüngel, God can only be love when “God is both lover and the beloved at the same time”.29 God loves himself, but this should not be misunderstood as self-love – rather God “differentiates himself in that he loves himself”.30 God’s love is neither egocentric nor monohypostatic, but ecstatic; it is a selfless and sacrificial trihypostatic love, “in which each of the hypostases acquires its own personal center not in itself but outside of itself, in other hypostases” (BL, 156). In the triune God we see a self-differentiation (hypostases) and a unity (ousia). Thus God, who is love, needs to be understood as the “absolutely selfless essence”,31 who, unlike created beings, is “totally identical with his essence in his existence”.32 It is in light of the triune nature of God that creation (and redemption) is understood as God’s work of love. If human beings are created in (or as) the image of this triune is freedom and destiny. But it is fulfilled through separation from the creative ground through a break between existence and essence. Creaturely freedom is the point at which creation and the fall coincide” (ibid., II, 256). 27 See D. J. A. Clines, “The Image of God”, Tyndale Bulletin 19 (1968): 53–103. Cline argues that Gen. 1:26 is more accurately translated “created as his image”, 75. The term “imago Dei” then “shows humankind as God had intended can called humans to be. It signifies the potential of human beings for the future. Its measure is Jesus Christ, the person who actually bears God’s image”, Anthony C. Thiselton, “Human Potentiality and the Image of God”, in Systematic Theology, 136–53 (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2015), 137. 28 Eberhard Jüngel, God’s Being Is in Becoming: The Trinitarian Being of God in the Theology of Karl Barth, trans. John Webster (London: T&T Clark, 2014), 83. 29 Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism, trans. Darrell L. Guder (London: T&T Clark, 2014), 327. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 369. 32 Ibid., 371.

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God, whose essence is love, then it logically follows that humans bear the image of the Trinity, which is “hypostatically multiple in consubstantiality” (BL, 185). We might then conclude that the human spirit is created for love, which is imprinted in creation and “determines this spirit’s entire life even in a fallen state” (BL, 157). Bulgakov, who argues along these lines, maintains that “hypostatic multi-unity in the image of the Holy Trinity” is “imprinted in every creaturely spirit” (BL, 106). All creatures are created in love and for the purpose to love God. In the act of creation by grace, creatures are called to participate in the relational love of Father and Son, in the bond of the Spirit.33 To participate in the divine love forms the very purpose of human existence and being created in the first place. Bulgakov describes the meeting of love between Creator and creature as the purpose of creation, the inner law of being, which “contains the mysterious act of the creation of the hypostases” (BL, 156). In light of this, creation needs to be understood as an “act of ecstatic love”: through the act of creation, God in his kenotic love not only limits himself and provides time and space for the other to exist, as we heard in our discussion on Zimzum, but also goes “outside the bounds of the Holy Trinity, into ‘nothing’, and there draws out of Himself the ‘fourth’, creaturely hypostases, created in His image . . . those upon whom the gift of love has been conferred” (BL, 155). Furthermore, having explained God’s being as love, kenosis needs to be understood as plērōsis, “the abundance of God’s trinitarian generosity”34 and “the outpouring of a divine love”,35 and should not be seen as either a suspension or a surrender of divine attributes. What we observed in Bulgakov’s theology is that the kenosis of the Logos corresponds to the very being of God, as seen in the economy of creation and redemption. Kenosis is thus a natural expression of divine life and has an eternal character.36 As David Fergusson highlights when commenting on Bulgakov’s Christology, kenosis should be understood as rooted in the life of God itself, which means that “the incarnation becomes its fullest historical expression”.37 This understanding of kenosis corresponds with what we saw in Moltmann’s account of creation, namely that the entire creation must be seen through the lens of God’s self-abasement.

PERFECTION, FREEDOM, AND THE FALL We answered the question, “if everything that is created comes from God, where does evil come from?” by explaining that evil is privation, the absence of good. In creation, we said, God, as self-renouncing love, gives space in Godself for the other to exist. This also gives rise to the potentiality for evil to occur. Before we explore the potential for evil in light of the God-given freedom bestowed on creatures (both angelic and human beings), we need to scrutinize God’s will and desire for his creation: freedom and the path to perfection.

For the Trinity as “the lover, the beloved, and the love”, see also Augustine De Trinitate 8.10.14, Augustine, On the Trinity Books 8–15, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, ed. Gareth B. Matthews, trans. Stephen McKenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 22. 34 Schwöbel, “The Generosity of the Triune God and the Humility of the Son”, 284. 35 David Fergusson, “Kenosis and the Humility of God”, in Kenosis: The Self-Emptying of Christ in Scripture and Theology, ed. Paul T. Nimmo and Keith L. Johnson, 194–211 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022), 210. 36 See ibid., 200. 37 Ibid.

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Freedom and the Path to Perfection The book of Genesis gives no indication that the world was made perfect – it says it was made “good”.38 Thus creation “remains to be perfected, in part by faithful human action”.39 Scripture specifies that only God is perfect, complete, without spot, undefiled, without blemish (Ps. 18:30; Sam. 22:31) and pure (Ps. 12:6).40 This perfection of God is seen in his will (Rom. 12:2), his law (Ps. 19:7; James 1:25), and his works (Heb. 7:11). Creatures, unlike God, are limited and do not possess divine perfection and fullness.41 What is essential to all creatures is, as we have said, the process of becoming.42 Humans created in the image of God are developing beings. Thus, God’s desire in eternity to create humans after his likeness is actualized in time. The idea here is that the world, made through, for, and to Christ (Rom. 11:36; Col 1:16; Heb. 1:2) is in the process of being perfected. Thus, perfection is not a given state, but that which is sought after in creaturely life, as creatureliness is characterized by imperfection, limitation, finitude, and mortality.43 This limitedness is part of God’s will and desire for the world to become perfected. Perfection is therefore not a state in which people are created, but rather something toward which people are going – the telos (Phil. 3:12; Eph. 4:13; Col. 1:28).44 Furthermore, within this limitedness, this fragmented, partial life that humans have is not only imperfect but also fallible (see BL, 148). Creaturely existence is characterized by being confronted with different paths and possibilities, which signifies that as humans we are not perfect, but fallible beings. To actualize our creaturely creativity and freedom

See Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–11: A Commentary, trans. John J. Scullion S.J. (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1987), 166, who writes that “‘good’ is not to be understood as indicating some fixed quality; the meaning is rather functional: ‘good for . . .’ The world which God created and devised as good is the world in which history can begin and reach its goal and so fulfill the purpose of creation.” See also Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 56, who writes: “‘good’ means precisely that which is destined for perfection.” 39 Colin E. Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology: Essays Toward a Fully Trinitarian Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 110. 40 Both notions, “without blemish” (Lev. 1:3, 1:10, 3:1, 3:6, 4:3, 4:23, 5:15, 5:18, 6:6) and “pure” (Lev. 4:12, 6:11, 7:19, 10:14, 11:36, 13:13), are reflected in the Levitical purification offerings and the entire cultic system. 41 As Gunton explains: “The creation is, we might say, perfect in that it is destined for perfection. That is, it is relatively perfect: created for an eschatological perfecting. It is the eschatological destiny of the finite creation that makes a fall possible; in that sense, the creation is imperfect”, The Triune Creator, 55. 42 Gunton points out that for “Irenaeus, that which comes from nothing is destined to become something, and it is perhaps the notion of creation as that which is directed to an eschatological perfection which is one of the most neglected features in Irenaeus’ thought”, The Triune Creator, 55. 43 It should also be noted here that mortality is not a symptom of the Fall, but part of creaturely being. Karl Barth writes that death “belongs to human nature, and is determined and ordered by God’s good creation and to that extent right and good, that man’s being in time should be finite and man himself mortal”, in CD III/2, 632. The concept of the immortality of the soul is not a Judaeo-Christian one, that is, it is not found in the Bible but stems from Greek philosophy. What is biblical, however, is the notion that through grace, the human mortal soul can become immortal. Human beings become partakers of the divine nature by participating in Christ, that is, by becoming children of God through adoption by the Holy and life-giving Spirit. Jesus, the second Adam, is the theandric person, in whose earthly life the new life of the glorified and perfected human existence is already foreshadowed, concealed before the cross, and fully revealed in the resurrection. 44 The finite human condition is that every human being is created and therefore imperfect. The message of God’s grace reveals that humans are created to be perfected. So every human being awaits the perfection as revealed in Jesus’ resurrection. Thus, as a human being, one can be imperfect (qua human in view of its potential) and still be holy (qua divine assistance – in view of their responsible action; i.e., posse non peccare). 38

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in this state of imperfection means that humans are subject to error, which though not yet characterized as sin or evil at this stage, can turn into it. As Bulgakov writes, “even if evil had not entered into the world, this possibility and presence of creaturely errors and imperfections would have been inevitable” (BL, 148). In this way, “creaturely creativity entails not only the possibility but even the inevitability of errors, which, in themselves, are not yet evil but prepare a place for evil” (BL, 149). What is important here is to understand error and imperfection in the light of God’s love and grace,45 as they alone reveal that God gives human beings the freedom to operate and develop in the world. Humans are not automatons functioning with the precision of a machine, but living and creative beings who need to actualize their creative potential in order to grow and mature. This process of growth necessarily entails error. However, without this God-given freedom to actualize their creative potential, which is synonymous with life, humans would be dead. Can we then say that God as Creator, who created humans imperfect, is responsible for sin, evil, and suffering in this world? Here we must immediately interject and say that God has put everything into creation that could be put into it. God has implanted the possibility for fullness and perfection in creation “to the extent they can be received by creation” (BL, 149) and his will and desire is to lead humans on a path from imperfection to the state of perfection. Yet this perfection could not be the beginning state of creation, for only God is perfect; it can only be the final stage, when God will be “all in all”. Creation’s task is (see Gen. 1:28), as Bulgakov stresses, “to actualize itself” (BL, 149), being “called to perfection through self-creation” (BL, 150).46 This calling needs to be understood as God’s gift to creation, namely to be created out of nothing, to exist and being given the freedom to utilize one’s creativity and potential in this world, to elevate or “raise the world, by humanizing it, to the perfection implanted in it” (BL, 149), that is, to live a life according to the will and purposes of God and to transform and elevate the entire world into the fullness and perfection of the garden of God, in which the first humans were placed. God’s love, grace, mercy, and goodness are manifested in his patience (long-suffering love) with creation, in giving humans “relative autonomy of being even at the price of limitedness” (BL, 149). Consequently, human autonomy or freedom comes at a great cost and risk. Humans can use this freedom and their potential for the good, growth, and conformity to God’s law by aligning their will to the divine will – that is, ascending on the path toward perfection and using their potential to promote the flourishing of self and others. Alternatively, they can misuse this freedom for destructive, selfish purposes, promoting a downward spiral to non-being, leading to a void that has come to be defined as “evil”. This empty space that was previously governed by love is then filled by selfish desires such as envy and lust for power. Ultimately the God-given capacity or potential for good and evil cannot be taken away from creation, even when used for evil purposes, as this freedom manifests God’s love and plan for his creation: God’s love will “endure any sacrifice in its long-suffering patience, and . . . is ready in advance to redeem and restore the distorted face of creation” (BL, 154). Bulgakov writes: “In itself, the creativity of creatures is the work of God’s love and condescension, which entrusts to the limited powers of creatures the fulfillment of God’s will ‘both in heaven and on earth’” (BL, 149). 46 Bulgakov explains: “God put everything into His creation that could be put into it. This gift of the Creator to creation, the given as a task to be realized, contains fullness and perfection to the extent they can be received by creation, which is created out of nothing and permeated by this nothing as its inner boundary” (BL, 149). 45

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Freedom and the Supramundane Fall For Bulgakov, the history of fallen human beings has a prologue in heaven. So before we take a closer look at the biblical narrative of the human Fall in Genesis, we will first look at what Bulgakov calls the supramundane Fall. Why does the Fall in the spiritual world matter? We will see that evil in the material world, though it differs from the spiritual realm, is connected to the spiritual world. We saw that the world is created on the basis of the “freedom of creaturely self-determination” (BL, 150). Creaturely freedom is “implanted in the world’s being, and, through this freedom, evil is also implanted in the world” (BL, 153). By “implanted”, Bulgakov means the creaturely potential, that is, the possibility in creation to do good and evil. While freedom is given by God to humans (and angelic beings) to protect creation and lead it to fullness and perfection, this freedom can also be abused to actualize evil. Every being is given talents to apply creatively in life. God, through wisdom and providence of the Spirit, assists creaturely freedom in “increasing these talents to the measure of fullness” (BL, 151). All created beings are inwardly determined by God to flourish. Yet in freedom creatures can also oppose their natural givenness (see BL, 154). According to Bulgakov, evil occurs first in a pure form in the spiritual world of the fleshless angels, not as an error, misunderstanding, ignorance, or as a deception (as with Adam and Eve), but arising as a direct rebellion and direct self-determination against God and in hostility toward him, “in the domain of the relation to God” (BL, 153), coram deo. How was this violation possible? Bulgakov gives an explanation (BL, 155): This unlawful freedom is an ontological revolt and, in the final analysis, it is the spiritual self-enslavement of creatures, their enslavement by their own nature. This unlawful freedom is determined by an inner disharmony, by a rending contradiction. Even in revolt, creation cannot arbitrarily become anything it wants to be. It remains only itself, but turned inside out, so to speak. In this sense, the condition of createdness or natural givenness is enslavement for creatures insofar as they rebel against this givenness and against their Creator. As such, this original sin occurring in creaturely freedom is completely arbitrary, rebellious, irrational, and without subject to any cause or rational explanation, as freedom is without cause (see BL, 153). After evil appeared in the spiritual world, it then inevitably seeped also into the human, material world (see BL, 160). However, evil in the material world, though connected to the spiritual world, differs from the spiritual realm due to the human corporeal existence and epistemic distance between God and humans. Evil in the material world is not a conscious usurpation and direct revolt against God as with the angels, but somewhat more complex, as the biblical narrative of the human fall so vividly tries to illustrate, to which we now turn.

The Human Fall, the Two Trees, and the Two paths To understand moral evil more holistically, we need to turn once again to creation out of nothing and its limits. Creation is limited by an outer and inner boundary. The Creator, as the wholly other, is the outer boundary of creation and the non-being or the nihil out of which creation was created is the inner boundary, which permeates all creation. These two boundaries present the possibility of two different paths. Human life and (relative) freedom do not operate in a vacuum but are connected to two paths or

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possibilities within time, with two opposing principles of good and evil, and heading to two opposed ontological poles: an upward path toward perfection and being itself (God) and a downward path toward destruction and non-being. The two trees in chapter 3 of the Genesis narrative might be read as a story of how humans respond to God’s love and given freedom, essential in the path toward perfection. The Old Testament does not define “evil” nor does it give a clear explanation of its origin. It does, however, speak about its existence throughout its narratives. Evil occurs in creation, distorting and corrupting its divine purpose. The word “evil” occurs for the first time in Genesis 2, which describes the tree (‫ )‏עץ‬of the knowledge (‫ )הדעת‬of good (‫)טוב‬ and evil (‫)ורע‬, from which Adam and Eve are prohibited to eat by God’s direct command.47 The Hebrew word “‫( ”‏דעת‬knowledge), which derives from the root ‫( ‏ידע‬knowing) and occurs in the Fall narrative of Genesis 2–3, expresses both the intimacy between husband and wife (Gen. 4:1) and a personal knowing of God.48 In particular, it means to love and obey God, since the “verb yd‘ (‘to know’) never signifies purely intellectual knowing, but rather an ‘experiencing’, a ‘becoming acquainted with’”.49 In biblical terms, evil must therefore be seen as an anti-relational force, contrary to the life-giving relationship with God. Key here is the separation from God, the alienation between God and humanity through “knowing evil”.50 When seen through this lens then the temptation of eating from the “forbidden fruit”, affected by the deception of the promise of self-deification,51 symbolizes evil entering the material world. It is the actualization of misused freedom.52 Eating the fruit that God commanded not to eat disrupted the equilibrium between body and spirit53 and allowed two opposing principles – the knowledge of good and evil – to arise in humans together. This is in contrast to the case of the fallen angelic beings, who do not know this duality but instead only have knowledge of evil, without any good.

See Matthias Grebe, “The Problem of Evil”, in T&T Clark Companion to Atonement, ed. Adam J. Johnson (London: T&T Clark, 2017), 707–12. 48 See Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, trans. John H. Marks (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1961), 81, 89, and 103. 49 Ibid., 89. 50 The term “fallenness”, if used at all, should therefore be seen not first and foremost as an ontological category but rather as a relational one – the “fall” away from God, that is, separation from the Holy One and Giver of Life. It is the state of not living in relation with God which leads to sin, affecting the very center of a human being (holiness) and impacting the way a person lives, that is, a life not oriented toward perfection but instead toward self-destruction, self-contradiction, and self-imprisonment, toward the state of non posse non peccare. 51 Adam and Eve’s being deceived and tempted and their wanting to be like God is what led to them grasping the fruit. This stands in contrast to the very being of God, as revealed in Jesus’ kenosis (Phil. 2:6-8), who did not regard to be equal with God something to be “grasped”. 52 On the point of misused freedom, see Gregory of Nazianzen, “On The Theophany, Or Birthday of Christ”, in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series, Vol. VII, trans. Charles Gordon Browne and James Edward Swallow (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1894), 345–52, who explains that the Tree of Knowledge was not evil from the beginning, nor was it “forbidden because God grudged it to us . . . But it would have been good of partaken of at the proper time, for the tree was, according to my theory, Contemplation, upon which it is only safe for those who have reached maturity of habit to enter; but which is not good for those who are still somewhat simple and greedy in their habit”, 348. 53 See BL, 163: “Thus, the deception of Satan was a grandiose ontological provocation, which perverted the correct relationship between the constituent parts of man’s being.” 47

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The Privation of God’s Gift of Love We understand the difference of these paths, but the deeper question is: What is absent in the second, downward path? What is the privation? As seen in the “struggle of order against disorder”,54 the telos of creation is union and community rather than division and separation. God’s love for humanity, manifested in the freedom and inner determination given to humanity in the act of creation, must be received as a gift from God if human beings are to flourish. As love is free and actualized by freedom, creatures need to freely and humbly respond to God’s love, omnipotence, and wisdom in time, in their becoming. Humans are called to mirror divine love in their lives,55 not only to love and to be in union with their Creator but also to live in unity (John 17) and to selflessly love their neighbor, who is also created in the image of God. Thus, the human task is to grow and mature by overcoming the enmity, egocentrism, and self-love which separates individuals, in order to become “a family, a multi-unity bound by love, in the image of the Holy Trinity” (BL, 89). As God’s Holy Spirit is a gift of love, and love by definition is not coercive,56 God wants humans to make a free response toward him, humbling themselves before his wisdom and omnipotence, and gratefully accepting his love and thereby meeting their Creator. Nevertheless, humans can also actualize their God-given freedom to ignore God’s command to love God and neighbor (John 13:34), a command which calls creatures into relationship, and take a different path – one which instead seeks self-deification by one’s own means. The risk in God’s creating the world is that this gift of love can be robbed by self-blinding human self-determination, manifested in self-directed pride, self-love (a contradiction in terms!),57 egocentrism, and an arbitrary will toward self-deification. This in turn results in an obscuring of the image of God and a gradual extinguishing and finally loss of the love for God, turning to envy and hatred of God. Thus, where the bond of love starts to fade, where a person is continually rebelling and actively trying to cut this bond of the Spirit, a vacuum or privation eventually occurs. And it is here that space opens for “evil” as this privation can lead to self-centeredness and self-love (Luther’s incurvatus in se), rather than an understanding of the other as the subject of one’s love. We conclude this section by saying that evil ultimately arises from creaturely freedom. The story of the Fall of Adam and Eve explains the universal conditio humana. We read that it starts with a temptation from the outside. It is mediated and to some extent caused by human misunderstanding, naivete, ignorance, and confusion – a deception borne out of human curiosity and gullibility. This does not mean, of course, that humans are “off the hook”, bearing no responsibility for their own actions, as “the possibility of evil nestles in the human heart, in the freedom to love or not to love God” (BL, 161). Human evil is actualized when the human heart is tempted and this misdirected human desire is acted upon. But, for Bulgakov, it shows that there are layers of complexity added to

Dalferth, Malum, 342. Moltmann writes: “The creation of God’s image on earth means that in his work God finds, as it were, the mirror in which he recognises his own countenance – a correspondence which resembles him”, God in Creation, 77. 56 Daniel L. Migliore writes: “Our choices and actions are important. God ever seeks to lead us out of our hell of self-glorification and lovelessness, but neither in time not in eternity is God’s love coercive”, in Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 347. 57 See BL, 156: “Love cannot be monohypostatic, egocentric, self-directed. A self-lover has no one and nothing to love in the case of this identity of the subject and object of love.” 54 55

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human self-determination that are absent from the fall of angelic beings, and that human evil, without the interference from the outside, might not have “attained the scope that became accessible to in the fall with the participation of the dark spirituality of the fallen angels” (BL, 162). He writes (BL, 153): Evil arises in time, just as it has its end in time. One can say that, in a certain sense, evil is created by creatures (both angelic and human), but of course, not “out of nothing” (which is the character of God’s creation). Rather, it is created out of the creatures themselves, who are created by God. In this sense, evil is a parasite of being; it arises in being as its sickness. As a parasitic intrusion, however, evil is a temporary sickness with no existence of its own except “by the powers of life, by the creative energy that belongs to the world” (BL, 159). It therefore has no power to destroy creation as such but can nevertheless bring temporary corruption.

FREE WILL, SOUL-MAKING, AND SUFFERING We began by asking a series of questions, which included “why does an omnipotent God allow evil?” Some progress was made toward answering this question, saying that Godgiven freedom, rooted in God’s love, creates space for evil in the spiritual as well as the material world. If God were to abolish evil altogether, he would also have to take freedom away, and this would be contrary to his very nature, as God is “the One who Loves in Freedom”.58 Richard Swinburne argues that “the traditional free will defence which points out that a (libertarian) free choice between good and evil (logically) can only be brought about by allowing the agent to bring about evil”.59 Created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26), free will is part of our being in God’s likeness. It follows that if “God has the power to benefit or harm humans” then it is also logically conceivable, and indeed a great good (!), if these agents are given free choice and “a share in his creative work [and] have that power also”, as a “world in which agents can benefit each other but cannot do each other harm is one where they have only very limited responsibility for each other”.60 This share in responsibility is closely linked to the notion of being covenant partners with God, co-operating with him in the Kingdom. It is what Bonhoeffer calls responsible living for the other,61 a responsible life of service for the sake of the other. If God wants to give humanity a “share in creation, God has to allow them the choice of hurting and maiming, of frustrating the divine plan”.62 Swinburne goes on to explain that

See Barth, CD II/1, §28, 257–321. Richard Swinburne, “The Problem of Evil”, in Richard Swinburne: Christian Philosophy in a Modern World, ed. Nicola Mößner, Sebastian Schmoranzer, and Christian Weidemann (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2008), 15–31, 19. 60 Ibid., 19. 61 See Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Clifford J. Green, trans. Reinhard Krauss, Charles C. West, and Douglas W. Stott (DBWE 6; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005), 257–89 (section “The Structure of Responsible Life”), who writes: “Jesus . . . the Son of God who became human, lived as our vicarious representative . . . In this real vicarious representative action, in which his human existence consists, he is the responsible human being par excellence” (258f.). 62 Swinburne, “The Problem of Evil”, 20. 58 59

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a free choice which made no difference to the world would not be nearly as valuable a choice as one which made a difference. It would be a great good for humans to have libertarian free choices which allow us to exercise genuine responsibility for other humans, and that involves the opportunity either to benefit or to harm them.63 But this freedom of choice comes with a great and real responsibility, as well as with the risk of misuse, following the less good and/or evil desires to which we are subject, corrupting our character. The underlying notion of this freedom bestowed by the Creator is the process of “soul-making” or “character-forming” and the aligning of our desires and inclinations to the will of God – a gradual change from imperfection (posse non peccare) to perfection (non posse peccare), to which we now turn.64 Christian discipleship is about learning to walk in the ways of God. Unlike God, who is in a state of perfect holiness, humans are on a path toward perfected holiness in Christ, and this path, as we know especially from the Pauline letters and other New Testament writings, often entails suffering.65 We read in these writings that at times suffering provides the “space” to grow in character and obedience to God’s will. Even the Son had to learn obedience through suffering (Heb. 5:8), which perfected his human nature (Heb. 2:10).66 What is important to remember here is that not all suffering is evil as such, and a clear distinction should be drawn between suffering that can lead to flourishing and suffering that is wholly devoid of any redemptive quality.67 Hunger and thirst are not evil but part of what it means to be a human being, a being with a physical body with certain needs. Touching a hot plate and burning oneself is also not evil, just as grazing a knee when falling is not evil, whereas inflicting suffering upon another person in torture is what we consider evil. Furthermore, suffering not only shapes the heart and the mind but also gives the opportunity for “heroic” acts, in which we transcend ourselves and are able to show courage or solidarity with others or prevent evil from happening. In these times of self-sacrifice, suffering ceases to be suffering since we find meaning in it.68 When we help others who are suffering, the positive side-effect is that we grow and mature as humans. This does not of course mean that evil is necessary, as there are many opportunities for growth and self-sacrifice (acting against selfish desires) without evil, one example being raising a child. But through hardships an individual can attain certain virtues, such as

Swinburne, “The Problem of Evil”, 20. See ibid., 20. For more on “soul-making”, see John Hick, “An Irenaean Theodicy”, in Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, ed. Stephen T. Davis (Louisville: Westminster John Knox (Press), 2001), 38–72, and Evil and the God of Love, 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 65 Gunton, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, brings creation and redemption (re-creation) closely together when he writes sacrifice means “the offering of the perfected creation back in praise to God” (199). What Gunton tries to articulate is that Christ will offer creation, perfected, before the throne of his Father: “to be the created world is to be that whose perfection is to be expressed in the offering back to the creator, through Christ and in the Spirit, of his perfected work”, 200. 66 As Gunton writes: “Jesus is one who, having learned obedience through what he suffered – and that seems to refer not only to what we call the passion, but to the whole human life and experience of Jesus – offered to God the Father that perfected human life without which no other human life can be perfect”, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, 27. 67 See Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 68 See Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square Press, 1984), 135. 63 64

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patience, humility, and hope. In order to grow we need this “space” and the freedom to make choices as to how to respond to our circumstances in life. The same is the case with temptation. Overcoming temptation and misguided desire promote personal growth. This does not mean that all desires, even those for pleasure, are themselves inherently evil, and often they form part of what it means to live in a physical body. But they can of course be abused and thereby turned into what we might define as “evil”, for example in the case of hunger prompting someone to steal. It is, Swinburne writes, therefore good that we should have the opportunity (occasionally) to do such actions which involve resisting great temptations, because thereby we manifest our total commitment to the good. (A commitment which we do not make when the temptation to do otherwise is not strong is not a total commitment).69 For humans, these free choices are therefore necessary for character-forming or soulmaking, as we are not created perfect. All human choices are character-forming and “each good choice makes it easier to make the next choice a good one”.70 In this way, humans can “form their own characters”.71 As Swinburne contends, “by doing a just act when it is difficult – when it goes against our natural inclinations (that is our desires) – we make it easier to do a just act next time”.72 This aligning to the will of God is a gradual change of our desires and the freeing oneself from the “evil inclination” is not something a person does simply as an act of will, but the work of the Spirit of God within us (Phil. 2:13) who “perfects those who cannot perfect themselves by perfecting them in communion with God’s glorious being”.73 But of course, the overall danger with this free creaturely choice is that it can also be actualized for evil rather than good, leading to the corruption of the character (non posse non peccare) rather than perfection.

CONCLUSION Our investigation began with the question Unde malum? – Where does evil come from? Having defined evil as moral failure and rebellion against God’s will, we looked at Moltmann’s theology of creation and the Jewish concept of Zimzum, God’s selflimitation or contraction, the notion that God in Godself creates “space” for creation and thereby also for the potentiality of evil. We saw that if creation takes place in this vacuum of potentiality, then this potentiality includes the arise of both good and evil. We looked at Bulgakov’s argument that ultimately evil arises from creaturely freedom, and although evil is contrary to the perfect will of God and may offer no specific purpose, we saw in our investigation of Swinburne’s understanding of soul-making that evil in this finite world cannot be destroyed by God without simultaneously also destroying the greatest human good – freedom to develop on the path to perfection, which is God’s plan for his creation. Through God’s love and freedom, God calls and enables each individual to participate as a responsible human being for the flourishing of living together in love and fellowship Swinburne, “The Problem of Evil”, 20. Ibid. 71 Ibid. Here Swinburne turns to Aristotle, who said in Nichomachaean Ethics 1103b that “we become just by doing just acts, prudent by doing prudent acts, brave by doing brave acts”. 72 Swinburne, “The Problem of Evil”, 20. 73 Schwöbel, “The Generosity of the Triune God and the Humility of the Son”, 284. 69 70

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with others, on the path to perfection. But precisely because God is freedom and love, no person is compelled into this relationship of love – that would be contrary to God’s very being. Nor does God abolish the autonomy of his creatures when they abuse their creaturely freedom, but allows incoherent creaturely action when they live in both contradiction to God and self-contradiction. We discussed how moral evil, which began in the spiritual realm and seeped in the material world, is the willing rejection of God’s gift of love, the rejection of an intimate relationship with God the Creator. Human moral acts of evil stem from a willing misdirection of human desires: this might be in the individual’s failing to even attempt to overcome the division experienced in this world of duality, therefore contradicting their God-given, creaturely purpose (this lack of overcoming the division could be called sloth). Or it might stem from an unwillingness to overcome this division with the help of God and instead rely on one’s own ability (which could be called pride). It might even be found in the individual’s believing the deceptions of the world more than in the revealed word of God (which could be called falsehood).74 The Christian hope is that the experience of duality in life, struggle of good and evil, chasm between life and death, and space between God and world can be overcome in the new Christ-reality. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, in “Jesus Christ the reality of God has entered into the reality of this world”,75 joining heaven and earth. It is only by participating in Christ’s reality, through God’s gift of the Holy Spirit, that a person can overcome the duality experienced in this world and in their misdirected desires otherwise leading to sin and evil. This does not mean that the process of becoming and the path to perfection is annulled, as humanity still operates in a material world that awaits the renewal of all things, but it means that when an individual is in Christ, she is daily renewed by the Spirit (2 Cor. 4:16), and transformed more and more into the image of the Son (2 Cor. 3:18), the first fruit of the new creation, God’s prototype of the perfected human.

FURTHER READING Bulgakov, Sergius. The Bride of the Lamb. Translated by Boris Jakim. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002. See especially chapter 3 on “Evil”, 148–64. Cited as BL. Dalferth, Ingolf U. Malum: A Theological Hermeneutics of Evil. Translated by Nils F. Schott. Eugene: Cascade Books, 2022. McFarland, Ian A. “The Problem with Evil”. Theology Today 74, no.4 (2018): 321–39. Moltmann, Jürgen. The Trinity and the Kingdom of God: The Doctrine of God. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1983. Cited as TKG. Swinburne, Richard. Providence and the Problem of Evil. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.

See Dalferth, Malum, especially “II.3 Malum as Unfaith”, 245–86. Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 54.

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Chapter 39

Creation NADINE HAMILTON

THE GOODNESS OF CREATION A theology that inquires into the problem of suffering and evil in creation must begin with a description of creation itself. If we understand the world in a Christian sense as the work of the triune Creator, this confession has far-reaching consequences not only for a theology of creation but also for the questions that subsequently arise regarding suffering and the problem of evil in this creation. Here, two opposing attributes are at the center of attention: on the one hand, the creation that is declared “good” by God; and on the other hand, the suffering and the evil that appear time and again in this creation. However, if Genesis 3 does not revoke this goodness after the so-called fall and the exclusion from paradise, then the question has always arisen for the Christian tradition as to how the evil in God’s good creation, as well as God’s goodness in the face of this evil, is to be understood. Or, to put it differently, in the face of evil and suffering in creation, can we still speak of God’s good creation – and correspondingly of a good God? Considering that the Bible begins with the two creation narratives, it would seem that faith in creation ought to precede other articles of faith. However, both creation narratives are embedded in a broader context of faith about the nature of God, of creation, and God’s creatures.1 In them, though, there are no speculations about God’s nature and activity. They also do not seek to explain the origin of the world and hence do not stand in opposition to modern scientific theories. Rather, in these, the confession of the world as God’s creation presents itself as an existential question about the origin of existence. If humanity finds itself in the tension between the experience of cosmic order and destructive chaos, the questions of “the whence and the whither of life”2 confront it. A view to the beginning provides orientation for life itself. In this sense, the biblical accounts are to be understood as the narrative and discursive unfolding of the conviction that everything is from God, the Creator, and that we exist for and through God (1 Cor. 8:6)3. Accordingly, the biblical confession of God’s creative power did not arise from an intellectual need for an explanation of the world and does not refer primarily to an initial event in the past, but is inherently connected with the expectation of a salvific future, which are already evident in the present. The confession of God’s creative power

See David Fergusson, “Creation”, in Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology, ed. John Webster, Kathryn Tanner, and Ian Torrance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 72–90, 73. 2 Reinhard Feldmeier and Hermann Spieckermann, God of the Living: A Biblical Theology (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2013), 251. 3 This is very well illustrated by Martin Luther’s interpretation of the first article in the Small Catechism. 1

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is therein a confession of hope in God’s power to save creation despite suffering and evil. In the New Testament, this hope in the future of creation is understood to be brought to its end in Jesus Christ, when God, the Creator, confesses himself in the resurrection as Lord not only of life but also of death.4 Both creation narratives are therefore narratives of God’s grace. Both stories tell of the creation of the world as the free work of God, which receives its form and its nature only from God’s word. Both narratives can be read as complementary portrayals of the same stage-setting divine act. Genesis 1 recounts the story of creation in six days with its fulfillment in the seventh day as a day of rest. Genesis 2 focuses on human beings and their community; God is viewed not so much as the architect of creation and instead more as a caring father who seeks companionship for his human being. While both narratives portray the Creator in different ways – Genesis 1 as a transcendent, superordinate, almost numinous power, and Genesis 2 in an anthropomorphized conception of a potter and human counterpart – both narratives nevertheless make clear the all-dominating power of the Creator vis-à-vis his creation. If Gen. 1:1 is to be understood as a superscription,5 this does not make the theologumenon of creatio ex nihilo unnecessary.6 For even if the “chaos” (tōhû wābōhû, Gen. 1:2) is thought to be presupposed, it is not to be understood as an ontic category, but as a non-existent influence. Karl Barth takes up this point in critical reference to Augustine and Leibniz by adopting the old, axiological concept of being and the corresponding interpretation of evil as non-being, which he himself calls the “nothingness” (“das Nichtige”).7 Thus, although he sees evil in connection with creation, he understands it to be involved in creation only negatively as that which negates the good creation, the “no” that exists only by virtue of God’s non-will.8 Barth can thus make clear that, even if it cannot be assumed that Genesis 1 intends to speak of a creation of the world out of nothing, both Old and New Testaments unmistakably emphasize the strict distinction between Creator and creature, between God and world (cf. 2 Macc. 7:28; John 1:3; Rom. 4:17; Heb. 11:3). God is praised as the creative power. God is the Lord over the totality of the world and history, setting a beginning and an end for it. Genesis 1 thus opposes God’s creative activity to chaos. This chaos is even transformed into God’s counterpart.9 Accordingly, Genesis 1 describes God’s creative activity as an ordering and shaping activity that takes place in separating and distinguishing, dividing and setting boundaries. Ingolf Dalferth can sum up accordingly: “Creation is told as the ordering of the disordered, non-divided and undivided, and it is good because it creates a world ordered by boundaries in which human beings can live and orient themselves.”10 Where these boundaries are blurred or destroyed, there is injustice, and chaos in its destructive power re-enters creation. For Genesis 1, therefore, it is not the chaos, the disordered and the evil that is astonishing and remarkable, but the formed, the ordered, See Klaus Wengst, “Die Macht des Ohnmächtigen. Versuche über Kreuz und Auferstehung”, in Einwürfe 5. Umgang mit Niederlagen, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, Dieter Schellong, and Michael Weinrich (München: Kaiser, 1988), 155–79, 166. 5 See Russell R. Reno, Genesis, Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2010), 39. 6 Ibid., 39–46. 7 See CD III/3, §50. 8 See Johan B. Hygen, “Böse, Das”, in TRE 7 (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 1981), 13. 9 See Feldmeier and Spieckermann, God of the Living, 254. 10 See Ingolf U. Dalferth, Malum: Theologische Hermeneutik des Bösen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 421 (Translation: N.H.). 4

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and the good. It is not the question of Unde malum? that occupies Genesis 1, but the questions Unde, cur et a quo bonum?, the questions of why and whence of the good.11 Genesis 1 understands God’s Creatorship as this ordering and order-maintaining activity, which makes life in the world possible in the first place. For this, God the Creator is to be thanked for the good in creation and for the goodness of creation. In this sense, Dietrich Bonhoeffer can also understand the chaos as still honoring the Creator, since God can bring forth the formed from the formless. That Genesis 1 wants God to be recognized as God through God’s creative activity becomes further clear from the fact that at the end of each day of creation, God judges God’s work as “good” and creation as a whole even as “very good” (Gen. 1:31). Creation is not inherently good: God declares creation good, because God wants the creation to be recognized as the reflection of God’s own goodness (cf. Ps. 136:1 and more). The Creator thus endows the creation with God’s own goodness, in which creation becomes life-serving, its entire being directed toward the thriving of life.12 If creation is good in its participation in God’s goodness, it cannot be understood as divine in itself. Here, too, the ex nihilo is constitutive: in the relation between the Creator and the creation, it remains foundational that God remains distinct from it. The essence of creation consists only in its being God’s counterpart. Creation receives its goodness in the fact that God gives it order, as God’s counterpart. In this sense, the human being is also understood as the image of God (Gen. 1:26), for God’s goodness is reflected there, and humanity has a unique share in God and stands in a special nearness and relationship to God; the human being is created to be the counterpart of God. If humanity is set apart from its fellow creatures, this becomes at the same time its obligation to these fellow creatures. Human beings are destined to care for the creation; the preservation of the goodness of creation is expected of them (Gen. 1:28; 2:16). By describing creation as God’s ordering activity that must constantly restrain chaos, Genesis 1 conceives this creative activity not only as a one-time event “in the beginning” but as ongoing. The fragility of creation in the face of chaos is, for Genesis 1 and 2, a constant danger experienced in the reality of suffering and evil, which can only be prevented by God’s constant devotion. However, the materiality of creation is not therein devalued, as was often traditionally the case and to some extent still is today.13 For even if suffering, misery, and sin prevail in creation, it remains God’s good creation. Its goodness is not limited to a past age in Eden, as the Psalms point out in their praise of creation in a postlapsarian setting. Accordingly, creation cannot be understood as perfect in its original state either.14 Even though the eschaton has often traditionally been understood as a return to the original state in paradise, the Bible seems to understand God’s initial creative activity only as the beginning of this activity. In the New Testament, the focal point is revealed in God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ. God’s creative activity, as Jürgen Moltmann has made especially clear, is still awaited in the perfection of God’s creation.15

Dalferth, Malum, 421. John D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 12. 13 The idea of the material world as lower than the spiritual world in Christian theology dates back at least to Origenes and can still be found in different school of thought (e.g., that which relate to Calvin). 14 See Ferguson, “Creation”, 78. 15 Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: An Ecological Doctrine of Creation, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1985), 86–93. 11 12

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This shows that creation and eschatology are not two theological loci to be considered independently of each other. Creation and salvation are not subsequently connected topoi, resulting from the apostasy of creation. According to recent theological interpretations of Genesis (influenced by Jewish biblical interpretation), the seventh day of God’s Sabbath rest can be read as pointing to this very goal of perfection,16 a perfection which already receives its good nature through God’s free bond with creation, but which is still in danger of falling back into chaos time and again. It is, however, part of this work of creation that God fights chaos and evil to the end and ultimately conquers them.17 Karl Barth, who makes this connection between promise and creation the structure of his theology (“creation as the external basis of the covenant”, “the covenant as the internal basis of creation”),18 even wants to understand the possibility of apostasy or evil in creation as necessary for the Creator and creation to be understood as different from each other. Accordingly, he does not understand it as an imperfection of creation that the creature can lapse from its Creator and be lost. Rather, he sees in it nothing other than the fact that the creatureliness of the creature is constituted through its dependency on God’s sustaining grace, just as it already owes its existence to this grace.19 Barth can, in this sense, also say that the so-called fall of humanity was always already a possibility, which God included in God’s eternal counsel.20

SUFFERING AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL IN CREATION That God has created a good world is the tenor of the creation narratives, with which not only the Old but also the New Testament takes its starting point. Even if Genesis soon knows how to report that the goodness of creation is endangered by the first human couple, creation’s designation as “good” remains as a frame of reference throughout the two Testaments. While in Genesis 1 the goodness of creation stands in the foreground, Genesis 3 makes sure that the question of the whence and wherefore of the evil that has taken its place in creation is not neglected. However, it is arguably not the case that Genesis 3 treats the question of evil as a question of what G. W. Leibniz called “theodicy”: the question of whether God can still be called “good” and omnipotent in the face of evil in the world. Rather, the question is whether this creation can still be understood as “good” in the face of evil. It is to this question that Genesis 2f. intends to give an answer. This second (and actually older) creation narrative is the basis for the narrative of the socalled fall: the curse and the expulsion in Genesis 3. With the question of the relationship between Good and Evil at its center, and excluding non-viable explanations, this narrative also indicates the limits of human understanding.21 However, this narrative is not intended to answer the question of the origin of evil. Even though different interpretations have been formulated throughout church history in order to find an answer to this question, the narrative itself seems to nip each of these attempts in the bud. For, it clearly indicates that evil is present as a potentiality in the midst of the Garden of Eden, just as chaos is there “in the beginning” in Gen. 1:2. Even See Reno, Genesis, 60–4. Levenson, Creation, §2, 14–25. 18 See CD III/1, 96–330. 19 See CD II/1, 499. 20 See CD II/2, 165. 21 See Feldmeier and Spieckermann, God of the Living, 256f. 16 17

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though Genesis itself does not make this connection explicit, it is possible to consider theologically whether this evil is identical to the chaos “in the beginning”. However, this is not the theme of Genesis 3; instead, it is the relationship of human beings to evil. All the important motifs from Genesis 1 are essential for this: the goodness of creation and the Creator’s sharing of his own goodness manifested in it, and also the image of God in human beings, through whom God relates human beings to Godself in a way that God does not relate to any other creatures. The image of God, which distinguishes human beings in a special way from other creatures, and the prohibition in Gen. 2:17 against eating from the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, seem to be directly related. Often the transgression of this prohibition is seen as the reason for the possibility of free will, which is inherent in the likeness. In a theological sense, this means being able to make a choice, as Hermann Spieckermann and Reinhard Feldmeier point out, concerning the foundation, content, and goal of one’s life: either thankful ties to God as the creator of one’s life or self-determination through which one establishes, perceives, and decides everything and, thus, no longer remains a creature but seeks to become a creator of one’s self. The decision between freedom granted in obedience to the Creator and autonomous freedom without ties to the Creator is on the agenda.22 In his lecture on Creation and Fall, Bonhoeffer interprets this decision in a unique way, by understanding this decision not as the consideration of two possibilities, but instead as a commitment to the Creator as the only reality (Wirklichkeit) of the first human couple. Therefore, he cannot see the possibility of Adam and Eve disobeying God’s command as part of the reality of creation. If Genesis 3 recognizes the evil in the seductiveness of disobeying God, Bonhoeffer interprets Adam’s and Eve’s violation of the commandment as their attempt to be more pious for God than God had commanded them. In this respect, Bonhoeffer understands the transgression of the commandment not as a trivial matter but as a disordering of the entire relational structure between Creator and creature. In this respect, Bonhoeffer interprets the serpent’s question as the first theological conversation, the consequence of which is the tearing away of the creature from its Creator. Against Luther and a broad strand of Christian interpretation of this passage,23 however, Bonhoeffer interprets the serpent not as an incarnation of the devil but as a creature of God, albeit a cunning one. He sees the incomprehensibility and inexcusability of the deed as deepened even further, when he finds its ground neither in the nature of human being nor in the snake. Bonhoeffer thus clearly rejects the attempt to make the deed comprehensible and thus exposes every such attempt as a self-justification of humanity before itself. The origin of evil thus remains unexplained; the guilt lies entirely on the human being who, in his desire to be better, sets himself above the commandment of the Creator and makes himself the Creator.24 Bonhoeffer sees no possibility for human beings to be relieved of their guilt, but at the same time the goodness of creation is preserved. With Bonhoeffer’s interpretation, the so-called fall comes into view as the rupture between creature and Creator. The creature thus becomes its own God. The transgression of the divine commandment is in essence the negation of creation and insofar the victory of chaos over the well-ordered creation. The fall of humanity has, as its consequence, the fall of all creation. The question of the Unde malum? remains as little answered as the question Feldmeier and Spieckermann, God of the Living, 258. See more on that at Reno, Genesis, 77–85. 24 See Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 103–14. 22 23

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of the origin of chaos; only the human being is presented as a being who is seducible by evil. Creation itself thus proves to be good only in that it stands in a relationship to the Creator. Torn loose from this life-enabling bond, it sinks back into the chaos from which it was made in the beginning. Genesis 2f. thus makes clear what Genesis 1 implies with the seventh day: creation is to be understood as in need of redemption even in its goodness, because this goodness derives solely from its bond with the Creator. By itself, creation is not good; God alone is that for Godself (Matt. 19:17; Mark 10:18). God’s good creation, which is set against chaos, thus proves to be extremely vulnerable and is made so by creatures themselves, who desire to divinize themselves and also rule over creation. God’s curses in Gen. 3:14-19 punish the human couple as well as the serpent. However, the punishments are not to be understood as a rejection by the Creator. Rather, the Creator reveals himself as a God who does not want to be without a relation to God’s creation and creatures. Therefore, the punishments do not annul the blessing granted to the good creation in Gen. 1:22-28 and 2:3, but they do create a tension that sustains the whole history of God with God’s creation, culminating in Jesus Christ’s death on the cross: the good God is compelled to punish in order to maintain God’s relationship with creation.25 God thus stands in a struggle with evil for the entire history of creation, up to redemption. Along with the question of the Unde malum?, the question of God’s omnipotence and sovereignty arises. If creation simultaneously brings evil onto the scene, then the question of God’s sovereignty arises, which according to Genesis 3 seems to be understood rather as a containment of evil than as power over evil. However, the very concept of “omnipotence”, which has come to be well established in the history of Christianity and which the Nicene Creed also confesses, brings the question of God’s sovereignty over evil into focus, especially when omnipotence is equated with total sufficiency. Hardly any divine attribute is currently as theologically controversial as omnipotence, above all because of the question of theodicy, whether asked in order to reduce the idea of a God defined by omnipotence to absurdity or in the interest of exculpating God. In this context, omnipotence can be regarded as a biblical predicate of God only to a limited extent. In Hebrew there is no clear equivalent to it, and also in the New Testament there are only a few prooftexts (here the Pantokrator of 2 Cor. 6:18 occurs only again in Revelation). It is true that especially in the Old Testament, power and strength belong to the central characteristics of God),26 but there can be no talk here of an all-dominating power. The New Testament in particular shows this in the incarnation and the cross, where Christologically the idea of power is understood as the personified will of God for the salvation for God’s own. In this sense, also suffering also receives a special function, as Jesus’ way of life documents God’s renunciation of counter-violence.

CREATION AND REDEMPTION IN JESUS CHRIST The New Testament gives a clear question concerning the power of evil and God’s fight against chaos. But this answer turns out differently than expected. If Genesis seems to understand the overcoming of evil in creation as a struggle, the New Testament shows similar tendencies. In God’s incarnation in Jesus of Nazareth and his death on the cross, See Feldmeier and Spieckermann, God of the Living, 258. The extended proper name “Lord Zebaoth” or “Lord of hosts”, YHWH Ṣĕbāʾôt is translated in some biblical books in the Greek Old Testament as (κύριος) παντοκράτωρ, “(Lord,) Almighty”, see Feldmeier and Spieckermann, God of the Living, 149–99, 149f. 25 26

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however, God’s power is interpreted differently than it was in the creation at the beginning. When John’s Gospel and Paul (and also the rest of the New Testament) place creation and incarnation in a close interpretative context, the question of evil and suffering in creation receives a new answer: the focus is on the power of God in the suffering of the creature. The renunciation of power is understood not only negatively as powerlessness, as it was interpreted for example by Dorothee Sölle27 and Hans Jonas28 especially after the Holocaust, but also positively as God’s gift of Godself.29 Process-theological approaches, such as that of Paul S. Fiddes, go one step further, understanding this suffering of God with the world as the creative process of God’s development with creation. Here, against the early church tradition, and using Exod. 3:14, God is understood as a living reality whose perfection must be understood as entailing relationality and an open future. In this sense, God is understood as radically capable of suffering, so that Fiddes can even understand the suffering of creation as incorporated into God’s infinite being. God’s co-suffering in this sense is also the suffering of Godself, which means an open process of development not only of creation but also of the Creator toward an undetermined future. Accordingly, Fiddes can understand God’s suffering as his creative power from which the process of creation with the Creator develops in hope toward a future of consummation.30 However, God’s self-giving does not only become evident on the cross, but already in the interpretation of the whole creation through the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.31 Although there are only few passages in the New Testament that speak of Christ’s mediation of creation (these include 1 Cor. 8:6; Col. 1:15-18; John 1:1-3; Heb. 1:2f.), they are among the first and oldest Christian confessions.32 Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and God’s life-creating power of creation are closely connected, so that creation was soon understood completely in the light of the incarnation33 (without, of course, identifying Creator and creature in this theologumenon; the ex nihilo of God’s creative power is also preserved here, as is clearly shown in the four alpha privativa of the two-nature doctrine of Chalcedon). This also bestows creation and suffering a distinctive relevance: for if God’s entering this world must be understood not first as a reaction to the transgression of the first human couple, but instead as a principle of God’s creative activity, then a different way of dealing with evil and suffering in creation is called for. Traditionally, theology has often had difficulty understanding God as suffering (cf. doctrine of impassibilitas) because, following an abstract metaphysical understanding of classical ontology, suffering would seem to imply God as mutable (cf. doctrine of immutabilitas) and hence call God’s divinity and power into question. However, in view not only of the suffering experienced in the world but also of the confession of God in Christ as the mediator of creation, this understanding must receive a new direction. See Dorothee Sölle, Leiden (Stuttgart: Kreuz-Verlag, 1973). See Hans Jonas, “The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice”, in Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz, ed. Lawrence Vogel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 131–43. 29 See Feldmeier and Spieckermann, God of the Living, 198. 30 See Paul S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 144–73. 31 See more on that topic at Sean M. McDonough, Christ as Creator: Origins of a New Testament Doctrine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 32 See Michael J. Gorman, “The Work of Christ in the New Testament”, in The Oxford Handbook of Christology, ed. Francesca A. Murphy and Troy A. Stefano (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 72–86, 76. 33 See Rowan Williams, Christ the Heart of Creation (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 226. 27 28

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Here, process-theological approaches provide an important impulse: if creation in Christ is understood neither as an isolated initial event nor as something apart from the nature of the triune God, then an understanding of suffering in creation must also take on a different dimension as well as an understanding of God’s power in the face of this suffering. God’s power, God’s sovereignty, can then no longer rely on being opposite to creation. Instead, God’s presence in creation, through Christ in the Spirit, must be understood as participating in the suffering of the world from the beginning in God’s struggle against evil. In turn, the suffering in creation and the suffering of creation (Rom. 8:22) cannot be understood without the triune God. This suffering in the mediatorship of creation must therefore always be understood as suffering which God has already taken on, which God shares, and which God has already overcome in the cross and resurrection. It is in this context that the confession of God as Creator receives a significant role for the New Testament, as in this confession the hope of overcoming the power of evil and suffering is expressed. Jesus Christ’s journey to the cross documents God’s self-giving to creation (without being absorbed in it!), in that his power over evil lies in compassion in the beloved Son and therein with all creation. Jürgen Moltmann’s understanding of the suffering God takes up this theological unfolding of the theology of the cross when he points out that before God suffers in the world and with his creatures, he suffers in creation. By understanding the condition of this world’s existence in an act of God’s withdrawal, in which God makes room in Godself for the finite, for Moltmann God’s suffering already begins in this partial self-limitation of God through which the nothingness comes into being from which God creates the world. This suffering continues in God’s entering into this nothingness, from which the world remains threatened, and reaches its climax on Golgotha.34 Moltmann can thus make it unmistakably clear that the suffering of creation can be meaningfully understood only from the cross, but not in the sense of a tidy answer to any theodicy. Rather, a theology of the cross that has its starting point in the theology of creation testifies to the powerful presence of God in the midst of suffering and death. This does not imply a trivialization or suppression of suffering or evil. On the contrary, suffering and evil are seen not only as an enemy to be fought, but as a sign of God’s innermost participation in the fate of God’s creatures – who rebel against God (see also the Lucan parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15:11-32)35. God’s being creator must be understood in Christ’s mediatorship of creation accordingly as God’s immediate co-suffering in the self-inflicted and self-destructive aberration of God’s creatures: a co-suffering from which ultimately, however, the possibility of new life arises. God’s compassion toward creation is finally clearly revealed as self-giving in God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ. God’s power lies in the power to serve over God’s creatures, which as a power of devotion and grace sustains creation as a place of life and frees God’s creatures for a relationship with the Creator. God’s sustaining action after the transgression of the prohibition, which already begins with God’s calling human beings out of their hiding place (Gen. 3:9), must be understood in just this sense, if the preservation of creation, starting from this, cannot be understood solely as an action of God on creation, but instead as co-suffering with the creation.

Moltmann, God in Creation, 86–93. See Feldmeier and Spieckermann, God of the Living, 75–7.

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This compassion of God becomes particularly clear in Jesus Christ’s life and his suffering on the cross. When Jesus Christ, in his public work, turns to those human beings who are excluded from the community, the kingdom of God is not only conveyed by the fact that these human beings are accepted into the community, but that Jesus Christ makes himself one of them. Jesus Christ’s life itself stands for a life on the margins and thus for compassion with the excluded. This co-suffering is introduced here as vicarious suffering, when with the passion predictions the life story of Jesus Christ is already interpreted as salvation story (Mark 9:12 par.). The salvation proclaimed can be understood in this context in the restoration of communion with the Creator and among creatures, which Jesus Christ himself personifies and is only (again) possible through him. Yet God’s compassion for his creation is most clearly seen in Jesus Christ’s suffering on the cross. It is particularly noteworthy that Jesus Christ does not argue about God in the face of the suffering that besets him (Mark 14:35f.). His treatment of suffering and evil in creation can be understood as the New Testament’s response to the fact of evil and suffering raised in Genesis 3. Jesus Christ does not seek an answer to the question of the Unde malum?. Although he names God’s power and love (this even in the doubling of the Father’s address in the Aramaic Abba and the Greek ὁ πατήρ), they do not become for him an accusation against God as the author of evil. Rather, he asks the Father for his attention and thus for his intervention to avert what is coming. Trusting in God’s power (Mark 14:36), he places his fate entirely in the Father’s hands. In his spiritual trial, Jesus Christ does not wrestle with the question of theodicy, but with God and God’s power to take his suffering. This happens in prayer and thus in deepest communion with the Father.36 Hence, the Bible itself suggests identifying the question concerning the whence of evil, which arises with the so-called fall of the first human couple depicted in Genesis 3, as the wrong question. When Jesus Christ, in the darkest hour of his life, asks about the overcoming of evil and his Father’s will, this refers to the Bible’s own question and answer about suffering and evil in creation. The biblical interest in evil and especially in suffering in creation lies in their being overcome by God, who is revealed as the Father not only for Jesus Christ but for all. The Son of God’s wrestling with suffering can be understood as precisely this groaning of creation (Rom. 8:22), which awaits its redemption from bondage (Rom. 8:20). Jesus Christ in Gethsemane does not wrestle with the question of theodicy; instead, his wrestling with God the Creator reveals something else: the contestation, the lamentation, the wrestling with God is also part of the suffering of creation37 and thus of God’s compassion for God’s creation. The scene of Jesus Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane, which in all its harshness transmits the shocking silence of the Father, is in this sense an important reference point for a theological approach to the suffering in and of creation. Spieckermann and Feldmeier point this out accordingly: In Jesus’ sorrow over death and lament, it [the Christian community, N.H.] saw not only the abyss of the estrangement of Creator and creation, but, as the suffering of the Son of God, in the light of Easter, Gethsemane was also promise for it that even the most extreme experience of God’s darkness ultimately remains encompassed by the fatherly attention of God.38

See Feldmeier and Spieckermann, God of the Living, 377f. See also Jacob’s wrestling with God at the Jabbok in Gen. 32:25-31. 38 Feldmeier and Spieckermann, God of the Living, 379. 36 37

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As the Father of Jesus Christ, God no longer proves to be hidden behind the curtain of the temple, but in the lowliness of the cross. To those who believe and who experience God’s compassion in faith, it is precisely in suffering that God’s powerful presence can be tasted. The Gospel of John, which retells the story of the life of Jesus Christ from the perspective after Easter, can therefore radically reshape this scene in Gethsemane: the lament becomes a praise of the glorification of the Father in the Son (John 12:27-28).39 The passion story as the climax and anticipation of the Creator’s final struggle against evil is the promise of God’s presence even in the deepest suffering, and hence the sign of hope that suffering and evil do not have the last word. Where the cross implies the powerful presence of God in suffering, the suffering and evil in creation are neither trivialized nor repressed. Insofar as the suffering of creation, through Christ’s mediatorship of creation and through the cross, opens up hope for the prospect of the overcoming of evil and, in the resurrection, of consummation, this Christological perspective on creation and suffering as well as evil provides a clearer picture for a theologically meaningful approach to these themes. While the question of the origin of evil is neither biblically meaningful nor Christianly appropriate because there can be no (satisfactory) answer to it, the hope of overcoming evil and suffering is the fundamental tenor of the biblical scriptures. In the resurrection of Jesus Christ, suffering and the history of suffering of this creation is thus not justified; rather, it points to God’s protest, begun through Christ in creation, against a reality alienated from God (Eph. 4:18), which will finally find its completion in the resurrection as on the seventh day of creation (Gen. 2:1-3) in the Sabbath.

FURTHER READING Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics. Edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, 4 Vols. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–75. See Especially Vol. III/3: The Doctrine of Creation. Cited as: CD. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, Volume 3. Edited by John W. De Gruchy. Translated by Douglas S. Bax. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004. Feldmeier, Reinhard and Hermann Spieckermann. God of the Living: A Biblical Theology. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2013. Fiddes, Paul S. The Creative Suffering of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Levenson, Jon D. Creation and the Persistence of Evil. The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

See ibid., 379.

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Chapter 40

The Suffering of God PAUL S. FIDDES

Does God suffer? It is all too easy in answering this question to be caught in inconsistency. For most of the history of the Christian church the official answer was in the negative, which seemed to many thinkers to be necessary to maintain the distinction between God and created beings, and so to ensure the efficacy of atonement in Christ. But at the same time, affirmations were made about the compassion of God that tended to strain the logic of impassibility. During the twentieth century, theological opinion swung the other way to a positive affirmation of divine passibility, largely because of the problem of human suffering that had become acute during a period of two world wars, the Holocaust, and other acts of genocide and atrocity that became widely known due to modern communications. But there has been a tendency to affirm that God suffers without accepting far-reaching consequences for other traditional attributes of God such as omnipotence and omniscience, with the accompanying danger of a merely sentimental handling of the subject. In order to sort out the issues, I intend to review customary arguments for and against divine passibility from the perspective of theodicy, to consider whether a “both-and” approach offers a way through the impasse, and finally to advance a constructive approach to divine suffering which is consistent with comprehensive thinking about the nature of a God who creates and relates to a suffering world.

LOVE, EMOTIONS, AND SUFFERING Sensitivity to the problem of human suffering prompts the awareness that love itself always involves suffering. Truly personal love will involve the suffering of the one who loves; in a world marked by suffering, love must be costly and sacrificial, if only in terms of mental pain. Sympathy must be taken in its literal sense of sympatheia – “suffering-with”. This is because love is the sharing of experience, so that “concrete awareness of another’s suffering can . . . only consist in participation in that suffering”.1 This affirmation may be supported from another angle; love means at least a communication between persons, a self-expression of one to another in a way that creates true community, and this also will involve suffering. For we do not only communicate conceptually and verbally; suffering for and with another is a language that often penetrates more deeply than words and in a situation where community has broken down can be the only kind of language that can restore communication. So Daniel Day Williams suggests that “suffering’s greatest Charles Hartshorne, A Natural Theology for Our Time (La Salle: Open Court, 1973), 105.

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work is to become the vehicle of human expression”.2 Further, and more generally, we “suffer” the impact upon ourselves of the one we love, in the sense of being passive in our receptivity, even when this does not include pain. In love we allow others to make their own contribution to the relationship, letting them be themselves and so allowing them to change us. Genuine personal interaction means being affected by another. If the claim that “God is love” is to have any recognizable continuity with our normal experience of love, the conclusion seems to follow that a loving God must be a sympathetic and therefore a passible God. Traditional theology has nevertheless declined to draw that conclusion, and in its strongest impassibilist form has denied that God has any emotions at all.3 True love, it has been argued, is purely an attitude and action of goodwill toward another person; it is to will and achieve the good of another and has nothing to do with feelings. Those holding this view find it reflected in classical Christian writers. Augustine, for example, seems to distinguish between emotions and moral actions as far as the perfect love of God is concerned, writing “His is not the wretched heart of a fellow-sufferer . . . the pity of God is the goodness of his help . . . when God pities, he does not grieve [but] he liberates”.4 Anselm suggested that while God’s mercy is not actually compassionate (in the sense of suffering sorrow with us), it seems to us as if God were compassionate when we receive the effects of his mercy in our experience; in fact, confesses Anselm, “since You are impassible, you do not have any compassion”.5 Calvin maintains that when Scripture speaks often of God’s grief and compassion for his people this is a mere figure of speech which accommodates to our understanding, “in order to move us more powerfully and draw us to himself”.6 Aquinas asserted that love, like joy but unlike sadness or anger, can be an act purely of the will and the intellect, so that love can be ascribed to God as an intellectual appetite.7 In line with this earlier discussion of divine passions, the question of divine passibility has recently been conceived by philosophers as subordinate to the prior question of God’s emotional state.8 Some defenders of divine impassibility have maintained that Augustine, Aquinas, and other earlier theologians do not in fact exclude all emotions from God, but only those that are irrational, immoral, uncontrollable, and disruptive to God’s bliss.9 Noting that Augustine and Aquinas distinguish between two kinds of human emotional phenomena, involuntary passiones and voluntary affectiones, it is suggested that God’s

Daniel Day Williams, The Spirit and the Forms of Love (Welwyn: James Nisbet, 1968), 183. Paul Helm, “The Impossibility of Divine Passibility”, in The Power and Weakness of God, ed. Nigel M. de S. Cameron (Edinburgh: Rutherford House Books, 1990), 131; James E. Dolezal, “Strong Impassibility”, in Divine Impassibility. Four Views of God’s Emotions and Suffering, ed. Robert J. Matz and A. Chadwick Thornhill (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2019), 15–17, 28–32. 4 Augustine, Contra Adversarium Legis et Prophetarum 1.40, trans. J. K. Mozley, The Impassibility of God: A Survey of Christian Thought (London: Cambridge University Press, 1926), 106–7. 5 Anselm, Proslogion 8, trans. M. J. Charlesworth, St Anselm’s Proslogion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 125. 6 Calvin, Commentary on Isaiah 63:9, trans. W. Pringle (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1853), 346–7. 7 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1a.20.1. 8 See Marcel Sarot, God, Passibility and Corporeality (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1992), 29–30; Anastasia Philippa Scrutton, Thinking Through Feeling. God, Emotion and Passibility (New York: Continuum, 2011), 2–6, 55–63; also Anastasia Scrutton, “Divine Passibility: God and Emotion”, Philosophy Compass 8/9 (2013): 866–7; R. T. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 59–65. 9 See R. T. Mullins, “Why Can’t the Impassible God Suffer? Analytic Reflections on Divine Blessedness”, TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 2, no. 1 (2018): 3–22. 2 3

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love and mercy are more akin to the latter as subjectively warm states10 or “God-befitting emotionally coloured characteristics”.11 The love of God for the world is, in this view, not just good will but “intense passion” and “compassion”.12 In this view God is both impassible and “impassioned”,13 and while some analogy with human emotions is thus affirmed, this impassibilist approach also stresses the differences. There is, however, a wide variety of ways in which theologians and philosophers holding to God’s impassibility aim to attribute emotions or passions to God. Some think that a passionate concern of God for the world can be consistent with insisting that God is not affected by anything external to God’s self, and that God does not experience change of any kind. For Thomas Weinandy, for example, the passion in God is generated by the eternal love of the members of the Trinity for each other, and while it is extended in divine generosity to the world it is not in any way caused by the world.14 Such thinkers hold to a tight package of divine attributes, including immutability, timelessness, simplicity, and pure activity. The explanation for a contingent and changing world is found in a creator who is unchanging, a worldview that has at times been influenced by Plato’s two worlds of Being and Becoming. A totally immutable God cannot suffer, since suffering necessarily involves change, and such a God will be timeless, dwelling in an eternal present that lacks any succession of “before” and “after”.15 In a God who has “simple being”, all essential attributes are identical to each other, and so one “part” of God cannot alter while others remain the same, as is required by the notion of change and suffering.16 This God is also “pure act” (actus purus) and so there is no movement from the potentiality to actuality which would be required by suffering.17 Other impassibilists think that it strains consistency of thought to combine passionate concern with a state of being totally unaffected by the world, and they can see truth in the view that a God of love must be emotionally affected by suffering in the world. Impassibility is nevertheless maintained by envisaging God as selecting from a range of responses to the world that are eternally conceived and willed in God, and as applying them in a way suitable for the situation which obtains at any particular time.18 God is thus “both invulnerable to involuntarily precipitated emotional vicissitude and supremely passionate about his creatures’ practice of either obedience or rebellion”.19 Such a God

Scrutton, Thinking Through Feeling, 53. Paul L. Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 51. Richard E. Creel, “Immutability and Impassibility”, in A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, ed. C. Taliaferro, P. Draper, and P. L. Quinn, Second ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 326–7 now allows for a change in God’s feelings, correcting his former view in his Divine Impassibility: An Essay in Philosophical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 113–40. 12 Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., Does God Suffer? (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 59. 13 Robert Lister, God Is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion (Nottingham: InterVarsity Press, 2012), 216. 14 Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, 123–4, 129–35. 15 Rory Fox, Time and Eternity in Mid-Thirteenth-Century Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 226–7. 16 Creel, “Immutability and Impassibility”, 322–3. 17 Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, 120–2. 18 Lister, God Is Impassible and Impassioned, 225–6; Creel, “Immutability and Impassibility”, 325; see earlier, Creel, Divine Impassibility, 82–101. Creel thus thinks that God is passible in knowledge of the world but not in will. 19 Lister, God Is Impassible and Impassioned, 153. 10 11

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might also be described as “voluntarily responsive” and “emotionally responsive”,20 but never “passive”.21 All emotions as we know them in our experience involve movement, a “motion” from one mood to another, and so a change in feeling. Those who think that God is prompted to make a certain response by something – especially suffering – in the world admit that this implies an emotional change, and thus they are compelled to modify the attribute of immutability in God, while holding generally to the package of attributes traditionally connected with impassibility. Although God is held to be immutable in nature and in will, an exception is made for divine feelings. In this view, God does undergo change, but it is a change which is entirely driven by God’s own internal will, and by God’s control of divine emotions. By contrast, those impassibilists who exclude any kind of change in God must deny that the passions in God have any analogy to the movement of human feeling at all. Weinandy, for example, denies firmly “that God experiences inner emotional changes of state . . . whether freely from within or being acted upon from without”.22 These diverse views about impassibility nevertheless have one constant feature: all divine feeling about the world is entirely voluntary on God’s part and is a response controlled by the will of God. To maintain divine impassibility means that nothing “happens” to God from outside the divine life which can cause God to suffer involuntarily; if this were the case, the argument runs, the distinction between creator and created would be lost. Recent modified accounts of impassibility, allowing for emotions and even passions in God appear to be provoked by the question of how to envisage the love of God in the face of human suffering, just as theodicy is a concern for those who affirm the suffering of God. Perhaps surprisingly, however, some advocates of divine suffering take a similar view of God’s emotion to impassibilists, stressing God’s emotional control. As Marcel Sarot puts it, “God may be influenced by the world, as long as this influence is subject to his will”, so that “God remains master of his own passibility”.23 When Sarot writes of the divine suffering being subject to the will of God, he means a continuous “self-restraint” of God, which God “can end . . . whenever he wants to, and this means that he can interfere whenever he wants”.24 Sarot thus affirms a “qualified form of passibility” in God in which God is passible but never passive, since God has command over any impact from outside. Moltmann seems to take a similar approach when he declares that God’s suffering is “the supreme work of God on God himself”.25 It seems quite difficult to distinguish “qualified impassibility” from this “qualified passibility”,26 but we can detect a shift of thought. For the first group God is affected only indirectly, in the sense that God has an affective life which is lived in voluntary emotional response to the world, so that God can experience emotion “as an affect”.27 Those who take this direction of thought generally avoid simply saying that God is “affected by” the Mullins, “Why Can’t the Impassible God Suffer?” 15. Creel, “Immutability and Impassibility”, 323. 22 Weinandy, Does God Suffer? 39. 23 Sarot, God, Passibility and Corporeality, 66, 41. 24 Ibid., 55. 25 Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom of God: The Doctrine of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1981), 99. 26 Daniel Castelo, “Qualified Impassibility”, in Divine Impassibility, ed. Robert J. Matz, and A. Chadwick Thornhill (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2019), 53–74, presents himself as a “qualified impassibilist” but seems to be a qualified passibilist, as the responses to him by James Dolezal and John Peckham make clear. 27 Lister, God Is Impassible and Impassioned, 231. 20 21

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world, since impassibility requires that God is not acted upon by anything external to God. Nevertheless, it must be the case that the world is indirectly affecting God, as is indicated by the admission of Richard Creel, a stout impassibilist, that “God is emotionally touched by the joys and the sufferings and the good and the evil actions of God’s creatures”, distinguishing between God’s being “emotionally touched” and “emotionally crushed” by their experiences and actions.28 In the second group, the world affects God in the sense that it makes a direct effect upon God, but only as long as God wills it. Sarot, for instance, thinks that God can apply a kind of filter on the nature of this influence. He argues that this has some analogy with human experience, since he believes that in personal relations both partners have the “ability to choose freely how they will act and react towards the other”.29 For Sarot, personal relations are thus different from “causal relations”, which he defines as those “in which ‘passion’ is caused within the being by something outside the being overpowering its will”.30 In this case the subject experiencing such an impact upon herself is “nothing more than a passive victim”. Thus, Sarot argues that personal and causal relations in human life exclude each other, and only personal relations are suitable for God. However, just as those adopting a “qualified impassibility” must surely admit an indirect effect of the world on God, those like Sarot who espouse a “qualified passibility” must admit some causation of the world on God. It is the nature of a “personal relation” of love to allow the other to be the cause of change in the one who loves; in love this is not a “causal manipulation”,31 as the beloved does not seek to “overpower” the will of the other or to make the lover into a “passive victim”. Beyond these often blurred attempts at a midway point between passibility and impassibility, a strong affirmation of divine suffering finds it impossible to maintain the distinction between voluntary and involuntary emotions, whether this is arrived at from an impassibilist or passibilist standpoint. Suffering by its very nature “happens” to sufferers, and it must be at least partly beyond their control if it is not to be a kind of masochism. Without assuming that divine emotions are exactly the same as human emotions, I am arguing in this chapter that if we want to talk of empathetic divine suffering, we must accept that God is vulnerable to something that “happens” to God or “befalls” God, and which transgresses God’s purpose in creation.32 Teasing this out requires us to consider the question of theodicy – how human suffering might be compatible with a loving creator.

THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING In beginning to grapple with the mystery of evil and suffering in a created universe, the so-called free-will defense offers, I suggest, the least inadequate approach.33 Christian Creel, “Immutability and Impassibility”, 326. Sarot, God, Passibility and Corporeality, 40; similarly, Jung Young Lee, God Suffers for Us: A Systematic Enquiry into a Doctrine of Divine Passibility (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 41. 30 Sarot, God, Passibility and Corporeality, 34. 31 Ibid., 40. 32 Paul S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 62–3, 213. 33 For a critique of the free-will theodicy, see Part IV, Chapter 7 of this volume. Alvin C. Plantinga attempts to argue the strongest form of the free-will defense, that there could not be any possible world containing moral good without moral evil: see God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), 34–53. But all that is necessary for my argument is that there could not be beings exactly like us in the world we know without the freedom to do evil: see Fiddes, Creative Suffering of God, 33–5. 28 29

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theology affirms that God is the kind of creator who makes a universe that has a freedom to be itself. In the Christian view, God’s purpose in making the universe was to make many living beings with whom to enter into relationship, beings who could enjoy the interweaving fellowship of divine love such as God knows in God’s own triune being, and who could be co-creative with God. Such beings need a great deal of freedom, which will involve suffering, in at least two ways. First there is the suffering that seems to be built into the very process of growth and development. In the evolution of sentient beings, let alone persons, there is a painful journey in which sacrifices have to be made by some for the sake of others. Further, if creation is to be free, then there is also randomness and chance in events, a chaotic element that will in itself create some pain.34 Such “natural suffering”, as we may call it, becomes an evil when it is excessive, when it is far more damaging than seems to be necessary for the basic education of moral persons.35 Second, there is a horrendous risk that creatures will misuse their freedom, turning away from the good purposes of the creator and working out their own selfish desires, with the consequence of the suffering entailed in disrupting the flourishing of life. This picture of free will must not be taken to mean that any particular sufferers have misused their freedom for evil ends, and this is why they are suffering. That is the argument of Job’s friends, which the biblical poem rejects. The point is rather that humankind as a whole uses its freedom to turn away from God’s aims for creation and leaves a network of malign influences for future generations. Further, since the existence of excessive evil in the natural world cannot be entirely attributed to human moral evil, if the argument from freedom is to be at all convincing we need to extend it into the whole range of nature. We must hold a vision of a universe in which there is a capacity for response or resistance to the creative Spirit of God at every level of existence, analogous to a free human response.36 This is not to suggest that there is a universal mentality in the universe, but that there is some “family-likeness” to human consciousness for which as yet we have no suitable language except poetry, such as the biblical imagery of a “covenant” between God and every living thing, and the “groaning” of the universe in frustration.37 Attempts at a more technical language, such as the process descriptions of the mutual interaction of subjective and objective poles of all entities,38 must in the end be counted as imaginative models. Even such an extended “free-will defense” does not justify God in the face of suffering, since a divine creator must remain ultimately responsible for a world with such dangerous freedom within it, even if not immediately responsible for particular instances of suffering. The fundamental question, as posed by Dostoevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov, is this:

Gloria L. Schaab, The Creative Suffering of the Triune God: An Evolutionary Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 133–5. 35 Hick, Evil and the God of Love (Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1985), 304–9, 318–22, argues for the “educational” principle in suffering. 36 Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil (Louisville: Westminster John Knox (Press), 2008), 61–4, argues this, but only with regard to all sentient beings. 37 Gen. 9:16-17; Hosea 2:18; Rom. 8:19-22. 38 See A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: Macmillan Press, 1967), 27–39, 163–6, 373–5, 519–33; Lewis S. Ford, The Lure of God: A Biblical Background for Process Theism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 82–5; Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 134–8. 34

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“Is the whole universe worth the tears of one tortured child?”39 Even if persons can be created only through suffering, and even if all persons will be fully formed in an eternal state, the question remains: Is it worth it? There can thus never be a complete theodicy, since this question calls for evaluation, and so for a leap of faith. Yet careful thinking can build a platform from which the leap can reasonably be made, and this requires, I suggest, a basic criterion. A free-will defense must be strengthened by the belief that God shares the suffering that flows from the risks of creation. Only the fact that God suffers in God’s own self can make credible the tracing of suffering to the free will of creation; if a God of love exposes creation to risk, God will face the risk with those God has made. In accord with this partial theodicy, several affirmations can be made about the suffering of God. First, a radical freedom of created beings will be bound to cause suffering in God, in terms of the frustration of divine purposes and desires, if only in the interim situation before an overcoming of evil and the fulfilling of the project of creation by God, about which more in a moment. This is a painful experience for God that the Old Testament prophets describe in colorful language of disappointment.40 A loving relationship allows the risk of freedom to the other, and therefore involves hurt; in our own time, for example, we must surely say that God’s aims for human life were savagely frustrated by the horror of an Auschwitz. Second, if God gives away freedom to creation in a humble act of self-limitation, God is allowing something strange and alien to emerge from God’s own creation. There is some destructive element that God has not purposed, something to be confronted and therefore suffered. Since the early Church Fathers, evil has been named “non-being”,41 asserting that it has no real existence of its own but is simply a turning away from the Good. Because creatures have been raised to be something “from nothing” (ex nihilo) – not a hostile but a neutral nothing – they can slip toward nothing, and it is this drifting away from the Good (deprivatio boni) that is an aggressive nothingness.42 This is familiar enough territory in presenting the classical free-will defense. But the implication not always drawn is that if evil issues from creation through the free will of the creatures, it is something that happens to God; it befalls God. The creator does not make it, and so has to endure it.43 To conceive this situation is not to deny the aseity or self-existence of God, but it is to refute the traditional association of aseity with a state of being totally unconditioned. The creator God who owes existence to nothing else, and so is infinitely different from the created, can still allow God’s self to be conditioned by an impact from what is alien. Such a God cannot be timeless, since suffering involves successiveness of experience, a sequence which is intensified if God submits to the emergence of some unpurposed event. But God can still be held to have a different relation to time than created beings have, always bringing past, present, and future into harmony whereas – as Augustine observed – the passing of time only fragments human life.44 All this means, third, that God will suffer in solidarity with a suffering creation. Moreover, in accord with the extended theodicy of freedom I have been advocating,

F. Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. D. Magarshack (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), 287. E.g., Hosea 11:8-9; Jer. 12:7-11, 31:20, 45:3-5; see Fiddes, Creative Suffering of God, 19–25. 41 E.g. Athanasius, De Incarnatione, 4–5. 42 Augustine, De Civitate Dei 11.9; Enchiridion 4.13–14; On Free Will, 3.1, 2, 18; cf. Origen, De Principiis 2.9.2. 43 Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God, 210–29. 44 Augustine, Confessions 11.26. 39 40

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this will be a sympathetic involvement with every level of the organic world, and certainly with all sentient beings. Believing this offers, in part, a “practical theodicy” that does not attempt to vindicate God in the face of evil and suffering, but that offers the consolation to human sufferers that God feels as they feel, and so an assurance that they are not abandoned but held in a divine communion of love. As Jürgen Moltmann interprets the involvement of God in the cross of Jesus: “Only if all disaster, forsakenness by God, absolute death, the infinite curse of damnation and sinking into nothingness is in God himself, is community with this God eternal salvation.”45 Through the cross of Jesus, God is the God of all the forsaken, and shares in their own protest against suffering as an alien presence in creation.46 The retort of impassibilist theologians is that it will be of more comfort to a sufferer to know that there is a divine Power which is immune to evil and suffering, and which may therefore offer some hope that evil will be finally overcome.47 It may also be objected that God can be omniscient in the sense of knowing what suffering is like, without having to feel suffering as an actual part of God’s own experience.48 But, as Creel suggests, what really matters is that God should not be “crushed” by the experience of God’s creatures. The question, then, is how evil can be overcome. If evil is indeed “nothing” but a slipping of created persons, other sentient beings and even things, away from the Good, evil cannot be overcome like an enemy in battle, but only by the attraction of what is created back to the creator. Evil itself is not a person or a thing to be eliminated. This means the need for power, not of conquest, but of persuasive love, and this takes form precisely in the empathetic engagement of God in creaturely lives. In this perspective, only the weakness of suffering love can overcome evil, and this love is never “crushed” because God has infinite resources of love and can always take the initiative of offering new possibilities for the flourishing of life when one or other lure toward the Good is rejected. So a theodicy of consolation becomes a theodicy – partial though it must remain – which is a coherent argument for God’s doing everything that is possible to defeat evil.

THE SUFFERING OF AN IMPASSIBLE GOD? Earlier, I reviewed attempts to find a middle ground between the impassibility and passibility of God, qualifying one or other stance by the strengths of the other. But there have also been attempts to accept change and futurity in God, and yet simultaneously retain the image of God as unchanging, timeless, and unconditioned – so envisaging a God who is both passible and impassible at once. That is, God’s transcendence over the world and God’s immanence in it may be simply driven apart into two compartments of the divine Being. A nineteenth-century theologian, Martensen, pictured this as like an inner Holy of Holies in God’s life where there is timeless peace and untroubled bliss, while in the outer courtyard there is all the hurly-burly of time and history.49 More subtle distinctions drawn are between God in essence and activity, or between necessary and contingent natures of God. Some hinterland is reserved in God which is Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. R. A. Wilson and J. Bowden (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1974), 246. 46 Ibid., 252–3; Fiddes, Creative Suffering of God, 221–9. 47 Creel, Divine Impassibility, 154–6. 48 Scrutton, Thinking Through Feeling, 96–101; also Scrutton, “Divine Passibility”, 870–1. 49 H. H. Martensen, Christian Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1866), 101. 45

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untouched by the world, and this is named transcendence. Abraham Heschel, for instance, graphically describes a Hebrew prophet’s feeling of sympathy with the pathos of God, while nevertheless excluding pathos from the very “being” of God; it is “modal” and not “essential”.50 Karl Barth conceives of the dual dimension in terms of the traditional doctrine of the immanent and the economic Trinity, or the difference between “God in himself” and “God for us”,51 and process thought proposes a “dipolar theism” of absolute and contingent aspects in God. For the process thinker Whitehead there is a distinction between a “primordial nature”, which is independent of the world as an “uncaused cause”, and a “consequent nature”, which is immersed into the world and feels all its suffering.52 For Charles Hartshorne, God’s “abstract essence” is an immutable potential for the definite possibilities that only emerge in interaction between God and the actuality of the world in the “concrete states” of God; here the contrast, he suggests, is like that between the enduring character of a person and his or her varying experiences.53 In a Christological variation of this dipolarity in God, the suffering of Christ in his ministry and crucifixion has been attributed only to his human nature and not to his divine nature. While some theologians, such as Luther, have protested against such a merely verbal “exchange of attributes” (communicatio idiomatum) between two natures in one person,54 they have often ascribed (like Luther) to the alternative proposal that the divine Logos in Christ suffers only during the period of the incarnation.55 That, then, is a version of the distinction between God in eternal essence and temporal activity. While not holding to this kind of Christology, Thomas J. Oord has revived the notion of a God whose nature is “immutable and impassible”, while God’s experience is passible. A distinctive note in Oord’s approach, however, is that an “essential attribute” of this impassible nature is love for what is other than God, so that God must necessarily suffer in loving sympathy with creation.56 All these dipolarities seem unsatisfactory in the face of the urgent claims of the problem of suffering in the world. Employing Barth’s own language against him, a God of love must truly “correspond” in outer actions and inner being,57 without some impassible reserve of safety from the risks to which creation is exposed. Taking up Harthorne’s personal analogy for God, the enduring character of a human person is not in fact unaffected by experiences, since persons always exist in relationships. What surely matters is that God should not be unstable in character, rather than immutable; what cannot change if God is to remain God is a moral consistency and a faithfulness in love, and these can persist through deep changes in being which are the effects of experience. The Christian symbol

Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 225–6, 229. Compare the immanent Trinity in Karl Barth, CD II/1, 40, with the economic Trinity in CD IV/1, 187; II/1, 313. See Church Dogmatics, ed. and trans. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, 14 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936–77), hereafter quoted as CD. 52 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 46–50, 134, 522–4. 53 Hartshorne, Divine Relativity, 81, 92–3; Hartshorne, Natural Theology, 27, 44, 46; Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1970), 232–4. 54 See Luther, Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper (1528), American Edition, General Editor H. T. Lehmann, vol. 37 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1961), 209–11. 55 Gavrilyuk, Suffering of the Impassible God, 173–5. 56 Thomas Jay Oord, “Strong Passibility”, in Divine Impassibility, ed. Robert J. Matz, and A. Chadwick Thornhill (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2019), 142–3; see Oord, The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2015), 144–9. 57 Barth, CD I/1, 371; cf. II/1, 271. 50 51

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of Trinity stands against all forms of dipolarity, suggesting a participation of created beings in an interweaving of three movements of love, where God is not “a personal being” (or three personal beings) but “personal” because supremely relational. Here, transcendence does not stand in contrast to immanence, but is about the inexhaustibility, the undefeatability, and the “eternal more”58 of love. All such language about God must, of course, be metaphorical or analogical. Since God is unique and incomparable, as the supreme mystery beyond categorization, no literal account of God is possible. Negative attributes such as “impassibility”, “immutability”, “timelessness”, and “simplicity” (non-complexity) are in fact as much assertions about the nature of God as are the positive attributes of – say – love, temporality and passibility. Negative descriptions do not ensure the apophatic humility with which we must finally approach God. The question is what language is most appropriate for God, given a community’s experience of God and the world, and I suggest that – in light of the world’s suffering – it is more appropriate to say that “God suffers” than that “God does not suffer”.

CONCLUSION: THE SUFFERING OF GOD WHO REMAINS GOD A suffering God thus remains God, not because of a distinction between essence and activity, but because suffering is part of the active purpose of God rather than a destiny before which God is merely a victim. In light of my discussion throughout this chapter, this statement needs careful nuancing. In moments of suffering, God cannot entirely control the impact of suffering or its effect on God’s emotions, or it would not be recognizable suffering, but God has freely willed that suffering should befall God in this way. In the theodicy I propose, God does not directly cause God’s own suffering (a kind of divine masochism) in order to be sympathetic, but God is the final cause of the emerging of excessive suffering from creation as something strange to God and unintended by God. The final root of divine suffering is thus the purpose of God in creation, for which the terms “willing” and “desiring” are both appropriate, the first highlighting the freedom of God and the second its loving character. Oord proposes that the final reason for the passibility of God in relation to the world is an essential attribute of love in God’s nature, but I suggest that active moments of willing and desiring in love are more ultimate still. The symbol of the Trinity affirms that God exists in act,59 rather than static being: God is what God wills and desires to be. We may perhaps find a witness to this truth in the ancient traditions of God as “simple” (and so a unified activity) and actus purus, though they are misleading in denying complexity and potentiality in God. The God who grants freedom is “the one who loves in freedom” (Barth’s phrase)60 and so it is more “appropriate” to a free-will theodicy that God should be bound only by God’s own free actions and not by any nature or essence that lies behind the act of loving justly. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory, vol. I: The Truth of the World, trans. Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 142. 59 See Barth, CD II/1, 263: “with regard to the being of God, the word ‘event’ or ‘act’ is final.” In Paul S. Fiddes, Participating in God: A Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2000), 37; I identify three acts of “sending”, “glorifying”, and “opening up” within the Trinity. 60 Barth, CD II/1, 301, 307. 58

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Locating the suffering of God in God’s own will and desire preserves the sovereignty of God, but it does not mean that God’s vulnerability to suffering is arbitrary, as if God could withdraw at any moment from a passible relationship, as Oord fears.61 God’s covenantal will to give freedom to creation is primordial, in the sense that God is what God wills to be in creativity, and so there can be no other God than the one who is committed to this painful relationship.62 Thinking consistently, we must even say that God freely chooses to be in need, since a God who is vulnerable to suffering will need to have this alleviated by the loving response of created beings.63 The conclusion must also, unsentimentally, be drawn that some suffering will be eternal in God. The point is not that evil will survive eternally, in the sense that there will always be a slipping of creatures from the Good, even though they be glorified. A free-will theodicy requires that all created beings can achieve final transformation and enjoyment of an unlimited common good,64 and yet God will know that persons in communion with the triune God are not entirely what they could have been. Some possibilities will not have been fulfilled, and the God who feels and values the worth of every life will also (as Charles Hartshorne puts it) be open “to the tragedy of unfulfilled desire”.65 Impassibilist thinkers deny that the blessedness of a perfect God can be disturbed by suffering; Mullins, for instance, claims that God has such “an emotional evaluation of Himself as the supreme good . . . that nothing could possibly disrupt His happiness”.66 But there is surely no reason why bliss and regret at what has been lost cannot exist together in a “tragic beauty”,67 and this ability to hold extreme states together can itself be seen as a sign of perfection.68 We can, of course, only think in this way if we deny the neoclassical view that in God all potentials are always perfectly actualized, since God will embrace some potentials that have either not been actualized at all, or which have been modified by the choices and creative freedom of God’s creatures. But then, we can agree with process thinkers such as Hartshorne, that the omniscience of God is perfectly satisfied by God’s knowing all potentials and all actualities there are, without knowing what is potential as actual.69 Such omniscience is congruent with the concept of a passible God, who in self-limitation allows created reality to make an impact upon the very being of God, causing divine suffering and also enhancing divine satisfaction. Such a God is not the eternal victim of the universe, disabled and broken by suffering, since passionate love can absorb suffering and transform it. Indeed, it is at the heart of the

So Oord, “A Strong Passibility Response”, in Divine Impassibility, ed. Robert J. Matz and A. Chadwick Thornhill (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2019) 121–3; cf. Oord, Uncontrolling Love, 147. 62 So Barth, CD II/2, 6, and II/1, 272: “God is His own decision”; but Barth spoils this perception by insisting that God might have done otherwise: CD II/1, 280. For critique of this inconsistency, see Fiddes, Creative Suffering, 70–1, 74–5. 63 Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God, 63–71; Vincent Brümmer, The Model of Love, 237, adopts my approach to the freedom of God to be in need. 64 Hick, Evil and the God of Love, 338–41. 65 Charles Hartshorne, Man’s Vision of God and the Logic of Theism (Hamden: Archon Books, 1964), 29. 66 Mullins, “Why Can’t the Impassible God Suffer?” 18–19. 67 A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (London: Cambridge University Press, 1939), 356, 380–1. See Charles Taliaferro, “The Passibility of God”, RelS 25 (1989): 223–4: “sorrowing love is part of the beauty of holiness”. 68 Scrutton, “Divine Passibility”, 869–70, doubts whether it is possible for extremes of suffering and joy to exist in the same person at one time, but God is not a person. 69 Hartshorne, Natural Theology, 20–1. 61

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partial theodicy I propose that only suffering love has the power to persuade reluctant created wills toward the Good, and so the ability to overcome evil.

FURTHER READING Fiddes, Paul S. The Creative Suffering of God. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Sarot, Marcel. God, Passibility and Corporeality. Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1992. Scrutton, Anastasia Philippa. Thinking Through Feeling: God, Emotion and Passibility. New York: Continuum, 2011. Weinandy, Thomas G. and O.F.M. Cap. Does God Suffer? Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000.

Chapter 41

Trinity and Suffering MATTHEW LEVERING

In what follows, I offer a brief reflection on the holy Trinity and suffering. I begin by drawing a connection between emphasis on an angry God, on the one hand, and associating God with other emotions such as sorrow, on the other hand. My purpose is to suggest one reason why some modern Christians felt the need to abandon the classical position articulated by Maximus the Confessor: “God is one, without first principle, incomprehensible, throughout being the total potentiality of being; he excludes absolutely the concept of temporal or qualified existence.”1 As a second step, I argue that the suffering of the incarnate Son – at the very center of the history of human agony that God the Trinity seeks to heal – should be seen as leading human beings to share in the divine beatitude, not as exposing intra-Trinitarian tensions or intra-Trinitarian sorrows.

DIVINE WRATH In his expansive New Testament Theology: Magnifying God in Christ, Thomas Schreiner surveys the numerous Pauline texts on God’s wrath and observes in conclusion: Some scholars have depersonalized Paul’s view of God’s wrath, maintaining that it should be understood as the natural consequence of sin. Such a view reads Paul through the lenses of Western culture and predispositions, for Paul was nurtured in the OT, where it is clear that God’s wrath is personal.2 Specifically, says Schreiner, scholars who detach “God’s wrath from his character” have adopted a form of deism “that comports with modern sensibilities but deviates from a proper understanding of Paul”.3 Among the passages that Schreiner cites is Rom. 2:8, which can function here as a representative passage. Paul states in Rom. 2:5-6, “by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. For he will render to every man according to his works”; and therefore “for those who are factious and do not obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury” (Rom. 2:8).4

Maximus the Confessor, Two Hundred Chapters on Theology, trans. Luis Joshua Salés (Yonkers: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2015), 43 (1.1). 2 Thomas R. Schreiner, New Testament Theology: Magnifying God in Christ (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 836. 3 Ibid. 4 Brendan Byrne, S.J., comments, “The verb ‘to be’ has to be supplied in translation to cover the fact that Paul abandons the accusative construction dependent upon ‘will repay’ (v 6) and adopts the nominative. The Greek

1

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Brendan Byrne is a Pauline scholar who follows the path criticized by Schreiner. According to Byrne, Paul in Romans 2 warns that “[t]he wrath already fallen upon the Gentiles in the shape of the vices to which they are ‘given up’ (Rom. 1:24, 26, 28) will fall no less severely upon the chosen people unless they repent”.5 This “wrath” is intrinsic to sin, and it entails condemnation and, at the eschatological Day of the Lord, a devastating and permanent judgment. Wrath is not something in God, but instead wrath is what sin intrinsically incurs in the sinner due to sin’s turning away from the holy and merciful God. I do not think Byrne is influenced by deism. But even if he were, it is certainly not only modern “deism” that detaches “God’s wrath from his character”.6 As Schreiner knows, early Christian theologians consistently denied that God possesses the passion or emotion of wrath, or that “wrath” names any attribute whatsoever in God. What “wrath” signifies is twofold: God is just and sin intrinsically entails a grave penalty. Thus, Origen insists that whereas God directly bestows the good gift of “eternal life” (Rom. 2:7), God does not cause destruction. Origen thinks that “anyone who is spiritual and understands what the Spirit would say through Paul” will recognize that “wrath and fury” (Rom. 2:8) do not come from God, since “God’s gifts are absolutely abiding and worthy of him”.7 Origen compares God’s punishment of sinners to the punishment experienced by people who refuse to follow the orders of their medical doctor and therefore become sick. As Origen says, “Obviously it is not through the physician but rather through his own want of discipline that this person contracted this pestilential sickness.”8 On the other hand, the doctor would rightly get credit for giving the gift of health, if the patient had followed the doctor’s orders and thereby stayed healthy. The fourth-century exegete known as Ambrosiaster makes the matter even clearer, along Origen’s lines: “The ‘wrath’ is not that of the judge but of the person judged, once found guilty. God is called wrathful only so that people may believe that God will take vengeance; the divine nature is not subject to such emotions.”9 In his justice, God will condemn those who persist in sin; but God has no “wrath”, even though the experience of remaining in one’s sins is a profound alienation from God’s goodness and thus merits “wrath”. John of Damascus represents the common tradition when he states, “neither the act of begetting nor that of creation has any effect on the one, unaffected, unvarying, unchanging, and ever-the-same God. For, being simple and uncompounded and, consequently, by nature unaffected and unchanging, He is by nature not subject to passion

terms orgē (‘wrath’) and thymos (‘fury’) appear together constantly in the LXX [. . .] and are virtually synonymous [. . .]. Here they designate the divine reaction at the final judgment to human wrongdoing”, Romans (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1996), 86. 5 Ibid., 82. 6 For background, arguing for the retrieval of divine wrath (in conjunction with divine love and justice), see Stephen Butler Murray, Reclaiming Divine Wrath: A History of a Christian Doctrine and Its Interpretation (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011). Note that Jonathan Edwards, in his treatment of divine wrath, is responding to deist thinkers: see Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 253. 7 Origen, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Books 1-5, trans. Thomas P. Scheck (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 118 (II.6). 8 Ibid., 119. 9 Cit. in Romans: Interpreted by Early Christian Commentators, trans. and ed. J. Patout Burns Jr. and Constantine Newman (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 44.

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or change”.10 John of Damascus is here describing the Father’s begetting of the Son, but his claim that God is not subject to passions (such as anger) holds for the divine nature shared by the three Persons of the Trinity. Maximus the Confessor, whose perspective I have already indicated, remarks that the Son’s divinity (which is none other than the divinity of the Father and the Holy Spirit) is an “inaccessible idea”, “absolutely beyond comprehension”.11 For Maximus, what Scripture terms God’s “wrath”, which justly comes upon sinners, consists in “abandonment by God”.12 God does not angrily punish anyone, but God does permit sinners to experience the punishments that their sins deserve. To be abandoned by God in divine “wrath” means to be deprived of the protective “operation of God’s grace”.13 During the Reformation period, this patristic-medieval tradition came to be seen by some theologians as tantamount to replacing the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob with the sterile and aloof “God of the philosophers” – to reference Blaise Pascal’s later mystical experience.14 The concreteness of God’s wrath was accentuated by the Reformers’ claim that God directed all his “wrath and fury” upon his innocent Son Jesus Christ on the cross, who bears the Father’s wrath for us. Thus, the eighteenth-century American theologian Jonathan Edwards remarks about Jesus at Gethsemane, “When he had a full sight given him what that wrath of God was that he was to suffer, the sight was overwhelming to him; it made his soul exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. Christ was going to be cast into a dreadful furnace of wrath”.15 In his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, Edwards memorably depicts God’s anger at sinners. Even now, sinners are “the objects of that very same anger and wrath of God, that is expressed in the torments of hell”.16 Edwards intensifies his rhetoric: “The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber; the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them.”17 Certainly, God has sent Christ, and Christ has suffered the full force of God’s wrath as the substitute for sinners; but this does not change the position of sinners who have refused to cling firmly to the cross. Toward such sinners, “God is dreadfully provoked . . . and they have done nothing in the least to appease or abate that anger”.18 Those who do not cleave to Christ – those whom God has not elected in the order of grace – will find that the time will come when “the fiery floods of the fierceness and wrath of God . . . rush forth with inconceivable fury”.19 Edwards concludes in a further flourish, “The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart,

John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, I.8, in John of Damascus, Writings, trans. Frederic H. Chase, Jr. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1958), 165–406, 179. 11 Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, trans. Maximos Constas (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018), 330 (q. 53). 12 Ibid., 321 (q. 52). 13 Ibid. Along these lines, Maximus interprets the graphic punishment that unfaithful Israel receives in Isa. 5:5-6. 14 See Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 266. 15 Jonathan Edwards, “Sermon VI”, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, ed. Patrick H. Alexander (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1998), 866–77, at 868. 16 Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, 7–12, 8. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 9. 19 Ibid. 10

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and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God . . . that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood”.20 Let me quote a bit more of this sermon just to complete the portrait. God, says Edwards, is “provoked and incensed”, and God is ready to unleash his wrath upon sinners with infinitely more fierceness and power than any angry human can muster.21 In Christ, of course, God is ready to have mercy, indeed eager to have mercy upon anyone who has faith. But toward those whom God has not chosen by grace to embrace Christ, God will soon “inflict wrath without any pity”, with “no moderation or mercy”.22 God intends to inflict everlastingly his infinitely powerful and merciless anger upon sinners; he will never relent, not even when “millions and millions of ages” have passed.23 In painting this portrait of God’s anger against sin, Edwards aims to highlight the goodness and urgency of God’s offer of mercy in Christ to those who believe and persevere. But my purpose here is to highlight Edwards’s emphasis on “the power of God’s anger”, which God will unleash upon the damned “without mercy”, so that they will be “swallowed up in wrath”.24 We sinners have “provoke[d] him to anger”, we have “slighted and abused” him as though his mercy in sending his Son were nothing, and God is infinitely “provoked”.25 Citing Ps. 90:11’s words of warning about God’s anger, Edwards underlines that along with his infinite power, infinite holiness, and infinite majesty, God has infinite wrath, “beyond all expression and signification”.26 If God is so angry at sinners, then surely God also grieves when sinners oppress and kill his beloved people. In his book on the biblical prophets, the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel observes, “For more than two thousand years Jewish and later Christian theologians have been deeply embarrassed by the constant references in the Bible to the divine pathos”.27 Heschel finds the traditional view to be wrongheaded. He explains that the traditional view arose from metaphysical claims regarding God’s transcendence and causal priority. On the traditional view, God is the ontologically prior First Cause; God is not “caused” by anything finite, since God transcends all finite things as their cause. God therefore cannot have emotions and cannot be affected in his being by any finite thing. Heschel points out that the Alexandrian Jewish scholar Philo held that the divine emotions that one finds in Israel’s Scriptures are not meant to be taken literally. Rather, the portrait of YHWH as angry (for example) is simply a way of communicating with uneducated persons who otherwise would not be able to understand the theological or spiritual meaning. As Heschel remarks, too, for Plato the emotions are the lowest part of the human being; to be rational is to control and master one’s emotions, and, besides, a pure spirit (such as God) would not have emotions, which arise in us due to our bodily nature. Heschel blames Aristotle for promoting the impassive, unmoved, utterly non-needy First Cause who does not even know human beings. Heschel blames Jewish theologians such as Judah Halevi and Moses Maimonides in the Middle Ages for going along with Aristotle’s strictures despite the clear witness of Scripture to a passionate God.

Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”, 9. Ibid., 10. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 11. 24 Edwards, “Sermon VII”, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, 878–88, 881. 25 Ibid., 886. 26 Ibid., 884. Elsewhere I have written in appreciation of other aspects of Edwards’s theology. 27 Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 318. 20 21

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According to Heschel, the prophets celebrate “emotional involvement” and “passionate participation”, both in humans and in God.28 Israel’s God is repeatedly depicted as deeply and emotionally affected by human events and human actions. God pours out his “wrath” and “dread assaults” upon those who make him angry by their sin (Ps. 88:16). Focusing on the witness of the prophets to God’s personal being, Heschel concludes that the key is that God personally relates to his people and therefore cannot be less than “His pathos, His relation to Israel and to mankind”.29

THE SUFFERING OF THE TRINITY? If God has “pathos”, then what could be more productive of divine anger than the sins (committed by all of us) that, so Christians believe, brought about the rejection and crucifixion of the divine Son? And, correspondingly, what could be more productive of divine grief and sorrow? It would seem that the Father must emotionally bewail the sufferings of his Son and the sufferings of all those whom he loves. Let me pause here upon the perspective of Hans Urs von Balthasar, who cautions that such a scenario (even when theologically more sophisticated than I have described), according to which “the Father himself is forsaken” just as the Son is, involves a God who “is entangled in the world process and becomes a tragic, mythological God”.30 As a solution, Balthasar proposes that the “suffering” of the Father is, in an analogous sense, present in his eternal relation with the Son. In begetting the Son, the Father posits “an absolute, infinite ‘distance’ that can contain and embrace all the other distances that are possible within the world of finitude, including the distance of sin”.31 Balthasar describes the begetting of the Son in wrenching terms: “the Father strips himself, without remainder, of his Godhead and hands it over to the Son.”32 He argues that the Father’s stripping of himself of his Godhead is the eternal ground of all intramundane suffering. As Balthasar says, his position “avoids all the fashionable talk of ‘the pain of God’ and yet is bound to say that something happens in God that not only justifies the possibility and actual occurrence of all suffering in the world but also justifies God’s sharing in the latter, in which he goes to the length of vicariously taking on man’s God-lessness”.33 Like Edwards describing the fierce wrath of a highly provoked and angry God, Balthasar offers a rhetorically powerful portrait of what can only be termed intra-divine suffering, in the context of which the economic mystery of the cross can be understood. The Father’s begetting of the Son “implies such an incomprehensible and unique ‘separation’ of God from himself that it includes and grounds every other separation – be it never so dark and bitter”.34 There is a “primal divine drama” here; and it is so serious that the most intense human separation and suffering – the experience of damnation – is as nothing in comparison to it.35 God does not need the cross or hell to experience, in the

Heschel, The Prophets, 332. Ibid., 620. 30 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. IV: The Action, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 322. 31 Ibid., 323. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 324. 34 Ibid., 325. 35 Ibid. 28 29

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intra-Trinitarian life, an infinitely greater form of the agony that these realities contain (an agony that does not, however, overwhelm the divine blessedness). The “recklessness with which the Father gives away himself” is answered by the Son’s own “recklessness” in self-surrender.36 Balthasar defends those who hold that God’s anger is real; God is infinitely angry when we resist his self-surrender. God’s love is such that the opposition his love receives produces fierce divine anger. His anger, though, is fundamentally his eschatological or apocalyptic conquest of all sin, and he does this as the Crucified One, having “diverted onto himself [the incarnate Son] all the anger of God at the world’s faithlessness”.37 Balthasar concurs strongly with Heschel’s account of divine “pathos”, according to which, without having human emotions, God has something like them. The joining of God’s anger and God’s love is found on the cross, where God the Father wills to shatter God the Son with all the force of the divine anger at human sin. This action in time reveals its eternal ground, the infinite separation or distance involved in the Father’s begetting of the Son – which, as infinite distance (not spatial but “hierarchical”38), is also infinite self-surrendering love. In the fifth and final volume of his Theo-Drama, Balthasar offers a lengthy reflection on the suffering of God. He takes for granted that the medieval tradition, and to a significant degree the Fathers as well, fell into a portrait of “God” that separated God sharply from history, despite Scripture’s testimony to God’s direct involvement in, and passionate response to, historical events and human actions. Balthasar asserts that at least from the medieval period onward, “the biblical ‘reactions’ of God to human conduct become mere anthropomorphisms, and any involvement of God in history seems highly questionable. Now God’s pity seems to be located only in its effect in the world, whereas he himself cannot be touched by the creature’s pitiful state”.39 In this light, Balthasar surveys various nineteenth- and twentieth-century theological efforts to renew a richly biblical sense of God the Trinity’s suffering with his people. He begins with the German kenotic theologians of the nineteenth century, preeminently Gottfried Thomasius. They collectively “introduce[d] a soteriological kenosis into the Godhead” along with change and suffering. Balthasar also briefly mentions a string of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century English theologians, including Newman’s opponent, A. M. Fairbairn. They, too, developed a theology of divine suffering. After describing the role of G. W. F. Hegel in developing this theological stance, Balthasar proceeds to Jürgen Moltmann, Gerhard Koch, Kazoh Kitamori, Bertrand Brasnett, Karl Barth, Jean Galot, and various others. His own solution, as I have indicated, is rooted in the perfect self-surrender characteristic of each divine Person. This self-surrender is of such infinite depth as to involve a certain kind of “God-forsakenness”. The Father pours out everything that he is and has to the Son (and the Son does likewise), resulting in a

Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. IV, 328. Ibid., 343. 38 See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. V: The Last Act, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998), 94, drawing upon Adrienne von Speyr. The key idea is that “[w] ithout this personal distance in the circumincessio of the Persons it would be impossible to understand either the creature’s distance from God or the Son’s ‘economic’ distance from the Father – a distance that goes to the limit of forsakenness” (ibid., 98). 39 Ibid., 222. 36 37

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certain intra-Trinitarian “loneliness of love”.40 Thus, it is impossible to be more absolutely “forsaken” than the Son, who is utterly given up by the Father. Balthasar draws from Adrienne von Speyr the logical conclusion that “hell is a trinitarian event”, since the infinite self-surrender of each of the divine Persons means that the divine Persons are “present” precisely where (having poured themselves out) they seem most “absent”.41 It is this absolute selflessness, this willingness to be entirely emptied out, that spans all creaturely separations and distances and that thus exhibits, at the heart of every creaturely suffering, the co-suffering presence of the Trinity. To my mind, these claims are unpersuasive and unnecessary.42 I cannot see a real comparison between the non-spatial infinite “distance” separating the Father and the Son, and the moral alienation that is hell, or the physical and spiritual agonies to which mortal creatures are prone after original sin. Nor would I wish the Triune God to be undergoing, however analogously, alienation or suffering or pain. For one thing, Christ “opens up for us a life wholly united to God himself”.43 While certainly this life must be self-surrendering love, in its perfect form it cannot be marked by suffering. Even if one grants that love can cause suffering in this life, to suppose that spiritual growth involves suffering in eternal life would mean that deification is a continual experience of suffering along with joy, and thus a continual experience of pain and lack. Anyone who has truly suffered would not want such an everlasting stretching on the rack. If God the Trinity himself experiences something analogous to suffering, then God the Trinity is himself in need of healing. I cannot agree that anything analogously painful befits the God who has no evil or lack. I deny that the distinction between the Persons or the mysteries of begetting and spirating imply that God the Trinity endures, analogously, anything that can be described as suffering.44 Am I therefore stuck with a divine Father who has no resource in his eternal relation to the divine Son that could ground an involvement in the Son’s economic mission of radical sorrow? After all, the Father is involved in the Son’s economic mission. At Jesus’ baptism and his Transfiguration, the Father proclaims: “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” (Luke 9:35). Jesus teaches, “no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son” (Matt. 11:27). If the Father knows the Son, then surely the Father would know the incarnate Son on the cross. When the incarnate Son cries out

Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. V, 269. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory, vol. II: Truth of God, trans. Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 352. 42 For further discussion along lines that make sense to me, see Thomas Joseph White, O.P., The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2016), 340–79. White makes clear that, in avoiding anthropomorphism regarding the intra-Trinitarian life, at the same time “one must avoid severing all connection between the cross and the revelation of the inner life of the triune God, so as to fall into a kind of practical Sabellianism” (ibid., 378). On this point see also my “Does the Paschal Mystery Reveal the Trinity?” in Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas, eds. Michael Dauphinais and Matthew Levering (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 78–91. 43 David Vincent Meconi, S. J., Christ Alive in Me: Living as a Member of the Mystical Body (Steubenville: Emmaus Road Publishing, 2021), 10. 44 See also the nuanced and detailed reflections of Joshua R. Brotherton, One of the Trinity Has Suffered: Balthasar’s Theology of Divine Suffering in Dialogue (Steubenville: Emmaus Academic, 2019), especially chapter 5. He concludes, “the problem for Balthasar is that he attempts to fuse metaphorical discourse with analogical predication, thus leaving little room for philosophico-theological precision” (ibid., 200). For a recent defense of Balthasar’s position and his analogical intention, see Angela Franks, “Thomistic-Balthasarian Comments on Thomas Joseph White’s The Incarnate Lord”, Nova et Vetera 20 (2022): 575–600. 40 41

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in anguish, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46), doesn’t the Father care? In response, one important issue is whether the biblical testimony to the Trinity can be upheld without conceiving of the Triune Persons as three centers of consciousness. Is it possible to follow the biblical witness in distinguishing the Persons, without suggesting that they are distinguished from each other by diverse thoughts or feelings? Second and correspondingly, can the biblical testimony to the incarnate Son’s suffering be upheld without attributing to the Father the anthropomorphic status of an onlooker? Third, must we conceive of divine wrath (or other emotions) as poured out by the passionate Trinity upon humans, or can we conceive of the testimony to God’s hatred of sin as a manner of describing his infinite holiness and goodness, so that God does not actually possess ever-changing emotions? Assuming that Christians do not worship three gods (who would thus be finite creatures), Augustine must be correct that “the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are of one and the same substance or essence”, and this essence is an infinite, metaphysically simple reality that our finite minds cannot encompass.45 This doctrine of the Creator-creature distinction comes from Scripture, as Augustine shows.46 Furthermore, as Gilles Emery has argued, we should “recognize that the Trinity is found at the center of the Gospel”.47 The New Testament exhibits “the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in their unity and in the relations revealed by their action of salvation on behalf of humankind”.48 Exploring the New Testament revelation of the Trinity as well as the liturgical expressions of the early Christians’ Trinitarian faith, Emery clarifies that “the revelation of the divinity of Jesus and of the Holy Spirit is not made by a sort of ‘addition’ that would break the divine unity . . . but by an inclusion of Jesus and of the Holy Spirit in the identity of the one God”.49 These insights make clear that Christians cannot “read off” the pages of the New Testament three agents and thus three distinct centers of consciousness, relating to each other in the same way that three intellectually and emotionally connected people relate. Augustine goes to great pains in De Trinitate to show us that what is being revealed in Scripture is Paternity, Filiation, and Love-Gift – personal, yes, but in an absolute unity of essence. A much deeper and awe-inspiring mystery of communion is being revealed than that of three beings who share divine power, intelligence, and volitional properties. According to Augustine, the purpose of the revelation of the Trinity is to draw us in. He states, “the image of God [i.e., each human being] will achieve its full likeness of him when it attains to the full vision of him”.50 This fact should instruct us about the Trinity’s plan for the suffering of Christ the mediator. In his infinite goodness and holiness, God works mercifully to heal our defects. God the Trinity is intimately present in history to unite us with the beatitude of his life. Rather than conceiving of the Father, Son, and Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991), 63–9, 67 (I.1). For a rejection of divine simplicity that in my view leads inevitably to tritheism (however unified the three may be), see William Hasker, Metaphysics and the Tri-Personal God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 46 For contemporary discussion of the issues involved here, see Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2019). 47 Gilles Emery, O.P., The Trinity: An Introduction to Catholic Doctrine on the Triune God, trans. Matthew Levering (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), xi. 48 Ibid., 19. 49 Ibid., 50. See also Steven J. Duby, “Further Thoughts on Natural Theology, Metaphysics, and Analogy”, Pro Ecclesia 30 (2021): 307–21, at 315. 50 Augustine, The Trinity, 390 (XIV.5). 45

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Spirit co-suffering with us in the economy, let alone in their intra-Trinitarian relations, we need to meditate further on the Father sending his Son to enter into our plight with utmost humility and love, to sorrow for us, to satisfy in justice for our sins, and to draw us into the glorious and non-sorrowing (but radically loving) divine life. This reality of healing and elevation is present in Cyril of Alexandria’s remark that Christ “saved his own people, not as a man conjoined to God, but as God who has come in the likeness of those who were in danger, so that in him first of all the human race might be refashioned to what it was in the beginning”.51 Through the Word incarnate’s suffering, the human race is being refashioned. Athanasius describes God the Father’s purpose in sending his Word to suffer for us: “The Word of God came in His own Person, because it was He alone, the Image of the Father, Who could recreate man made after the Image . . . He assumed a human body, in order that in it death might once for all be destroyed, and that men might be renewed according to the Image.”52 Given that death is the wages of sin, Christ came to pay this penalty – to restore the human image of God to a proper and just relation to the Trinity. Thus the best way to think about the Trinity and suffering is to consider the Trinity’s love and goodness in healing the sorrowful suffering of humankind by entering into it in Christ Jesus. We do not need to imagine the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as eternally possessing in their own life something analogous to hell, or becoming miserable when they see our misery or Christ’s misery.53 Rather, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are supreme goodness and love, eternally free from any misery or lack whatsoever. It is this perfection that enables the Father to send the Son and Spirit into the world for the purpose of redemption and deification. The Son Jesus Christ “made our poverty his own”, so that we see in him “the strange and rare paradox of Lordship in servant’s form and divine glory in human abasement”.54 Christ thereby revealed the Father’s will to conquer every agony, and to do so not by fiat but by healing it from within human life. By means of the Son’s “descent”, we ascend into the beatitude of the divine life, following the path of Christ and being configured to his redemptive suffering so as to be glorified with him. Christ undid “our abandonment by his obedience”, making “what is ours his own” by suffering for our sins as “a ransom for the life of all” for the purpose of defeating suffering and death once and for all.55 Cyril states, “The Word was alive even when his holy flesh was tasting death, so that when death was beaten and corruption trodden underfoot the power of the resurrection might come upon the whole human race”.56

CONCLUSION In sum, the Trinity – infinite love and infinite goodness – knows our suffering and wills that we be healed and come to share in the beatitude of the Trinity. Knowing our suffering,

51 Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, trans. John Anthony McGuckin (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 88. 52 Athanasius, On the Incarnation, trans. A Religious of C.S.M.V. (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1993), 41 (§13). 53 On Christ’s salvific sorrow, see Khaled Anatolios, Deification through the Cross: An Eastern Christian Theology of Salvation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020). 54 Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, 101. 55 Ibid., 105, 110. 56 Ibid., 114–15.

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the Father, Son, and Spirit engage evil and suffering not out of the resources of intraTrinitarian wrath or suffering, but with wisdom and love and power aimed at bringing us into divine beatitude. Sent by the Father, the Son becomes one of us and heals us sinners from within our sorrowful agony (a healing that is ongoing in the Mystical Body), so that we come to share in the glory of the intra-Trinitarian life of the Father through the Son in the Spirit. As Thomas Weinandy concludes his Does God Suffer?: “The mystery of Jesus, as the incarnate Son of God who died for our sins and rose that we might have eternal life, is the Father’s response to the mystery of human suffering . . . Through faith and baptism Christians come to share a new life with the Father in Christ through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.”57 The Trinity meets human sin and suffering not with wrath or lack of compassion, nor with intra-Trinitarian misery, but with the divine wisdom and goodness of incarnation, redemption, and deification.

FURTHER READING Cyril of Alexandria. On the Unity of Christ. Translated by John A. McGuckin. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995. Duby, Steven J. God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2019. Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 2, 7–12. Edited by Patrick H. Alexander. Peabody: Hendrickson, 1998. Maximos the Confessor. On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios. Translated by Maximos Constas. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018. Weinandy, Thomas G. Does God Suffer? Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000.

Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., Does God Suffer? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), 243. See also Paul L. Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For a valuable recent study that appeared too late to be integrated into my chapter, see Thomas Joseph White, O.P., The Trinity: On the Nature and Mystery of the One God (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2022). 57

Chapter 42

Christology KENNETH SURIN

In Memoriam: Nicholas Lash In Christian theology, the problems of evil and suffering have usually been formulated in terms defined by a so-called classical theism premised on a godhood defined primarily in terms of metaphysical attributes. Classical theism is a complex and ramified conceptual formation, with many and not always compatible variant formulations, but its spine is the principle that godness or godhood is the ultimate metaphysical being. In the circle of faith constituted by Christian dogma, this ultimate metaphysical being is typically conceptualized under the ancient Greek rubric of the logos. The primary issues (among others) for proponents of this theism are twofold. First, to delineate the logos (or godness more generally) in terms of a metaphysical framework that is cogent philosophically while being recognizably Christian at the same time. Second, and more specifically, to render this delineation compatible with the gospel figure of Christ Jesus, or to put it in the gospels’ most concrete terms, the crucified rabbi from Nazareth. With this or that rendition of classical theism as its pivot, in post-Enlightenment Christian philosophical theology the problems of evil and suffering have in the main fallen under the designation of theodicy. This designation has turned out to be highly problematic for Christian dogmatics (or to use a less formidable characterization, doctrinal formulations framed from within the circle of the Christian faith). Terrence Tilley (1947–) has made a useful distinction between (1) theodicies which seek to explain how evil is compatible with an already existing belief in godhood and (2) those which aim to explain the validity of belief in godhood, given the presence of evil and suffering in the world.1

(1) Presupposes convictions regarding the deity of classical theism, it is directed at those possessing this conviction, and responds to challenges directed at this conviction’s consistency and validity.



(2) Is epistemically neutral about godhood, is directed at those with or without conviction regarding the deity of Christianity, and bears a bigger onus of proof with regard to the challenges it faces.

However, neither (1) nor (2) center their respective discussions on the godhood of Christian faith and practice. The godhood of Christian faith and practice is embedded

See Terrence Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy (1991; Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2000), 227.

1

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deeply in highly specific, indeed irreducible, Trinitarian, Christological, and soteriological discourses and their accompanying liturgical and ecclesiological practices. It should be noted that this is not the only instance where the specificity of the godhood of Christian faith and practice has been transposed into the somewhat generalized deity of philosophical theism. Anselm’s (1033–1109) famous “ontological argument” was originally framed in terms of a prayer or extended address to Christian godhood, titled Proslogion,2 with the existence of godhood forming a presupposition for prayer, before it mutated into the abstract deity of philosophical theism, where it could become a curiosity for philosophers of religion with a background in symbolic and modal logic, such as Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) and Alvin Plantinga (1932–), who in effect renovated Anselm’s petitionary prayer into a set of premises (invoking for instance the neutral philosophic notion of a “maximally great being”), with conclusions then drawn as a matter of “logical necessity” from these premises.3 On evil and suffering, prior to the Enlightenment, Christian reflections on these, as exemplified by Augustine and Boethius, for example, simply did not take the form of theodicies premised on the abstract deity of philosophical theism (thus the theological and philosophical parallel with the abovementioned “ontological arguments” formulated in modern times after Anselm). Rather, as a consequence of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, Christian speech and discourse is in some sense speech and discourse about the very history of godness.4 Hence, Augustine sought to provide an elaboration and defense of Christian convictions in a creating, salvific godhood, while Boethius proffered an amplification and defense of divine dispensation.5 Neither Augustine nor Boethius was concerned to provide a rational proof for the existence and divine outreach of a theistic God in the face of evil and suffering. Engaging with the sheer particularity, the radical contingency, of human evil and suffering in contexts shaped within the circle of Christian faith, requires speech and discourse, which pivots on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, that is to say, Christology and its doctrinal concomitants soteriology and the doctrine of atonement. While theodicy finds its crux in the question “Is theism (posed here as a problematique/‘problematic’) intelligible or coherent in the face of the realities of evil and suffering?”, a Christological approach to these realities will pose itself in terms of the question “What does infinitely loving godhood do in response to the evil and suffering that exist in the created order?”. This question has a concomitant, namely, “What do we

Anselm of Canterbury, “Proslogion”, in St. Anselm: Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Sidney N. Deane (1078; Chicago: Open Court, 1962). 3 See Charles Hartshorne, The Logic of Perfection and Other Essays in Neoclassical Metaphysics (1962; La Salle: Open Court, 1973) and Charles Hartshorne, Anselm’s Discovery (La Salle: Open Court, 1965), and Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), especially chapter 10 “X. God and Necessity”, 197–220. 4 This is the core argument formulated in Kenneth Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil (1986; Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2004). 5 See Augustine, Enchiridon: On Faith, Hope, and Love, ed. and trans. Albert C. Outler (420; Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1955), xxv, 100; and Anicius Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. David R. Slavitt (525; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Both Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil, and Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy go on to argue that theodicy as a form of speech and discourse predicated on the deity of classical theism inadvertently erodes the frequently intractable realities of evil and suffering in the attempt to justify this deity. Another corollary of theodicy is to misrepresent the Christian doctrinal edifice, which has to be twisted or torqued into a conformity with the imperatives of this classical theism. 2

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(qua creatures of godhood) do in response to evil and suffering?”. This concomitant is of course secondary and derivative – it is after all a central tenet of the Christian faith that humankind is enabled to overcome evil and suffering only by the sovereign grace and power of godhood. Therefore, for the Christian, if (supposing) godhood does nothing to overcome evil and suffering, then the question “What can humankind do to overcome evil and suffering?” can easily be answered: humankind, without godhood, can do virtually nothing to free itself from the hold of evil and suffering. It is important to be clear at the outset exactly what area of the theodicy problem we shall be concerned with when we advocate that the “answer” to the problems of evil and suffering is to be sought by adverting to the concept of a godhood which is not disengaged from the evil and suffering that afflict the created order and who shares the sufferings embedded in this order.6 The theodicist, we have already seen, has the task of reconciling the omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence of the godhood with the existence of evil and suffering. In claiming that the theodicist can accomplish this task most adequately by resorting to the notion of the godhood who suffers with the travails of the creation, we are of course concerned solely with demonstrating that such a godhood is benevolent; this claim leaves untouched the relation between divine omnipotence and omniscience and the facts of evil and suffering. The theodicy problem is invariably a problem for a certain individual or group at a certain place and a certain time. So the question arises: For whom, in principle, are the problems of evil and suffering a problem? What sort of person finds the facts of evil and suffering so difficult to reconcile with the mystery of an almighty and benevolent godhood? Quite obviously, the theodicy problem (in its classical form) is not a problem for the atheist, nor is it necessarily a problem for someone who believes in a finite God or a malevolent deity. Nor is it a problem for the person who denies that evil has any “reality” (it is impossible to do this for the palpably brute realities of suffering with their physical and psychological registers and scars) – evil would not, for example, be a problem for the person who believes that good and evil are simply states of mind, purely subjective phenomena, lacking any basis in objective reality.7 The theodicy problem, then, can only arise for the person who believes (or once believed) in the perfect goodness and infinite power of the godhood, and who believes in the realities of evil and suffering. The question that is of crucial import to the sufferer of extreme pain and torment is not “Is theism unintelligible because I am in torment?” but “Is this God a God of salvation – is this God a God I can pray to for mercy and deliverance?” Given the extremes of suffering prevailing in the dark places of this earth, it is quite likely that the latter question – if it is

Invoking the notion of suffering godhood may be construed as yielding to the heresy of patripassianism, that is, implying that God the Father suffered on the cross, that God the Father became incarnate, and so became His own Son. The only way to retain the notion of a suffering godhood while avoiding this heresy is to uphold the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. The Second Person of the Trinity suffered for the redemption of the created order – the only Divine Person to have suffered on the cross was Jesus Christ, who while retaining a complete divine nature also possessed a complete human nature by virtue of becoming incarnate. Neither the Father nor the Holy Spirit suffered on the cross, though in the mystery that is godness the Father underwent the loss of the Son. A valuable overview of discussions of the subject of divine suffering is to be found in Warren McWilliams, “Divine Suffering in Contemporary Theology”, Scottish Journal of Theology 33, no. 1 (1980): 35–53. 7 For such a person there would be no point in doing theodicy: the “solution” to the problems of evil and suffering will lie in transforming or altering the states of mind of those who are troubled by the facts of evil and suffering, and not in any need to “justify” the godhood. 6

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asked – will be answered in the negative by the victims of extreme suffering. Nevertheless, it is this question, which is more likely to be at the forefront of the intellectual horizon of the person who is afflicted, not the question of the intelligibility of the deity of classical theism. An approach to the problems of evil and suffering from the standpoint of the victims of evil will therefore lead us to soteriology, or more precisely (given the framework of the Christian mythos), into the Christian doctrine of the atonement. As the much-overlooked Scottish theologian P. T. Forsyth (1848–1921) put it, “the only possible theodicy is an adequate atonement”.8 Again: The final theodicy is in no discovered system, no revealed plan, but in an effected redemption. It is not in the grasp of ideas, nor in the adjustment of events, but in the destruction of guilt and the taking away of the sin of the world.9 From within the circle of faith, there is for the Christian the basis for an “answer” to the problems of evil and suffering – it is the practical, absolutely concrete answer constituted by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ: It is not really an answer to a riddle but a victory in a battle . . . We do not see the answer; we trust the Answerer, and measure by Him. We do not gain the victory; we are united with the Victor.10 An “answer” to the problems of evil and suffering by means of the theology of the cross (which is what Forsyth’s proposal amounts to) will of course create its own “problems” for some circles in philosophical theology, since it is, necessarily, an answer that is circumscribed by an incarnational faith. Such an answer will make sense only to the person who is not prepared to dismiss as patently absurd the idea of godhood incarnate in the midst of human suffering. It is precisely for this reason that John Hick (1922–2012) rejects the “classic” atonement doctrine, which, according to him, is inextricably bound up with the notion of the Incarnation, effectively making Christology the absolute ground of soteriology. Hick rejects this incarnational Christology because of the so-called scandal of particularity, which surrounds the Incarnation. Salvation, thus conceived, says Hick, will of necessity be confined to the adherents of this incarnational faith, and this, says Hick, is unacceptable in a world that is characterized by a plurality of faiths.11 But (as we have argued) theodicy must incorporate the principle of a redemptive incarnation if it has anything to say to the moral atheists of this world. The only other alternative is silence, as opposed to the stammering and inarticulate speech involving a redemptive incarnation.12

Peter T. Forsyth, The Justification of God (London: Latimer House, 1948), 167, http://www​.luc​.edu​/faculty​/ pmoser​/idolanon​/For​syth​Just​ification​.pdf. For a discussion of Forsyth's theodicy/theory of atonement, see Richard Floyd, “The Cross and the Church: The Soteriology and Ecclesiology of P. T. Forsyth”, When I survey . . . , April 16, 2015, https://richardlfloyd​.com​/2015​/04​/16​/the​-cross​-and​-the​-church​-the​-soteriology​-and​-ecclesiology​-of​-p​ -t​-forsyth/. 9 Forsyth, The Justification of God, 53. 10 Ibid., 211, 220. 11 See John Hick, “Evil and Incarnation”, in Incarnation and Myth: The Debate Continued, ed. Michael Goulder (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1979), 77–84. 12 Sometimes, however, silence is the only morally appropriate response to extreme suffering. The principle of redemptive incarnation is not one that can be vindicated by philosophical or systematic theology. That salvation should be proffered to humankind in and through a Nazarene who died on a cross at Golgotha two thousand 8

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In the foregoing sections, we have delineated a basis for treating the problems of evil and suffering, which resorts to the language of atonement (as formulated by PT Forsyth). Our proposals have taken the form of a number of largely unqualified propositions. It may be that our approach has been insufficiently dialectical. It may be that we have not really given enough emphasis to the notions of paradox and mystery, notions which must lie at the heart of any theodicy that purports to be taken seriously, and this despite our emphasis on the Deus Absconditus. As a result, we may have appeared to overlook some of the more intractable features of the problems of evil and suffering. Theodicy is inherently flawed: it requires us to be articulate in the face of the unspeakable. Theodicy, it seems, will always be at variance with the profound truth that the problems of evil and suffering will cease to be such only when evil and suffering no longer exist on this earth. Until then, the theodicist’s implicit belief that speech and discourse can express the reality of the unspeakable can only serve to trivialize the pain and suffering of this world.13 So why do we persist with the enterprise of theodicy (even one) that is transmuted into the doctrine of the atonement? “I must discover what God has concealed from me.” It is these words of Nicolas Berdyaev (1874–1948) that provide a raison d’être for theodicy (as indeed they do for any form of theological reflection).14 And if Berdyaev’s dictum is augmented with the principle that humankind can discover what the godhood has concealed from us only if godness first chooses to reveal it to us, it then follows that theodicy is, in an important sense, an extension of the theology of revelation. Theodicy is done so that the theologian can find out what the godhead reveals to humankind about the pain and suffering that exist in the created realm. The content of this revelation, we have already argued, is to be articulated in terms of a theologia crucis: what godhood reveals to humankind, in the context of the problems of evil and suffering, is that godhood, through the cross of Christ, bears the sufferings that afflict the created order (albeit without the taint of patripassianism).15 It is crucial to note, however, that this revelation (if it is genuine) is only secondarily, and not primarily, an impartation of knowledge, a “gnosis”; primarily, it can only be the action of godhood to bring salvation to the created order through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The focus of this answer to the problem of evil, therefore, is

years ago is a truth that can only be established by a theology of revelation based on the Word of God as given in Holy Scripture. If this is the case, then theodicy moves of necessity away from philosophical or systematic theology into the realm of dogmatic theology. 13 Theodicy hinges on the immense presumption that evil and suffering in all their depths are something within our power to comprehend. It is this presumption that trivializes theodicy’s treatment of evil and suffering, because they are reduced by it to humanly assimilable proportions. Theodicy would not get off the ground if it heeded the words of Elie Wiesel (1928–2016), a survivor of Auschwitz: “I who was there still do not understand.” 14 See Nicolas Berdyaev, Freedom and Spirit (1935; Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1972). However, this quotation is reproduced from Donald A. Lowrie, Christian Existentialism: A Berdyaev Anthology (London: Allen & Unwin, 1965), 41. 15 I have developed this point in Kenneth Surin, “Atonement and Christology”, NZSTh 24 (1982): 131–49. In turning to the theology of revelation to provide a basis for a theologia crucis I am mindful of Wolfhart Pannenberg's formula that God is “accessible . . . by his own action”. Pannenberg makes this point in his Theology and the Philosophy of Science (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1976), 310. Nicholas Lash rightly says that Pannenberg's formula is a necessary condition for the project of a critical theology. See Nicholas Lasch, Theology on Dover Beach (1979; Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2005), 16–23. To quote Lash: “unless God is accessible by his own action, Christian faith expresses only man's hope, and theology is rendered incapable of speaking of God” (17).

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God’s revelation of himself on the cross of Christ. The self-revelation of God on the cross of Christ is the self-justification of God, “in which judgement and damnation are taken up by God himself, so that man may live”.16 In the face of this divine self-justification on the cross of Christ the attempt by humankind to justify God vis-à-vis the facts of evil and suffering (which is what theodicy essentially is) becomes superfluous. Those who stand within the circle of faith and who take the atonement seriously have no real need for theodicy.17 They will wait on godhood’s self-revelation in the event of the cross of Christ. It follows from this that the problems of evil and suffering cannot be dealt with from a cosmic perspective. As Donald MacKinnon (1913–94) rightly points out, to do this is “totally to misunderstand both the difficulty and the consolation of its [the Christian faith’s] treatment”.18 Rather, the believer should eschew the cosmic perspective and give up the thought that by adopting such a perspective we can provide an intellectual “answer” that will be adequate to the needs of those who are the victims of evil and suffering. Quite simply, for those who experience godforsakenness there can be no answer except the stammeringly uttered truth that godhood keeps company with those who are oppressed, excluded, and finally eliminated. For these sufferers, the utterance of this truth, no matter how deeply felt it is by those who utter it, can only be half a consolation. The mistake of those who seek to acquire a cosmic perspective on the problems of evil and suffering is superbly depicted by the Welsh Anglican priest R. S. Thomas (1913–2000) in his poem “The Prisoner”:19 It is the same outside. Bars, walls but make the perspective clear. Deus Absconditus! We ransack the heavens, the distance between stars; the last place we look is in prison, his hideout in flesh and bone. Theodicy, as supplanted by Christology and the doctrine of the atonement, in the account provided here, is perhaps best regarded as a form of second-order theological discourse facilitating a first-order praxis. The answer to the problems of evil and suffering lies in a praxis, involving the very being of godness, intended to overcome the cruelty and distortedness existing in the midst of our lives. It does not lie in the acquisition of a cosmic perspective which enables us to justify godhood – the godhood who shares our sufferings in the person of the Son needs no justification, while the deity who is disengaged from our afflictions cannot be justified, either by humankind or the deity – the godhood who

See Jürgen Moltmann, Hope and Planning (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 43. “Theodicy” here refers to its variants premised on the metaphysical deity of classical theism. 18 See Donald M. MacKinnon, “Order and Evil in the Gospel”, in Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays, ed. George W. Roberts and Donovan E. Smucker (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1968), 92–4. MacKinnon goes on to say: “Rather Christianity takes the history of Jesus and urges the believer to find, in the endurance of the ultimate contradictions of human existence that belongs to its very substance, the assurance that in the worst that can befall his creatures, the creative Word keeps company with those whom he has called his own.” 19 See Ronald S. Thomas, The Poems of RS Thomas (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986). 16 17

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is a mere onlooker when confronted with gratuitous evil and suffering is a demon and not God. While the decision to view the problems of evil and suffering from the perspective of those whose sufferings lead them to the experience of godforsakenness has prompted us to adopt a theologia crucis as the way to deal with this problem, it nevertheless remains the case that we cannot understand the action of the godhood which lies at the heart of this theology of the cross in any straightforward way. If we do, then we will have an understanding of the power of godness, which may eventually be confounded by the unfolding of events. As Hans Urs von Balthasar says: “The key to the understanding of God’s action lies exclusively in the interpretation which God gives of himself before man on the stage is not understandable or justifiable from a human, worldly point of view, and from the standpoint of our fragmentary knowledge: by these standards it is bound to appear ‘foolishness’ and ‘madness’.”20 The salient theological insight of this strand of thought involving the Deus Absconditus is that we cannot truly understand godhood’s salvific ways on our behalf by using our disjointed and flawed powers; if we did this, then we run the risk of being stupefied by grim equivocity of human experience. A Christological focus on the problems of evil and suffering, in the final analysis, has to be silence qualified by the stammering utterance of broken words. It cannot be otherwise for believers; for them, the only possible “answer” to the problems of evil and suffering is the being of flesh and bone who plumbed the depths of our malevolence and indifference on the cross at Golgotha. And while evil and suffering continue to ruin the lives of countless persons, the fate of this crucified being will represent a question rather than an answer: a question that is directed at my heartlessness in a world where godness never ceases to endure the agony that is inflicted on the creature order.

FURTHER READING Anselm of Canterbury. Proslogion. Edited and translated by C. C. J. Webb, 28. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2019. Forsyth, Peter T. The Justification of God. London: Latimer House, 1948. http://www​.luc​.edu​/ faculty​/pmoser​/idolanon​/For​syth​Just​ification​.pdf. MacKinnon, Donald M. “Order and Evil in the Gospel.” In Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays. Edited by George W. Roberts and Donovan E. Smucker, 92–4. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1968. Surin, Kenneth. Theology and the Problem of Evil. Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2004. Tilley, Terrence. The Evils of Theodicy. Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2000.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone: The Way of Revelation (London: Burns & Oates, 1968), 58.

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Chapter 43

Divine Suffering and the Communicatio Idiomatum DAVID R. LAW

That Jesus Christ is “truly God and truly a human being” was fixed as orthodoxy in the Chalcedonian Definition or “two-natures doctrine” formulated at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The Chalcedonian Definition, however, did little to clarify the relationship between Christ’s divine and human natures and how it is possible for Christ to be a single, united person in view of his duality of natures. This issue is particularly acute with regard to Christ’s suffering and death on the cross. Christ’s human nature is clearly involved in these experiences, but what is the relation of his divine nature to the suffering of his human nature? Does the incarnate Christ suffer not only as a human being but also as God? An important attempt to address these issues is the communicatio idiomatum, the view that in Christ’s person there takes place a mutual exchange of the attributes belonging to his divine and human natures.1 This chapter considers how the communicatio idiomatum has been employed to think through the relationship of Christ’s divine nature to the suffering undergone by his human nature. After sketching the historical development of the doctrine, we shall trace how the kenotic theologians of the nineteenth century developed the communicatio idiomatum into a defense of the view that the incarnate Christ suffered not just as a human being but also as God.

THE COMMUNICATIO IDIOMATUM IN THE EARLY CHURCH We first encounter the communicatio idiomatum in the early Church Fathers, notably in the Christologies of Origen and Leo the Great. Arguably the most extensive treatment of the communicatio idiomatum in the early church, however, is that of Cyril of Alexandria. Cyril’s version of the communicatio idiomatum takes the divine Logos as the person-forming element of the incarnation. By virtue of the “hypostatic union” or unio Major studies of the communicatio idiomatum are Hermann Schulz, Die Lehre von der Gottheit Christi: Communicatio Idiomatum (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1881); Joar Haga, Was there a Lutheran Metaphysics: The interpretation of communicatio idiomatum in Early Modern Lutheranism (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012); and Richard Cross, Communicatio Idiomatum: Reformation Christological Debates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). None of these works, however, gives much attention to the genus tapeinoticon, an aspect of the communicatio idiomatum that will be a major focus of this chapter.

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personalis divinity and humanity are united in the single, unified person of Jesus Christ. Consequently, it is not one of Christ’s two natures or their combination into a divine– human hybrid, but rather the Logos that is the subject of the incarnate Christ. That is, Jesus Christ is the divine Logos under the conditions of human existence. According to Cyril, “all the sayings contained in the Gospels must be referred to a single person, to the one incarnate subject of the Word”.2 Consequently, it is completely legitimate to say of the incarnate Christ, kathʼ hypostasin, that is, according to the person, that the Son of God has been born; is tired, thirsty, and hungry; grieves; suffers; and dies. To avoid misunderstanding Cyril’s point here, however, it is crucial to emphasize that it is not the Son of God’s divine nature that experiences these things, but the human nature the Logos has assumed on becoming incarnate. Cyril categorically rules out the possibility that the incarnate Christ experienced suffering according to his divine nature. Christ suffered because he assumed a “passible body”, which “has become his own through the union”,3 but his divine nature remained impassible. This reasoning allows Cyril to make such statements as “within the suffering body was the Impassible”,4 and the Son “suffered, as it were, impassibly”.5 For Cyril, then, the incarnate Logos undergoes human experiences not as God, but as a human being, for this is now the new mode of existence that the Logos has adopted for the duration of the incarnation. The person of the Logos suffers through the human nature he has assumed, but his divine nature remains untouched by this suffering. As Cyril puts it, the Son “suffered without suffering”.6 There are two problems with Cyril’s Christology. First, is the notion of an impassibly suffering God coherent? Second, is it not inconsistent to claim that the hypostatic union brings about a communication of attributes from divinity to humanity, but not from humanity to divinity? In his book Does God Suffer? Thomas Weinandy defends Cyril against these charges and accuses those who would ascribe suffering to Christ’s divine nature of having “locked God out of human suffering” on the grounds that human beings do not suffer as God but as human beings.7 To suffer as God would be suffering that is so radically different from the suffering that human beings experience that if Christ suffered in his divine nature there could be no solidarity between Christ’s suffering and that of human beings. Consequently, according to Weinandy, “to replace the phrase ‘the Impassible suffers’ with ‘the Passible suffers’ immediately purges the suffering of all incarnational significance”.8 Despite Weinandy’s attempts to justify Cyril, Cyril’s solution to the relation between Christ’s two natures leaves unresolved issues that threaten to undermine the coherence of the doctrine of the incarnation. If it is the divine Logos who is the subject of the incarnation, as Cyril argues, then the question still remains of how the suffering he experiences through his human nature impinges on the divinity of the Logos. If, as Cyril Cyril, Ad Nestoriam, 3, 8. ET: Cyril of Alexandria, Select Letters, ed. and trans. Lionel R. Wickham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). 3 Cyril, Scholia de Incarnatione Unigeniti, 37. ET: “The Scholia. On the Incarnation”, in Cyril of Alexandria, Five Tomes against Nestorius and Other Works (A Library of the Holy Catholic Church, Anterior to the Division of the East and West), trans. by members of the English Church (Oxford: James Parker & Co., and Rivingtons, 1881), 185–243. 4 Cyril, Ad Nestoriam, 2, 5. 5 Cyril, De Recto Fide, 27, quoted in Weinandy, Does God Suffer? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), 203, n. 58. 6 Cyril, Scholia de Incarnatione Unigeniti, 37. 7 Weinandy, Does God Suffer? 206. 8 Ibid., 204–5. 2

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and his defender Weinandy accept, the incarnate Logos suffers in his human nature and the subject of this human nature is the divine Logos, then surely the Logos must be affected in some way by the experiences of the human nature he has taken upon himself. Otherwise, the Logos would seem to be cut off from the humanity he has assumed. Indeed, the Logos would seem to be suffering from a version of dissociative disorder, a medical condition in which persons feel disconnected from themselves and the world around them. Cyril and Weinandy, then, are dodging precisely the hard problem kenotic theologians tackle head-on, namely how Christ as God experienced suffering and death. It is not sufficient to claim that Christ experienced this suffering through his human nature, since the issue is how Christ’s humanity is related to the divine, supposedly impassible personhood of the Son of God. To address this problem, efforts were made to develop the communicatio idiomatum beyond what had been achieved by Cyril. One such attempt was made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to address theological controversies arising from the Protestant Reformation.

THE COMMUNICATIO IDIOMATUM IN LUTHERAN ORTHODOXY The question of the communication of the attributes between Christ’s two natures resurfaced with some intensity as a consequence of the Eucharistic controversy between Luther and Zwingli concerning whether Christ was present in both human and divine natures in the bread and wine (Luther) or present only spiritually (Zwingli). This theological controversy contained an important Christological issue, namely, the extent to which Christ’s divine and human natures participated in each other. For Zwingli and his successors in the Reformed Church, the communication of attributes between divinity and humanity is not an objective reality in Christ but only a figure of speech or, in Zwingli’s terms, an alloiosis. The predicates of one nature can be verbally predicated of the other nature (praedicatio verbalis), but under no circumstances can they be affirmed in reality (realiter) of the other nature. Underlying the Reformed view is a conception of the radical difference between divinity and humanity. Human nature is characterized by the principle of finitum non capax infiniti, that is, “the finite is not capable of [receiving] the infinite”. It is thus inconceivable that attributes belonging to divinity could be communicated to humanity. In so far as there is a communicatio idiomatum, it involves the communication of attributes not between Christ’s natures but to his person, which is the unifier of the two natures. The acts of Christ’s human nature can, according to Calvin, be transferred only “improperly” (improprie) to his divinity.9 It is therefore not permissible to say that Christ’s human nature is omnipotent or omnipresent. The proper formulation is that the person of Christ has these predicates. At first sight, the Reformed doctrine would seem to be preferable to Lutheran Christology on grounds of its simplicity. When we probe more deeply into the consequences of Reformed Christology, however, this simplicity gives way to some significant problems. If taken literally, the Reformed conception of humanity as finitum non capax infiniti would undermine the personal unity of Christ that the Reformed themselves affirm. If divinity and humanity are as radically different as Reformed theology claims, then how

Calvin, Institutes, Book II, XIV, 2. ET: John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1975), 417.

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can they be united in Christ’s person? Furthermore, if both natures are preserved in the person of Christ despite the impossibility of human nature sharing in divine predicates, then Reformed Christology implies a duality of mutually opposed human and divine activities on the part of Christ. This is a problem Lutheran Orthodoxy is able to ameliorate by arguing in contradiction of Reformed Christology for the principle of finitum capax infiniti, that is, the finite is capable of [receiving] the infinite. It is this capacity of the finite to receive the infinite that enables Christ’s human nature to appropriate properties belonging to Christ’s divinity. This Lutheran solution to the two-nature doctrine, however, demands an explanation of how divinity and humanity are united in Christ’s person. To achieve this, the Lutheran theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries turned to the communicatio idiomatum. This, however, led to another controversy, though this time within Lutheranism itself, between the followers of Johann Brenz (1499–1570) and those of Martin Chemnitz (1522–86). Brenz took the view that Christ was by virtue of the communicatio idiomatum in full possession of the divine attributes from his conception in the womb of Mary to his death on the cross, and continued to exercise his cosmic rule both in the cradle and from the grave. Kenosis consists in Christ’s concealment of his divine majesty and his willingness for the purpose of salvation to undergo the humiliation of human existence.10 Brenz emphasizes, however, that Christ could have revealed the glory of his divine nature had he chosen to do so. Like Brenz, Chemnitz insists that “from the very moment of the hypostatic union the whole fullness of the Godhead dwelt bodily in Christ or in His flesh or His assumed nature”.11 This raises the question of the manner of the presence of the fullness of divinity in Christ’s earthly life, for, as Chemnitz readily admits, “the brilliance of Christ did not always shine out in the time of His humiliation, since it was covered with infirmity, and it did not always assert itself plainly and clearly because of the humiliation”.12 To answer this question, Chemnitz interprets Paul’s use of the term “emptied” (ekenōsen) in Phil. 2:7 to mean that Christ withheld the exercise of his divine power during his earthly ministry. In contrast to Brenz’s view that the incarnate Christ retained his divine powers in all their fullness but concealed their use, Chemnitz thus argues that Christ deliberately refrained from exercising his divine attributes in order to live a genuinely human life. These Lutheran debates led to the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum being refined in greater detail. This was achieved by identifying three, later four, forms or “genera” of the communicatio idiomatum, namely, the genus idiomaticum, the genus apotelesmaticum, the genus majesticum, and the genus tapeinoticon.

THE FOUR GENERA The Genus Idiomatum The genus idiomaticum or “idiomatic” genus is the principle that the properties of the divine and human natures can be predicated vere et realiter of the entire person of Christ. Both natures share their attributes with the person of Christ so that Christ’s Hans Christian Brandy, Die späte Christologie des Johannes Brenz (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1991), 206–8. Martin Chemnitz, The Two Natures in Christ, trans. J. A. O. Preus (St. Louis: Concordia, 1971), 488. 12 Ibid., 488. 10 11

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person possesses the attributes belonging to both natures. David Hollaz (1648–1713)13 provides the following definition: “The first genus of the communicatio idiomatum is when the characteristics of the divine or human nature are truly and really attributed to the whole person of Christ, which is named according to one of the two or according to both natures.”14 In contrast to the Reformed view, then, the Lutherans insisted on a real exchange of attributes between divinity and humanity. The genus idiomatum was further refined by distinguishing between two distinct ways in which divine and human attributes were communicated to Christ’s person. The communication of human attributes to the divine nature is by means of appropriatio or idiopoiēsis, biblical examples of which are Acts 3:15 (“you killed the Author of life”) and 1 Cor. 2:8 (the Lord of glory has been crucified). The communication of divine attributes to the human nature, on the other hand, was designated as communicatio divinarum idiomatum or koinonia tōn theiōn, biblical examples of which are John 3:13 (the Son of man is in heaven) and 1 Cor. 15:47 (“the second man is from heaven”). Furthermore, both human and divine attributes can be predicated of the person of Christ according to the two sides of his being, a process termed alternatio or antidosis. Biblical examples are the linking of the titles Son of David and Son of God (Rom. 1:3) and such descriptions of Christ as the one who was “crucified in weakness, but lives by the power of God” (2 Cor. 13:4).

The Genus Apotelesmaticum The genus apotelesmaticum is concerned with the relationship of the activities (apotelesmata) performed by Christ’s two natures, such as redemption, propitiation, salvation, and mediation. According to the genus apotelesmaticum, each of Christ’s natures does what is appropriate to it in cooperation with the other nature in the carrying out of Christ’s salvific purpose. As Chemnitz puts it, “the natural or essential activities or operations of each of Christ’s natures concur or join together to produce or accomplish these [saving] effects (apotelesmata).”15 The biblical basis for the genus apotelesmaticum are passages such as Luke 9:56 and 1 John 3:8. Although both natures cooperate with each other to carry out Christ’s saving purpose, they have distinct tasks which should not be conflated. With respect to Christ’s redemptive suffering and death, it is the human nature that suffers, while the divine nature remains unaffected. Nevertheless, the divine nature remains in communion with the human nature during its suffering and confers salvific value on the suffering undergone by the human nature. Christ is our redeemer and reconciler precisely because he suffers death according to his human nature, but overcomes death by virtue of his divinity. Both of Christ’s natures are thus active in his redemptive work and both are essential for the completion of this work, but differ in the way they carry out this work.

Excerpts from Hollaz’s works can be found in Emanuel Hirsch, Hilfsbuch zum Studium der Dogmatik (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1964). 14 Hirsch, Hilfsbuch, 326. 15 Chemnitz, Two Natures in Christ, 216. We find a forerunner of this genus in the John of Damascus’ notion of the koinonia apotelesmatōn. 13

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The Genus Majestaticum The genus majestaticum, the “genus of majesty”, or, alternatively, the genus auchematicum, the “genus of glory”, consists in the communication of the divine attributes to Christ’s human nature, so that Christ’s humanity is able to make use of the attributes of majesty and glory belonging to the divine nature. As Hollaz puts it: “Through and because of the personal unity, truly divine, uncreated, infinite and immeasurable gifts are given to Christ according to his human nature.”16 The genus majestaticum is evident in passages such as John 5:27, Matt. 11:27, and Col. 2:9. The communication of the divine attributes of glory and majesty to the human nature is possible on two grounds. First, by virtue of being made in the image of God, Christ’s human nature possesses a receptivity for the glory belonging to his divine nature. It is this receptivity that forms the basis for the exaltation of the human nature Christ has assumed, without, however, undermining the reality of Christ’s humanity, and always in accordance with Christ’s vocation as redeemer. Second, Christ’s human nature has no independent existence, but subsists by virtue of the hypostatic union inseparably from his divine person. The hypostatic inseparability of Christ’s humanity from the divine person of the Logos (enhypostasis) enables the human nature he has assumed to partake of the attributes belonging to the divine nature. Under no circumstances, however, does the human nature come to “own” the divine attributes it has received. Christ’s human nature remains human and therefore continues to be finite. Nevertheless, by virtue of being hypostatically united with divinity, Christ’s humanity participates in the attributes belonging to his divine nature without, however, losing its own attributes or communicating human attributes to divinity. It is at this point that Lutheran Christology is in danger of lapsing into docetism. If Christ’s human nature developed in a natural human way, for example, by undergoing the growth of knowledge and understanding that characterizes the development from childhood to adulthood, while at the same time possessing by virtue of the communicatio idiomatum the divine attributes in all their perfection, then Christ’s childhood becomes utterly docetic, since how is it possible to conceive of the child Jesus growing in knowledge like other children if he were omnipotent and omniscient throughout his infancy and childhood? It was the question of the state of Christ’s majesty or glory during his incarnate life that led to renewed dispute concerning the communicatio idiomatum in the so-called Kenosis-Krypsis controversy of the early seventeenth century between the Lutheran theologians of Gießen and Tübingen, respectively.17 As had been the case in the dispute between Brenz and Chemnitz in the previous century, the argument centered on to what extent the incarnate Christ possessed the glory belonging to his divine nature and exercised his divine attributes during his earthly ministry. The Tübingen theologians (Hafenreffer, Osiander, Nicolai, and Thummius) argued for Christ’s continued possession but hidden use of his divine powers (krypsis chreseōs), while the theologians of Giessen (Mentzer, Feuerborn) maintained that the Son had emptied himself of the use of his divine powers during his earthly ministry (kenosis chreseōs). In both cases, Christ continued to possess such divine attributes as omnipotence and omniscience. The difference between the two

Hirsch, Hilfsbuch, 328. See Ulrich Wiedenroth, Krypsis and Kenosis: Studien zu Thema und Genese der Tübinger Christologie im 17. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011); Haga, Was There a Lutheran Metaphysics?, 213–69.

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camps is that the Tübingen theologians held that the incarnate Christ exercised these attributes, though secretly, while the Giessen theologians held that Christ renounced the use of his divine attributes for the duration of the incarnation. According to the Giessen view, Christ’s divine nature refrained from asserting itself in its absolutely perfect divinity during the state of humiliation, taking upon itself this limitation in order to allow Christ’s humanity to remain genuinely human. Both Christologies are faced by considerable problems. The weakness of the Tübingen Christology is that it is docetic. It is difficult to see how Jesus could have lived a genuinely human life if from his very conception he was in full possession of such attributes as omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. The problem with the Giessen Christology is that it is difficult to see how the incarnate Christ could refrain from exercising such an attribute as omniscience, since if Christ is omniscient by virtue of his divine nature, it seems inconceivable that he could resolve not to know in his human nature what he knows in his divine nature. The danger of docetism is thus present in both Christologies, although to a greater extent in the Christology of the Tübingen theologians. Despite its deficiencies, however, the Giessen solution does mark a step forward in the development of a Christology that does justice to the reality of Jesus’ humanity, for, as Dorner points out,18 the kenosis doctrine of the Giessen theologians initiated the movement toward the notion of a limitation of the divine nature in Christ, which is arguably required by a logically consistent communicatio idiomatum.

The Genus Tapeinoticon Neither the early church nor the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lutheran doctrines of the communicatio idiomatum posit an equal relationship between Christ’s two natures. The communication of attributes is restricted to the conferral of the divine predicates (majesty, glory, omnipotence, etc.) on Christ’s human nature and excludes the reciprocal transmission of human properties (capacity for growth, suffering, and death) to the divine nature. Although the tensions within the communicatio idiomatum and indeed that of the entire two-natures doctrine prompted the abandonment of Chalcedonian Christology by liberal and rationalist theologians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, other theologians identified the problem not with the doctrine as such but with the incomplete and inconsistent way the communicatio idiomatum had been formulated. Isaak Dorner, Hermann Schulz, and Friedrich Loofs considered the doctrine to be a theological “jewel”19 but one in need of further development. The solution to the problem was alluded to by David Strauss, who in his Glaubenslehre observed that the conferral of divine attributes on the human nature by virtue of the genus auchematicum needed to be complemented by the addition of a fourth genus that affirms the communication of human attributes to

I. A. Dorner, Entwicklungsgeschichte der Lehre von der Person Christi: von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die neueste dargestellt (Stuttgart: S. G. Liesching, 1839), 180. 19 Isaak Dorner, Entwicklungsgeschichte, 177. For references to Schulz and Loofs, see Alexander von Oettingen, Lutherische Dogmatik, vols. I–II/II (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1897–1902), II/II:49. 18

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the divine nature.20 This fourth genus is the genus tapeinoticon, the “tapeinotic genus” or “genus of humiliation”. This move had been rejected by Lutheran Orthodoxy, however, and the view that Christ divested himself in the state of humiliation of his power according to his divinity had been condemned in the Formula of Concord as a “horrible and blasphemous interpretation” on the grounds that it undermines the eternal divinity of Christ and paves the way for Arianism.21 The kenotic theologians of the nineteenth century, however, viewed this rejection of the genus tapeinoticon as a mistake that undermined the entire two-natures doctrine and risked reducing Christ’s humanity to an illusion. Thus Alexander von Oettingen (1827–1905) criticizes the Formula of Concord for undermining the reality of Christ’s human development by one-sidedly emphasizing the glorification of Christ’s human nature and neglecting the humiliation of Christ’s divinity brought about by Christ’s becoming a human being. To rectify this deficiency, Oettingen insists that the genus tapeinoticon must be emphasized over and against the genus majestaticum.22 The nineteenth-century kenotic theologians thus took the step rejected by their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century predecessors of affirming the genuinely mutual transferral of attributes between Jesus’ divine and human natures, so that not only did the divine nature affect the incarnate Christ’s human nature, but the incarnate Christ’s human nature also affected his divine nature. A pioneer in this respect was Ernst Sartorius (1797–1859), whom some commentators claim to have been the initiator of the new kenotic theology of the nineteenth century.23 In his 1832 essay on the communicatio idiomatum, Sartorius claims that the mutual communication of attributes between Christ’s two natures means that “divinity enters just as deeply into the suffering of humanity as humanity is raised to the glory of divinity”.24 Furthermore, later in the same essay, Sartorius claims that it was necessary for the incarnate Son to limit the use of his divine attributes, since if the Son had not done so, his divine nature would have “driven back the darkness of human suffering”, which would have rendered the incarnation an impossibility.25 The Son’s freely willed restriction of the use of his divine attributes, however, means that “the deadly shadows of suffering darkly enfold the concealed majesty; or rather, it is not merely the shadows of suffering that darken his majesty, but the true feeling of suffering that permeates the unity of the divine and human consciousness into the heart of divinity”.26 Such suffering on the part of Christ “in the heart of his divinity” is essential if Christ is to show solidarity with human

David Friedrich Strauss, Die christliche Glaubenslehre in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung und im Kampfe mit der modernen Wissenschaft (Tübingen: C. F. Osiander; Stuttgart: F. H. Köhler, 1841), II:134–5. 21 Formula of Concord: Epitome, VIII: “On the Person of Christ”, Negative Theses, §20. 22 Oettingen, Lutherische Dogmatik, II/II:57; cf. 128. 23 Gottfried Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk. Darstellung der evangelisch-lutherischen Dogmatik vom Mittelpunkte der Christologie aus, 2nd ed., 3 vols (Erlangen: Theodor Bläsing, 1856–63), II:526; Ernst Günther, Die Entwicklung der Lehre von der Person Christi im XIX. Jahrhundert (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1911), 173–6. 24 Ernst Sartorius, “Die lutherische Lehre von der gegenseitigen Mittheilung der Eigenschaften der beiden Naturen in Christo”, in Beiträge zu den theologischen Wissenschaften von den Professoren der Theologie zu Dorpat, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes, 1832–33), I:348–84; 349. 25 Ibid., I:374–5. 26 Ibid., I:375, emphasis added. 20

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beings in their suffering. Indeed, Sartorius argues that Christ’s divinity actually made his sufferings more intense than they would be for someone who was solely a human being.27 Gottfried Thomasius (1802–75) recognized that the approach developed by Sartorius, though in need of significant development, furnished a strategy for dealing with the dissonance between Chalcedonian Christology and the insights into the reality of Christ’s humanity that were emerging from contemporary biblical criticism. Thomasius also believed that the Lutheran tradition contained the resources for extending the communicatio idiomatum to Christ’s divinity. There are, he claims, indications of such a development in the Formula of Concord, since it states that the Logos participates in the suffering of the human nature by virtue of the genus apotelesmaticum.28 Since both divine and human natures participate in bringing about the salvation effected by Christ’s death, Christ’s divinity must itself be affected by suffering in some way. The result of these developments was that several theologians in the nineteenth century came to recognize the necessity of adding the genus tapeinoticon to the other genera. The defense of the genus tapeinoticon, however, demanded greater attention to the capacity of divinity to undergo human experiences. If human nature is characterized by finitude, temporality, limitation, development, and change, how can such a nature be united to divinity, which has the opposite attributes of infinitude, eternity, omnipotence, and immutability? To address this question, nineteenth-century kenotic theologians shifted the kenosis from the incarnate Christ to the pre-existent Logos, from the logos ensarkos (“enfleshed”, i.e., incarnate, Logos) to the logos asarkos (“unfleshed”, i.e., pre-existent, Logos). That is, to gain clarity on the relationship between the divine and human natures of the incarnate Christ, it is first necessary to consider how the pre-existent Logos can make the transition from heavenly pre-existence to earthly existence. This necessitates distinguishing between what we might call “kenosis proper” and “tapeinosis”. The term “kenosis” applies to the pre-existent Logos and denotes the means by which the Son of God assumed a mode of being that made the incarnation possible. What we here term “tapeinosis”,29 on the other hand, denotes the capacity of the incarnate Logos to experience the human lot. Kenosis and tapeinosis are connected by virtue of the fact that it is the kenosis of the logos asarkos that enables the tapeinosis of the logos ensarkos to come about. In contrast to the seventeenth-century debate, then, where kenosis was a characteristic of the logos ensarkos, in the nineteenth-century debate kenosis is applied to the logos asarkos. Kenosis is the means by which the logos asarkos modifies his divinity

Ernst Sartorius, Die Lehre von Christi Person und Werk in populairen Vorlesungen (Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes, 1831); ET: The Doctrine of the Person and Work of Christ in a Course of Popular Lectures (London: Religious Tract Society, 1838), 32. Cf. “Mittheilung der Eigenschaften” 376–8. Sartorius, however, failed to follow through with these insights and, because of his anxiety to protect the doctrine of immutability, ultimately retreated to a more conventional conception of the communicatio idiomatum. 28 Gottfried Thomasius, “Ein Beitrag zur kirchlichen Christologie” Zeitschrift für Protestantismus und Kirche, Neue Folge 9 (1845): 99–100. 29 For the sake of clarity, “kenosis” and “tapeinosis” should be held apart. Much of the confusion in kenotic theology is due to conflating the Logos’ transition from pre-existence to existence and Christ’s suffering within existence. It is better to reserve “tapeinosis” for the latter. The term “tapeinosis” should therefore be applied to the logos ensarkos, but kenosis reserved for the logos asarkos and the transition from pre-existence to the status exinanitionis. It is, of course, this transition that makes the genus tapeinoticon possible. For the sake of clarity, then, “kenosis” should be reserved for the transition of the Logos from pre-existence to existence, while “tapeinosis” (which is derived from Paul’s use of the term “etapeinōsen” in Phil. 2:8) should be reserved to denote the Logos’ capacity for suffering during the incarnation. 27

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in such a way that his divine nature can experience a genuinely human life as the logos ensarkos. Thomasius, for example, conceives of kenosis as the pre-existent Logos’ renunciation of his attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence in order to live a genuinely human life as the incarnate Christ and undergo the human experiences of suffering and death.30 For nineteenth-century kenotic theologians, “kenosis” thus comes to denote the means by which the divine Logos renounced his attributes and prerogatives for the purpose of the incarnation. The unifying factor between kenosis and tapeinosis is love. Love, of course, has always been regarded as a divine attribute within Christian theology. A feature of nineteenth-century kenotic theology, however, was to give precedence to love as God’s primary attribute or, more accurately, to conceive of love as the essence of God from which all other divine attributes are derived. This is a move made by Sartorius and K. T. A. Liebner (1806–71), who regard love as the primary divine attribute to which all other attributes are subordinated.31

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS: KENOSIS, TAPEINOSIS, AND “PASSIBLE IMMUTABILITY” The genus tapeinoticon and the kenoticism it supports have been rejected in some quarters on the grounds that they undermine divine immutability and impassibility. Does the genus tapeinoticon entail a diminution of the divine nature, or does it in fact express something essential about the character of God? Our answer to these questions depends on what we mean by “immutability”. A hard doctrine of immutability risks reducing God to an impassive, aloof observer, unaffected by the trials and tribulations of the human beings he has created. If, however, God is by nature a relational God, as the doctrine of the Trinity would seem to indicate, and if this relational God sustains genuinely living relationships with human beings, then unless we subscribe to hard determinism, God must be affected by these relationships, for example, by the necessity of responding to human actions. Furthermore, it is difficult to conceive of a loving God not being perturbed by the presence of evil, sin, and suffering in the world. The notion of a suffering God, however, raises some difficult and profound theological problems. It violates the long-held doctrines of divine immutability and impassibility. It also seems to diminish God by making God himself the plaything of forces greater than he. It also has soteriological consequences, for what good is a God who would appear to be in the same predicament as suffering human beings? This is one of the criticisms Weinandy advances against kenotic theologies in Does God Suffer? where he observes that The soteriological import of divine suffering remains barren. It does not achieve any end other than to register that God does indeed suffer in solidarity with humankind,

Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, I:137, cf. I:43. For a summary of the various ways in which nineteenth- and early twentieth-century kenotic theologians conceived of kenosis as the Logos’ renunciation of divine attributes and prerogatives, see David R. Law, “Kenotic Christology”, in The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Theology, ed. David Fergusson (Malden: Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 251–79. 31 See Ernst Sartorius, Die Lehre von der heiligen Liebe, oder Grundzüge einer evangelisch-kirchlichen Moraltheologie (Stuttgart: S. G. Liesching, 1840–56); ET: The Doctrine of Divine Love; or, Outlines of the Moral Theology of the Evangelical Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1884). K. T. A. Liebner, Die christliche Dogmatik aus dem christologischen Princip dargestellt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1849). 30

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and so comfort can be taken from this. Why we should be comforted by a suffering God remains unclear, especially if he, like us, can now do little to alleviate it and is rendered helpless in vanquishing its actual causes.32 Indeed, Weinandy goes on to claim that those who support the notion of a suffering God “isolate the sufferer in his or her suffering. This is humanly and emotionally devastating. The sufferer stands alone in his or her suffering before a suffering God, who is himself a helpless and impotent victim”.33 A possible response to Weinandy’s critique is that Christ’s suffering as God offers the believer comfort for two reasons. First, God offers comfort by showing solidarity with us in our suffering.34 God is not a passive onlooker who leaves us alone in our suffering, but, as Whitehead puts it, “is the great companion – the fellow-sufferer who understands”.35 Second, in his co-suffering God is not overcome by his suffering. That is the meaning of Christ’s resurrection, which must always be held together with Christ’s suffering and death. Crucifixion and resurrection belong together and we lose the meaning of both if we separate them. It is in suffering but not being overcome by suffering that Christ is savior, thereby offering human sufferers the assurance that they too will ultimately be victorious over suffering. The genus tapeinoticon attempts to articulate this and in doing so is an important corrective to previously one-sided forms of the communicatio idiomatum and the two-natures doctrine it serves. The genus tapeinoticon expresses the insight that it is because it is God who suffers in Christ that Christ’s suffering is significant. If Christ suffers solely as a human being, then his suffering is just another instance of the suffering of the human lot. Does this undermine divine immutability? Yes, if by immutability we mean hard immutability, but hard immutability would also rule out the incarnation and is therefore unacceptable to Christian theology. God’s immutability is not hard, however, but what we might term “passible immutability”. If we understand God’s essence first and foremost as love, then Christ’s participation in human suffering is a statement of God’s immutable love for humankind. “Immutability” means that God acts in accordance with God’s own nature and that nothing can deflect God from doing so. Since God’s nature is love and love entails vulnerability and co-suffering with the beloved, then responding and adapting to the needs of the beloved is not a change that threatens divine immutability, but is on the contrary the expression of the immutability of God’s loving nature. It is precisely because God loves human beings that he suffers – not helpless suffering, however, but suffering that through the victory of the resurrection offers human beings the hope of overcoming their own suffering. It is in providing this insight that the genus tapeinoticon corrects and completes the communicatio idiomatum.

FURTHER READING Cross, Richard. Communicatio Idiomatum: Reformation Christological Debates. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Weinandy, Does God Suffer? 214. Ibid., 261. 34 We should note, however, that not all forms of human suffering apply to God. God is not subject to human appetites and sinful desires, nor does God experience the suffering that comes about as the consequence of sin. 35 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 351. 32 33

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Haga, Joar. Was there a Lutheran Metaphysics: The Interpretation of Communicatio Idiomatum in Early Modern Lutheranism. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012. Weinandy, Thomas G. and O.F.M. Cap. Does God Suffer? Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000.

Chapter 44

Kenosis ROBERT STACKPOLE

Let earth and Heaven combine, Angels and men agree, To praise in songs divine The incarnate Deity, Our God contracted to a span, Incomprehensibly made man. He laid His glory by, He wrapped Him in our clay; Unmarked by human eye, The latent Godhead lay; Infant of days He here became, And bore the mild Immanuel’s name. Charles Wesley (1707–88) What, in essence, is the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation? It is the belief that in Jesus Christ we have one divine person, one subject and bearer of properties, in two natures: without ceasing to be fully divine, he came to dwell among us in a fully human way. To put some flesh on those abstractions, Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey expressed the heart of the doctrine when he wrote: The divine Creator has humbled himself to take on himself the entire experience of existence as man, in all the conditions of humanity. That is what we call the Incarnation. That is the heart of Christian belief . . . God’s answer to our need is to give himself utterly to us in the total self-donation of the Word-made-flesh.1 Can we dig deeper and plumb the depths of this great wonder of the Incarnation? Is there an incarnational model or theory that best expresses and unfolds this mystery for us? And how can the Incarnation, rightly understood, help us to see more clearly God’s relationship with human suffering?

A. Michael Ramsey, Introducing the Christian Faith (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1961), 42–3.

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CLASSICAL TWO-NATURE CHRISTOLOGY One option before us is classical Patristic and Scholastic “Two-Nature Christology” (TNC, for short). This model of the Incarnation states that the two natures of Jesus Christ, divine and human, are present and operative simultaneously in one person (or hypostasis) while each nature remains distinct. In other words, when God becomes incarnate among us as Jesus of Nazareth, none of his divine attributes are abandoned, limited, altered, or affected in any way. In addition to his eternal divine nature, the divine Son, the second person of the Trinity, simply adds a human set of properties, a fully human manner of life, to the completely unchangeable and utterly impassible reality of who he is. The cost of understanding the nature of God and the mystery of the Incarnation in this way, however, is very high. Since the divine Son in the Incarnation has two natures, fully divine and fully human, when in his human nature as “Jesus” he is suffering and dying, his fully divine mind and consciousness does not participate in that suffering at all. In the heavenly realm, God the Son in his divine mind certainly must know that he is suffering in his human form whenever Jesus is suffering, and God the Son in his divine mind must “see” his human nature suffering (so to speak), but only as a relative spectator. A close analogy for TNC would be the relationship between a video games player and the action-hero character whom he operates as a kind of extension of himself in the on-screen, virtual world. The video games player sees and knows but does not directly or fully experience the struggles and sufferings of his on-screen character. The action-hero is truly “his” character and self-expression in that virtual world, but the video games player remains largely unaffected in his own proper nature by the fortunes of the character he operates. In other words, classical TNC has defined in such a rarefied manner the way in which the divine Son is the hypostatic “subject” of all the human experiences of Jesus of Nazareth that it is hard to see how we can clearly say he fully shared the human condition: [T]he problem . . . with classical TNC is not that it is necessarily self-contradictory – as if divine and human properties, logically and ontologically, cannot be attributed to a divine person simultaneously. Rather, the main problem with TNC . . . is that talk of God “taking on” or “assuming” human nature and human experiences in a TNC way is a problem of intelligibility. In particular, the theory provides us with no assurance that in an intelligible way God the Son has really “borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” To put it in a nutshell: in classical TNC the divine Son, in his divine nature at least, was a mere spectator of, and entirely immune to his own earthly sufferings. The divine Son thereby “suffers impassibly” – the rest of us are not so lucky.2 Given the sharp distinction between the two natures of Christ that this model necessitates, it is no wonder that many of the Fathers of the Church, and later the medieval Scholastic theologians, remained somewhat uncomfortable with it. They tried to bridge the gap by elevating the human nature of Christ as much as possible due to its unique union with a fully divine person. Thus, as a necessary consequence of the hypostatic union, Jesus was said to possess knowledge of all actual realities in his human soul (the attribute of

Robert Stackpole, The Incarnation: Rediscovering Kenotic Christology, 2nd ed. (Chilliwack: The Chartwell Press, 2021), 222. For example, Jesus’ cry of dereliction from the cross was marginalized in most post-Nicene, Patristic, and Scholastic discussions, and even when it was discussed, it was often subject to convoluted interpretations. See Gerard Rossé, The Cry of Jesus on the Cross (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2003), 76–8.

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“relative omniscience”), which means he did not suffer any real, human anxieties, nor did he need the virtue of faith – “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1) – precisely because in his human soul he saw everything that could be seen. Also, when he needed to for the sake of his mission, through his human will, he could utilize his own unlimited power: the divine omnipotence that in his incarnate state he always held in reserve in his divine nature. Of course, most defenders of TNC today would not endorse these traditional features of the theory, but that only leaves them with the yawning chasm between the two natures of Christ that the theory implies. It is certainly a blessing that centuries of popular Christian devotion to Jesus Christ have been largely oblivious to this theological problem, and despite the handicap of an insufficient theory of the Incarnation, have been inflamed by the Holy Spirit with the love of the divine infant and the crucified God (manifest, for example in Charles Wesley’s hymn, quoted earlier). Ever since the rise of Kenotic Christology in the nineteenth century, however, there has been a persistent attempt to match that fire of love with a theory of the Incarnation that can fully support and sustain it.

A KENOTIC INCARNATIONAL ALTERNATIVE We need to recover another, fully incarnational option: the Moderate Kenotic Model (Moderate KM), found especially in one stream of the twentieth-century Anglican tradition flowing from Bishop Frank Weston, but also in various ways in Russian Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov, and philosophers Thomas Morris and Richard Swinburne. In its most coherent form, Moderate KM is the notion that in the Incarnation, the divine Son of God, without ceasing to uphold and guide the whole creation as the universal Word, by a voluntary act restrained the exercise of some of his divine attributes at a particular time and place in human history – to begin with, in relation to an ovum in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, relating to it in precisely the way a human soul would be given to, and interact with a human body from the moment of conception. In this way, God the Son extended his divine mind or range of consciousness into an additional, more limited, fully human range of consciousness, and human faculties of knowledge and action. He thereby experienced all the joys and sorrows, sufferings and struggles of human life as Jesus of Nazareth – experiences to which his divine mind had full and complete access. This kenotic theory not only can be shown to be coherent in itself but also remarkably powerful in its impact on the wider pattern of Christian belief. Just to be clear, when some proponents of Kenotic Christology speak of the second person of the Trinity “abandoning” or “divesting himself” of divine attributes in order to dwell among us in a fully human way, this is not the version of kenoticism that we are proposing here. That can be termed “radical” rather than “moderate” kenoticism. If (as Moderate KM holds) the eternal Son merely holds divine attributes to some degree in abeyance within the sphere of His incarnate life as Jesus, while exercising them in other ways elsewhere in the universe, this is really just an act of “self-restraint”: a self-limitation of the exercise of divine attributes by the Logos asarkos (i.e., by the eternal, unlimited divine Word) in relation to a certain place and time in human history, not the outright “abandonment” or loss of those attributes. Ironically, the person who once expressed this model best – H. P. Liddon, the great preacher at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London – was alarmed by the initial appearance of

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Kenotic Christology in the nineteenth century (he did not live to see some of its difficulties ironed out a couple of generations later by theologians such as Weston). Here is how Liddon summed up the mystery of the Incarnation: Jesus is the Almighty, restraining His illimitable powers; Jesus is the incomprehensible, voluntarily submitting to bonds; Jesus is Providence, clothed in our flesh and blood; Jesus is infinite charity, tending us with the kindly looks and tender handling of a human love; Jesus is the eternal wisdom, speaking out of the depths of infinite thought in a human language. Jesus is God making Himself, if I may dare so to speak, our tangible possession.3 There are good analogies for this kenotic model of the incarnation in human acts of selflimitation – even in acts of the self-restraint of one’s essential human attributes – that do not necessarily compromise the integrity of one’s human nature. For example, every time we choose to go to bed at night and fall asleep, we voluntarily restrain the exercise of our daylight consciousness – including our faculties of reason and volition – for the good purpose of “recharging” our bodily “batteries”, so to speak. And when we are asleep, we are not less than fully human: we are simply fully human in a self-limited and selfrestrained way, in order to achieve a good purpose. Similarly, when US General Omar Bradley voluntarily joined his troops on the front lines during the Second World War, he did not thereby cease to be a four-star general. When he was in the trenches, he simply chose for a time to leave the safety and security of central headquarters, thereby limiting his invulnerability to attack by the enemy, in order to share and experience the frontline struggle for victory with his men, and to rally and inspire his troops by his personal presence among them. All analogies for divine acts in the spatio-temporal realm are imperfect, of course, but this one surely expresses something of what the faithful have always meant when they rejoiced with St. John that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14, which in Greek literally means he “tabernacled” among us, that is, he “pitched his tent among our tents”, and became a tent-dweller like us). In other words, in his kenotic Incarnation the divine Son truly came all the way down to share our ontological space, our level of being, as an ontological participant in the human condition, so that there is no depth of suffering and affliction that he might ask us to walk through that he was not willing to undergo himself. Brian Hebblethwaite once wrote, “It is the manner in which our God is believed to have taken upon himself the burden of the world’s evil that renders him morally credible.”4 As Creator of “an organic self-reproducing world of sentient and free persons”, vulnerable to suffering and death, the divine Word enters into solidarity with us by sharing our lot, showing us the way, redeeming us from our sins, and revealing divine love in person, not just by proxy.5

H. P. Liddon, The Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (London: Pickering, 1864), 187. Brian Hebblethwaite, The Incarnation: Collected Essays in Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 64. 5 Ibid., 5. From a kenotic perspective, when the Son of God incarnate needed to draw on divine power to perform miracles, out of love and compassion for his people, he did so not in a superhuman way by accessing an extra “power-pack” from his divine nature, but in a fully human way by accessing to a supreme degree the loving power of the Holy Spirit. As the divine Son self-limited in human flesh, Jesus Christ, he was supremely anointed with the Spirit, and completely surrendered to the Spirit (Luke 4:16-21; Acts 10:38). 3 4

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Another analogy may help: consider how the relationship between human mind and the divine mind of the Son of God in the Incarnation is comparable to the relationship between the conscious and subconscious life of a single human person. Central to this analogy is that the human subconscious has an asymmetric accessing relationship with all that a human person experiences on a conscious level throughout his life. In other words, everything that we experience in our life on a conscious level is stored in our subconscious memory. At the same time, we normally do not have voluntary and conscious access to most of what is stored in our subconscious. It is also important to note here that the human subconscious normally preserves intact our memories of past events and conscious experiences, even as it also relates them to the rest of what is stored in the vast reservoir of the subconscious. In other words, the memory of past events and conscious experiences is not lost in the subconscious “soup”, so to speak, and even can be recovered and brought to daylight consciousness, if need be, by a good psychotherapist or spiritual director. In a similar way, all the finite experiences that the divine Son has in his human soul and body as Jesus of Nazareth, from the limited perspective on events of his human consciousness, are stored intact, as a subset, in the infinite divine mind or divine consciousness of the Son, thereby providing an eternal divine touchstone for the Son’s compassionate bond with the struggles and sufferings of all human beings. All of this entails, of course, a different understanding of divine immutability and impassibility, divine omnipotence and omniscience than the classical tradition bequeathed to us. We do not have the space to explore those implications here. Suffice it to say that this revised understanding enables moderate kenoticism to hold that these divine attributes are not in fact lost or compromised by the Son’s kenotic Incarnation.6

KENOSIS, HOLY SCRIPTURE, AND CHRISTIAN ORTHODOXY Scholarly debate over the Moderate Kenotic Model of the Incarnation begins with the claim that it lacks proper biblical support. Its defenders would contend, however, that while it is not mandated by Holy Scripture, Moderate KM is certainly consonant with the message of the New Testament, and makes better sense of the scriptural witness to the mystery of the Incarnation than classical TNC, much less other, sub-orthodox theories. The locus classicus of Kenotic Christology is Phil. 2:6-7 (RSV): “though he was in the form of God, [Christ] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped [n.b.: the Jerusalem Bible renders 2:6 as ‘did not cling to equality with God’, which may be a more accurate translation], but emptied himself [ekenōsen], taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” That this passage can be interpreted as an expression of St. Paul’s belief in the Incarnation has been ably defended in recent years by Larry Hurtado7 and Gordon Fee.8 A similar theme can be found in 2 Corinthians: “For you

Kenotic Christology and the divine attributes are discussed in depth in Stackpole, The Incarnation, 101–30, 143–5, 222–6, 281–9, 297–306, 312–16, 319–26, 332–41, 345–8, 641–76. 7 Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 118–26. 8 Gordon Fee, “The New Testament and Kenosis Christology”, in Exploring Kenotic Christology, ed. C. Stephen Evans (Vancouver: Regent College Press, 2006), 30–5. 6

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know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9; cf. John 17:5). Above all, the book of Hebrews is replete with kenotic resonances. The author tells us that “for a little while” the divine Son was “made lower than the angels”, which even included his “tasting death for every one” (Heb. 2:9). In order to become a “merciful” high priest for humanity (2:17), a Savior who could truly “sympathize with our weaknesses” (4:15), it was necessary for him to “partake of the same nature” as those he came to rescue from the power of death and the devil (2:14), and to be “in every respect . . . tempted as we are, yet without sinning” (4:15). It is precisely this kinship with us in our struggles and sorrows that enables us to turn to him with “confidence . . . that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (4:16). Again, no one claims biblical “proof” for Moderate Kenotic Christology – simply consonance with the way the incarnational faith of the church was expressed in the time of the apostles. Moving from Scripture to the voice of mainstream Christian Tradition, the question arises of how Moderate KM fits with the basic pattern of consensus and conciliar Christian orthodoxy. In particular, is this just a modern version of the ancient heresy of Apollinaris, who taught that in the Incarnation the omniscient mind of the divine Son took the place of the human mind? Was Jesus a divine–human hybrid, so to speak? For example, Roman Catholic theologian Fr. Thomas Weinandy complains that in the kenotic theories of Charles Gore and Frank Weston, “The consciousness . . . of Christ is not really human, but merely the divine consciousness . . . brought down to a human level”.9 Richard Swinburne has persuasively argued, however, that what the ancient Fathers objected to in the Apollinarian heresy was the way it deprived Jesus of a fully human soul with a fully human psychological life. In Moderate KM, the soul of Jesus is held to be fully human, with authentic human limitations, without being merely human; the soul of Jesus was the divine Word assuming all the limitations and conditions of a human soul, uniting himself with human flesh in the womb of Mary. Moderate KM also might be charged with violating the parameters of the classical Chalcedonian Definition, which stated that in the Incarnation the divine and human natures are present in Jesus Christ “without confusion”. But again, advocates of Moderate KM could respond that the intention of the bishops at Chalcedon was to ensure that Jesus had all the divine attributes, and an authentically human body and soul, with all the essential human attributes. Jesus was not some kind of blending of the divine and human natures resulting in a tertium quid, possessing neither a fully human nor a fully divine nature. Of course, given their Hellenistic presupposition that the divine nature, in every possible way, must be absolutely immutable and impassible, the only way the Council fathers could conceive of the Incarnation was in terms of classical Two-Nature Christology.10 In the Moderate Kenotic Model, on the other hand (as found, for example, in Richard Swinburne and Thomas Morris), housing the human mind or range of consciousness within the Son’s divine mind or range of consciousness does not necessarily swallow up or fail to preserve the properties of his human nature. The human range of Thomas Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., Does God Change? The Word’s Becoming in the Incarnation (Still River: St. Bede Publications, 1985), 117. 10 Hints of a more kenotic perspective, however, can be found in St. Irenaeus of Lyons and St. Hilary of Poitiers. See J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 5th ed. (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1978), 147–9, 335. 9

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consciousness of the divine Son is definably human, with authentically human limitations and experiences, even though it is included within his divine range of consciousness as a subset, and an earthly vehicle and expression of the divine life. Moreover, the divine Son does not cease to possess and exercise his omniscience and omnipotence throughout the cosmos, even while he assumes human limitations in the sphere of his incarnate life (Col. 1:15-17; Heb. 1:3).11 So, on this model both the human and divine natures are preserved. In short, while he is incarnate in Palestine, the divine Word is simply “double-tasking”. This model of the Incarnation fits not only with the logic of Christian orthodoxy but also with the logic of love. Consider, how does a father properly love his child? He stoops down to the child’s level: as best he can, he enters the child’s thought-world, offering him guidance in simple words and concepts that the child can understand, and he shares sympathetically in all the joys and sorrows that the child must go through in the difficult process of growing to maturity (since he himself, as a child, also had to go through that same process). Would we complain of that father: “this is inadequate – it is merely a denuded and self-diminished form of adulthood, and therefore this father cannot properly communicate the fullness of his adulthood to his child”? On the contrary, it is love after the pattern of the Incarnation – the only kind of love that can truly meet us where we are and thereby do us the most good.

KENOSIS, DIVINE SUFFERING, AND DIVINE COMPASSION Most importantly, many theologians today would object to the Moderate Kenotic Model of the Incarnation, either because it ascribes suffering to the divine nature of the Son of God, thereby violating (as proponents of classical TNC would say) the absolute immutability and impassibility of God, or (at the opposite end of the theological spectrum) because it ignores the fact that a loving and omniscient God always would be sympathetically involved in human suffering – so there is no need for a kenotic theory of the Incarnation to insure that involvement. Philosopher John Hick lays out this latter objection: It is a highly preachable thought that in the incarnation God became our fellow sufferer. But do we not want to say that in his total awareness and sympathy with his creatures, God has always participated in every pain and joy, every hope and fear, every feeling and volition, every success and failure of all his human children? . . . [T]he doctrine of unceasing divine sympathy and suffering removes this particular need for incarnation, since God is already fully involved in all his creatures’ joys and sorrows.12 On the other hand, if we are going to say that God somehow truly “participates in” or is “fully involved in” human suffering, then we need to know that he has been subject to the limitations of human nature, which are the necessary conditions of trauma and pain being for him what they are for us. In other words, it is hard to see how God could know what it is like for us to experience overwhelming suffering without himself sharing our human manner of being, and experiencing human suffering and abandonment from a

This was also the common teaching of the early Fathers of the Church: see St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies, V.18.3, and St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, I.17.1. 12 John Hick, “Evil and Incarnation”, in Incarnation and Myth, ed. Michael Goulder (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1979), 81. 11

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limited human perspective on events, with limited human resources to endure and pass through it. The Incarnation, according to Moderate KM, enables us to say that God has truly shared our lot in just this way, as the ground or touchstone for his sympathetic bond with all who suffer. All this is not to say that prior to the Incarnation God did not care about human pain and struggle. David Brown explains that believing that God cares about human suffering is quite different from saying that he identifies with our suffering: There is a major difference between the claim that God knows that someone suffers and cares and the claim that God knows that someone suffers and he himself once suffered likewise. The difference lies in the fact that in the latter case, suffering is part of the memory of God (and divine memories presumably do not fade!), and if that is so, then self-identification means exactly what it says, that God has direct experiential knowledge of the situation, and not just an abstract factual knowledge.13 To put it another way, divine omniscience presumably means that God knows all that can be known, all that it is logically possible for him to know, but “experiential knowledge” that is not based on ever having had similar experiences would seem to be a contradiction in terms, and therefore not possible even for divine omniscience. Even if one were to argue that a loving and omniscient God, by definition, must feel for us at least in some way – pitying our afflictions and sorrowing over our sins – still, he does so from his omniscient perspective on all events, including his full knowledge of the limits of suffering, of his own ability to heal suffering and bring good out of permitted evils, and his full knowledge of the meaning, purpose, and general outcome of the suffering of his creatures in his overall plan for history.14 Thus, God in his blessed and heavenly life may have something remotely analogous to empathy and sympathy for our plight, but, apart from or prior to the Incarnation, he has not really identified with the human condition. He has never experienced himself anything like the depths of human suffering, with all the mental and emotional trauma this entails. Thus, he has never truly “borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows” (Isa. 53:4). And if not, then it is not clear how he can be said to empathize and sympathize with our afflictions very closely – at least not in a way that enables us to look to him and find (in Whitehead’s famous phrase) “the fellow sufferer who understands”. According to Moderate KM, however, the Incarnation is the principal act in which God surrenders his own immunity to tragedy and loss for our sake and for our need. In a mysterious way, the eternal Son or Word reduces the operation of his divine attributes in order to dwell among us in human form. The incarnate life thereby truly affects the divine nature: the divine Son has added to his store of experience an experience of all the conditions and limitations of an authentically human life. And this fully human life experience, forever present to him, is the touchstone of his closest possible bond of compassion with the plight of suffering humanity. Through Jesus, therefore, he offers us in all our afflictions the human companionship of God. At the opposite end of the theological spectrum, Fr. Thomas Weinandy insists that the whole theology of divine pathos involved in Kenotic Christology merely “imprisons” God

David Brown, The Divine Trinity (La Salle: Open Court Publishing, 1985), 11. Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 197–8.

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in the same state of misery as suffering humanity, and thereby effectively undermines the gospel. In his essay “Does God Suffer?”, for example, he writes: If God, having lost His singular transcendence, is now infected by evil and suffering, then He too is immanently enmeshed in an evil cosmic process from which He, like all else, cannot escape. God may now suffer in union with all who suffer . . . but in so suffering, humankind, and even God Himself, are deprived of any hope of ever being freed from evil and so the suffering it causes. There is no hope of divine justice ever setting things right, nor is there any hope of love and goodness vanquishing evil . . . [T]he truth that God does not suffer is at the heart of the gospel, making it truly good news. This is especially in contrast to the bad news, which has become something like a “new orthodoxy”, that God is in as much trouble as we are.15 The argument here against divine passibility, however, seems to be a non sequitur in several respects. Even on the notion of divine suffering involved in Moderate KM, it is certainly not the case that “God is in as much trouble as we are”, helplessly imprisoned in the cosmic web of suffering and death. First, God is never merely the passive, helpless subject of suffering and sorrow; in becoming incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth, he has only taken upon himself what he willed and always in the service of his infinitely wise plan of salvation. For our sake he freely chose to share in our human vulnerability to suffering and death. Second, God’s infinite divine nature cannot be overwhelmed by his finite experience of human suffering, for he has infinite resources to absorb and transcend it. He knows its limits; he knows the extent to which he can bring good out of such permitted evils; and in his human nature he is risen to new and glorious life as well, which is also part of his eternal store of experience. Third, if God in some sense takes on an everlasting burden of compassion in his divine nature, it does not necessarily follow that all hope is lost of “goodness vanquishing evil”. Presumably, he has taken on this burden through the Incarnation precisely because he knows that in so doing he can thoroughly vanquish evil in us, by bringing to salvation all those who will receive and return his love. He can overcome evil and suffering in us by bearing it in his own heart, in some sense, forever. All this should move us to wonder and love, not to despair. Still, Fr. Weinandy is rightly concerned about exaggerated forms of kenoticism that do not carefully explain in what sense the divine nature transcends the experiences of suffering that God has voluntarily undertaken for our sake. Ascribing absolute impassibility to the divine nature, however, is not the only solution available. Suppose we draw the line between God’s experience of human suffering and his transcendence of all suffering – that transcendent “place” where he longs to bring each one of us with the risen Christ at our journey’s end – not between his human and divine natures, but (rather less clearly, but more appropriately) within the mystery of the divine nature itself. For this is the mystery of all mysteries that any human mind can ever attempt to comprehend: the mystery of the essence of God. Suppose the location of God’s transcendence of all pain and sorrow lies in the unfathomable depths of his divine Thomas Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., “Does God Suffer?” First Things 117 (November 2001): 13, 18.

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nature, in which God has infinite resources for absorbing the suffering he freely assumed as Jesus of Nazareth, and from which he has an infinite capacity to bring good out of permitted evils.16 Protestant theologian Bordon P. Bowne once expressed, in summary form, much of what we have struggled here to put into words: We look on the woes of the world. We hear the whole of creation, to use Paul’s language, groaning and laboring in pain. We see a few good men vainly striving to help the world into life and light; and in our sense of the awful magnitude of the problem and of our inability to do much, we cry out “Where is God? How can He bear this? Why doesn’t He do something?” And there is but one answer that satisfies: and that is the Incarnation and the Cross. God could not bear it. He has done something. He has done the utmost compatible with moral wisdom. He has entered into the fellowship of our suffering and misery and at infinite cost has taken the world upon His Heart that He might raise it to Himself.17

FURTHER READING Brown, David. Divine Humanity: Kenosis and the Construction of a Christian Theology. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011. Hebblethwaite, Brian. The Incarnation: Collected Essays in Christology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Morris, Thomas V. The Logic of God Incarnate. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Swinburne, Richard. The Christian God. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Weston, Frank. The One Christ: An Inquiry into the Manner of the Incarnation, 2nd edition. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1914.

For a plausible philosophical framework for this distinction, see W. Norris Clarke, S.J., Philosophical Approaches to God (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 131–7. 17 Bordon P. Bowne, Studies in Christianity (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 99. 16

Chapter 45

Atonement, Suffering, and Evil The Problem of Meaninglessness ADAM J. JOHNSON

The biblical interest in the problem of suffering and evil focuses on the people of Israel and the fulfillment of the covenants: Where is the righteousness of God, his fulfillment of his covenants with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob?1 In the midst of all this evil and suffering, when and how will God bless all the families of the earth in and through the blessing of Israel (Gen. 12:1-3)? One of the great concerns of the New Testament and early church was to establish that in Jesus Christ the maker of the covenants had fulfilled the same; that the Savior was in fact the creator; that the solution to the problem of evil, via the fulfillment of God’s promises to all creatures in and through his chosen people,2 lay in the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus. To put the point theologically, the doctrine of the atonement is the key to a Christian understanding of the problem of suffering and evil.3 Such an approach demands that our understanding of evil conform to the God revealed in the person and work of Jesus Christ (for as we will see, it is ultimately the doctrine of Or, as Webster puts it, this is a matter of “love issuing in fidelity”. John, Webster, God without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology, vol. I: God and the Works of God (New York: T&T Clark, 2016), 136. 2 Matthias Grebe, “The Problem of Evil”, in T&T Clark Companion to the Atonement, ed. Adam Johnson (New York: T&T Clark, 2017). 3 Several recent works have made a similar point, though with quite different emphases. Marilyn McCord Adams, for instance, writes of God drawing near “to purify [our world] and make it whole” in response to the problem of evil; but she does so by writing that “God . . . sacrifices Godself . . . to us”. The atonement is God coming “into our world in order to expose Godself to human wrath. Thus God’s offering of the Word made flesh functions as a propitiation” in which “the Lamb of God is offered to calm our anger by showing solidarity”. Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 275– 6. Integrating the Christian faith with evolutionary science, Elizabeth Johnson accounts for the problem of evil (in the form of suffering and death) by explaining that “new life comes from death. But the cost is terrible . . . Indwelling the world and empowering its creative ways, the ineffable living God also freely joins the world and drinks the cup of suffering, even unto death” – a form of solidarity verging on apology. Elizabeth A. Johnson, Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God Love (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 210. Eleonore Stump similarly centers on the cross (“neither [an acceptable theodicy or an acceptable doctrine of the atonement] can be properly constructed without the other”), in a form of solidarity entailing mind-reading empathy, such that Christ is opened to the “psyches of all human beings” on the cross – a form of sin bearing that is then followed or reversed to lead toward our creaturely union with God. Eleonore Stump, Atonement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 368, 164, cf. 331f. 1

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God which gives rise to the problem of evil). This chapter explores how understanding suffering and evil from the standpoint of Christ’s atonement calls attention to the unique character of God, highlighting the role of God’s freedom, righteousness, and patience in establishing meaning in the midst of meaninglessness.4 To properly understand suffering and evil, we must not think merely in terms of the power, goodness, and knowledge of God, but in terms of his freedom, righteousness, and patience as well. This chapter not only integrates the problem of evil and the doctrine of the atonement but also focuses on the contribution of Paul’s letter to the Romans, considering the role of divine freedom, righteousness, and patience in the plan of salvation, and therefore, in the problem of evil.5 Suffering, Paul says, pales in comparison to the coming glory. Creation was subjected to futility by God in anticipation of the freedom of the children of God – an extended and patient labor, full of the groanings of childbirth which culminates only in the redemption of our bodies, in those who are justified by God in his Son (Rom. 8:1830). The key to Paul’s approach is God’s intentionality, his purposefulness which orders the experience of suffering and evil, patiently locating it within a movement, a teleology which affirms and qualifies its meaning through the cross of Christ and its implications – a work of freedom, righteousness, and patience.6

BACKGROUND: THE PROBLEM OF EVIL To briefly situate our approach within a traditional formulation of the problem of evil, Maximus the Confessor writes: “Some say that God is simply ignorant of the means and methods of providence, or that He does not wish to employ them, or has not the power to do so.”7 God’s providence fails, and suffering and evil triumph, either because God is not omniscient, benevolent, or omnipotent. Were God to be all three, obviously he would thwart evil within his creation. That evil exists conclusively demonstrates that we are not under the providence of such a God, who may be any one or two of these, but not all three – or so the argument goes. Before proceeding, we highlight the point that our view of evil is a function of our understanding of the divine character. It is a vision of God’s goodness that raises the thought of evil in ourselves and our surroundings. It is a belief in the reality and illimitability of God’s power that makes our vulnerability acute. And it is our belief in God’s knowledge that makes his apparent ignorance so confusing. Apart from an account of the living God’s character, the problem of evil subsides into a mere sequence of events – interpretation presupposes meaning. Only presupposing an object allows for the meaningful account of a void, only from the standpoint of wisdom can we understand

4 On my broader understanding of the doctrine of the atonement, see: Adam Johnson, Atonement: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: T&T Clark, 2015). 5 After all, “the theologian’s occupation is primarily exegetical”. John Webster, The Culture of Theology, eds Ivor J. Davidson and Alden C. McCray (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), 65. 6 This work presupposes and unfolds the logic of divine simplicity. See Stephen J. Duby, Divine Simplicity: A Dogmatic Account (New York: T&T Clark, 2015). 7 Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, 2 vols, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 315.

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folly, only by preconceiving right can we feel there to be wrong.8 The divine character is at the heart of the problem of evil. The question, then, is how the doctrine of the atonement shapes our understanding of God’s character and thus of the problem of suffering and evil.9 For “Jesus Christ, now present in the power of the Holy Spirit, is the great catastrophe of human life and history. In him, all things are faced by the one who absolutely dislocates and no less absolutely reorders”.10 What does the presence of God among us, the dislocator and reorderer of our thinking about evil and suffering, teach us about these matters – for he, not death, not prolonged illnesses, or the ravages of empires, is the great catastrophe of human history.

ROMANS AND THE FREEDOM, RIGHTEOUSNESS, AND PATIENCE OF GOD Paul clearly affirms that God’s will is good, acceptable, and perfect (Rom. 12:2), that he gave Israel a good law (Rom. 7:12), and that his will is a supremely good one: to have mercy on all (Rom. 12:32). He likewise affirms God’s power, listing it among his invisible qualities (Rom. 1:20), affirming it as God’s ability to fulfill his promises (Rom. 4:21). And Paul praises the depth of the riches of the knowledge of God (Rom. 11:33). So how does Paul affirm these in such a way as to allow for the presence of suffering and evil? What is it about the character of God, that he can be all-knowing, good, and powerful, while both allowing for and responding to evil? Our first qualification pertains to God’s freedom, for it is as the God who loves in freedom that he freely gives us the gift of freedom (Rom. 5:15-17; 6:7-23). God’s goodness is not an irresistible force – it allows for creaturely denial, negligence, and sin, which is to say that God’s goodness is operative within the context of a relationship, granting existence to others, to free creatures for the sake of the “obedience of faith” (Rom. 1:5).11 The goodness of God is such as to will goodness and obedience, while allowing the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men (Rom. 1:18). And in response to such ungodliness and evil, to receive, take, and bear this suffering and evil on the cross, to do away with it in himself, and so to bring the goodness of God’s workmanship to completion. “The truest meaning of goodness is that it is the power of uniting with others for them to receive its goods and for itself to receive their evils”12 – and for the sake of this union, rooted in exchange, this goodness is utterly free. Free to give and free to receive. God is Lord in a manner that is utterly free, “in no sense dictated to Him from outside and conditioned by no higher necessity than that of His own choosing and deciding, willing As C. S. Lewis puts it, Christianity “creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance ultimate reality is righteous and loving”, The Problem of Pain (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 24. In short, is the doctrine of divine attributes which creates the problem of evil. 9 This approach takes the Christological over the theistic approach to theodicy. See Telford Work, “Advent’s Answer to the Problem of Evil”, International Journal of Systematic Theology 2, no. 1 (2000). 10 Webster, The Culture of Theology, 43. 11 The correlation between freedom and obedience is essential to the telos of God’s freedom, accounting for what McCord Adams calls the “two stages” of Divine love: a permissive stage, and a second stage where God “domesticates the material household into the personal, so that persons do not become . . . radically vulnerable to horrors”. Adams, Christ and Horrors, 219. 12 William of Auvergne, “The Treatise on the Reasons Why God Became Man”, in Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. Roland J. Teske (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2011), 49. 8

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and doing”,13 and therefore such as to value and treasure the goodness of his relationship with his creatures and thus their freedom (“compulsion is no attribute of God”14). In treasuring his freedom God retains and affirms himself and his will for creation through the work of Christ the creator and recreator.15 The freedom of God, in other words, is the freedom and goodness of his righteousness. God is good, powerful, and knowing, but as such he is righteous: a righteousness which allows for the sin and unrighteousness of the creature, but which gives unrighteousness up to itself as a form of punishment (Rom. 1:18-32), and ultimately and finally judges unrighteousness in every form (Rom. 2:12-16). God’s righteousness is good and therefore rejoices in preserving the freedom of the creature, sustaining rebellious creatures even while judging them.16 But the righteousness of God is greater than this, does not lose itself in preserving and judging the creature, for at its heart the righteousness of God is a living and joyful justice which delights in establishing the pattern, order, and fulfillment necessary for creaturely thriving through the redemption of Jesus Christ – a righteousness leading to justification and life (Rom. 5:18). God is good, all-knowing, and omnipotent, but he is these as the free and righteous God. Within this affirmation of God’s righteousness stands a divine attribute, which quietly but pervasively shapes both a theology of suffering and evil and Paul’s letter to the Romans: God’s patience. That God is patient means that he is free to be who he is in the wisdom of his own peculiar timing,17 in the long-suffering and enduring exercise of his government.18 It means that he wills to allow another – for the sake of His own grace and mercy and in the affirmation of His holiness and justice – space and time for the development of [the other’s] own existence, thus conceding to this existence a reality side by side with His own, and fulfilling His will towards this other in such a way that He does not suspend and destroy it . . . but accompanies and sustains it and allows it to develop in freedom.19 God, who is good, knowing, and powerful, who is free and righteous, is these in his patience, his freedom to be who he is in his own time and way with his creatures. Paul’s greeting to the Romans tells of an ancient promise dating back to David and the prophets (Rom. 1:1-4). So great is this patience, that the temptation is to rely upon it, to “presume on the riches of [God’s] kindness and forbearance and patience” (Rom. 2:4) – an act which has the counter-effect of “storing up wrath for [ourselves] on the day of

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, 4 vols (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–75), II/1, 301 (hereafter cited as CD). 14 “The Epistle to Diognetus”, in The Apostolic Fathers in English, ed. Michael William Holmes (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 545. 15 Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 29. See 26–36. As Barth puts it, “Patience exists where space and time are given with a definite intention, where freedom is allowed in expectation of a response . . . That [God acts this way] lies in His very being. Indeed, it is His being. Everything that God is, is implied and included in the statement that He is patient”. CD II/1, 408. 16 John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, vol. 2, trans. S. D. F. Salmond (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), 24–30. 17 See Jeremy J. Wynne, Wrath among the Perfections of God’s Life (New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 180–2. 18 John Webster, God without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology, vol. II: Virtue and Intellect (New York: T&T Clark, 2016), 179. 19 Barth, CD II/1, 409–10. See Paul Dafydd Jones, “Patience and the Trinity”, Modern Theology 34, no. 3 (2018): 386–402. 13

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wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed” (Rom. 2:5). Paul’s development of God’s patience centers of the cross, where “now”, finally, after these many centuries of waiting, “the righteousness of God has been manifested”, as God put Christ Jesus forward “as a ἱλαστήριον (propitiation/expiation) by his blood” (Rom. 3:21-25). This was to make God’s righteousness manifest, “because in divine forbearance he had passed over former sins (διὰ τὴν πάρεσιν τῶν προγεγονότων ἁμαρτημάτων). It was to show God’s righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier” (Rom. 3:25-26).20 Paul, to unite Jew and Gentile in the church of Rome, rehearses the Christian faith, with particular attention to how this relates to the fulfillment of the history of Israel and the role of the Gentiles therein. The hinge upon which the account swings is the work of Jesus in establishing the righteousness of God – but central to the account, a matter raised from the very beginning of the letter is the patience, the forbearance of God: the remission of sins not “in such a way that He no longer regards the work of anyone as sin and simply takes the Law away”, but rather to patiently endure them in order “that He may justify”.21 The passing over of former sins (a form of “bearing”22 sin which anticipates the cross), the waiting to fulfill the promises given to the patriarchs and prophets, the agony of Israel under the power of foreign nations, the groaning of creation: these create a mounting burden, a growing question and charge against God. The problem of suffering and evil from Paul’s perspective is not simply the problem of God’s knowledge, goodness, or power: it is the problem of his freedom and righteousness, culminating in the problem of his patience.23 Patience with the lives of Adam and Eve after their disobedience, patience until the days of Noah, patience as Israel grew as a nation, patience as they suffered under Egyptian bondage, patience in their sin and years of wandering and, later, exile. The problem of evil is not so much that of the existence of pain (for we can rejoice in suffering, see Rom. 8:18), but the question of meaning in the midst and persistence of great pain. And as Paul explains it, the question of meaning revolves around the patience of the triune God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and his slowly unfolding purposes. What seems to be apathy is God’s “great and marvelous plan”24 of patience, a work of intentional kindness designed to lead, invite, and encourage repentance/penance.25 Romans 11 is the capstone to an argument establishing the purposeful patience of God in a plan, an act of wisdom. “God has consigned all to disobedience” and the accompanying suffering – lives full of evil – “that he may have mercy on all” (Rom. 11:32). This is the glimpse Paul gives us into the “riches and wisdom and knowledge of God”, of his judgments and ways – that God is not merely omniscient, powerful, and good, but that, as such, he is the wise and patient God26 who in his love of himself and his creatures, and therefore in his love of his freedom and righteousness, is patient: patient in himself, patient with us, patient in an ordered and purposeful way to bring about his John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans, trans. John Owen (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1979), 145. 21 Martin Luther, “Lectures on Romans”, in Luther’s Works 25, American Edition, ed. Hilton C. Oswald, trans. Walter G. Tillmanns and Jacob A. O. Preus (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1972), 249. 22 Ibid., 175. 23 Wynne, Wrath among the Perfections of God’s Life, 148–9, 164. 24 “The Epistle to Diognetus”, 545, cf. 545–9. 25 Peter Abelard, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, trans. Steven R. Cartwright (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 125, cf. 163. See Origen, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, trans. Thomas P. Scheck, 2 vols., vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 225. 26 Barth pairs these attributes in CD II/1. 20

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saving purposes in and with his creation, in the midst of and through our suffering and evil.27 The problem of evil is the problem of the meaning of God’s patience, of his timely working not without cause but with purpose28 – a patience ordered around the saving work of Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection, the work which will be completed at the second coming of the Lord.29

PATIENCE AND MEANING This emphasis on patience highlights the way that the problem of suffering and evil is thus fundamentally a problem of meaning, of finding the intentionality, wisdom, and purpose that signals patience in the midst of what seems to be absence or apathy. Apart from a presupposition of meaning, evil is simply pain: a different problem altogether. We regularly endure, minimize, or even embrace pain, if we have a strong sense of the purpose or role it plays in life (the pains involved in childbirth and sports, for instance), but remove that sense of meaning, and pain or suffering become something far greater – they become the problem of evil. Meaning is the goal, purpose, direction, (final) cause, or end that is greater than the activities, parts, and agents that contribute to or participate in an event, act, or state of affairs, it is the space within which we can be patient, can experience even great suffering, knowing that there is a larger purpose at play. To endure pain and suffering we need to have a sense of meaning: to come in contact with something greater than ourselves, something in which we participate, something which orders and organizes the whole of, or even just a part of, our lives, and thus allows patience to be meaningfully distinct from apathy. “Only through [Christ] is the righteousness of God clearly seen to be the unmistakable governance of men and the real power of history”, seen to be the work of the patient God.30 What, then, is the relationship between meaning, patience, and the atonement? God is the meaning, the goal or end for himself and all creation. God is the ultimate source of all that we call meaning: the root of all goals and purposes that are greater than the activities, parts, and agents that contribute to or participate in them coming about. He is this because there is nothing greater than himself; his completeness and self-satisfaction, his aseity and simplicity are such that God is his own purpose in all that he does. God is meaning, the source of meaning, and his creative work is that of sharing with others not only their being but their meaning, deriving as it does from participating in his glory and his glorious purposes.31 In his patience, and for the sake of the meaning which he both is and affirms, God became man in order to take upon himself our rejection or lack of meaning in its full reality and consequence – that we, raised to new life in him, might be restored to a life

Freedom and patience are interwoven: to be patient is to give room for the freedom of others, and to cherish freedom is necessarily to have patience. See Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 29; Barth, CD II/1, 407–22. 28 Abelard, Romans, 300. 29 Origen, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 1, 106. 30 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 106. Such an account of patience is vital for a proper account of providence as “teleological” – “fulfillment of the ordered fellowship with God which is the creature’s perfected happiness”. Webster, God without Measure I, I: God and the Works of God, 131. 31 See Andrew Davison, Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 27

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of meaning in him. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46), channeling the spirit of Job through the language of the Psalmist, is not so much a cry of pain as it is a cry for meaning. But God does not come to Jesus as he did to Job (Job 38–42), for whom God’s mere presence was the presence of meaning and therefore the cessation of the problem; God does not rescue Jesus as he did the Psalmist. Jesus, for us and for our sake, is left with the problem of evil in the silence and pain of death. Jesus, bearing our sin, bearing the meaninglessness which is the reality of our life in sin (“under the sun”, see Ecclesiastes), was cut off from the sense of meaning, from the goal, purpose, direction, cause, or end of all things in God. Why did God become man and die such a death? That at the right time, in the fruition of his covenantal freedom and patience and therefore in the fulfillment of his righteousness, he might embrace for us the full reality of evil: the evil of the body in its tearing, breaking, and death; evil of relationships in the betrayal or abandonment of friends; political evil in the machinations of the Jews and the abandonment of justice by the Romans; demonic evil in the work of Satan. God became man that he might take upon himself the full consequence of our sin, of meaninglessness, of evil. Jesus, the Logos, or Meaning incarnate, the one in whom all things hold together, embraces, experiences, and allows himself to be overcome and torn apart, by meaninglessness. And in this, he remains the free, righteous, and patient one. He is the one who in death, in that “day of waiting, a hiatus and a barrier . . . across this motionless, unhurried interstice between yesterday and tomorrow, this deadly stasis of inertia which faith has been constrained to speak of as a descent into hell”, is suspended on Holy Saturday.32 Why did God become man? Why did the God-man die such a death? That after his great patience, after the long passing over of sin, after the continuation of his patience in death, he might rise from the meaninglessness, that he might re-enter this life of ours in the power of the resurrection, and, in his freedom and righteousness, in patience and time for us, introduce a new order, a new kingdom, a new (or renewed) goal, purpose, or direction of all things. This work of patience is a simultaneous reaffirmation of creation and its goal, and yet a radical critique and displacement of creation (“the great catastrophe of human life and history”33) as that which, given its disorder, chaos, and malformation in and through sin, has meaning only in its destruction and re-creation. Jesus became man that he might rise from the dead, bring meaning from the ashes, and so re-establish the telos toward which he guides creation in his freedom, righteousness, and patience, and which puts present evils in their place, within their defined term. From this standpoint, that of the meaning of the resurrection, the purpose of God’s patience becomes clear, and the problem of evil is reframed in light of the hope, in light of the way that the powers and realities of this present world have been used by God to advance his grace and righteousness. From this standpoint, Donne can chastise death,34 and Athanasius can anticipate the incorruptibility we will receive as the fruit of the cross (and with it, immunity to evil).35

Alan E. Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 412–13. See Adam Johnson, God‘s Being in Reconciliation: The Theological Basis of the Unity and Diversity of the Atonement in the Theology of Karl Barth (New York: T&T Clark, 2012), 127–32. 33 Webster, The Culture of Theology, 43. 34 John Donne, “Holy Sonnet 6: Death Be Not Proud”, in John Donne: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 175. 35 Athanasius, On the Incarnation, trans. John Behr (Yonkers: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), 171–3. 32

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ATONEMENT, EVIL, AND CHRISTUS VICTOR This reflection on meaning and patience, bound up with the history of God’s covenantal relationship with Israel, culminates in a vital aspect of the atonement and the problem of evil which to this point we have only hinted at. According to the Christian faith, demons and Satan play a constitutive role in God’s purposes and therefore his patience. Satan first tempted Eve. Job’s suffering happened within the context of God’s interactions with Satan. And at the conclusion to Paul’s letter, he writes that “the God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Rom. 16:20), after having affirmed that no demon or death or powers or anything else in creation “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:31-39).36 Evil in this world is not reduced to but is profoundly bound up with, Satan and demons, who have real power and influence in this world. Scripture at times goes so far as to make God’s conflict with these forces his primary purpose. God became man, in part, to overcome the evil one. This is not a separate theme but a distinct layer vital to understanding the full picture portrayed so far – that evil is a problem of meaning generated by God’s freedom, righteousness, and patience, in a plan that involves far more than human concerns. And according to the law, prophets, apostles, and the majority of Christian writings throughout history, God’s purpose, the frame of reference for meaning, includes a vital role for fallen angelic beings. With them too, God is patient, for they are his creatures. They too cause immense suffering. They too are bound up with God’s purposes in the death and resurrection (“now will the ruler of this world be cast out” [John 12:31]). Though the fundamental insight concerning the atonement and evil is the same, integrating the presence and role of the demonic yields a fuller picture, a wider frame of reference for understanding, grieving, and resisting evil. God’s purpose in Christ is to restore his creation to a right relation to him, and therefore to freedom and righteousness. But the backdrop of this purpose is a conflict larger than our own stories (see Job). Meaning, and therefore the problem of evil and suffering, is a cosmic matter, as God reconciles all things to himself: things in heaven, on earth, and under the earth (Eph. 1:10; Phil. 2:10).

CONCLUSION To begin understanding suffering and evil from the standpoint of Christ’s atonement, we must submit our minds to the unique character of God – we must consistently refuse to approach the question merely in terms of the power, knowledge, and goodness of God, in isolation from a scriptural reflection on God’s freedom, righteousness, and patience in establishing meaning in the midst of meaninglessness. The atonement, in other words, pushes the problem of evil and suffering away from abstract generalizations into God’s enacted plan in Christ to overcome evil within his creation.37 The question is not one of philosophical understanding but of accommodating ourselves to the patiently enacted plan of the triune God in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Torsten Löfstedt, “Paul, Sin and Satan: The Root of Evil according to Romans”, Svensk Exegetik Årsbok 75 (2010): 109–34. 37 This is precisely the burden of Dostoevsky’s rejoinder to the problem of the “Grand Inquisitor”, as offered in the mutually informing stories of Elder Zosima and Alyosha in the Brothers Karamazov. 36

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FURTHER READING Adams, Marilyn McCord. Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Johnson, Adam. Atonement: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: T&T Clark, 2015. Rutledge, Fleming. The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015. Stump, Eleonore. Atonement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Chapter 46

The Cosmic Spirit’s Creatorship and Redeemership in the Context of Natural Theodicy JONGSEOCK (JAMES) SHIN

INTRODUCTION Pain and suffering are present both in human society and in the physical and biological levels. The suffering of non-human creatures is gaining awareness among scientists and theologians in theology-science dialogue. Even though the prevalence of evil in the world raises a question as to the goodness of a god in any religion, “The problem is particularly pressing for Abrahamic faiths that insist on God’s fairness, love, and goodness”.1 In that vein, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen points out, “Rampant suffering and acts of evil in the world, both in relation to humanity (moral evil) and to nature (natural evil), constitute a major atheistic challenge concerning the existence of God.”2 In this chapter, I engage with the Spirit’s mode of presence in creation ridden with pain and suffering. In creation, the Spirit is both immanent and transcendent in creatio continua as the Creator and the Redeemer, while creatio ex nihilo is a Trinitarian framework on which the whole of creation is ontologically dependent.3 In so doing, I argue that the Spirit, the Creator, is deeply immanent in the history of evolution in a Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Creation and Humanity: A Constructive Theology for the Pluralistic World, vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 194. Citing Andrew Linzey, Christianity and the Rights of Animals (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1987), 59. 2 Kärkkäinen, Creation and Humanity, 194. 3 Based on the idea of the world’s fundamental contingency on the Creatorship of God according to creatio ex nihilo, God’s Creatorship means the ongoing divine involvement in the history of nature. Rather than limiting creatio ex nihilo to the beginning of the world, the creatio originalis is to be in unity with God’s continuously creative immanence in creation. In the doctrine of creation, especially within the Eastern Orthodox tradition, God’s creativity is the source of novelty and diversity that emerges and evolves in nature. Ted Peters, “On Creating the Cosmos”, in Physics, Philosophy, and Theology, ed. Robert Russell, William Stoeger, and George 1

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creative and compassionate mode while continuing to be the Redeemer as the vital lure of the eschatological new creation. To that end, I first discuss the Trinitarian framework of creatio ex nihilo and its pneumatological implications. The cosmic dimension of the Spirit in this doctrine of creation is significant when one considers the Western theology’s tendency to subsume creation under the redemption of human beings contrary to the holistic portrayal of the creative and soteriological roles of the Spirit in Scripture. Then, I move on to concretize the creative and redeeming presence of the Spirit as the self-transcending lure for creatures and compassionate co-protester against the universal, inevitable, yet contingent natural evil. Here, while honoring the divinely established order of nature, the Spirit continues to be the Redeemer in a non-coercive, compassionate, and dynamic manner. In the last section, I discuss the significance of the non-anthropocentric understanding of the new creation that constitutes the basis and the goal of creatio continua.

CREATIO EX NIHILO: A TRINITARIANPNEUMATOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK OF CREATION According to the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, creation is ontologically dependent on its Creator. First, “God, in creating the universe, was not constrained by the limitations of the already existing stuff from which the universe was to be fashioned”. Second, God was “free to bring into existence a universe in which the divine will was recognizably embodied and enacted”.4 In these two tenets, it is affirmed that God was not forced by any inner or outer necessities to create the universe, but freely brought into existence the universe “out of love for creatures that are other than God”.5 In Scripture, the economic Trinity in God’s self-revelation constitutes the ground of the Christian confession of God’s creation.6 In other words, the early Christians’ confession of the post-Easter Jesus as the Son of God led to “the logocentric conception of creation”.7 The Logos by whom all that exists is created is confessed to be “uncreated, existing before the work of creation itself” (Phil. 2:6; Col. 1:15; Heb. 1:3). In the same vein, Christopher Knight also points out that for the patristic fathers, such as the Cappadocians, Maximus the Confessor, and others, “The Logos in His kenosis, His self-emptying, is hidden everywhere, and the types of His reality, whether in the forms of persons or teachings, will not be the same outside the Christian world as they are within it”.8 This cosmic Christology is inseparable from cosmic pneumatology. According to 1 Pet. 3:19, Jesus was crucified and rose again as an embodied person in the power of the Spirit. In Rom. 8:11, Jesus is the first fruit of the general resurrection. In his resurrection, the

Coyne (Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory Publications; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 284–91. 4 Alister McGrath, A Scientific Theology, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: T&T Clark, 2001), 166. 5 Ted Peters and Martinez Hewlett, Evolution from Creation to New Creation: Conflict, Conversation, and Convergence (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2003), 24. 6 For a further detailed discussion of the contingency of creation in a Trinitarian framework based on biblical, theological, and historical sources, refer to Jongseock J. Shin, Natural and Cosmic Theodicy: A Trinitarian Panentheistic Vision (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2022), 54–7. 7 McGrath, A Scientific Theology, vol. 1, 157. 8 Christopher Kinght, “Theistic Naturalism and the Word made Flesh”, in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being, ed. Philip Clayton & Arthur Peacocke (Grand Rapids: Eerdsmans, 2007), 60.

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whole of creation hopes for the universal resurrection that will take place through the Spirit. The Spirit is the one who raised Jesus from the dead. In that sense, the Spirit is the pledge of the kingdom of God, and the Spirit’s redemptive work is believed to be universal in the material world.9 This Trinitarian framework of creation constituted the foundational ground for the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. Thereby, the doctrine affirmed the genuine value of the whole of creation, including the material world in opposition to the Gnostics when Christianity expanded into the Hellenistic intellectual world of late classical antiquity.10 Considering this Trinitarian dimension of creatio ex nihilo, in my view, a Trinitarian-pneumatological framework of creation apropos renders the founding presence of the Spirit in both inorganic and organic creatures. The Triune God, the Creator, is immanent in creation by accompanying all creatures in pain and suffering while not ceasing to care for and reach out God’s saving hand to every creature. God continues to work as the Creator through the mediation of created causes: both sub-human creatures and human beings. In that vein, Kärkkäinen argues that the Triune God is “not ever really distant from creation, although creatures, since they are unlike God in nature, are necessarily distant from God”.11 In the same vein, he contends, “In the Trinitarian grammar, similarly to Christ’s mediating work that links together creation, redemption, and eschatological fulfillment, the Spirit’s mission relates in its own way to the Trinitarian unfolding of the divine economy.”12 The creation, reconciliation, and consummation of the world comprise the history of the Trinitarian God, who continues to work in creation toward the culmination of God’s kingdom. For Kärkkäinen, while the Triune God constitutes the ground of being for the cosmos as a whole, the history of nature is “the fruit of the loving God’s longing for the other and for that other’s free response to the divine love”.13 In the contingent history of nature, the Triune God is deeply immanent while being freely transcendent as the Creator and Redeemer.

THE ECLIPSE OF COSMIC PNEUMATOLOGY However, Kärkkäinen contends, “A lacuna in Christian theology is the forgetfulness of the cosmic dimensions.”14 The cosmic Christology resonates with patristic theologies, but “unfortunately was by and large lost by the time of modern Classical Liberalism and its highly reductionist conception of Jesus merely as a ‘spiritual’ teacher of personal piety”.15 The eclipse of the cosmic dimension of Christology leads to that of cosmic pneumatology.16 According to José Comblin, the cosmic aspects of the Spirit’s work in creation are honored in the Eastern tradition. However, the Western Church did not

Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 45. McGrath, Scientific Theology, vol. 1, 161–3. 11 Kärkkäinen, Creation and Humanity, 78. 12 Ibid., 80. 13 Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Trinity and Revelation: A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014), 236. 14 Kärkkäinen, Creation and Humanity, 2. 15 Ibid., 58. 16 For a further detailed development of this discussion, refer to Shin, Natural and Cosmic Theodicy, 34–7. 9

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pay careful heed to the Eastern Church’s pneumatology.17 Instead, the understanding of the Spirit’s work was institutionalized and accordingly identified with the church’s ministry. Consequently, the Spirit was regarded as engaging with the inner piety of a believer through the celebration of the sacraments and the hearing of the Word of God. It was not until Vatican II that the Western churches began to rediscover the Creatorship of the Spirit.18 Furthermore, in my view, more fundamentally, the logocentric and humano-centric idea of the imago Dei is conducive to the anthropocentric understanding of the Spirit’s presence in creation. The patristic fathers did not ignore the bodily-ness of creatures in the economy of salvation. Nonetheless, according to John of Damascus,19 Athanasius,20 Augustine,21 and Aquinas,22 only the human beings are entitled the imago Dei thanks to the rational ability to conceptualize and pursue a life of unity with the Logos.23 In a similar vein, for John Calvin, the intelligence of human beings is a major faculty of the soul that separates them from other creatures, as the imago Dei.24 For Martin Luther, the first pair of humans were able to lead the ideal relationship with God before the loss of the image of God.25 Their fall was conducive to that of all other creatures. Human beings determine the fate of non-human creatures. Although the Reformers advance a doctrine of divine providence based on creation’s ontological dependence on God, they rarely propose a continuously saving work of the Son and the Spirit for non-human creatures amidst their pain and suffering in nature. For that reason, John Cobb claims that these anthropocentric understandings of creation lead to soul-body dualism and the undue subsuming of creation under the redeeming of the human self.26

A CALL FOR A ROBUST COSMIC PNEUMATOLOGY IN THE CONTEXT OF NATURAL THEODICY A proper understanding of the cosmic dimension of the Spirit is strongly invited when one considers the problem of the universal, inevitable, and contingent presence of pain and suffering in nature. In contemporary natural sciences, the cosmos as a whole and the evolution of the biosphere of our planet are regarded as self-organizing systems as they are developed by the interplay of chance and law. Particularly, according to contemporary evolutionary biology, evolution is the product of random genetic mutations and the

José Comblin, The Holy Spirit and Liberation, trans. Paul Burn (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1989), 46. Ibid., 47. 19 John of Damascus, “Exposition of the Orthodox Faith”, 2.12, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994), 9:31–2. 20 Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, 11–18, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 4:42–6. 21 Augustine, The City of God, 12.23, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1:241. 22 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1.93.7. 23 Stanley Grenz, The Social God and Relational Self: A Trinitarian Theology of the Imago Dei (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 141–60. 24 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John McNeil, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), I​.15​.i​ii: 188f. 25 Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 1, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1958), 61–3. 26 John Cobb, “All Things in Christ?” in Animals on the Agenda, ed. Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamamoto (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 173. 17 18

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constraint of natural selection.27 The diversity and beauty of nature are brought into being through the sacrifice of countless individual creatures and species. It is currently known that approximately 98 percent of the species went extinct in the history of evolution.28 Hence, the entire history of evolution witnesses is ridden by death, pain, and suffering. Not only moral evil but also natural evil exists as an unintended yet inevitable by-product of the natural process that God created for the existence of independent creatures. Ironically, in the physical level, the increase of entropy serves as a fundamental platform for the increase of complexity in evolution and the emergence of life, sentience, free will, and the religiosity of Homo sapiens. The cosmos and the biosphere of our planet are continuously self-organizing through the operation of non-linear dissipative open systems. These systems interact with each other, and new levels of novelty emerge out of chaos in those interactions, indicating that they are interrelated and interdependent.29 This emergent process of diversity and complexity in evolution inevitably entails the growth of entropy in our universe as a whole. The increase of entropy has two definitions: on the one hand, the reduction of the availability of energy and, on the other hand, the increase of disorder.30 A new life is birthed when another dies and decays. Without the death and extinction of the predecessors in the history of evolution, there is no emergence of new and more complex forms of life. As the increase of entropy serves as the fundamental cause of death, it becomes the ultimate cause of the pain and suffering involved in the process of dying. Unlike the traditional Cartesian denial of animals’ suffering, it is “now widely accepted that animals can feel pain and suffering”.31 Individual living organisms with central nerve systems feel pain in the face of viral/ bacterial infection, parasitism, diseases, predation, or other threats to their lives.32 Furthermore, diverse levels of psychological suffering are experienced by non-human creatures.33 Not only these ordinarily experienced pain and death, but there are also “so many millions of species, each of which was an attempt on the part of the evolutionary process to establish a particular niche and many of which (like the dinosaurs) had to die for mammals to flourish”.34

For a detailed explanation of neo-Darwinian synthesis, see Ted Peters and Martinez Hewlett, Evolution from Creation to New Creation: Conflict, Conversation, and Convergence (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2003), 51–70. 28 Peters and Hewlett, Evolution from Creation to New Creation, 23, 118. 29 For a highly detailed discussion, see Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stenger, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (London: Verso, 2017). 30 Robert J. Russell, Cosmology: From Alpha to Omega: The Creative Mutual Interaction of Theology and Science (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 228. This instability and disorder are regarded as a state of death, disorder, and decay, and thus it is an “affront to hope and peace”. 31 Alain Boissy et al., “Assessment of Positive Emotions in Animals to Improve Their Welfare”, Psychology and Behaviour 92, no. 3 (2007): 375–97, 376. 32 For example, “affective states of pain, fear, and stress are likely to be experienced by fish in similar ways as in tetrapods [i.e., land vertebrates]”. K. P. Chandroo, I. J. H. Duncan, and R. D. Moccia, “Can Fish Suffer?: Perspectives on Sentience, Pain, Fear and Stress”, Applied Animal Behaviour Science 86, no. 3–4 (2004): 225–50, 225. 33 For the psychological stresses experienced by the lobster, see Thomas Bretihaupt, Daniel Lindstrom, and Jelle Atema, “Urine Release in Freely Moving Catheterized Lobsters with Reference to Feeding and Social Activities”, Journal of Experimental Biology 202, no. 7 (1999): 837–44, 840–3. 34 Christopher Southgate, “God and Evolutionary Evil: Theodicy in the Light of Darwinism”, Zygon 37, no. 4 (2002): 803–24, 806. 27

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The increase of entropy is not only inevitable but also contingent in our life-birthing universe. In other words, from its birth, the second law of thermodynamics has constrained the development of our universe. The birth of our universe at the Big Bang with highly low entropy is not a necessary but a very special (or contingent) event. Many other possible initial conditions would end up in different states that preclude the emergence of life is not possible.35 Furthermore, according to Robert Russell, a physicist-theologian hybrid, in a non-linear dissipative system (a thermodynamically open system), if their excess entropy production (E) is below 0, a system “may or may not resist change during fluctuations”.36 This takes place in all open systems in the physical levels. This shows that nature works in a contingent manner. Also, “universally all forms of life that we know are open systems, and hence all are subject to these kinds of thermodynamic contingencies”.37 In the biological level, likewise, the violence in predation is contingent. As a vivid illustration, numerous sea lion cubs suffer orcas’ unnecessary behavior of excessive tossing for prolonging their agony. This behavior is contingent as there are other kinds of orcas who do not behave in the same way when they hunt.38 For another example, according to biologist John Alcock, the male desert beetle Tegrodera aloga will “run to a female and wrestle violently with her in an attempt to throw her on her side”. However, it is also observed that the male beetles are “perfectly capable of courting potential partners in a decorous manner”.39 As demonstrated, the behaviors of the insect are not predetermined but contingent. In that vein, Pannenberg notices that contingency is prevalent in the operation of the cosmos, and this implies that there is the possibility for natural forces to “close themselves against the future of God or the kingdom of his possibilities” and become a closed, self-centered system, ending up as a demonic force.40 The universal sway of entropy represents the inevitable by-product of the contingent natural order necessitated by God’s intention to create independent living organisms. “If the Creator willed a world of finite creatures and their independence, then he had to accept their corruptibility and the possibility of evil as a result of their striving for autonomy.”41 That is, entropy is “the [inevitable] cost of the development”42 inherent in our cosmic order created to bring independent creatures into existence. By making themselves independent, creatures inevitably fall victim to entropy. If this is the case, natural evil should not be neglected in Christian theodicy and in understanding the cosmic role of the Spirit. Otherwise, how could we still affirm the love of the Triune

35 Roger Penrose, Emperor’s New Mind, Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 436–48. The contingency of our universe may be contested by the idea of the multiverse. Yet I find helpful Russell’s explication of the contingency of our universe’s fine-tuning of our universe in the matrix of the multiverse. He conceptualizes a hierarchy of logical meta-levels at work. In other words, in an upper meta-level, there can be a higher logical system that governs the operation of the lower meta-levels. Therefore, even in a multiverse, the problem of why certain possibilities actualize in a particular universe is not solved (Russell, Cosmology, 49–52). 36 Russell, Cosmology, 245. 37 Ibid. 38 Douglas Chadwick, “Investigating a Killer”, National Geographic, April 2005, 86–105. 39 John Alcock, The Triumph of Sociobiology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 209. 40 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 108. Henceforth, ST II. 41 Ibid., 173. 42 Ibid., 97.

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Creator and the goodness of creation declared in Gen. 1:31? Paradoxical as it may sound, I think the Trinitarian and pneumatological framework of creation becomes imperative because of the problem of pain and suffering prevalent in nature.

THE CREATIVE, COMPASSIONATE, AND LIBERATING SPIRIT For Pannenberg, God’s fulfillment of the new creation constitutes the ground of the novelty in emergence throughout creatio continua. The Father continues to actualize the purpose for creation through the mediation of the Son and the Spirit. The principle of creation is the Logos. The Spirit is the source of the movement and life of creatures.43 Pannenberg identifies the Spirit as “the force field of God’s mighty presence”,44 which is similar to the notion of the energy-time-force field advanced by Michael Faraday. The Spirit is the allembracing field that works in all creatures. The Spirit is “the vitalizing principle, the lure of independent creatures to self-transcendence as the power of ecstasy”.45 The Spirit is the creative matrix for “independent creatures” and continues to lure them toward harmony in self-transcendence.46 For Pannenberg, this divine creative work means “the lure to the eschatological future in that the perfect unity among creatures only lies in the eschatological kingdom of God”.47 The cooperative work of the Logos and the Spirit finds expression in “the ecstatic nature” of independent organic creatures.48 However, Pannenberg also acknowledges that the creatures’ free responses to the Spirit’s ecstatic lure may fail due to their contingent choices. Thus, God’s truth is hidden until the eschatological fulfillment of the history of nature.49 Therefore, for Pannenberg, the all-embracing field of the Spirit should not be physicalized. The Spirit is not conditioned by the spatio-temporal processes of nature. Rather, the former always transcends the latter when the Son and the Spirit work in unity in “arousing the ecstatic response of life” in creatio continua.50 While Pannenberg considers the transcendent immanence of the Son and the Spirit as the ground of the genuine contingency of creatures, he neglects “the transformative conflict between the present and the future of God in the latter’s inbreaking into the former”.51 Instead, he gravitates toward the claim that “the absence of God is the negative

Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 3, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 4. Henceforth, ST III. 44 Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 382. 45 Wolfhart Pannenberg, “The Working of the Spirit in the Creation and in the People of God”, in Spirit, Faith, and Church, ed. W. Pannenberg, A. Dulles, and C. E. Braaten (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1970), 13–31, 23. 46 Ibid. 47 Pannenberg, ST II, 144–6. 48 Wolfhart Pannenberg, “The Spirit in Creation and the People of God”, in Spirit, Faith, and Church, ed. W. Pannenberg, A. Dulles, and C. E. Braaten (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1970), 36. 49 Pannenberg, ST III, 608–20. 50 Wolfhart Pannenberg, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 45. Cited and further discussed in Shin, Natural and Cosmic Theodicy, 254. 51 Jongseock Shin, “The Church as a Messianic Fellowship in Jürgen Moltmann’s and Wolfhart Pannenberg’s Public Ecclesiology. Constructing a Holistic and Participatory Pneumatology and Ecclesiology”, The Evangelical Review of Theology and Politics 7 (2019): 30. 43

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side of his futurity. In Jesus’ message, it is only as future that God is present”.52 Here, Pannenberg means that the contingent and inevitable presence of suffering in the present creation is “God’s absence rather than God’s compassionate overcoming of the power of death and sin through co-suffering with creatures”.53 Like Pannenberg, Moltmann also understands God as revealing the Godself proleptically in the Christ event.54 However, Moltmann differentiates himself from Pannenberg in that, for Moltmann, a Christian proclamation of the gospel does not aim at offering a holistic understanding of the world’s history under the theme of God. Rather, the Christian proclamation of the gospel is “the language of liberation”.55 In other words, what connects the past and the present to the future is “not a substance that penetrates the whole of history, but rather the loving Creator’s compassionate immanence with the suffering creatures in the hope for the eschatological healing and renewing”.56 For Moltmann, this applies to the entire creation and includes the non-human lives that are ridden by the power of pain, suffering, and death.57 In that vein, the Spirit as the creative field represents God’s co-suffering immanence in creation. A French novelist, Albert Camus, saw that it is not legitimate that God intentionally causes and utilizes violence, pain, and suffering even for a good intention even when it is God who participates in the suffering on the cross. For Camus, such a God cannot be a good God. The cross of Jesus was not the emblem of God’s protest against evil, but rather, God’s intentional use of pain and suffering for the sake of actualization of God’s salvific plan.58 I endorse Camus’ claim that any form of evil cannot be intended by God to be used even for good purposes. In order to respond to Camus’ criticism, one is not only to understand the cross as God’s use of evil for bringing out good. Rather, he/she should regard it as the Triune God’s liberative protest against the inevitable and contingent powers of death and evil by persistently bringing good out of the unnecessary but inevitable evil that emerges in the course of creation.59 For George Ellis and Nancey Murphy, disorder, pain, and suffering are unnecessary yet inevitable and universal “by-products” of God’s non-coercive creative process that aims at creating diversity, higher levels of complexity, and ultimately, “the development of free and intelligent beings”.60 This process is both creative and liberative. Through the lens of Jesus’ cross, one can understand that God does not intend to perpetuate violence but continues to overcome the ongoing cycle of violence in the context of creatures’ victimizing relationships. The cross serves as the Son’s once and for all efficacious self-sacrifice to Wolfgang Pannenberg, Theology and the Kingdom of God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969), 68. Shin, “The Church as a Messianic Fellowship”, 30. 54 Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 142. 55 Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 215. 56 Shin, “The Church as a Messianic Fellowship”, 30. 57 Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 297–303. 58 Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 32–5. 59 For Moltmann, the loving Triune Creator participates in the creatures’ suffering as an act of protesting against the universal evil. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 226. 60 Nancey Murphy and George Ellis, On the Moral Nature of the Universe (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 247. 52 53

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vanquish all forms of violence.61 Accordingly, in my view, when the “insurance chicks” of the White Pelican are sacrificed for their siblings’ survival, I believe that the Spirit does not take for granted their sacrifices but continues to be the faithful Creator by inviting creatures into the loving community of the Kingdom of God.62 Thereby, the Creatorship of the Spirit is redemptive, too.

THE DYNAMIC AND PARTICULAR PRESENCE OF THE SPIRIT IN CREATION In my view, the Spirit not only creates but continues to save in a dynamic manner. Creaturely contingency is created, sustained, and governed by the loving Creator in this continuous process of emergence of novelty. For Maximus the Confessor, the Son or the Logos finds diverse expressions as logoi or “divinely given patterns of being”.63 The logoi means creatures’ full potential granted by God. Along that vein, for Southgate, creatures are “best seen as representing points and peaks within the evolutionary fitness landscapes”.64 In evolutionary history, these peaks are contingently created and not static. They undergo constant shifts through the spontaneous and dynamic interactions among organisms and their environments. The shifts also take place through the interaction among the diverse species that share the same habitats. Furthermore, different individuals of a species do not take the same location in the landscape of evolutionary history, since all of them do not live out their full potentials. Contemporary developmental biologists engage with theories of epigenetics, symbiogenesis, cooperation, self-organization, niche construction, developmental systems theory, and neutral gene mutations.65 According to these theories, natural selection is not the only factor at work in their adaptation to their natural environment, rather, they transform their environment and actively affect their evolutionary paths by changing environmental pressures.66 In this continuously creative way, biological evolution can be regarded as the co-creative work of the Logos and the Spirit in unity as the two hands of the Father.67 Considering this openness of nature to novelty, Denis Edwards argues that if God is the loving Creator of all, God works through both general and special providence in

Murphy and Ellis, On the Moral Nature of the Universe, 189. See a similar argument in Holmes Rolston III, Science and Religion: A Critical Survey (New York: Random House, 1987), 137. 63 Andrew Louth, “The Cosmic Vision of Saint Maximus the Confessor”, in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being, ed. Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 188–90. 64 Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 61. 65 For a detailed explanation of these alternative factors in evolution, see Ian Barbour, “Five Models of God and Evolution”, in Evolutionary and Molecular Biology, 419–42. For Joshua Moritz, living organisms transform their environments, and in so doing, reshape the paths of the evolution of their descendants. Joshua Moritz, “Evolutionary Evil and Dawkins’ Blackbox”, in The Evolution of Evil, ed. Gaymon Bennett, Martinez Hewlett, Ted Peters, and Robert Russell (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 143–88. 66 See Christopher Southgate, “Creation as ‘Very Good’ and ‘Groaning in Travail’: An Exploration of Evolutionary Theodicy”, in ibid., 53–85; James Haag, “Nature and Nurture: The Irony of the Sociobiology Debate”, in ibid., 99–119; Joshua Moritz, “Evolutionary Evil and Dawkins’ Black Box: Changing the Parameters of the Problem”, in ibid., 143–88. 67 Colin Gunton, The Triune Creator (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 166–71. 61 62

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creating the emergent biosphere and the cosmos as they keep evolving. Coupled with cosmic Christ, the cosmic Spirit, according to biblical traditions, is to be taken seriously in understanding how God interacts with creatures in the course of biological evolution.68 Edwards understands the interplay of chance and regularities in nature as a way of creatio continua in which God brings into existence novelty and diversity in nature. In so doing, he avers that the traditional anthropocentric doctrine of redemption should be expanded to non-human levels even though human beings’ redemption involves higher emergent levels that are weakly present in non-human creatures. While building his idea of divine action on the Thomistic tradition, Edwards advances his claim that within the order of nature graced by the creative and redemptive Spirit, there can be ongoing special divine action without violating or suspending the established order of nature ordained by the Godself. God’s one act of self-giving comes to expression in particular ways in diverse contexts: not only in human society but also in the world of animals.69 In God’s general providence, God does not limit the Godself but rather consistently is at particularly creative and redemptive work through the mediation of the emergent processes of nature. The continuously creative work of the Spirit is particularly soteriological. Peacocke also argues that for theists, God is “acting creatively in the world often through what we call chance or random processes, thereby operating within the created order”.70 Theists can see the Creator of our universe unfolding the created potentialities “in and through a process, in which its possibilities and propensities become actualized”.71 Yet, for Peacocke, the creative processes of nature mean God’s immanence in nature through self-limitation when God grants genuine contingency to natural processes. Contra Peacocke, Keith Ward contends that if God is believed to have brought the world into being ex nihilo through “the strongest possible causal influence”, God can act in particular ways in interaction with creatures that are contingently open to emergent novelty and diversity.72 In that way, special divine action can be in concurrence with the order of nature that God establishes.73 For instance, one may conceptualize the Creator as continuously and particularly working via “an active input of information” without suspending or violating the order of nature. For Polkinghorne, there can be certain instances of particular quasi-localized divine causality through “vulnerability to small disturbances” in chaotic systems.74 This mode of divine action can be “such as we presumably exercise within our bodies and perhaps as God does within terrestrial history”.75 Here, one can theologically envision God working through the created causes in a whole-part, top-down mode while not excluding bottom-up constraints.76

Denis Edwards, Deep Incarnation: God’s Redemptive Suffering with Creatures (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2019), 40–2. 69 Denis Edwards, How God Acts: Creation, Redemption, and Special Action (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010), 57–65. 70 Arthur Peacocke, “A Naturalistic Christian Faith for the Twenty-First Century: An Essay in Interpretation”, in All That Is, ed. Philip Clayton (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 18. 71 Ibid. 72 Keith Ward, “Personhood, Spirit, and the Supernatural”, in Peacocke, All That Is, 155. 73 Ibid. 74 Russell, Cosmology, 232. 75 John Polkinghorne, Scientists as Theologians (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1996), 39. 76 John Polking, Science and Religion in Quest of Truth (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2011), 87. Unlike Polkinghorne, Robert Russell regards the effects of quantum events as comprehensive rather 68

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Without denying the emergence of consciousness and morality through biological evolution, one may still maintain that the redemptive work of the Spirit is manifest and experienced only at the level of human beings since divine revelation takes place only through subjective acceptance of the Word by faith.77 I agree that only human beings can conceptualize theological and ethical ideas and put them into practice. However, those religious and moral ideas are emergent products that gradually developed in the history of biological evolution. Joshua Moritz points out that the development of morality requires knowledge, rationality, and independence. That is, moral agents must be “able to make sense of the world in which they act, anticipate the consequence of the action, and consider alternative possibilities”.78 The history of biological evolution witnesses the gradual emergence of these attributes even before the appearance of Homo sapiens.79 Then, one should also consider the significance of the proto-morality at work in sub-human levels in biological evolution. Even in the sub-human levels of evolution, one can theologically conceptualize the Triune Creator consistently at work in both general and particular manners throughout the history of evolution. All in all, sub-human creatures, in the different levels of contingency and complexity, are granted different levels of independence and freedom in the field of the Spirit. For Southgate, there are creatures whose lives are “fulfilled”, “growing toward fulfillment”, and “transcending [themselves]”.80 In a fulfilled life, a creature is “utterly being itself, in an environment in which it flourishes . . . with access to the appropriate energy, sources and reproductive opportunities”. While “growing toward fulfillment”, a creature’s life may not be mature yet. However, the life is not disrupted but continues to grow “with the possibility of attaining the ‘fulfilled’ state”.81 In contrast, in a “frustrated” life, a creature is “held back in some way from fulfillment”. In all these phases, God lures creatures to transcend themselves via “some new pattern of behavior, whether as a result of a favorable mutation, or a chance exploration of a new possibility of relating to its own or another species”.82 Here, one could, theologically, interpret the emergence of various types of altruism or growing self-transcendence as God’s providence at work in biological evolution by bringing forth the gradual development of “the transcendence of mere self-interest”.83 It is not necessary to regard it as evolutionary strategies that reinforce their egoistic DNA. When one sees cooperation among animals within the same species and across species, the process takes place within the matrix of competitions over the limited

than episodic and argues that the quantum level may be the most fundamental realm of special divine action. Russell, Cosmology, 115–24. The current debates on theological notion of divine action are open-ended in continuous dialogue with natural sciences. 77 Roger Haight, Faith and Evolution: A Grace-Filled Naturalism (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2019), 132–5. 78 Joshua Moritz, “Contingency, Convergence, Constraints, and the Challenge from Theodicy in Creation’s Evolution”, in God’s Providence and Randomness in Nature: Theological and Scientific Perspectives, ed. Robert Russell and Joshua Moritz (West Conshohocken: Templeton Press, 2019), 311. 79 Ibid., 319–24. 80 Southgate, The Groaning of Creation, 64. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Southgate, “Creation as ‘Very Good’ and ‘Groaning in Travail’”, 69.

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resources.84 Nevertheless, one may theologically posit that God is persistently luring creatures to genuine “self-transcendence” through general and special providence.85

THE NEW CREATION AS THE FULFILLMENT OF SPIRIT’S CREATION AND REDEMPTION As discussed in the chapter, the present creation through evolution reflects the goodness and purpose of the kenotic Triune Creator. Nonetheless, the biggest challenge to understanding natural evil as a developmental hindrance is to justify death and suffering by a “means-end” argument,86 as we see unnecessarily excessive pain, premature death, and the extinction of uncountable species in the history of life in our planet. Then, one should consider that “[c]reation praise of God to which the Psalms refer is always in anticipation of the eschatological fulfillment of the new creation. Creation already praises God by its continuation as a finite reality, for in this way, creatures are as God willed them to be. They also praise God in their perishing, because this is part of their finitude”.87 In that vein, the new creation is to be, as Polkinghorne labels it, “creatio ex vetere”: the redeeming transformation of the old creation.88 I agree with Denis Edwards that considering the prevalent problem of suffering in nature, understanding the resurrection of Jesus the Son as a subjective experience is insufficient.89 There are NT scholars and systematic theologians who support the existentialist view of the resurrection, such as Rudolf Bultmann, John Dominic Crossan, and John Hick. However, the understanding of the resurrection as a cosmic and holistic transformation is supported by Karl Barth, Denis Edwards, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jürgen Moltmann, and N. T. Wright. For these scholars, the resurrection of Jesus is the locus where one can have hope in the transforming of creation into the eschatological new creation (Rev. 21:1; cf. Rom. 8:18-23). The resurrection of Jesus is a proleptical event of the general resurrection that will be fulfilled in the new creation (1 Cor. 15:21-24, 52-54; 1 Thess. 4:13-17). In the Son, we see all living creatures as ontologically dependent on the Father as they emerge and persist in duration. The Spirit is the pledge of the kingdom of God and actualizes the principle of the Logos or the Son from the future of God. The order and goodness we see in creatio conitnua is the work of the Triune Creator, but since the new creation is yet to come, what we see in the present creation is both in continuity and discontinuity with the reality of the new creation. In that sense, for Ted Peters and Martinez Hewlett, creation is an emergent whole “created from the future, not the past”.90

Along with symbiosis for better survival together, symbiogenesis makes possible an organism’s rapid acquisition of higher complexity through “horizontal sharing of cells” that takes place in the digestion of food. While taking place mostly in predation, it implies “relationality” among creatures rather than the selfish meme hardwired into the genes. Moritz, “Evolutionary Evil and Dawkins’ Black Box”, 165–72. 85 For a further detailed account, refer to Shin, Natural and Cosmic Theodicy, 229–33. 86 Russell, Cosmology, 262. 87 Pannenberg, ST II, 173. 88 John Polkinghorne, Science and Religion in Quest of Truth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 107. 89 Edwards writes, “Only a theology of resurrection that is eschatologically transformative can begin to respond to the suffering that is built into an evolutionary universe” (Edwards, How God Acts, 92). 90 Peters and Hewlett, Evolution from Creation to New Creation, 161. 84

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God is both immanent and transcendent in the present creation from the perspective of the new creation.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I argued that the Spirit, as the creative and redemptive field, continuously creates through the interplay of chance and law by virtue of nature’s genuine openness to the future. Also, creatio continua reflects both the compassionate and redemptive presence of the Triune God who creates ex nihilo. This compassionate and saving presence redeems the suffering of creation from the vantage point of the new creation. In anticipation of the new creation, this Trinitarian theology of nature is imperative. Without this Trinitarian understanding of creation and the eschatological hope, the victims of premature and contingently violent predations and mass extinctions will find no ultimate purpose and meaning that God, the powerful and loving Creator, granted them. The goodness of creation proclaimed in Gen. 1:31 is in the light of Rev. 21:1: “Then, I saw a new heaven and a new earth.” In the present creation, we only anticipate the new creation in the mirror dimly (1 Cor. 13:12).

FURTHER READING Edwards, Denis. Deep Incarnation: God’s Redemptive Suffering with Creatures. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2019. Shin, Jongseock (James). Natural/Cosmic Theodicy: A Trinitarian Panentheistic Vision of Creation. Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2022. Southgate, Christopher. The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. Veli-Matti, Kärkkäinen. Spirit and Salvation: A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World, Vol. 4. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2016.

Chapter 47

Suffering, Evil, and Eschatology STEPHEN J. PLANT

INTRODUCTION On the night of November 14, 1940, the German Luftwaffe bombed Coventry in the English West Midlands. Coventry was an industrial center and much of the damage was to its factories, but around 4,300 homes were also destroyed and over 500 people were killed and 1,000 injured. Joseph Goebbels coined a new term, “coventriert”, to describe the effect of heavy bombing. My mother, who was then a child living on a farm 7 miles from the city, recalls her parents opening their barns to shelter fleeing families. Shortly afterwards, the Provost of Coventry Cathedral, which had been all but demolished, had the phrase “Father Forgive” written where the altar had once been. After the war, the decision was taken to leave the medieval building in ruins as a memorial to the dead and a new cathedral was planned to be dedicated, as the old had been, to Saint Michael. When it was re-consecrated in 1962, a large bronze figure of Saint Michael, by Jacob Epstein, was unveiled beside its west doors. The Archangel stands, with a spear in hand, triumphant over the bound figure of Satan, depicting a passage in the book of Revelation that speaks of the Devil’s final defeat: The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world – he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. Then I heard a loud voice in heaven, proclaiming, “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah, for the accuser of our comrades has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God.” (Rev. 12:9f.) The hope, expressed in the book of Revelation by John of Patmos, is for the final fulfillment of God’s work of salvation in which suffering will be ended, evil overcome, and justice done. The hope expressed, in the visionary language of apocalyptic literature, looks for the fulfillment of the prophetic hope that the Lord God “will swallow up death forever” and “wipe away the tears from all faces” (Isa. 25:6-9). It was a hope that John believed was being brought to fulfillment in the coming of Christ.

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In Christian hope, Jesus Christ is the agent and the substance of that which is hoped for, both for human individuals and the consummation of the whole created order. Such hope articulates the deepest human longings for justice, forgiveness, healing, and homecoming: longings so deep that they find their liveliest expression in the languages of art, music, and poetry. Yet theologians too must “always be ready to make” their “defence to anyone who demands from” them “an account of the hope that is in you” (1 Pet. 3:15). In this chapter I explore some of the challenges that face theologians as they reflect on evil and suffering from an eschatological perspective. How can this be done without collapsing the distance between the future and the present? How can this be done without treating suffering as if it were merely a temporary setback on the road to ultimate bliss? How can this be done without reducing poetry to prose? To begin, I will discuss some possible ground rules when making eschatological assertions. With these hermeneutical theses in mind, I will go on to consider, deliberately relying directly on biblical texts and imagery, what is to come for suffering and evil under the headings of judgment and reconciliation; woundedness and healing; and consummation and abundant life.

THE HERMENEUTICS OF ESCHATOLOGICAL ASSERTIONS Eschatology is the term given (since the mid-nineteenth century) to Christian doctrine concerning last things (from the Greek ta eschata). The content of these last things is adumbrated in two clauses in the Nicene Creed: He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end. . . . We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. In the Apostles’ Creed last things are in view in the conviction that Jesus Christ “will come to judge the living and the dead” and in belief in “the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting”. The last things then describe Jesus Christ’s return to earth on “the Day of the Lord”, his raising of the dead, his judgment of those who have died and those still alive and the new earth and heaven he will bring about. These are events with a personal aspect, in that they are concerned with what is to become of individuals; they are events with a public aspect, in that they restore the community of God and humankind and “the communion of saints”; and they are events with a cosmic aspect, in that they are concerned with what is to become of earth and heaven. All people, whoever they were or are, are caught up in these events; so too is all creation, which, with the risen and transformed bodies of those who are raised from death, will be renewed and transformed. In both the creeds, the tenses used are future tenses. Whereas earlier events in Jesus’ life are described in past tenses (was conceived, was born, suffered, crucified, descended, ascended) or present tenses (is seated), with respect to the last things, future tenses are used (will come). The futurity of eschatological events creates an obvious problem: while Christians may believe in what has happened on the basis of the testimony of those who saw them, and know that this testimony is true (John 21:24), and may believe through their own experience in things that are now the case, on what basis may Christians believe in what has not yet happened? In a helpfully short essay the Catholic theologian

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Karl Rahner, writing in 1960, set out seven theses to be borne in mind when making eschatological assertions.1 Without necessarily endorsing all of Rahner’s theses, they are useful2 in helping one to register what eschatological assertions have in common with other kinds of theological assertions, and also how they differ. The date of the essay is significant: Rahner was responding to eschatologies, such as that of Rudolf Bultmann, in which apocalyptic passages in the New Testament were “demythologized” and understood to have been, or to be in the process of being, fulfilled immanently and existentially. Rahner also has in view Karl Barth’s early theology, in which an emphasis on the present valence of New Testament eschatology, in Rahner’s view, similarly downplayed the temporal futurity of New Testament eschatology. In reply, Rahner’s first thesis is that “Christian understanding of the faith and its expression must contain an eschatology which really bears on the future, that which is still to come, in a very ordinary, empirical sense of the word time”.3 In a brief essay, Rahner acknowledges that he must take shortcuts – the most significant of which is to forgo the close engagement with biblical texts that would normally be the basis of dogmatic statements. Still, Rahner readily asserts a priori rather than a posteriori, that “the self-understanding of Scripture itself, no matter how existentially interpreted, undoubtedly excludes such an elimination of eschatology” in its futurity.4 Rahner’s second thesis is that “[t]he Christian understanding of the nature, life and personal being of God takes his ‘omniscience’ not merely as a metaphysical axiom, but as a strict truth of faith, and makes it include God’s knowledge of future events”.5 Based on merely natural, human knowledge of what is to come, eschatological statements will have no more truth than a horoscope, or reading tea leaves. Only insofar as God reveals what is to come can anything about last things be known. The operative principle that should follow from this, Rahner continues, “is open mindedness” about the future. This recommendation cuts two ways. On the one hand, God is not restricted by what human beings understand God to have revealed, and so eschatological statements must always be provisional; on the other hand, Christians should be open to taking God at God’s word in Scripture. Rahner’s third thesis establishes further parameters for eschatological assertions in the form of “the dialectical unity” of two limiting statements. The first is that “[i]t is certain from Scripture that God has not revealed to man the day of the end”;6 the second is “the essential historicity of man”.7 Eschatology must, of necessity, be hidden in God’s revelation; yet to be truly human there is a sense in which human beings must not only know themselves by remembering their past but know themselves as they are disposed toward the goal of salvation. It follows (in thesis 4) that “knowledge of the future will be knowledge of the futurity of the present: eschatological knowledge is knowledge of the

Karl Rahner, “The Hermeneutics of Eschatological Assertions”, in Theological Investigations: Volume IV Most Recent Writings (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966), 323–46. 2 A generation after Rahner wrote his essay Wolfhart Pannenberg could still describe it (pace Jürgen Moltmann’s better-known writings on eschatology) as “the most important contribution to theology today in its attempt to find an anthropological basis and interpretation for eschatological statements”. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology: Volume 3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 542f. 3 Rahner, “The Hermeneutics of Eschatological Assertions”, 326. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 329. 7 Ibid., 330. 1

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eschatological present”.8 Rahner means that eschatological knowledge is not made up of revealed pieces of information about the future that one adds, as it were, to what one knows of the present; rather, eschatological knowledge serves to illuminate the present. In attending to what God reveals of one’s future, one learns to surrender oneself to it, while hoping for it as the fulfillment of salvation in Jesus Christ. For Rahner, then, eschatology is not a kind of movie trailer of The Day of the Lord which conceives knowledge of last things as a preview of future events. His fifth thesis, an expansion of his fourth, holds: [B]iblical eschatology must always be read as an assertion based on the revealed present and pointing towards the genuine future, but not as an assertion pointing back from an anticipated future to the present. To extrapolate from the future to the present is eschatology, to interpolate from the future into the present is apocalyptic.9 From this (thesis 6) still further consequences follow. If the future really is open and unforeseeable, then “eschatological discourse must exclude the presumptuous knowledge of a universal apokatastasis [i.e., the restitution of all creation and post mortem cleansing of all evil and sin] and of the certainty of the salvation of the individual before his death, as well as certain knowledge of a damnation which has actually ensued”.10 Eschatological assertions must deal with the whole person, body, and soul. They will be both immanent (since they are concerned with the light shed by eschatology on present lives) and distant (since the future is incalculable). Eschatological assertions will be essentially Christological – since “Christ himself is the hermeneutic principle of all eschatological assertions. Anything that cannot be read and understood as a Christological assertion is not a genuine eschatological assertion”.11 And finally, eschatological assertions will shed light on history, in which, though the world is daily immersed in conflict and ambiguity, sin is always and finally “encompassed by the grace of God”,12 and for this reason eschatology is shown to be directed toward a definitive end. Rahner’s seventh and final thesis (a riposte, once more, to Rudolf Bultmann) concerns the relation between the form and content of eschatological assertions in Scripture and tradition. With eschatological assertions, at least and perhaps more so than with other doctrinal assertions, any attempt to separate the biblical imagery – one might say the myth – from the concepts the biblical writers sought to convey is misguided just to the extent that it is impossible to achieve. Further, while a certain fluidity of relation between what I described earlier as the “poetry and the prose” of eschatological statements is inevitable, and while fresh imaginations may yield new imagery and poetic metaphor to speak of last things, the imagery of Scripture must remain, and must remain normative. For this reason, making sense in the mid-twentieth century of the ultimate triumph of God over Rahner, “The Hermeneutics of Eschatological Assertions”, 332. Ibid., 337. This distinction between eschatology and apocalyptic, always to the detriment of apocalyptic, is quite common in twentieth-century theology. I am myself less “allergic” to apocalyptic and see potential risk and loss in attempts to dismiss all apocalyptic aspects of eschatology. 10 Ibid., 339. Note that Rahner here sets his face against several doctrinal options, not only the doctrine of apokatastasis influenced by Origen and taught, for example, by Gregory of Nyssa in De mortuis oratio and embraced by Hans Urs von Balthasar in Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory V: The Last Act (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998; German original 1983) but also certain forms of the doctrine of predestination. Both doctrines, for Rahner, simply presume to know too much. 11 Rahner, “The Hermeneutics of Eschatological Assertions”, 342f. 12 Ibid., 343. 8 9

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evil and suffering it was still appropriate to use the image of the Archangel Michael standing over the bound figure of Satan at the entrance to Coventry Cathedral.

JUDGMENT AND RECONCILIATION In this and the next two sections I want to explore aspects of New Testament eschatology as they relate to evil and suffering, where possible with one eye on Rahner’s hermeneutical guidelines. We can realize some sense of the immediate backdrop to New Testament eschatology by glancing at the second book of Maccabees, written, like the New Testament, in Koine Greek, sometime between 150 and 120 bce. 2 Maccabees recounts attempts by Antiochus IV Epiphanes between 175 and 163 bce to repress a rebellion and to eradicate Jewish religious life. In chapter 7, a compelling account is given of seven brothers and their mother, who were compelled by the king to eat pork to signal their religious apostasy. One by one they are tortured to death until the youngest, when his turn comes, addresses the king: And if our living Lord is angry for a little while, to rebuke and discipline us, he will again be reconciled with his own servants. But you, unholy wretch, you most defiled of all mortals, do not be elated in vain and puffed up by uncertain hopes, when you raise your hand against the children of heaven. You have not yet escaped the judgement of the almighty, all-seeing God. For our brothers after enduring a brief suffering have drunk of ever-flowing life, under God’s covenant; but you, by the judgement of God, will receive just punishment for your arrogance. (2 Macc. 7:33-36) In the midst of terrible present suffering, the youngest brother hopes for reconciliation with God after death for himself and his brothers. For Antiochus IV, however, though he may appear temporarily to have won, he will one day be judged by God for what he has done. For the brothers who now suffer there is the promise of “everlasting life”, while for the evil king, there will be “just punishment”. Similar themes – the promise of judgment for evil and of reconciliation with God and an end to suffering for those who do God’s will – recur in Jesus’ teachings, according to the Synoptic Gospels, but now with several changes. The most obvious change lies in the person of Jesus. He is the one who will judge humankind, together with the apostles: Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man is seated on the throne of his glory, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” (Matt. 19:28) One of the best-known and most important biblical passages concerning judgment also makes the Son of Man central. Here, it is less evil that is judged than compassionate action is rewarded, and their neglect punished. Matthew 25:31-46, which in the New Revised Standard Version is headed “The Judgment of the Nations”, is strategically placed by the Evangelist at the conclusion of a series of “parables” that conclude Jesus’ teaching ministry, immediately preceding the narrative of his anointing, arrest, crucifixion, and resurrection: When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will

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separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. (Matt. 25:31-33) If Rahner is right, it is pointless trying theologically to separate out the colorful imagery from the content here (thesis 7). As importantly the parable is intended not so much as blueprint of the future, but to illuminate the way we live now (Rahner’s fourth thesis). Those who show love to “the least of these” will find eternal life, while those who do not will “go away into eternal punishment”. As so often in what Jesus teaches about judgment, the parable of the sheep and goats also serves as a cautionary note for anyone who thinks they are certain about which category – sheep or goats – describes them: the goats are caught by surprise at being judged to have lacked compassion, while those who have acted compassionately cannot recall having done so. Throughout the Synoptics, the present relevance of God’s final judgment is iterated again and again. The disciples are to forgive as they wish to be forgiven (Matt. 6:12) and to refrain from judgment as they hope not to be judged (7:1-2). Though the present significance of judgment is explored in Jesus’ teachings in the synoptic gospels, however, there remains an unflinching reticence about details such as time and place (Rahner’s second thesis): “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father” (Mark 13:31f.). In the book of Revelation, which is of all New Testament texts most thoroughgoingly focused on last things, judgment is also central: And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Also another book was opened, the book of life. And the dead were judged according to their works, as recorded in the books. And the sea gave up the dead that were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and all were judged according to what they had done. (Rev. 20:12f.) Yet while judgment is a consistent theme in many New Testament texts, it is often tempered by God’s grace taught in and through Jesus Christ. Speaking to Nicodemus, John has Jesus say: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. (John 3:16f.) And the presence of grace through Jesus Christ is also a defining feature of Paul’s teaching about last things: “There is therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death” (Rom. 8:1-2). Traditional assumptions about a last judgment, in which some are saved and some damned, have proved to be problematic to some modern theologians. Moltmann expresses the difficulty like this: If the double outcome of judgment is proclaimed, the question is then: why did God create human beings if he is going to damn most of them in the end, and will only redeem the least part of them? Can God hate what he himself has created?13

Jürgen Moltmann, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1996), 239.

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Moltmann himself proposes recovering a doctrine of apokatasis, something Rahner ruled out; others have tried to focus attention away from judgment altogether.14

WOUNDEDNESS AND HEALING The painter Matthias Grünewald (around 1470–1528) is best known for the Altarpiece originally painted for the monastery of St. Anthony in Isenheim. It is a more complex artwork than is generally appreciated in theological circles. The panel depicting the crucifixion is relatively well known: famously, Karl Barth hung it above his desk and found in the “bony finger” of John the Baptist pointing to Christ an image for the task of the preacher and theologian. In the painting the figure of the Crucified Christ is gray with blood loss, his whole body wounded by scourging, and his hands dramatically contorted by the pain of the nails. But the altarpiece has a less well-known reverse. At appropriate points in the liturgical calendar, the altarpiece would be rotated, and now the less wellknown image of Christ, bathed in yellow, orange, red, and even blue light, is seen rising from his tomb. While the marks of scourging are gone from his body in this painting, his feet, hands, and side are displayed, red in the center of each and radiating light. In the painting, then, Jesus displays his wounds as he rises in glory, and does so with purpose. There is something recognizably biblical in this. In John’s Gospel, Thomas says, when told of the resurrection: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25). And Jesus, when he appears to Thomas, tells him to “[p]ut your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe” (20:27). This is not the first time in Scripture that woundedness has served God’s purpose. In Genesis 32, for example, Jacob wrestles a mysteriously divine stranger at the Jabbok ford, has his hip put out of joint by the stranger but at the same time receives from him the blessing of a new name. With the body of the risen Jesus, however, more is at stake, because, as Paul puts it, the risen Christ is the “first fruits of those who have died” (1 Cor. 15:20). However, while there are similarities between the risen Christ and those who will be raised at the last judgment, there are also dissimilarities. Christ’s risen body had laid in the tomb for less than three days; the bodies of those who will be raised on the last day will have had their atoms scattered and will be raised – as Paul puts it – as “spiritual bodies”, embodied yet transformed in a way that is never fully filled out. Moreover, the wounds of Christ serve – according to John’s Gospel – a clear purpose: that Thomas, and those who must subsequently rely on the apostles’ testimony, should “not doubt but believe” (John 20:27). Since at least the second century, those who have sought to make sense of the biblical witness have concerned themselves with the question of whether the bodies of those raised from the dead will bear the wounds that they bore in life. Isaiah prophesied that at the coming of God who saves, “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; . . . the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy” (Isa. 35:5-6).

E.g., Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 239: “My own systematic assumptions take me away from the idea of a momentary final verdict pronounced from without. Rather, redemption from horrors involves the recovery and appropriation of positive personal meaning from the worst we can suffer, be, or do.”

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When John the Baptist’s disciples went, at his bidding, to ask Jesus what he was doing, his reply echoes Isaiah to suggest that this prophecy is already being fulfilled in his ministry. More recently, theologians considering disability have asked whether those who have been disabled in life will be raised “whole” (a word I place in speech marks to indicate the problems that occur when disabled bodies are to be distinguished from supposedly normative able bodies). Will the blind be raised sighted or the deaf hearing, or the lame with healthy legs? Or, insofar as blindness or deafness or being lame has been part of someone’s earthly life and identity, in order to be recognizably themselves at the resurrection, will they be raised blind, deaf, and lame? I have no definitive answer to give. But one thing can be said with complete certainty based (Rahner’s second thesis) on the clear revealed word of Scripture. It is that even if wounds are retained in risen bodies, suffering ends. This is put nowhere better than Revelation 21: Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away. (Rev. 21:1-4) Insofar as wounds remind those who will be raised of past suffering perhaps they remain, for as Paul put it, “we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame” (Rom. 5:3-5a). Marilyn McCord Adams recalls that in Medieval Latin theology “all human beings will be raised in a state of permanent ontological completeness. The human soul will be inseparably reunited to its complete body, this time in prime (thirtyyear-old) condition”.15 But she goes on to ask (though not definitely to answer) what would be the implication for resurrected bodies “if bodily deformities dug their way deeply into the individual’s ante-mortem identity, not only negatively, but positively by becoming integral to the way they served Christ?”16

CONSUMMATION AND ABUNDANT LIFE Evil will be judged, then, and suffering ended – though woundedness or the memory of woundedness may remain in those who are raised to eternal life. But what kind of life will the life of those who have been raised to eternal life be? A prominent theme in John’s Gospel is abundance. At the beginning of his ministry, in John’s Gospel (chapter 2) Jesus attends a wedding at Cana in Galilee, where he transforms water into wine. The wine that he miraculously brings about is in extravagant quantity – John tells of six stone jars, Adams, Christ and Horrors, 225. Ibid., 232.

15 16

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each containing 20 to 30 gallons – upwards of 600 liters. The wine is, further, of the finest quality. Jesus’ ministry, then, begins in an abundance that is richly symbolic of the new life God’s Son brings to the world. Later in the Gospel, Jesus makes the link between abundance and the new life even more explicit: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). What will abundant life be like? If we re-join Revelation 21, we come to something like a description: And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children.” (Rev. 21:5-7) I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day – and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honour of the nations. But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practises abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life. (Rev. 21:22-27) In this consummated and abundant life, the overcoming of evil and sin by God’s judgment and gracious salvation will mean that that there is no longer separation between human beings and God. Further, in light of the unity of God and humankind, all enmity between one human being and another will be ended. All the diversity and richness of the created order will be restored and treasured. The unity of human and divine will, split apart in Adam’s Fall, is again made whole in Jesus Christ, such that there is no longer any sin, only free and joyful obedience to God. Consequently, neither evil nor suffering will exist anymore.

FURTHER READING McCord Adams, Marilyn. Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. See especially pages 205–81. Moltmann, Jürgen. The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology. London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1996. Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Systematic Theology, Vol. 3. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. See especially pages 527–646. Rahner, Karl. “The Hermeneutics of Eschatological Assertions”. In Theological Investigations: Volume IV Most Recent Writings. Translated by Kevin Smyth, 323–46. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966.

Chapter 48

Providence VERNON WHITE

Of all the Christian doctrines we could deploy to throw light on suffering and evil, providence might seem one of the most obvious. Providence plays a pivotal and pervasive role both in faith and theology. As David Fergusson comments in his overview of the doctrine, it has long been a vital constituent of both Protestant and Catholic theology and some Eastern theology, by no means just “a Calvinist franchise”.1 This central role in theology creates at least a general presumption it will bear on core human experiences of suffering and evil. The specific focus of the doctrine makes this inescapable. At its heart, providence positively relates all kinds of events in the world to the ordering and purposes of God. This implies some sort of explanation and justification of all events, at least in principle, including those events which bring suffering. So providence clearly ought to have significant and substantive claims to make about theodicy. It should do some heavy lifting in this difficult area, even if other doctrines fail to satisfy. Contemporary wariness about theodicy generally may try to spare providence this task. Fergusson, for example, tells us that because all attempts to resolve the problems of theodicy “will prove inadequate to the immensity of the problem of widespread, intense, destructive and undeserved suffering”, so providence “should not assume the burden of explaining evil and suffering”.2 Cyril O’Regan warns that “the Christian doctrine of providence is turned by Hegel into something that it is not, that is, a theodicy”.3 He prefers to approach suffering and sin through Balthasar’s non-speculative, mysterious, prayerful Trinitarianism. It is tempting to acquiesce in this. Theodicy has now acquired such a dubious reputation we might well wish to keep it at arm’s length even from providence. Providence has plenty of other challenges to face to establish its credibility without the potentially fatal infection of theodicy. Even so, I do not think we can separate them. Depending on what is meant by both theodicy and providence, they stand and fall together. Some emasculated meanings of providence might survive without an engagement with suffering and evil. But it is moot whether these can stand up to theological scrutiny. A robust doctrine of providence will have a scope and range of concern that cannot possibly bypass suffering and evil altogether. The major purpose of this chapter is to show how and why this is the case. I will argue that in theological reflection we are bound to believe suffering and evil have some sort of David Fergusson, The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 1. 2 Ibid., 211. 3 Cyril O’Regan, “Hegel, Theodicy, and the Invisibility of Waste”, in The Providence of God, ed. Francesca Aran Murphy and Philip G. Ziegler (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 101. 1

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relation to the purposeful activity of God – regardless of whether we can see or accept that relation in our experience. To this end I will first review various meanings of both theodicy and providence, make the case for their integral connection, and then make some constructive proposals within the range of theological positions on offer.

MEANINGS OF THEODICY Theodicy carries a wide range of meanings. Overall, it is normally best described as an attempt to offer an explanation for the world’s suffering of a kind that constitutes a morally sufficient justification (of God). All these terms, however, are open to various interpretations. To begin with, what is reckoned to constitute a sufficient explanation varies. It may be enough to assert only some kind of indirect divine agency or responsibility in the events of suffering, heavily mediated through other agencies. But it may be reckoned that divine explanation entails rather more. It signifies a comprehensive and “ultimate” explanation, so that even if other agencies or causes are involved they are always radically subordinate. As David Hart points out, an extreme or totalizing version of this view paradoxically fails to explain at all. It simply asserts that every event is equally and uniformly the outcome of a single overriding will, an expression of absolute power and actuality. All other causes, contingencies, agencies, freedoms, are collapsed into the overarching will, rendering any sense of specific “explanation” meaningless.4 Even so, the instinct that adequate explanation must be ultimate and comprehensive remains. It avoids meaningless tautology by incorporating other causes, agencies, and contingencies in a way which allows genuine differentiation, though still not conceding any metaphysical ultimacy to them. Of course, the nature of that incorporation still remains open to different interpretations.5 What constitutes adequate justification also varies. The site where justification is required may relate to God’s permission of suffering or to God’s positive will in suffering: to God’s consequent or antecedent will. More usually it relates to both, not least since these distinctions collapse in any doctrine of an eternal and radically transcendent God.6 The precise nature and meaning of moral justification within this area is then highly contested. Views that suffering is justified as either a retributive or reformative divine action to balance or correct human sin are the most common. But they fail on almost all counts. They are empirically improbable. In this life at least, suffering is evidently not fairly apportioned to actual sin. Nor is it effective in reforming it. They are also theologically flawed. Retribution is never presented in Judaeo-Christian tradition as a morally sufficient response to evil, even in parts of the tradition where retributive elements appear.7 Nor is reformation through suffering ever presented as sufficient. This world remains fallen, unperfected, still “groaning in anticipation”.8

See David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where was God in the Tsunami? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005). See the discussion of options how creaturely freedom might operate within an overarching divine will in this chapter on pages 339–42. 6 See pages 342–3 and 345 of this chapter. 7 For a general theological critique of retributive theory, see for example Vernon White, Atonement and Incarnation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chapter 4 “Two recent contributions”, 42–50. 8 Romans 8.18. Note too, the Christ of the Gospels specifically denies any direct moral link between sin and suffering (Luke 13:1-5; John 9:1,2ff.) 4 5

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Aesthetic-moral theories of balance and proportion likewise fail to convince.9 These consider extreme suffering to be balanced by its intrinsic relation with a greater good, which casts it in a different overall light (either in this world or beyond). But for many the outcome of a final overall “proportionate” harmony has been won at too great a cost, as Ivan Karamazov bitterly laments in his celebrated fictional rejection of God.10 Instrumentalism is the common element here, and the moral villain. Any theodicy in which God is using, or even just permitting, the outcome of suffering to create a greater good appears to instrumentalize people (and animals) who suffer: that is, treating them as means not ends. This is a major criticism made by “protest” theodicy, which resists any attempt to justify or legitimate great suffering.11 As far as moral justification is considered possible at all, much theodicy therefore appeals to more radical solutions. If events of extreme suffering can ever be deemed morally justifiable, this must involve imagining a transcendent reality, an eschatological or eternal context.12 It will require imagining a state of being in which the temporal suffering has been transformed not just “used”. More than that, the way we perceive, and consent to, moral justification in this eschatological context must also be radically different. It will transcend normal moral reasoning. What lies behind this is the recognition that extreme suffering and grief affect and impair our cognitive capacities as well as our emotions and other visceral reactions, so that moral justification is only thinkable when these too are radically reformed.13

MEANINGS OF PROVIDENCE Meanings of providence also vary considerably. The strongest versions of the doctrine are uncompromising in nature and scope. They are developed both from metanarratives of scripture and metaphysical assumptions in order to express a universal divine rule and purpose, both in the generality of the world and in specific events. All events and all kinds of events are steered in some way by divine agency to fulfill divine purposes. This has pre-eminent expression in theology in the Western classic canon of Augustine, Aquinas, the Reformed theology of Calvin, and the neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth. All use scriptural foundations, variously interpreted through Stoic, Aristotelian, then Hegelian philosophies, to produce strong theological forms of universal providence. Even in late modernity where we might expect deconstruction of any metanarrative, and a more fragmented account of divine purposive action, the instinct for some strong form of it persists. Rowan Williams, for example, uses Augustine’s anticipation of semiology to show how the whole of temporal reality, seen through the lens of incarnation, is a divine

See Rowan Williams, “Redeeming Sorrows: Marilyn McCord Adams and the Defeat of Evil”, in Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology, ed. Mike Higton, and Rowan Williams (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 2007). 10 F. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: see Hart’s discussion The Doors of the Sea, 40–1. 11 Protest against theodicy, which gained huge momentum post-holocaust, is arguably a genre in its own right. See John Roth’s “A Theodicy of Protest” and discussion in Stephen T. Davies, ed., Encountering Evil (Louisville: Western Kentucky Journal, 2001); also Kenneth Surin, Theology and the problem of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). 12 See pages 343–4 of this chapter. It is a major ingredient in John Hick’s seminal theodicy Evil and the God of Love (London: Macmillan, 1966/1977). 13 See William J. Abraham, Among the Ashes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017). 9

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sign that everything is in some sense intended by God: a sign that “the whole creation is uttered and meant by God”.14 What undergirds this strong form of the doctrine is normally a radical understanding of divine transcendence of God. Deus non in genere, that is, God is not just an instance of a kind that can be compared to others. God is not constrained by space and temporality as we are. This means that God’s agency cannot be compared, and that is why this transcendent agency can be conceived to operate effectively and universally, incorporating all other agencies without competing with them or displacing them. Such radical transcendence is not uncontroversial. Late medieval theology, following Scotus and others, considered that talk of God was only possible if God shares the property of being with creatures, not radically transcending them. God’s transcendence can then be conceived only as difference in degree. God is a reality operating in the same register of being and action, time and space. When reinforced by a more univocal notion generally of God’s personhood, and a retrieval of more anthropomorphic strands of biblical theology, the outcome for providence is predictable. Since the nineteenth century especially, God has come to be conceived more as an agency alongside others, acting and reacting in relation to others, and therefore more constrained. Far from being universal and wholly effective, divine purpose can only be worked out in a limited fashion. God’s purposes can only be achieved sporadically because God has no power to do otherwise, given the contingencies and complexities of space and time, the freedoms we have been given, and God’s refusal as a God of love to impose on those freedoms. This new orthodoxy entails trimming the classic doctrines of omnipotence and omnipresence which underwrote a more universal providence. It means the whole of creation cannot be “meant” or “uttered” by God, only some of it. The reality of apparently unredeemed evil and extreme suffering is a major driver in this alternative view. Empirically speaking some events appear just surd or too evil ever to be considered in any real relation to the positive agency of a good God. Their only possible meaning is as occupants of the space a loving God has left, because love must always leave space, not impose.15

PROVIDENCE AND FREEDOM Freedom (ours and God’s) is a key issue underlying these contrasting views of the nature and extent of providence. Thomas Flint summarizes what is at stake like this. In so far as we count ourselves genuinely free to act, prima facie this must constrain both divine capacity to act and divine (fore)knowledge: “Mustn’t we, then, concede that a God who leaves some of his creatures free surrenders not only control, but also the knowledge that the traditional picture of providence affords him?”16 How can we resolve this? Flint offers a useful if schematic threefold summary of options, reflecting the different interpretations of providence just outlined but focusing specifically on freedom as the driving issue.

Rowan Williams, “Language, Reality and Desire in Augustine’s ‘De Doctrina’”, Journal of Literature and Theology 3, no. 2 (1989): 138–50, 141. Emphasis mine. 15 See W. H. Vanstone, Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1977); see also Paul Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 16 Thomas P. Flint, “Divine Providence”, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology, ed. Thomas P. Flint and Michael C. Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 263. 14

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First, there is the view that human freedom, properly understood, is in fact compatible with complete divine control and foreknowledge. This classic view is usually associated with some form of Thomist distinction between primary and secondary causality in which God is always the primary cause of our “free” action (and all other events). In this way, God is able to know directly and timelessly how creatures use their freedom and accommodate that within the divine will (God also knows what they could or would have done in other circumstances). God’s will is always done, therefore, in and through all these “free” secondary actions because God wills them. This is a consequence of God’s free choice and decision to create us with the (known) propensity to act in such a way. There are metaphysical and moral objections to this picture. If the primary divine causality is not to overwhelm or displace our secondary causality, rendering its freedom meaningless, it must be transcendent causality of a wholly different kind, a “non-competitive” view of divine agency.17 As already indicated such radical transcendence is contested. Depending on how it is construed it may still leave our agency too limited, and leaves evil events in uncomfortably close and direct relation to the divine will.18 Nonetheless, it has remained as one major kind of option in theology. The second contrasting option refuses this qualification of freedom altogether. Freedom cannot be meaningfully maintained if the primary agent of our action is another agent (God) even when that other is conceived transcendentally and sui generis. So God is reconceived, not freedom. God’s perfection can no longer be thought of in terms of wholesale control. As perfect love (which cannot impose its will) God’s will cannot be universally effective in all things, only partially according to our willingness to cooperate. Nor can God’s knowledge be conceived as complete. When God acts God cannot directly know what we will do, or would do in other circumstances, because this would entail determining the outcome (including predetermining sin). Instead, God can only guarantee our freedom if God acts only on the basis of God’s knowledge of what we might probably do, or on the basis of what we have actually done. This view is usually associated with what has been called “open” theism because of its reformulated view of the nature of God. There are objections to this view too. The price of unqualified freedom has been to diminish the meaning of God in key aspects of God’s being and capacity. Constraints on divine knowledge and divine capacity to act make the creative enterprise as a whole fundamentally risky and (arguably) irresponsible. Is it really an act of responsible love to create that which is bound to suffer without a guarantee of total transformation and redemption? Yet in spite of the objections this also stands as an option, particularly in recent theology. The third option mediates. It is closer to the first “classic” view, restating a strong view of complete divine knowledge and the efficacy of the divine will. But it offers more to creaturely freedom and agency whose exercise is not under God’s control in the same way. In a Thomist view, God knows what any creature will choose to do when placed in certain circumstances and exercises control by virtue of willing that choice. In this more nuanced view, what a creature chooses is conceived independently of any exercise of God’s will. It is a genuinely contingent truth, which could have been otherwise. At the same time, God fully knows these truths about our free contingent actions (“middle knowledge”) so God is not reduced to risk-taking. By knowing perfectly everything that See Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). One of the points made in a seminal article by Karen Kilby, “Evil and the Limits of Theology”, New Blackfriars 84, no. 983 (January 2003): 13–29.

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creatures might do, might have done, and will do, God can always act perfectly and effectively and providential “control” is complete. Nonetheless, the creaturely agency remains their own. This sort of view is normally associated with Molinism. The main objections here relate to the problem of “grounding” an agent’s power of free action and contingency. If grounded in God’s primary causality Molinism has effectively reverted to Thomism. If not, the question of its grounds remains unanswered.19 Even so, suitably qualified, this option too is viable.

MAKING THE CONNECTIONS, CLARIFYING OPTIONS This threefold schema demonstrates well the integral connection between meanings of providence and theodicy, the nature of that connection, and what is at stake in it. Broadly speaking, the first and third options give no quarter to any divine absence, inactivity, or impotence in any event. Positive and effective divine will is being exercised in everything, ultimately, however invisible to us. Divine responsibility may be mitigated in some events by being shared, especially in the Molinist view (though this needs qualification),20 but divine presence, activity, and potency are universal and uncompromised. By contrast, the option of Open Theism allows some events to be more significantly the outcome of creaturely causes, contingency, chance, or randomness. God has no positive part in them beyond the abstract generality of God’s being as ground of all. It allows creaturely agency and contingency the power, in some events, to cause radical ruptures and tears in the fabric of divine order. These events are spaces, which God’s agency and being as love cannot enter decisively and remain love, because love will not override their creaturely causes. God has no power to guarantee redemption of such events. God can judge them, and (through incarnation) empathize with their victims, but that is all. The only meaning left to the event in itself is as the space necessarily left by love (or a certain definition of love). It is in that space where we perceive the greatest tragedies and atrocities. How are we to choose between these options? It is not easy. The conundrum is a familiar one. On the one hand, the instinct of theodicy to offer ultimate explanation and justification, and the instinct of providence to affirm universal meaning, will both in principle push us toward a “classic” (or Molinist) view. The meaning of God as ultimate explanation, and the meaning of divine action as universal, implies that there can be no unredeemed, empty, meaningless events. This offers theological coherence. It also offers consolation, of a kind, since it assures us of ultimate divine control, not chaos. It may seem in principle the only truly theistic option possible. On the other hand, when the empirical reality of apparently surd experiences hits hard in events of extreme dysteleological suffering, this strong form of theodicy will seem incredible. The a priori nature of its metanarrative will seem outmoded, unconvincing, and unconsoling. Worse, it may also be castigated as pernicious and oppressive. The most potent protest against a universal theodicy and providence is not just that it fails to convince or console but that it legitimizes suffering and evil as instrumental to God’s purposes, and suppresses a proper protest and struggle against them. The primary response to the ruptures of suffering and evil must be to overcome them, not to give

See Flint, “Divine Providence”, 274–82, where he critically reviews this and other objections and possible responses. 20 See pages 343–4 of this chapter. 19

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meaning to them. The option of Open Theism, with no claims for absolute and universal divine efficacy and explanation, will then seem the only possible basis for faith.

MEDIATING BETWEEN OPTIONS: ESCHATOLOGY AND CHRISTOLOGY These options may seem incompatible. But some mediation is possible. The appeal to eschatology is one route. As we have seen, if it only offers future compensation to balance this world’s sufferings or future greater harmony for which present suffering is a necessary constituent, it will fail the test of moral adequacy.21 But if it offers a radical transformation in which present sufferings are given new meaning in a new context to which we consent with renewed cognitive capacities, then it can do more. It mediates between the options by acknowledging the meaninglessness of some events in our current experience, but affirming their ultimate meaning in principle by incorporation in this other narrative. Providence in this view is ultimately affirmed in all events, but only by extending its reach into radically new dimensions beyond this world.22 Another (complementary) route is to draw more intentionally on a Christological foundation. Neither theodicy nor providence should be considered a priori but only in the light of the narrative of Christ.23 Used selectively this might only embed the options in their own terms. For example, an exclusive focus on the human suffering, forsakenness, and death of Christ will reinforce divine limitation and vulnerability in events; whereas an exclusively Johanine reading of the passion stressing ultimate divine control and resurrection will reinforce positive divine purpose in everything. But adequate Christology will claim a combination of both perspectives. The earthly Jesus’ empirical life shows how some events may well not yield meaning in finite human experience; yet when held alongside the realized eschatology of Christ’s resurrection, with its possibility of radical transformation of cognition, those same events are placed in a new dimension, offering meaning after all.

THE ANATOMY OF EVENTS AND ACTIONS: MAKING A GENERAL CLAIM SPECIFIC Even so, this possibility of affirming meaning in otherwise meaningless events will surely need more to be credible. We shall need more than a general appeal to “transformational new contexts” of eschatology and resurrection. A concept of radical divine transcendence might lend credibility to the notion of a “transformation of meaning” in general terms, but it is much harder to conceive in the particularity of specific events. Faced with the full measure of an event of vicious abuse of a particular child, how can we imagine any context in which it could be positively re-described? As critics have pointed out, theodicy See Hart’s discussion, Doors of the Sea, chapter 1 “Universal Harmony”, 1–44. For how this might be articulated, see Vernon White, The Fall of a Sparrow: A Concept of Special Divine Action (Exeter: Paternoster, 1985); and Purpose and Providence. Taking Soundings in Western Thought, Literature and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2015/18). As noted previously the notion of impaired cognitive capacities was introduced in Abraham, Among the Ashes. 23 Karl Barth is a main proponent of a Christocentric approach. His doctrine of providence is worked out most extensively in CD III/3. See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960). 21 22

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too often fails in addressing the specificity and particularity of evil.24 So, can more be said about this? One response is to pay more attention to what we mean anyway by “a specific event”. A claim that all events (including evil or surd events) can in principle have meaning as actions of God will only begin to make sense with further analysis of both “event” and “action”. The issue arises because most events are composite, that is, divisible into many constituent sub-events, and whereas the overall event may be conceivable as an action (i.e., an event directed toward some purpose or goal) this is often harder to see for its constituent sequence of sub-events. An event of rainfall, for example, is difficult to see as purposive action viewed only as its sub-events of evaporation and various molecular and subatomic movements. It can more readily be seen as purposive only if considered as a whole event in a wider narrative, serving a life-giving purpose of watering crops or assuaging thirst. Prima facie this analysis might seem to lead back to generality: that is, by resisting any claim of divine action in all specific events and referring it only to “overall” or composite events which have an evident good purpose. But in fact highlighting the composite nature of events simply alerts us to the sense in which all events (composite and discrete) depend anyway on a wider configuration or sequence of events if they are to be considered as action (whether divine or human). It reminds us that these wider contexts for meaning also then interconnect with other configurations of events, serving a variety of other purposes, good or bad. So, with the example of rainfall, even this composite event is not considered in itself as purposive apart from its context in those other narratives involving the watering of crops in one context, or flooding in another (or both); we shall also need to know whether the crops are feeding the poor or propping up oppressors, whether the floods are driving the poor from the land or overwhelming their enemies. In short, if any event is to be described as an “act” this depends not so much on whether it is composite in itself but on its relation to other events and narratives. It is those wider configurations or contexts (spatio-temporal or eternal) that determine its meaning and potentially transform its proximate meaning.25 This in turn is what now allows us to think, in principle, of divine activity in all specific events. If there is a wider eschatological context of some other configuration of events being steered by divine agency (whether conceived linearly, figurally, or sub specie aeternitatis26) then any event, composite or discrete, is a conceivable ingredient within that. Any event, however meaningless or evil in one narrative, may always be radically transformed when reframed within this other narrative. That reframing is the goal of universal redemption. It arises, on this view, only and precisely out of a robust doctrine of providence, which maintains divine activity in and “behind” every event in time and eternity to provide it with this wider redemptive context.

THE FINAL MORAL QUESTION The question remains whether this satisfies an adequate theodicy in the full sense previously set out. Can the “interim” unredeemed narratives, not yet transformed in historical

See Terrence Tilly, The Evils of Theodicy (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1991); Surin, Theology and the Problem of Evil. The problem is discussed in Kilby, “Evil and the Limits of Theology”. 25 See White, Purpose and Providence, 132. 26 Reviewed further in White, Purpose and Providence, e.g. 100–20. 24

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experience, be deemed morally justified, as well as explicable in principle? This account certainly reframes them. Because they are always transformable in wider configurations, it means their status, like the status of evil itself, may be considered ultimately tenuous. But however tenuous their hold on ultimate reality, these interim perspectives remain an inescapable part of our experience, known and permitted by God. This may still seem morally intolerable Can anything more be said to mitigate this? The most usual way is to describe them as tragic but necessary “consequences”, “concomitants”, or “side effects” of the divine creative act in which God chooses to respect rather than override the world’s own freedoms and contingencies.27 In other words they are considered permitted as part of God’s consequent will but never formed part of God’s antecedent will and intentions. The best that can then be said to justify the creative act as a whole is that God at least has the capacity to use these tragic events in the construction of the wider configurations in which they will be transformed. But this still has the semblance of instrumentalism about it. Can this ever be morally justified? One response has already been trailed. It depends on whether we conceive the transformation ultimately achieved not only outweighs the evil suffered (compensation is not enough) but also creates a unique and greater good for every individual sufferer, not just for others or for a general good.28 In other words, it depends on whether there is an internal not just external greater good created out of the evil suffered. In the face of some particular horrendous evils, I do not think this is imaginable. But if our cognition is impaired it may still be true. If it is accepted, vital clarifications and caveats still need stressing. First, on this view no specific evil event in itself is ever intended by God, not even instrumentally. What God intends is always the wider context of meaning in which evil events are transformed. While evil events may be a foreseen consequence or concomitant of a divine creative decision to work with creaturely freedoms (so there is some divine responsibility for them), there is no intention specifically to bring them about. It is possible to insist this precisely because the notion of an event “in itself” crumbles under scrutiny. Events only have meaning as intended actions in the wider narrative and it is that wider redeemed narrative that God intends.29 Following from this, no particular evil need be considered instrumentally necessary to this redemption. Although every event is redeemable into a good purpose by its incorporation into the wider narrative of redemption, none in itself is necessary. Others might have occurred. This follows from the tenuous status of the very notion of an event in itself. It also follows from the freedom and love of divine action. It is possible for God to foresee and permit all actual narratives which emerge from the contingencies of the creative act, and act redemptively in relation to them, without imposing metaphysical

See Anthony Kenny, Will, Freedom and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), where he distinguishes carefully between these categories. 28 See Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and Goodness of God (Ithaca: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 29 This distinction between divine intention from “atomized” events was important for both Calvin and Barth. See for example Calvin’s insistence that God does not intend the event of our evil intention, even though God intends the ultimate outcome of what we may do in a wider perspective. See Paul Helm, ed., The Secret Providence of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010). 27

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necessity on them. They remain contingencies, rather than God’s sole specific “policies”.30 At the risk of repetition, this wider context of redemption must never be construed as a state in which events of evil suffered by one are constitutive only of others’ redemption. They must always also be internally related to the benefit of the sufferer too.

KEEPING QUIET BUT KEEPING FAITH A final caveat relates to practical and public theology. On this view, and especially given the cognitive impairment we all suffer, it should be obvious there will be strict limits to what can be known and said about any specific situation. To relate providence to any particular named public event, in order to specify its “final” transformed meaning, is likely to be problematic and perilous. It may sometimes be the risky gift of a prophet to pronounce on this, but it is not the task of a theologian to appeal to providence in this way in either public or pastoral theology.31 Reticence becomes us. Even so, even when it is impossible to experience, explain, or even believe in particular events, this sort of universal providence can be held as a general disposition of belief. Only this will warrant ultimate trust in God and offer a final consolation. So perhaps it needs to be held on behalf of us all, even when it cannot be held by us all. And that is a task of theology.

FURTHER READING Fergusson, David. The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach. Cambridge: Cornell University Press, 2018. Kilby, Karen. God, Evil and the Limits of Theology. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2020. Murphy, Francesca Aran and Philip G. Ziegler, eds. The Providence of God. London: T&T Clark, 2009. White, Vernon. Purpose and Providence: Taking Soundings in Western Thought, Literature and Theology. London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015.

See Williams, “Redeeming Sorrows”. Williams adopts a neo-Thomist view of divine action in which particular configurations of events emerge within timelessly ordered systems are sustained by God in such a way that they are to be seen as “foreordained results of finite outcomes” not “specific policies of God”. 31 See White, Purpose and Providence, 153–61, cf. 118ff. 30

Chapter 49

Ecclesiology JEREMY WORTHEN

INTRODUCTION The development of ecclesiology – the doctrine of the church – in the second millennium of Christian history is associated in particular ways with concern for ecclesial reformation. At the beginning of this period, controversies in Western Christendom over the extent to which kings and other rulers should exercise influence on ecclesiastical appointments sparked a fresh examination of questions around authority in the church and its relation to the social order and amplified growing calls for church reform.1 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Western Christendom broke into different components, separated by divergent responses to the radical message of reform preached by Luther and those associated with him, and by emerging conflicts around what it meant to be the church of Christ. During the past hundred years, attempts to heal these historic divisions in the context of Christianity as a new global faith have put a premium on ecclesiological agreement, as the key to significant progress in making the unity of the church visible here on earth through fresh processes of renewal and reform.2 What then might ecclesiology have to do with theodicy? One formulation that became current in much ecumenical theology in the closing decades of the twentieth century is that the church can be considered a sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s reign.3 The terminology here is designed to balance affirmation of the participation of the church in the victory of God in Christ over sin, evil, and death with acknowledgment that the fullness of God’s saving work is not exhausted by the church in human history: it awaits us at the resurrection of the dead, while it may touch us in other – also partial – ways in the present age. This assertion of the church’s intrinsic relation to God’s reign draws ecclesiology into the sphere of theodicy. Christian doctrine may not have a single agreed position on the origin and nature of evil in the world, but it has at its heart the claim that evil has been overcome through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.4 The plausibility of that claim may appear to be inseparable from the life of the church, as the Christopher M. Bellitto and David Zachariah Flanagin, eds, Reassessing Reform: A Historical Investigation into Church Renewal (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012). 2 World Council of Churches’ (WCC) Commission on Faith and Order, The Church: Towards a Common Vision, Faith and Order Paper 214 (Geneva: World Council of Churches, Commission on Faith and Order, 2013). 3 E.g., Anglican-Reformed International Commission, God’s Reign and Our Unity: The Report of the AnglicanReformed International Commission 1981–84 (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1984), §14(c). 4 Paul S. Fiddes, “Christianity, Atonement and Evil”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil, ed. Chad Meister and Paul K. Moser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 210–29. 1

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communion of persons that share in God’s reign and communicate it in and to the world. As sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s reign, the church enables God’s final victory over evil to be known in the midst of human history. At various times, however, critics of Christianity have pointed to the persistence of evil in the life of the church as evidence for the falsity of its claims about the work of God in Christ. The reality of the church’s consistent implication in moral evil is taken to refute its theological claim to be sign, instrument, and foretaste of the already accomplished victory of divine goodness, and thereby to render belief in such accomplishment without foundation. This line of argument, anticipated by Jewish critics of Christianity in the medieval West who believed that God’s decisive victory over evil still lay ahead in the messianic future, was taken up by anti-religious thinkers of the Enlightenment and may continue to be a factor in the steady increase in recent decades across many societies in those expressing deep alienation from the church and Christian faith. Two strands of critique might be noted regarding the problem of evil in the life of the church. The first is that the church consists of a set of institutions and communities that are ultimately no different in character from other institutions and communities within society, capable of the same kinds of goodness and susceptible to the same kinds of evil. This will be referred to in what follows as the moral equivalence critique. The second is that the church consists of a set of institutions and communities uniquely prone to moral evil because of their entanglement with theological claims that are objectively false and practically dehumanizing. This will be referred to as the immoral tendency critique. The two can be connected easily enough: one of the false and dehumanizing claims made by the church, for the immoral tendency critique, might be the refusal to accept that it has no special relationship to the divine, no special share in some supposed final victory over evil. If the moral equivalence critique is true, but the church refuses to accept this, then it can be argued that it is bound to end up acting in ways that are immoral as well as mistaken. The first two sections of this chapter will attend to how the relations between the church and violence and between the church and abuse have shaped the development of such critiques and theological responses to them. The third and final section will consider a particular question that first emerges in the context of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation: Is it possible to speak of the church itself as sinning without abandoning the claim that the church truly participates in a distinctive way in the reign of God? If answered negatively, then the only defense of Christian faith that can be offered against either strand of critique involves some kind of separation of “the church as such” from the still sinful men and women who form its members. One way to answer it affirmatively is to propose that the dynamic of repentance, reform, and renewal in the church’s life is in fact intrinsic to its reality as sign, instrument, and foretaste of a divine reign that has yet to arrive in its fullness.

THE CHURCH AS AGENT OF VIOLENCE The reign of God is understood in Christian theological tradition as the overcoming of destructive conflict and the establishment of transforming peace; hence the church is regarded as sign, instrument, and foretaste of humanity’s reconciliation – to God and to one another – and of its creaturely unity that has been obscured and distorted by sin. The Second Vatican Council declared that “the Church is in Christ like a sacrament or

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as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race”.5 Concern that the church should express such unity in Christ in its day-to-day life, including the way it challenges accepted social divisions, in the face of emerging disagreements and tensions is already evident in many documents of the New Testament, including Romans, 1 Corinthians, and Ephesians. There has, therefore, been an awareness from earliest times that the church’s participation in God’s reign of reconciliation and peace is always liable to counter-currents of human conflict. One kind of theological response to that awareness has been to insist that the church itself remains truly one, and that anything that threatens that unity must therefore be essentially alien to the church, and hence be either corrected or expelled; it cannot be tolerated within the one true church, because it does not belong there and is inimical to it. Where churches assumed positions of power and privilege within society, as under the “Christian” Roman empire that emerged following the conversion of Constantine and the various instantiations of Christendom that continued through the Middle Ages and into the modern era, then the refusal to tolerate that which is deemed alien to the unity of the church could begin to find expression in marginalization, coercion, and ultimately violence regarding groups and individuals perceived as resisting reconciliation in and to the God of Jesus Christ. This would apply to the treatment of those who identified as Christians but were deemed heretics or schismatics by the dominant church, as well as of those persisting in other kinds of religious identity. From the later fourth century onwards, then, there were grounds for regarding the church as an agent of persecutory violence toward those who dissented from it. It has been proposed that this dynamic intensified in the later Middle Ages, with lasting consequences for the subsequent history of Western societies.6 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Western Europe became riven with violent conflict within and between “Christendom” states, conflict that was bound up with divergent responses to the Protestant Reformation. How to describe properly the causal relation between religious divisions within Christianity and the so-called “wars of religion”, which clearly involved other factors as well, is a matter of significant scholarly debate, inevitably colored by the subsequent anti-religious appeal to the mass killing of Christians by other Christians during this period as evidence for the church’s abject failure to be sign or instrument of peace (Radner, A Brutal Unity, 19–56).7 One response from within the church to the violent conflicts of the early modern period, already evident in the seventeenth century, has been to argue on theological grounds for the “tolerance” of dissent. This begins to open up the prospect of moving beyond Christendom to a political pluralism in which the aim is to avoid any kind of dominant church or normative religion, with political unity now wholly detached from the unity of the church. In the context of such political pluralism, it becomes easy to accept separation between churches and conflicts within them as ineradicable, even at some level beneficial in maintaining religious plurality, to be managed by a kind of mutual

Vatican II, Lumen Gentium: Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, 1964, http://www​.vatican​.va​/archive​/hist​ _councils​/ii​_vatican​_council​/documents​/vat​-ii​_const​_19641121​_lumen​-gentium​_en​.html, §1; Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, trans. Lancelot C. Sheppard (London: Burns and Oates, 1950), 1–17. 6 R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). 7 See William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 5

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tolerance across persisting divisions and fractures that mirrors that within the pluralist society, with earlier expectations that the church in its remarkable visible – social – unity should serve as sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s reign of peace laid aside (Radner, A Brutal Unity, 63–79).8 Such a response may help to defuse what was termed the immoral tendency critique. It can maintain that it is not intrinsic to the church’s self-understanding as one that it should be intolerant of difference and seek to correct it or else expel it using coercive means. It may, however, then become vulnerable to the moral equivalence critique: if it is true that the church when it lives in the light of true doctrine is no more generative of violence than other communities and institutions, what does it signify about or contribute to human peace and unity beyond the achievement of stable pluralist democracies? Reflection on the Holocaust has prompted renewed attention to the church as agent of violence. The absence, on the part of the great majority of European Christians to whose awareness it came, of active resistance of any kind to the violent persecution and then mass slaughter of Jewish people instigated across Europe by the Nazi regime has only become clearer over the decades since the Second World War (ibid., 88–114). While it is possible to argue that it constituted a terrifying example of the susceptibility present in every society to scapegoat and dehumanize a specific group, some have sought to draw a much more direct line between Christian self-understanding, as expressed in ecclesiology, and murderous antisemitism.9 If the church must correct or expel everything within its sphere that threatens the unity it holds as God’s gift in Christ, then Jewish people who refuse to acknowledge Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ stand as the original and formative example of those who cannot be accommodated within the peace of the church’s unity and must therefore be placed demonstrably outside its bounds if it is to serve as sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s reign. In the Middle Ages in Western Europe, official teaching was in fact that Jewish people should remain protected within Christian societies – but protected precisely as a minority kept on the margins and subject to various legal penalties to ensure the social enactment of their divine punishment for disobedience, until such time as it might be replaced by obedient faith in Christian teaching. In such a context, it could appear obvious that where Jewish people in any way strayed from the narrow constraints of this Christian “protection”, punishment through violence and expulsion were entirely proper responses – responses that became increasingly frequent in the second half of the Western Middle Ages and into the early modern period. The antisemitism that began to gain widespread public influence in European societies from the end of the nineteenth century can be seen as the continuation of such long-standing Christian traditions, urging that if Jewish people were unwilling to accept their marginal and subordinate role within the social order, that order’s survival depended on their removal – by any means necessary. Christians who assisted with the actions of the Holocaust or failed to offer active resistance to them were able to do so in part at least because of the deep influence of two millennia of Christian teaching, never seriously questioned before the mid-twentieth century, about the ultimate incompatibility of the continuation of distinctively Jewish existence with the divinely Jeremy Worthen, “The Ecclesiology of Visible Unity at Lambeth 1920: Lost beyond Recovery?” Ecclesiology 16, no. 2 (2020): 224–42. 9 Philip A. Cunningham, Joseph Sievers, Mary C. Boys, Hans Hermann Henrix, and Jesper Svartvik, eds, Christ Jesus and the Jewish People Today: New Explorations of Theological Interrelationships (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 14–76. 8

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given calling of the church to be the sacrament of humanity’s unity in Jesus Christ.10 The critical question that then emerges is whether the church can shed such teaching and still remain historically recognizable as the one catholic and apostolic church, or whether the shadow of violence against the church’s “other”, beginning with the Jewish people, finally defines it.11

THE CHURCH AS COVER FOR ABUSE Although cases where the church could be identified as the agent of violence might appear to have receded since the Second World War, perceptions of the church’s collusion with if not active promotion of moral evil have continued to sow doubt about its claim to be sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s reign, and thereby undermine the credibility of the Christian message of God’s victory over evil. The new context since the final decades of the twentieth century for such perceptions has been the church’s role in the perpetration and cover-up of abuse, in particular – though not only – sexual abuse. The force of the anger felt toward the church for what has happened in this regard cannot be underestimated. There is a profound sense of betrayal of trust by the church, and it is not clear how it can be remedied. The contradiction between what the church teaches about the reign of God, as characterized by security, mutual care, and protection from harm, and the reality of abuse within the church’s life runs very deep. Analysis of the church’s responsibility for abuse is, however, at least as complex as analysis of its responsibility for violence, and in certain respects perhaps more so. With regard to sexual abuse, the issue is not, as with violence, that churches have sometimes stated or implied that it is morally justified. The concern might be described instead as twofold: first, that aspects of church teaching and practice have made it relatively easy for sexual abuse to happen in church contexts; second, that aspects of church teaching and practice have obstructed a proper response to sexual abuse once this has come to light. For those who share that twofold concern and continue to identify as part of the church, the relevant aspects of church teaching and practice can and should be corrected; reform remains a possibility and a duty. Some have argued that Christian language – beginning with the Scriptures – about the overwhelming power of God, or about atonement through the unmerited punishment of God’s Son, including physical beating and torture, or about the need for our conformity to the suffering Son in order to be saved, shapes a culture within which abuse becomes both readily imaginable and freighted with a religious significance that can blunt the conscience to the harm that is being done. Reform in this case can only mean a wholesale revision of traditional teaching about God and about salvation, together with a recasting of the inherited language of the church’s worship, teaching, and prayer.12

See the responses to the Vatican document on the Holocaust published in 1998, We Remember, in Part I of Judith H. Banki and John T. Pawlikoswski, eds, Ethics in the Shadow of the Holocaust: Christian and Jewish Perspectives (Franklin: Sheed & Ward, 2001), 1–226. 11 Jeremy F. Worthen, The Internal Foe: Judaism and Anti-Judaism in the Shaping of Christian Theology (Newcastleupon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). 12 Susan Shooter, How Survivors of Abuse Relate to God: The Authentic Spirituality of the Annihilated Soul (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 10

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Perhaps more commonly, however, the focus has been on the way that authority is allocated and power distributed in the life of the church.13 On such an account, it is the way that the church has understood itself and ordered its life that lies at the root of its tendency to serve as a cover for abuse – often with a particular focus on the role of the clergy. As those called to pastor the flock of Christ, clergy are in a particular position of trust, opening up the potential for power over individuals that can generate unhealthy dependence and fear and also readily elude public visibility and bypass accountability. The same dynamics of authority and power that enable abuse to take place in church life then also function to obstruct an effective response when it comes to light. One question for those who would see this area as the focus for reform is how far the distinctive role of ordained ministers as understood within ecclesiology is implicated in these negative dynamics. The linkage between the immoral tendency critique and the moral equivalence critique becomes clear at this point. The aspects of church teaching and practice that have helped to enable abuse and to obstruct a right response to it are arguably bound up with its self-understanding as differing in significant ways from other communities and institutions. For instance, Christian teaching about forgiveness has been used to justify the granting of “second chances” to pastors known to have committed abuse, along with the refusal to pass on the knowledge of their abuse to others; it has also been invoked to demand that those who have been abused take no action against their abusers and remain compliant members alongside them of the same families and church communities. That is wrong and must be resisted, yet if the church’s message about divine and human forgiveness makes no actual difference to the way it responds to the reality of sin in its midst, then it is not clear how it can serve as a witness to the gospel and a sacrament in history of God’s reign embodied in Jesus Christ.14

THE CHURCH AS REPENTANT SINNER As with the tension between unity and division, the question of how the church can be at once holy and sinful is already implicit in the documents assembled in the New Testament. That question becomes framed in a fresh way in the Reformation period, in response to the Lutheran articulation of Christian existence as that of the justified sinner, always simul iustus et peccator, with the church itself then being readily cast in the same terms. Can it therefore be said that the church itself is a sinner, as Luther asserted, and if so, what does it mean to affirm with the creed that it is holy? There has been an apparent polarization of Catholic and Protestant responses at this point, though arguably with an underlying commonality (Bergen, Ecclesial Repentance, 199–242).15 At the risk of excessive generalization, the characteristic Catholic answer has been to make a distinction between the church as such and its individual members: the members

Marie Keenan, Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church: Gender, Power, and Organizational Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); James Newton Poling, The Abuse of Power: A Theological Problem (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991). 14 Church of England Faith and Order Commission, Forgiveness and Reconciliation in the Aftermath of Abuse (London: Church House Publishing, 2017), 54; also available at https://www​.churchofengland​.org​/about​/ leadership​-and​-governance​/faith​-and​-order​-commission. 15 See also Walter Kasper, The Catholic Church: Nature, Reality and Mission, trans. Thomas Hoebel (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 169–74. 13

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sin, but the church remains holy, so that it makes no sense to speak of the church itself sinning. The characteristic Protestant response, on the other hand, has been to draw on the Augustinian distinction between the visible church and the invisible church: the visible church here on earth is indeed flawed and sinful, while the invisible church remains perfect in holiness. One might argue, however, that the difference is primarily a matter of where the “true” church is located: Catholic theology since the Reformation has sought to maintain a strong identification between the true church and ecclesial institutions in history, while Protestant theology has been more willing to loosen that identification.16 Either way, the true church – the real church, which lives in union with Christ – does not sin: a distinction is introduced that insulates the true church from the sins of its members in human history. Yet the price of that distinction is the difficulty for ecclesiology, whether Catholic or Protestant, in explaining the relation between this true church and the communities in history that encompass its sinning members. Where is the witness of the church in time to God’s final victory over evil to be found, if not among actual communities of Christians? Nonetheless, the differences between the two responses have some significance in terms of the subject of this chapter. For those adopting a more Protestant position, acknowledging the force of the moral equivalence critique and even the immoral tendency critique as they have been shaped over the last century in particular may not appear too costly: after all, they can by definition have no purchase on the true – invisible – church and its abiding holiness. The danger is that if it is conceded that the visible church utterly fails as sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s reign, then it ceases to be evident why anyone should belong to the visible church at all, or believe in the reality of that which it is unable to signify, bring near or anticipate. Catholic ecclesiology, by contrast, has been more likely to resist such critiques and to maintain an account of the sinlessness of the church as such that includes – at some level – the church as social reality. Can that be sustained, however, without denying the reality of sinfulness within the church? It was, then, an act of profound ecclesiological significance when Pope John Paul II chose to mark the beginning of the third millennium since the incarnation of Christ with a “Day of Pardon”, in which he made a formal, public confession on behalf of the Catholic Church of sins with which it has been associated (Bergen 2011: 115–50). His action was built on decades of theological thinking within Roman Catholic ecclesiology, including documents from the Second Vatican.17 Nonetheless, it still occasioned considerable controversy.18 While it could be interpreted as breaching the strict demarcation between the church as such and its sinful sons and daughters, the wording that was used kept the theological distinction here carefully intact. Since the early decades of the twentieth century, Protestant and Anglican churches have engaged in acts of what has been termed “ecclesial repentance”, for their involvement in Christian disunity, in the Second World War and other conflicts, in colonialism, slavery, and racism, and in other forms of discrimination and injustice (Bergen, Ecclesial Repentance, 15–114). Pope John Paul II

Avery Dulles, Models of the Churches, expanded ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1987), 34–46, 76–88. Jeanmarie Gribaudo, A Holy yet Sinful Church: Three Twentieth-century Moments in a Developing Theology (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2015), 88–147; International Theological Commission, Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past, 1999, https://www​.vatican​.va​/roman​_curia​/congregations​/ cfaith​/cti​_documents​/rc​_con​_cfaith​_doc​_20000307​_memory​-reconc​-itc​_en​.html. 18 Gribaudo, A Holy yet Sinful Church, 148–94. 16 17

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both aligned himself with this emerging ecumenical practice as a new century dawned and also maintained a continuing distance from it. One alternative to maintaining some kind of separation between the sins of the church’s members and the church as such, visible or invisible, is to reframe the church’s holiness in terms of the Pope’s action, that is, as the sinner who through repentance begins to know God’s sanctifying work (Radner, A Brutal Unity, 121–65).19 The demonstration of the church’s holiness, on this account, would not be in the (relative) absence of sin from the life in time of the people who constitute the church, but in the testimony they offer to the space made by repentance for newness of life that opens up through faith in Christ. Such repentance cannot be confined to individuals in separation from one another, but must extend to the reform and renewal of the whole church where it can be seen that structures, practices, and culture are bound up with sinful tendencies. The convergence text on ecclesiology from the World Council of Churches’ Faith and Order Commission states that “part of the holiness of the Church is its ministry of continually calling people to repentance, renewal and reform”, though that still appears to presuppose a distinction between the church as such (with its “holiness”) and those in need of “repentance, renewal and reform”.20 Pope Paul VI perhaps went further when he wrote that “Evangelizing is in fact the grace and vocation proper to the Church, her deepest identity . . . The Church is an evangelizer, but she begins by being evangelized herself” – so long as it is understood that the church on earth is never finished with “being evangelized”.21 One might compare the attempt of the ecumenical Groupe des Dombes to articulate an ecclesiology that has as its starting point the insight that “Christian identity is conversion to God”, “a shifting of the centre, an exodus, a transition, a paschal movement”.22 Such an ecclesiology might respond to the critiques noted in this chapter by arguing that they miss the point: what is distinctive about the church is not that, according to the right moral calculus, it emerges with more points on the board than other communities or institutions, but that it is sinful human beings meeting together in Jesus Christ crucified and risen the holy God who loves them and raises them to new life. What makes it the sign, instrument, and foretaste of God’s reign is that it both tells of that encounter and testifies to it in the way that lives are transformed and hope upheld that such transformation is not bounded by the horizon of death. In turning to Christ, evil is named and recognized, not denied, but also known to be overcome by God’s saving action on our behalf, so that new life can begin at precisely that point of recognition and corresponding repentance. It might be argued that the ways in which the church has served as a cover for abuse underline the importance of such an ecclesiology in shaping a church culture that is able to face the gravity of sinful acts and the radical persistence of human sinfulness, and to be ready to repent as the church for how it has failed in love of God and neighbor and thereby seek its own reform and renewal, always in the light of the mystery of the cross that reveals both the vastness of human sin and the unimaginable greatness of divine grace.

Nicholas M. Healy, Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology, Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), e.g., 7–15. 20 WCC Commission on Faith and Order, The Church, §24; cf. §36. 21 Pope Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi: Apostolic Exhortation of his Holiness Pope Paul VI, 1975, http://w2​.vatican​ .va​/content​/paul​-vi​/en​/apost​_exhortations​/documents​/hf​_p​-vi​_exh​_19751208​_evangelii​-nuntiandi​.html, §§14f. 22 Groupe des Dombes, For the Conversion of the Churches, trans. James Grieg (Geneva: World Council of Churches Publications, 1993), §2, §19. 19

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An understanding of the church as the company of repentant sinners might also enable ecclesiology to overcome the dilemma between “strong” accounts of church unity that require exclusion of individuals and groups that cannot be accommodated within it, and “weak” accounts that recede into the social tolerance that might be hoped to be experienced in any well-functioning pluralist democracy. To begin with, unity – like the other creedal marks of the church, its holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity – is not something achieved in history, but rather defines the journey that the church is always making through history. While the church’s unity through history requires the constant exercise of ecclesial judgment regarding what may stand in tension with the good news of peace with which it is entrusted, such judgment must be accompanied by respect for the freedom of those dissenting from it and openness to dialogue with all, with trust in God’s providence within history and hope for God’s merciful judgment at its end. Finally, the repentant church knows that the roots of division extend deep into its own life, and unity only becomes visible by way of their continual eradication through repentance, renewal, and reform, in deepening union with Christ and indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

FURTHER READING Bergen, Jeremy M. Ecclesial Repentance: The Churches Confront their Sinful Pasts. London: T&T Clark, 2011. Gribaudo, Jeanmarie. A Holy yet Sinful Church: Three Twentieth-century Moments in a Developing Theology. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2015. Radner, Ephraim. A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012.

Chapter 50

Sacraments DAVID GRUMETT

Christian theologians in the Augustinian tradition have frequently opted to present evil as an absence or deficiency of good. There are good reasons for this. If evil had an ontological reality independent of goodness, life would be an ongoing chaotic battle between good and evil. This does not satisfactorily account for the divine ordering and preservation of the world, its redemption by Christ and its promised eschatological completion. Yet from the perspective of human experience, life may nevertheless sometimes appear to be a conflict between good and evil, with the latter having stark reality in the suffering of individuals and communities. Part of the function of the sacraments as outward and visible symbols of divine presence and action is to represent in word and image this objective aspect of suffering and evil and Christ’s response to it. Such representation may be by personifying, naming, or representing evil, or by describing or recollecting the suffering to which evil gives rise. In this chapter I shall consider how different sacraments relate to evil and suffering. I will begin with baptism and the Eucharist, partly because these are the two most widely recognized sacraments, and partly because the recognition and representation of evil and suffering is, in different ways, intrinsic to each of them. I shall then more briefly consider how evil and suffering are recognized and represented in each of the five other sacraments in use in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches: confirmation, reconciliation (confession), the anointing of the sick (extreme unction), marriage, and ordination (holy orders). It will be seen that, although the sacramental representation of evil and its conquest employs language and imagery that may sometimes appear alien to the modern mind, such representation enables liturgy to perform the vital pastoral function of acknowledging and responding to suffering in the contemporary world.

BAPTISM In classic baptismal rites, both Eastern and Western, evil is engaged in up to three ways: the candidate is exorcized, the candidate renounces Satan, and the baptismal water is exorcized.1 Because each engagement presents different aspects of how baptism liberates from moral and natural evil, each requires a separate discussion. In modern Roman Catholic usage there are several possible prayers for exorcizing the candidate. The celebrant prays that God may “protect them from the spirit of evil” and

Henry Ansgar Kelly, The Devil at Baptism: Ritual, Theology, and Drama (Ithaca: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

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from “every manner of evil”, or asks in another prayer that God may “free them from evil and the tyranny of the enemy” and “keep far from them the spirit of wickedness, falsehood, and greed”.2 Important in Roman Catholic theology is the belief that baptism removes original sin. Sin in general is presented as a corollary of evil, which, to be vanquished, requires the intervention of God rather than the candidate’s personal effort alone. In the Orthodox baptismal rite, there are three exorcisms of the candidate. The theology underlying each deserves consideration. During the first exorcism, the devil is directly addressed in striking language. The prayer opens with the priest proclaiming: “The Lord puts you under ban, O Devil! . . . that He might overthrow your tyranny and deliver men.” This subjugation is traced to the cross, on which Christ died, thereby overthrowing death and the devil. Christ’s own death annihilated death, with the graves opened and the bodies of saints arising out of them.3 Invoking God’s power, the priest continues: Fear, begone and depart from this creature, and return not again, neither hide yourself in him (her), neither seek to meet him (her), not to influence him (her), either by night or by day, either in the morning or at noonday, but depart hence to your own infernal abyss until the great Day of Judgement which is ordained.4 The devil is thus dismissed along with all his powers and angels. By grounding this victory over the moral evil that the devil and his associates represent in the cross, the prayer presents exorcism as an outworking of Christ’s death, which, by opening the way to resurrection, overcame physical death. The second exorcism has a contrasting theological emphasis. The priest again directly addresses the devil, stating: “God . . . has foreordained you for the penalty of eternal punishment.” Invoking an exorcism performed by Jesus, the prayer continues: “I charge you, most crafty, impure, vile, loathsome and alien spirit . . . acknowledge the vainness of your might, which has not power even over swine.”5 In the episode alluded to, Jesus expels the demons from the Gerasene demoniac and admits their request to enter a large herd of swine instead. However, rather than remaining under demoniacal possession, the entire herd immediately rushes down a slope into the Sea of Galilee and is drowned.6 In the prayer of exorcism, this watery ending is related to God’s control and order of the waters, both of the deep and of the firmament, at the creation of the world. Still addressing the devil, the priest continues: “Begone, and depart from him (her)!” The prayer culminates by looking forward to Christ’s second coming, at which, the priest forewarns the devil, “He shall chastise you and all your host with burning Gehenna, committing you to outer darkness”.7 While including this eschatological dimension, this second prayer of exorcism foregrounds Christ’s ministry and own exorcisms. The third exorcism of the candidate is shorter. Rather than directly addressing the devil, it compares exorcism with healing, petitioning God to find and eradicate “every

International Commission on English in the Liturgy, Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (London: Chapman, 1987), 42f. 3 See Matt. 27:52f. 4 Orthodox Church in America, Baptism (2012), 2. 5 Orthodox Church in America, Baptism, 3. 6 See Matt. 8:30-32; Mark 5:11-13; Luke 8:32f. 7 Orthodox Church in America, Baptism, 3. 2

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operation of the devil”. Referring to the candidate, the prayer continues: “Rebuke the unclean spirits and expel them, and purify the works of Thy hands; and exerting Thy trenchant might, speedily crush down Satan under his (her) feet, and give him (her) victory over the same, and over his unclean spirits.”8 This prayer presents exorcism as fundamentally a work of Christ, rather than leaving open the interpretation that it is primarily achieved by a human priestly act. Following the exorcisms, the priest breathes in the form of a cross over the candidate’s mouth, forehead, and chest, while reciting a further prayer. In an excellent exposition, the Russian Orthodox liturgical theologian Alexander Schmemann presents breathing as signifying the organic unity in a person, including in their liberation, of the physical and the spiritual.9 Breathing is biologically essential to human life and constitutes human dependence on the world, but this dependence is corrupted by evil, which is both physical and spiritual. Breathing, being a physical act that, by signifying life and the Holy Spirit, is also spiritual, is therefore fittingly used in exorcism. The second way in baptism that evil is engaged, which is familiar from Western baptismal rites, is the renunciation of the devil, evil, and sin by the candidate, or, if the candidate is an infant, by his or her representatives. In the Church of England’s baptismal liturgy, the priest questions the candidate: “Do you reject the devil and all rebellion against God? Do you renounce the deceit and corruption of evil? Do you repent of the sins that separate us from God and neighbour?” To each question the candidate responds that they reject them, renounce them, or repent of them.10 The questions are notable because they are the only point in this liturgy that the devil is referred to and because they are the point within the core part of the baptismal liturgy at which evil is named. In the Orthodox baptismal rite, the confrontation with evil is dramatized by the candidate turning around, or being turned around by the priest, to face west. Being the direction of the sunset, this is associated with darkness and evil, and signifies the exorcized candidate freely facing and confronting Satan.11 The priest asks the candidate, “Do you renounce Satan, and all his works, and all his angels, and all his service, and all his pride?”, to which the candidate responds: “I do renounce him!” The candidate is then called on to breathe on Satan and spit upon him, before facing east again and thus symbolically turning their back upon Satan. The third way in which the Orthodox baptismal rite engages evil is the exorcism of the baptismal water. Close to the middle of the blessing of the water, the priest breathes upon it and, addressing the Lord, prays three times: “Let all adverse powers be crushed beneath the sign of the image of Thy Cross.” He continues: We pray Thee, O God, that every aerial and obscure phantom may withdraw itself from us; and that no demon of darkness may conceal himself in this water; and that no evil spirit which instills darkening of intentions and rebelliousness of thought may descend into it with him (her) who is about to be baptized.12 Orthodox Church in America, Baptism, 4. Alexander Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 20–7. Breathing to exorcize demons also forms part of the historic Western baptismal rite: see Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae IIIa, q. 71, a. 2, resp. (61 vols; London: Blackfriars, 1964–81), 57.176f. 10 Church of England, Common Worship: Christian Initiation (London: Church House Publishing, 2006), 67. 11 Schmemann, Of Water, 27–30. For similar practice in the West, see U. M. Lang, Turning Towards the Lord: Orientation in Liturgical Prayer (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004), 53. 12 Orthodox Church in America, Baptism, 12. 8 9

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This language echoes Old Testament associations of water with chaos, especially in Genesis 1, where God separates and gathers the waters before they may produce living creatures. Moreover, the notion that the water might be inhabited by evil beings evokes Ps. 74:13, in which God smashes the heads of the dragons (tanninim) in the waters.13 However, the baptismal water is also associated with the water of the River Jordan, in which Jesus was baptized and which was thus hallowed by his descent into it.14 These dual associations account for the otherwise obscure preceding statement in the prayer for blessing the water that God “didst hallow the streams of Jordan . . . and didst crush the heads of the demons who lurked there”. Interpreting the exorcism of the water for today, Schmemann contends that it signals that matter is not neutral. As a Russian Orthodox emigré, he understood that materialism may be conceived in purportedly scientific terms to promote atheism and banish religious belief. The exorcism of the water reminds us that unless matter is intentionally used as a means of communion with God, it may become demonic.15 In some Western churches, the classic baptismal rite has been augmented by an act of commissioning that points forward to the life of the newly baptized Christian in the world. The Church of England baptismal liturgy includes the task of alleviating suffering and resisting evil in the world and within oneself.16 This is comparable with the more dramatic statement in The Book of Common Prayer, made by the priest immediately following the act of baptism while signing the newly baptized with the cross. Referring to Christ, the priest explains that the cross is a sign to the newly baptized “manfully to fight under his banner against sin, the world, and the devil”.17 The newly baptized Christian, set free from the power of evil, is thus called to contribute to the mission of the church to free others from evil and suffering.

EUCHARIST In the Gospels, the Last Supper takes place against a backdrop of impending suffering resulting from evil acts. The contents of the chalice are identified with Jesus’ blood, which, in Matthew, is described as poured out for the forgiveness of sins.18 Jesus’ statement that he will not again drink of the fruit of the vine until the day when he drinks it new in the kingdom of God suggests that his death is near.19 There is talk of betrayal. Although it is stated that Judas acts to fulfill what is written in Scripture, Jesus states that it would have been preferable for him not to have been born.20 In John, Judas is described as possessed by Satan.21 In Luke, Jesus predicts after supper that Peter will disown him, and suggests that the apostles should prepare for what is about to happen and even arm themselves.22 In John’s account of the supper, Jesus himself suffers, being described as troubled in From a Romanian Orthodox perspective, Constantin Oancea, “Chaoskampf in the Orthodox Baptism Ritual”, Acta Theologica 37, no. 2 (2017): 125–42. 14 Matt. 3:13-17; Mark 1:9-11; Luke 3:21-22; John 1:29-34. 15 Schmemann, Of Water, 48f. 16 Common Worship: Christian Initiation, 73. 17 The Book of Common Prayer (Cambridge University Press, 1968), 269. 18 Matt. 26:28; Mark 14:24; Luke 22:20. 19 Matt. 26:29; Mark 14:25. 20 Matt. 26:24; Mark 14:21; Luke 22:21f.; John 13:21f. 21 John 13:27. 22 Luke 22:34. 13

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spirit (tarassó), comforting his hearers so that they may not be similarly troubled, before commencing his farewell discourses.23 Several of these elements from the Last Supper are invoked in the institution narratives that standardly form part of eucharistic prayers. Referring to Christ, the Roman Catholic first eucharistic prayer, which approximates to the 1570 Roman Canon, describes the supper as taking place “the day before he was to suffer”, while the third eucharistic prayer identifies this as “the night he was betrayed”.24 Following The Book of Common Prayer, betrayal also features in five of the Church of England’s eucharistic prayers (A, B, C, D, H), in the Church of Scotland’s first order for Holy Communion and in the Church in Wales’s eucharistic prayers 2, 3, and 4.25 Christ’s suffering is also invoked in the Church of England’s prayers C and F, and in the Scottish Episcopal Church’s prayers II, III, and IV.26 A significant additional emphasis is found in the latter’s principal eucharistic prayer, which states of Christ: “He broke the bonds of evil / and set your people free / to be his Body in the world.”27 The third eucharistic prayer of the Church in Wales similarly refers to Christ on the cross “destroying the power of evil, suffering and death”, while the fifth prayer contains the same words as the Scottish prayer just quoted.28 These three tropes of Christ suffering, being betrayed, and overcoming evil each merit theological reflection. The first two partly function as a means of designating the day on which the Last Supper occurred. Yet as described in the Gospels, the betrayal imputes moral evil to Judas Iscariot, even if he was fulfilling a role appointed to him. Moreover, understood as the handing over (paradosis) of Christ from active ministry into a state of passivity to the authority and power of others, betrayal is an important theological notion in the synoptic gospels. In the prayers just cited, the brief and dispassionate references to Christ’s suffering respect the Gospel writers’ approach of not dwelling on this suffering nor suggesting that, from a theological perspective, it was the most important aspect of his death. The references to Christ overcoming evil, which only appear in some relatively recent eucharistic prayers, form a suggestive theological supplement to the older concerns with Christ’s betrayal and suffering. Because evil and suffering are omnipresent in the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper, it is unsurprising that the imagery of suffering is prominent in the Eucharist, which is its re-enactment. This is especially true regarding the chalice. The simple fact of the separation of Christ’s blood, represented in the contents of the chalice, from his body, represented in the host, evokes his scourging, nailing to the cross and piercing with the lance.29 If Christ is, depending on one’s eucharistic theology, either ontologically or spiritually present in both elements, the provision of both appears unnecessary. However, neither element could by itself signify this separation of body from blood.

John 13:21; 14:1. The Roman Missal, 3rd ed. (Totowa: Catholic Book Publishing, 2011), 639, 651. 25 The Book of Common Prayer, 256; Common Worship: Services and Prayers for the Church of England (London: Church House Publishing, 2000), 185, 189, 192, 194, 204; Book of Common Order of the Church of Scotland (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 1994), 138; The Church in Wales, An Order for the Holy Eucharist (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2004), 44, 50, 57. 26 Common Worship: Services and Prayers, 192, 199; Scottish Liturgy 1982 (Edinburgh: General Synod of the Scottish Episcopal Church), 22, 23, 26. 27 Scottish Liturgy 1982, 17. 28 The Church in Wales, An Order, 49, 61. 29 Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medical Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 166–8, 173f. 23 24

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If the chalice is associated with Christ’s passion, then the host is identified with his embodiment, including at his incarnation and resurrection and in his body the church. With reference to Christ, the host, even though it is broken, represents unity. However, the host may be simultaneously viewed as imaging the suffering that Christian discipleship may bring, as souls become incorporated into Christ’s body. The countless grains of wheat that compose the bread represent the numerous Christians who compose the church. Threshing and winnowing evoke the separation of Christians from non-believers. The grinding of grain is suggestive of the stringent spiritual discipline that precedes Christian initiation.30 These images also recall the persecutions that Christians have undergone in many places through the ages. An issue that may arise in eucharistic practice is how those guilty of serious evil, or of causing great suffering to others, should be treated. In The Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church, the priest is directed to speak to a person “living a notoriously evil life” if they know that this person plans to attend Communion, telling them that they must not approach the holy table until they have proved their repentance.31 This is similar to the provisions of the Church of England’s canon B16, which, while not using the language of evil, directs that the priest takes steps, in consultation with the bishop, to exclude any person in “malicious and open contention with his neighbours, or other grave and open sin without repentance”.32 The expectation that a priest and bishop may withhold Communion from evildoers is evidence that resisting evil is part of the role of an ordained minister. This will be further discussed in the section on ordination. Before concluding this section, it should be acknowledged that the eucharistic host may, through its reservation or consumption, be believed to protect church buildings or individuals from evil. During the medieval and early modern periods, belief in the apotropaic power of the host was widespread. Laypeople removed hosts from church buildings for burial or deployment in outdoor settings to repel many different sources of evil and suffering, such as pests, flooding, storms, and hail, which were frequently attributed to the work of the devil.33 Formal liturgical processions of the host were widely believed to achieve similar ends. Few, at least in the minority world, are likely to regard the host as possessing such powers today. Nonetheless, the importance of the sense of spiritual protection that may be felt when in physical proximity to the consecrated host remains pastorally important.

CONFIRMATION In confirmation, by means of prayer and the imposition of hands, the already baptized receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which, in the words of the seventeenth-century Anglican divine John Cosin, “assisteth them in all virtue, and armeth them the better against all the several temptations of the world and the devil, to resist the wiles of the flesh”.34 Cosin’s language accurately shows that the theology of confirmation is grounded in the notion of

David Grumett, Material Eucharist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 69–70, 268f. The Episcopal Church, The Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Publishing, 2007), 409. 32 Canons of the Church of England, 8th ed. (London: Church House Publishing, 2022), 16. 33 Grumett, Material Eucharist, 108. 34 John Cosin, “Confirmation”, in Anglicanism: The Thought and Practice of the Church of England, Illustrated from the Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Paul Elmer More and Frank Leslie Cross (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1957), 443–5, 444. 30 31

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the continued development of faithfulness by Christians capable of rational understanding and independent judgment. Although protection from suffering or evil, or combating these in the world, may form part of the Christian life, such protection and combat are not intrinsic to the understanding of confirmation in major Christian denominations. The theology of confirmation, being focused on perseverance in the good, addresses suffering and evil only indirectly.

RECONCILIATION (CONFESSION) In the Rule of Benedict, which gave birth to Western monasticism, the fifth degree of humility is that the monk “humbly confess and conceal not from his abbot any evil thoughts that enter his heart”.35 The Rule, which was probably compiled for small communities of about twelve members, combines the two core aspects of reconciliation. The first is the individual penitent’s petitioning of God for pardon and their absolution by a confessor. The second aspect is the maintenance and, where necessary, the restoration of good community relations. When the latter is needed, reconciliation mediated by a leader or representative of the community is a reconciliation with the community they represent. The Church of England’s orders for reconciliation and restoration are framed in the context of “recovering baptism”, and indeed are contained within the same Common Worship volume as the baptismal liturgy. The corporate service of penitence includes, in its extended form of penitence, the acknowledgment that “we have returned evil for evil”.36 Moreover, the rite for the reconciliation of an individual penitent includes in its opening prayer the petition: “Wash me thoroughly from my wickedness / and cleanse me from my sin.”37 Such a plea suggests that humans both themselves cause evil and suffer the effects of evil resulting from the actions of others. The frank language used to describe the moral state of an individual penitent is traceable to The Book of Common Prayer, in which the absolution given by the priest at Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer each day includes the statement that God desires not the death of a sinner but that “he may turn from his wickedness and live”.38 The Church of Ireland Canons of 1634 included a similarly blunt view of human depravity, stating that people, following examination of conscience, might “resort unto God’s ministers to receive from them as well advice and counsel for the quickening of their dead hearts and the subduing of those corruptions whereunto they have been subject”.39 Although reconciliation requires initiative and remorse on the part of the penitent, the use of the language of wickedness and evil suggests that he or she is implicated in pathologies of fallenness for which they are not wholly responsible. The power of these is sufficiently great that to be freed from them requires divine grace and cannot be achieved by human effort alone.

The Rule of St. Benedict 7, trans. Justin McCann (London: Sheed & Ward, 1989), 20. Common Worship: Christian Initiation, 242; Rom. 12:17; 1 Pet. 3:9. 37 Common Worship: Christian Initiation, 275; Ps. 51:2. 38 The Book of Common Prayer 3, 18. 39 “The Irish Canons of 1634”, canon 19, in Anglicanism, 516f. 35 36

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ANOINTING OF THE SICK (EXTREME UNCTION) People who are seriously ill because of sickness or old age, and who may be approaching death, may be anointed with blessed oil on their forehead, hands, and perhaps an affected body part. Those anointed are likely to be experiencing some combination of physical, mental, and spiritual suffering. Thomas Marsh perceptively sets the anointing of the sick in its theological context. In the Garden of Eden, humans were alienated from God, from each other, and from their own bodies because of the disintegrating force of evil. Marsh writes: “Sickness and death are particularly powerful manifestations of the alienation and disintegration of the full human being which evil operates.”40 Salvation is the undoing of these destructive forces, being achieved by the restoration of human life in all its relationships. This is why ministry to the sick is so prominent in the ministry of Jesus, which Marsh describes as an “attack upon, and a destruction of the power of evil in its sources”.41 Ministry to the sick is central to the proclamation of the Gospel and is a sign that the kingdom is coming near. Moreover, addressing the whole person physically, mentally, and spiritually, the church’s ministry to the sick is a “sacrament of the continuing presence and ministry of Jesus”.42 Because sickness is likely to encompass physical, mental, social, and spiritual forms of alienation, ministry to the sick addresses all of these, rather than being focused on curing illness or even on preventing death. In ministry to the sick, the Christian community “seeks to overcome the evil which sickness as a human experience represents” and “rallies round its member attacked by the forces of evil in the form of sickness”.43 In consequence, the “evil of sickness is here attacked at its very root of alienation and isolation and overcome through the community binding the sick member more closely to itself, thereby re-establishing the relationships which have been ruptured”.44 Theologically, the act of anointing the sick is associated with the imparting of the Holy Spirit, as when the spirit of the Lord came upon the lowly shepherd boy David at his anointing by Samuel.45 This suggests that healing, while due to Christ, is a work of the Spirit. Anointing also identifies the sick person with Christ, who was himself anointed in recognition of his status as the Messiah, or savior, of his people.46 This is a pastorally powerful association.

MARRIAGE Marriage is the binding together of two people in faithful embodied living. Among the purposes that The Book of Common Prayer enumerates for marriage is: “It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication.”47 From a modern perspective this statement may seem unduly negative and it has, probably for this reason, been omitted from the Common Worship marriage service. Even so, by channeling sexual desire and

Thomas Marsh, “A Theology of Anointing the Sick”, The Furrow 29, no. 2 (1978): 89–101, 93. Ibid., 94. 42 Ibid., 95. 43 Ibid., 97. 44 Ibid., 99. 45 1 Sam. 16:13. 46 John 1:41; Acts 9:22; 17:3. 47 The Book of Common Prayer, 302. 40 41

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its expression, marriage reduces the risk, to which all people are exposed, of suffering the effects of the evils that The Book of Common Prayer describes. This does not, of course, mean that a marriage will be free from suffering. Common Worship refers to marriage enduring through “good times and bad”, providing “strength, companionship and comfort” in periods of suffering as well as in times of joy.48 This reality is powerfully reflected in the vows that the bride and bridegroom make to each other, which, in their own words, are “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health”.49 In Church of Scotland marriage orders, these contexts are named by the minister as part of their words to the couple during the giving and receiving of rings.50 Although marriage helps to protect the partners from the effects of evil and suffering, the marriage bond is not itself invulnerable to these. In Common Worship this is recognized when the priest, immediately after proclaiming that the couple are husband and wife, warns: “Those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder.”51 Similar statements, originating in Scripture, are made in the Roman Catholic marriage order and in the Orthodox marriage service.52 Either of the partners in a marriage, or a person external to a marriage, may attempt to break it up for their own gain. The priest’s words at this point serve as a reminder that individual marriages, and the institution of marriage, need to be safeguarded from the dissolution that evil may bring.

ORDINATION (HOLY ORDERS) In ordination, by means of prayer, the laying on of hands, anointing, and the presentation of one or more material elements (e.g., a Bible or a chalice), individuals are placed within the ministerial order of their church. The principal ordained ministers today are deacons, priests, and bishops. Although the ministerial response to suffering and evil is not the focus of ordination liturgies, this aspect of ministry is rightly present in ordination rites. When a priest is ordained in the Church in Wales, they are offered the realistic reminder that their ministry will “require sacrifice and bring suffering”.53 In the Church of England, priests being ordained are, in contrast, called to resist evil. It may reasonably be assumed that such resistance encompasses three aspects. First, repelling evil so that it gains no hold over the minister’s own thoughts and actions. Second, remaining watchful over the community in which the minister has responsibility, and being ready to act to prevent the spread of evil, to alleviate suffering where possible, and to respond compassionately to suffering where its alleviation is not possible. Third, resisting evil includes contributing to combating evil and suffering in their many manifestations in the wider world. Although this may be presumed to be part of priestly and presbyteral ministry across the denominations, explicit mention of resisting evil is absent from most other ordinals. At the consecration of bishops in the Church of England, and in some other Anglican Churches, a prayer is offered that the candidate be defended from evil.54 Moreover, in

Common Worship: Pastoral Services, 2nd ed. (London: Church House Publishing, 2005), 105. Ibid., 108. 50 Book of Common Order, 200, 212. 51 Common Worship: Pastoral Services, 110. 52 The Order of Celebrating Matrimony (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2016), 18; Orthodox Church in America, Holy Matrimony (2013), 10; Matt. 19:6, Mark 10:9. 53 The Church in Wales, Alternative Ordinal, 26. 54 Common Worship: Ordination Services (London: Church House Publishing, 2007), 37, 67. 48 49

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the Church in Wales, the charge to a bishop-elect includes the dramatic biblical injunction to hate what is evil.55 Such language suggests that a bishop, through representing Christ as a leader in their church, is likely to be subject to very considerable testing by evil and must be resolute in their response to it in order to protect themselves, their clergy, and their people.

CONCLUSION This chapter has focused on direct references to evil and suffering in sacramental rites and liturgies, and on the theological interpretation of these. It has shown that the different sacraments represent and respond to evil and suffering in a variety of ways and to varying degrees. These representations and responses have as their backdrop a general recognition and concern with evil and suffering, which are implicated in any reference to sin and death. Moreover, evil is referred to in the Lord’s Prayer and in many litanies, which may be used with a sacrament and which permeate Christian liturgy and prayer. In the sacraments, evil and suffering are represented and responded to intensively and purposively.

FURTHER READING Bynum, Caroline Walker. Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medical Northern Germany and Beyond. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Kelly, Henry Ansgar. The Devil at Baptism: Ritual, Theology, and Drama. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Marsh, Thomas. “A Theology of Anointing the Sick”. The Furrow 29, no. 2 (1978): 89–101. Oancea, Constantin. “Chaoskampf in the Orthodox Baptism Ritual”. Acta Theologica 37, no. 2 (2017): 125–42. Schmemann, Alexander. Of Water and the Spirit: A Liturgical Study of Baptism. Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminar Press, 1974 (especially 15–70).

The Church in Wales, Alternative Ordinal (2004), 39; Rom. 12:9.

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Chapter 51

Prayer and Suffering JONATHAN D. TEUBNER

SOME CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVE The intersection of prayer with the topic of evil and suffering admits, at a certain level, dark comedy. There have been some double-blind peer-reviewed empirical experiments testing whether prayer alleviates suffering or aids the healing process that were funded and performed by medical and public health professionals.1 Alas, these studies conclude much in the same way a classic piece from the satirical newspaper, The Onion, did on this issue. According to the article, a wheelchair-bound child had fervently prayed for years to walk again, but, alas, the article reports that “God said ‘No, not ever’”.2 Suffice it to say, there is a good deal of confusion about what prayer is, in both the editorial offices of The Onion and in the scientific laboratories that study prayer’s healing effects. But there is also a good amount of assumptions being made about what variety of suffering – its kind, intensity, and duration – is being addressed in the Christian practice of prayer, not to mention some ableist assumptions, again both at The Onion and in scientific laboratories. A single chapter for a handbook is not a promising place to clarify the interrelation of prayer, suffering, and evil. But I take it as the task of this chapter to clear away some debris that has piled up around the issue regarding the intersection of prayer and suffering and evil, and then to present what some classical theological productions from Latin late antiquity, one of the formative periods of Christian witness and expression, might have to say about the interrelation of prayer, suffering, and evil. As popularly understood, prayer consists of asking God for stuff. This is what scholars of prayer have traditionally classified as “petitionary prayer” – something is lacking in our life, so we ask God for help in obtaining it. This is, of course, not without its biblical warrants – “Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you” (Matt. 7:7) – but it’s not self-evident how one might square this with a range of beliefs about God’s omniscience and providence, as Boethius was at pains to highlight in the final book of his Consolation of Philosophy, a meditation occasioned Tyler VanderWeele et al., “Attendance at Religious Services, Prayer, Religious Coping, and Religious/Spiritual Identity as Predictors of All-Cause Morality in the Black Women’s Health Study”, American Journal of Epidemiology 185, no. 7 (April 2017): 515–22; Bert Garssen, “Does Spirituality or Religion Positively Affect Mental Health? Meta-analysis of Longitudinal Studies”, International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 31, no. 1 (2021): 4–20; Benjamin Jeppsen, “Does Closeness to God Mediate the Relationship Between Prayer and Mental Health in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Samples?” Mental Health, Religion & Culture 25, no. 1 (2022): 99–112. 2 Staff writer, “God Answers Prayers of Paralyzed Little Boy”, The Onion, December 9, 1998, https://www​ .theonion​.com​/god​-answers​-prayers​-of​-paralyzed​-little​-boy​-1819564974 (accessed March 12, 2022). 1

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by his imprisonment and sentence to death.3 Moreover, there’s not always a plethora of evidence for the effectiveness of petitionary prayer. But that’s perhaps less embarrassing than it initially seems. Whatever prayer is, it cannot just be asking God for stuff. The common alternative to petitionary prayer is to interpret the set of actions and beliefs as a therapeutic practice. But this can equally slide toward a reductive view of prayer. At times based on generally sound theological principles, some want to dispense with the idea that prayer is anything like “talking” to God – when properly understood, Christian prayer is not some maneuver with the divine, some effort to manipulate God into doing what you want. Instead of this “childish” version of prayer, one ought to look toward the salutary psychological effects of the practice – more settled in mind, at peace with those around you, open to accepting life’s bumps and bruises. This more clinical approach smacks of a certain skepticism toward prayer that befits Immanuel Kant’s condescension toward it as a mere “fetish-making”, and can sit rather oddly with an honest attempt to understand religious practices and their practitioners. Whatever prayer is or isn’t, these reductions capture, at the very most, a small piece of the overall picture. While it is challenging to define prayer, it does not seem warranted to reject the study of prayer’s effects in the world, tout court. But one needs to be clearer about what one is doing when one is praying. This is difficult precisely because prayer is a difficult thing to theorize, for it needs to be understood both as a practice and as a set of beliefs about the practice, the God who is addressed in the prayer, and the effects that the practice is thought to have. As I have argued elsewhere, Christian prayer cannot be separated or abstracted from the ongoing theological tradition to which it appeals for its doctrinal account (even if there is some interreligious or intercultural benefit to theorizing it as a “religious and spiritual practice”).4 Therefore, I shall advance a definition of prayer particular to Augustine and the tradition of reflection that draws on him: prayer is (a) moral and psychological reflection on one’s desires, (b) articulated in and through a Christological idiom, and (c) oriented toward the corporate or communal fulfillment of beatitude. In this chapter, I will be focusing on (c), the corporate or communal context of the prayer for the Augustinian tradition, as it is within the day-to-day living with others that occasions for Augustine questions of evil and suffering. While this definition of prayer is particular to Augustine, it is representative of a broad Latin tradition of prayer.5 Evil and suffering, however, require just as careful conceptualization and definition. But that’s more easily demanded than delivered. Indeed, something could be said about evil that Augustine famously said about time: “What is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an enquirer, I do not know.”6 Perhaps because of this, I’d like to set aside evil from this discussion about prayer and focus instead on suffering. While certainly coming closer to the range of comprehensibility, focusing on suffering does not exactly clear up a path of understanding. It is generally agreed upon in recent social scientific studies that subjective experience of suffering “can be understood as multifaceted state of distress that involves bearing under loss or privation of some

Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Joel C. Relihan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2001). Jonathan D. Teubner, Prayer after Augustine: A Study in the Development of the Latin Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 8. 5 Ibid., 7–13. 6 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1991), 230 (11.14.17). 3 4

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perceived good”;7 suffering is intolerable either by virtue of its duration or intensity. It sounds odd to say, but these definitions largely presume that suffering is something special, that it is an exceptional aspect of our life: it starts, it stops, it cannot be ignored. But there’s another sense of suffering that is easily forgotten because of how unexceptional it is, just how seemingly permanent it is: it is the form of suffering that arises not from events or unforeseen circumstances, but from other people we find insufferable. The definition of exceptional suffering I just referenced, perhaps the most sophisticated in the field of social epidemiology, is all very well and seems to get its author a fair bit of the way toward addressing the questions that drive him.8 But this is not the suffering the Christian literary tradition is apt to highlight. The Christian tradition has, on the whole, spilled more ink over those small, easy-to-miss injustices and slights that slowly corrode a community. These can be verbal or physical and come in bite-size amounts; they can also be systemic and simply too large to notice if you aren’t looking. So what might we think about prayer in this context? It is my hunch that, like the popular senses of prayer, the senses of suffering studied by social scientists today are a bit estranged from the context of classical Christian thought. For classical Christian thought – and here in this chapter I will narrowly refer to a Latin tradition that can be captured between Augustine of Hippo, Benedict of Nursia, and Gregory the Great – prayer is intimately tied to how we relate to others. It is, in a word, a relationship – with God, with others, with ourselves. And precisely through these relationships that dull, aching, never-going-away suffering enters the Christian life. Prayer is not reducible to relationships (though Augustine gestures in that direction in places, see his Epistula 130: ad probam de orando deo), but rather occurs in and through the reflection on these relationships and the suffering they produce. The way prayer relates to this pedestrian form of suffering should tell us, I wager, a good bit more about how prayer relates to those intense and, one hopes, finite episodes of suffering that occupy social and medical scientists.

THEORIZING THE SUFFERING COMMUNITY To live in community is inevitably to come to terms with the deeply flawed nature and expression of others. But, in spite of nearly every thoughtful reflection on Christian community beginning with this insight, from the Apostle Paul’s hectoring of the sometimes comically flawed early churches to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s gentle encouragement to those who might want to try “life together”, we somehow find ourselves consistently shocked by how insufferable our fellow humans can be, co-religionist or not. While there is no one thing that Augustine’s writings or life suggests to us, it is not too much of a distortion to say that much of Augustine’s pastoral writings – whether found in his letters, sermons,

Tyler J. VanderWeele, “Suffering and Response: Directions in Empirical Research”, Social Science & Medicine 224 (2019): 58–66. 8 See also Eric Cassell, The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); S. C. Hayes et al., Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2012); Richard G. Cowden et al., “Resource Loss, Positive Religious Coping, and Suffering during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Prospective Cohort Study of US Adults with Chronic Illness”, Mental Health, Religion & Culture 25, no. 3 (2022): 288–304; Samuel Ho et al., “Suffering, Psychological Distress, and Well-Being in Indonesia: A Prospective Cohort Study”, Stress and Health (2022), doi:10.1002/ smi.3139 (first published March 4, 2022, ahead of print). 7

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diatribes against heretics, or excurses embedded within his many treatises – are about getting his listeners and readers to accept the fact that human community is never going to live up to the ideal. This was perhaps no more clear than in his writings to and for his fellow “monastics”,9 but it can also be seen as the central, animating impulse of his magisterial Exposition of the Psalms that he worked on over the course of his entire ministry. Because a treatment that could faithfully account for this theme in Augustine’s Exposition of the Psalms is outside the scope of this chapter, I will focus, here, on only one of his sermons that he preached to a mixed audience of cleric, religious, and lay. Augustine’s exposition of Psalm 132 (133), which represents one of his most extensive commentaries on monastic life, is also an effort to reflect on the non-ideal nature of communal life as it struggles toward Christian unity. As I have suggested elsewhere, Augustine’s thoughts on the church as a praying community emerged from the tension between the bickering of the refectory and the harmony of the chapel.10 “See how good and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity” is this exposition’s refrain, but it is the second verse – “Like fragrant oil upon the head, flowing down upon beard, Aaron’s beard, the oil that flowed down to the border of his tunic” – through which Augustine addresses the suffering that he sees at the heart of the Christian vocation: A beard is a sign of strong men; a beard is typical of young, vigorous, energetic, eager people. That is why we say, “He’s a bearded fellow”, when we describe someone of this character. The fragrant oil therefore fell first upon the apostles, upon those who withstood the first attacks from the world: the Holy Spirit came down on them for this reason. Those who first began to live together in unity suffered persecution. Yet, because the oil had flowed down onto the beard, they suffered but were not overcome. Their head had preceded them on the path of suffering, and from him the oil flowed.11 By drawing on the totus Christus (whole Christ) imagery – the “body of Christ” is both the “head” (Christ) and “body” (Church) – Augustine presents the unified community as one that is unified in suffering. For Augustine, here, suffering is the background or assumed context of the community; it is not one thing or another, as if one’s “sufferings” can be easily cordoned off from their life. No, suffering in this context is something closer to the very shape of Christian existence in this world. Within this more totalizing conceptualization of suffering, Augustine identifies the Holy Spirit as that which holds this community together, not as a displacement or removal of the suffering, but as the “glue”, to borrow one of Augustine’s favorite metaphors, that keeps the suffering community together when it would be easier, perhaps even psychologically satisfying, to turn against one another. The medicinal intervention of the Holy Spirit is not, for Augustine, a therapeutic to cure suffering, but is rather a balm to make the Christian community in this world something less than insufferable. The “bearded man” in Augustine’s exposition is not simply trying to reduce the amount of suffering he encounters to a tolerable level. This imagery is also an opportunity for Augustine to think through what kind of charitable existence is possible in this life. A case in point is St. Stephen. Interpreted as “charity in suffering” in this exposition, the story of Stephen’s stoning instructs Augustine’s listeners in the prayer of the Christian community: Luc Verheijen, Nouvelle approche de la Règle de Saint Augustin (Bégrolles en Mauges: Vie Monastique, 1980); George Lawless, Augustine of Hippo and his Monastic Rule (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 10 Teubner, Prayer after Augustine, 66f. 11 Augustine, Exposition of the Psalms, trans. Maria Boulding (New York: New City Press, 2004), 6:182 (132.7). 9

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love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matt. 5:44). Augustine’s more common metaphor of charity as “glue” that holds the body of Christ together is, despite its homeliness, too sensational for the banalities of actual communal life as he knew it in his own community. The metaphor he opts for in this exposition is “dripping”: charity does not cease to drip in times of suffering. But, the dripping of charity is not so easy to control: it slows, it gushes, it irritates. As I have suggested elsewhere, we can understand the doctrinal point here by reversing Augustine’s statement, “Because charity was not conquered, fragrant oil flowed down onto the beard”, to something like, “Because the dripping of the Holy Spirit was not plugged up, charity flowed during times of suffering”.12 This framing puts acts of charity within the context of a doctrine of the Holy Spirit that is resistant to human attempts to control, manage, or manipulate its effects and outcomes. There is, then, a certain subversion of the very concept of suffering: by declaring it ubiquitous or all-pervasive, we are tempted to forget the ways in which Augustine framed communal practices of prayer, or even community life itself, as not a response to suffering but embedded within it. The monastic community is not an exceptional form of Christian existence for Augustine. While it certainly does not fully represent the patterns of “secular” life, Augustine envisioned it as putting on display for the broader Christian community the process of “deepening human relations”, as George Lawless has defined the goal of Augustine’s asceticism.13 To borrow from a much later source that does not always feature positively in histories of spirituality, Adolf von Harnack suggested in one of his earliest essays that monasticism consistently acted as a source of reform for the church – that body of believers that calls the broader community back to its primary goal of dwelling together in unity.14 But what Harnack studiously avoids in his essay, which is hardly surpassed by more recent attempts to tell a coherent story of monasticism, is that the witness that monastics offer is embedded in a life of strife and conflict, with each other, with the church, and with the world. It is hardly the bedtime story version of Christianity, if not quite a nightmare from which we are struggling to awake. Rather, for Augustine, the monastic community models for the whole body how they might deepen their relations in the midst of conflict.

PRAYER AND SUFFERING IN A MONASTIC MODEL For those of us who do not live in or even very near a monastic community, it is easy to forget that the majority of the monastic’s life is spent in relatively mundane activity. While contemplation does shape the monastic imaginary, the commonplace practices of stocking the pantry, washing dishes, reconciling argumentative brothers or sisters, and managing divided loyalties are just as powerful. But what bridges these two ethoses, if you will, is the practice of common prayer. What was likely envisioned to be the core instructions of the first recension of the Benedictine Rule was a series of instructions about how and when to pray (chapters 8–20). Many commentators have attempted to discern a theory or even a psychology of prayer in these quasi-bureaucratic chapters. But these efforts Teubner, Prayer after Augustine, 82. Lawless, “Augustine’s Decentring of Asceticism”, in Augustine and his Critics, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless (London: Routledge, 2000), 142–63. 14 Adolf von Harnack, Das Mönchtum – Seine Ideale und seine Geschichte. Eine kirchenhistorische Vorlesung (Giessen: Alfred Töpelmann, 1880). 12 13

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run up against the enigma that is the historical person of Benedict of Nursia: despite his reputation as a “holy man”, what he has left behind is this “small rule” that is seemingly more concerned about community logistics than monastic theory. Scholars are thus left with the regrettable strategy of reading Augustine, John Cassian, Evagrius of Ponticus, and some “eastern” traditions of monasticism to decipher Benedict’s “uncompromisingly prosaic” rule, as one notable commentator has characterized the Rule.15 No one’s experience reading the Rule tends to be transformative. In fact, it can be positively underwhelming, perhaps intentionally so: it’s a “little rule for beginners”.16 While the world swirling around the original Benedictine monastery on Monte Casino was certainly volatile, the author of the Rule was more interested in addressing the profoundly disturbing tension between Christian visions of harmony and the propensity for dissension, bickering and alas, violence when humans live together. Benedict’s Rule did, of course, enter history at a time when communal and individual suffering was widely evident. According to some, this accounts for the prevalence of military imagery.17 But, for the author of the Rule, it was not the threats from outside that animate its pages, but rather the internal enemy, that which attacks with those small slights and injustices that wound and fester, if left unattended for too long. Again, this leaves the question of suffering in an odd place. For Benedict, suffering is not principally a product of contemplative intensities – the late antique and medieval equivalent to modernity’s tormented genius – but emerges for most from the warp and woof of living with other human beings. Life together can sometimes take the shape of low-level suffering. This is similar to what Fergus Kerr suggested that Cassian was attempting to say about prayer in his ninth Conference in an unjustly neglected essay. Prayer and the virtue that grows through learning how to live with others have a “reciprocal and inseparable link”.18 As Kerr puts it, “There is no use in talking about how to pray until one has understood how important it is to face the problem of how to live with others”.19 For Kerr, it is the virtue of patience that Cassian sees as necessary for relating with others to go on. If patience is going to mean anything, it is going to be patience in the face of something or someone that is plaguing you. It’s a virtue that is unimaginable in the abstract. As Kerr states it, “You can be patient only if there is someone else there, someone whom you find maddening and irritating, someone with whom you have to be patient”.20 For Cassian, as for the Benedictine tradition he influenced, this is not some glitch in the system of fraternal charity. It is precisely what love for others, when it is deep and meaningful, consists of in this world. And this links us back to prayer. Taking part regularly in group or common prayer reminds us of the need to modify expression and to harmonize with others’ moods. As Kerr notes, the problem of prayer for Cassian is always in the first place “the problem of getting on with other people”.21 It’s a check on our inclination to self-assertiveness, a

Rowan Williams, The Way of St Benedict (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 11. Rule of Saint Benedict, ed. and trans. Timothy Fry (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1980), 297 (73.8). Hereafter RB. 17 Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, 2nd ed. (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1990), 104. 18 John Cassian, Conferences, trans. Boniface Ramsey (New York: Newman Press, 1997), 329 (9.II.1). 19 Fergus Kerr, “Prayer and Community”, in Religious Life Today, ed. John Coventry et al. (Tenbury Wells: Fowler Wright Books, n.d.), 37–51, 38. 20 Kerr, “Prayer and Community”, 42–3. 21 Ibid., 39. 15 16

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danger that the linguistic form of prayer draws us into. But there is a limit here. Just as Ulysses floating through the Pillars of Hercules is, in Dante’s telling at Inferno XXVI, a self-subverting pursuit to find knowledge alone,22 the complete erasure of the individual eradicates the very material or stuff of the community – human persons with unique and, at times, irreconcilable voices. A balance or harmony between the individual with his or her own aspirations, voice, and actions, and the community with its need to preserve itself as a unity, finds its highest expression when Christians experience the Psalter’s refrain, “See how good and pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity”. But when this is off-kilter, it is the source of much suffering, both for the individual and the community as a whole. In these moments, the community – sometimes quite literally – cannot pray. Suffering overwhelms prayer. At one point in the Benedictine Rule, the author remarks that the monk’s life ought to be a “continuous lent”.23 This is not one of the sentences of the Rule that has attracted centuries of devotional attention and scholarly scrutiny. Indeed, it can be read as Benedict clearing his throat to talk about Lenten observance. But it captures something about how suffering, if I may use the term loosely here, is part of the ideal as Benedict envisioned it and could be lived here in this age. In characteristic generosity, Benedict also allows that this is not for everyone, that not everyone would have the strength to go on denying him- or herself without end. He is not suggesting, as some rules that predate Benedict’s do, that life should be lived in full tilt toward self-denial. In fact, Benedict reports just the opposite: “In drawing up its regulations, we hope to set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome.”24 But this is a moment when the athletic heroism of so much of monasticism emerges in the Rule as a lower-bound that is paradoxically the upper-limit of human existence. If I may take some liberties with Benedict, to live in a “continuous lent” is to learn to see prayer as the form of life that continually suffers others, with their irritating, distracting, and annoying acts. As strange and perhaps pathological as this might sound to us, this became for Gregory the Great, one of Benedict’s early champions, a kind of prayerful balm to the kinds of ailments and events that are more commonly associated with ascriptions of suffering today.

SACRAMENTALITY OF PRAYER AND SUFFERING Gregory’s experience of the world and life can be stated in one word: suffering. He experienced both those dull, long-lasting aches that can slip out of direct view if never completely unnoticeable and also mental and physical agony. This was not just a personal experience – he witnessed it in the world around him. Gregory was born into a world war where pestilence, starvation, and the plague struck city after city in almost unceasing repetition. The last half of the sixth century was marked by a serious economic recession, the magnitude of which is incomparable to modern recessions. Although he was comparatively lucky by being born to a noble lineage that was handsomely rich, he suffered bodily pains throughout his life, especially toward the end, being forced to administer the papacy from his bed. In a letter from his last year on earth, Gregory

See Vittorio Montemaggi, Reading Dante’s Commedia as Theology: Divinity Realized in Human Encounter (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 149ff. 23 RB 49.1 24 RB Prol, 46. 22

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remarks to a priest Philip that his “sole consolation was the hope that death would come quickly”.25 In light of his broader context and his personal experience, it is unsurprising that Gregory sought to transform suffering and trial into spiritual progress. It is in fact a “spirituality of suffering”, if you will, that Gregory, for better or worse, bequeathed to the Western Latin tradition of Christianity. Many of the ways that Western Latin traditions of reflection have attempted to reframe suffering as pedagogical are in debt to Gregory’s profound and, at times, disturbing interpretation of the suffering of his age and body. But to lump Gregory into later, accommodationist views that rationalize temporary suffering by the promised reward would be to miss his profoundly theological rationale for seeing suffering as an instrument of grace. Gregory believed that by God’s ordinance the universe is so arranged to educate humans that they might eventually return to God. Gregory sees God as almost catching humans off guard with paradoxes that jar them into learning something about the way the world works. One such paradox is that as the “fall” causes humans to become “carnal in mind”, by which Gregory means that the mind has been defiled through involvement with the flesh, the body becomes not less important but more important as an instrument of reform. As Gregory sees it, physical suffering encompasses the whole of the human person, and it is the whole person that Christ redeemed through his willingness to bear the weakness of the flesh. For Gregory, Christ’s humanity is most evident in Christ’s suffering, and any imitation of Christ must be an imitation of his passion. It is for this reason that Gregory can see the body as the instrument of humans’ redemption. As Gregory memorably states in his massive Moralia in Iob, “The human soul would not fall if it were not changeable; and banished from joys of paradise, if it were not changeable, it would never return to life”.26 Indeed, Gregory saw humans as purged through suffering27 and brought back to “eternal joys through temporal losses”.28 This is what some scholars call his “logic of antithesis”, a logic that also explains God’s motives for allowing humans to fall in the first place: evils are instrumental in teaching the good by contrasts, or as Gregory paradoxically states it, “wounding to heal”.29 This suggests that, in distinction to much of the more recent reflections, petitioning God to remove suffering and evil from this world is not the dominant concern of prayer for Gregory. There are perhaps two reasons for this. First, in his own personal experience, suffering was such a totalizing experience that to petition God to remove it would be to ask for God to remove life as he knew it. This is beyond it being a purgative or pedagogical instrument; it marked life itself. But second, and more theological, the focus of Gregory’s “holy man”, to borrow Peter Brown’s well-known (and well-worn) reclassification of “saint”, is the Mass.30 This positions Gregory’s holy man not in some desert cave or atop a pillar but in the middle of the city, teaching the faithful lessons of obedience and sacrifice, Gregory the Great, The Letters of Gregory the Great, trans. John R. C. Martyn (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2004), 3:845 (epp. 13.26). 26 Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob (Turnholt: Corpus Christianorum Series Latins, 1979), 1235 (Mor. 25.6.10). Hereafter Mor. 27 Mor. 24.11.33-34. 28 Mor. 26.16.26. 29 Mor. 26.47.87. 30 See Carol Straw, Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Robert A. Markus, Gregory the Great and His World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); George D. Demacopoulos, Gregory the Great: Ascetic, Pastor, and First Man of Rome (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015). 25

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the principal means of which are found in the Mass. Similar in effect to Augustine’s rhetorical trope of the totus Christus, the sacrifice of the Mass is, for Gregory, the clearest and most explicit moment when the Christian finds his or her identity within the corporate body of Christ. The suffering of Christ is then held up and realized in the Eucharistic hostia, Christ offered as a sacrificial victim. In this context, prayer is understood as the verbal intercessions and internal movements of the heart and soul that are oriented toward sharing in Christ’s sufferings, a ritualized, or perhaps, to offer a rather ugly neologism, liturgized movement that drags into the process the individual pray-er’s worldly suffering, from the seemingly small slights and injustices to moments of agony and pain that arrest one’s life. Gregory’s devotion to the Mass is itself a form of petitioning. But its intent, if it can be said to have one, is not to remove suffering but to make sense of it by drawing it into the drama of Christ’s suffering, that which has ultimate meaning for Gregory. This exalted interpretation of Gregory’s own suffering finds a distressing parallel, at least for our age, in his response to disease and pestilence. In two notable exchanges, Gregory implores bishops to interpret plague as, on the one hand, unsurprising, what should be expected in the “last days”, and, on the other hand, an opportunity to urge “barbarian heretics to convert to the Catholic faith”. Again, Gregory’s instincts simply are not ours, but it reveals a kind of sacramental vision of reality that leaves nothing untouched or unexplainable. The visible world of flesh and blood maintains a variety of mysterious links with the transcendent, invisible world of the spirit. In this way, the earth with its climatic and epidemiological disasters is no less able to convey or “signify” the spiritual meaning than the human body. As a man who left behind scores of personal, gut-wrenching reflections on his bodily and psychological suffering, Gregory should not be read as attempting to ignore or even sublimate the physical manifestations of his suffering. Rather, he wants to wrap all of experience, from moments of contemplative bliss to suffering and evil, into the drama of redemption. The intersection of suffering and prayer points Gregory to the Mass, as it points back at unwanted moments and feeble attempts to understand as if to say that those moments of suffering and pleading now make sense. Prayer in these moments become part of the sacrament of Mass itself, which is, to reiterate, the moment in which the church realizes itself as the body of Christ. Moments of prayer in times of suffering, even extreme and intense bodily and psychological varieties, are, then, not exceptional from those other prayers and for scientific and medical communities to think that it is doing anything other than what it normally does is to misunderstand a sacramental vision of reality.

PRAYER IN A TIME OF COVID Throughout the Covid outbreak of 2019 and beyond, churches have had to shut their doors. Retreating into closets, spare rooms, or the breakfast table, many Christians attempted to continue the habits of prayer that had been inculcated in them through the regular gathering of their community. Although many Christians have a habit of private devotion, there was a certain novelty in private or perhaps family devotion being the only avenue for prayer. “Zoom church”, of course, became a thing. And despite the evidence that suggests that online religious participation failed to meet the needs of the devout,31 it was, in one sense, a successful endeavor – significant portions of the

Koichiro Shiba et al., “Associations of Home Confinement during COVID-19 Lockdown with Subsequent Health and Well-Being among UK Adults”, Current Psychology (2022), doi:10.1007/s12144-022-03001-5 (first

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regularly worshiping community did in fact show up on Sunday morning, often with coffee beside them, to hear Scripture, listen to a message, and share a time of prayer and reflection. Indeed, communal bonds forged through regular physical interaction die hard. Like in so much of life during the Covid outbreak, the church muddled along. Similar to many school children around the United States, the faithful can carry on within a failing system, sometimes remarkably so. But what does this make of the classical account of prayer in times of suffering that I have laid out here? Does our more recent experience question the relevance of the vision of prayer and suffering I have laid out? What do we make of the communities that seemed ever so eager to go online and, in some cases, kept their doors locked even during periods of relatively low risk in their community? Have they somehow diverged from the classical picture I have drawn here? These questions are not intended to express skepticism for the public health judgment that many local, regional, and national church leaders made in order to ensure safe worshiping conditions. But it does, I hope, expose a certain tension between prayer in times of suffering then and now. But, to think about the intersection of this handbook’s theme with the practice of prayer must inevitably encounter this very tension. Indeed, in a time of uncommon suffering and illness, it would seem strange – perhaps even pathological – if an essay on “prayer and suffering” did not conclude with some consideration of the impact of Covid-19 on practices of prayer. By comparing my Latin story and today we can see more clearly the crisp edges between our modern, transactional understandings of prayer that subtly slip into cost-benefit analysis, and a more ancient and medieval understanding that sought to push the pray-er, for better or worse, into deeper relationship with the community. The modern propensity to prioritize petitionary prayer is, I think, a result of the departure from Kerr’s insight that “relationship with others is the form our growth in virtue takes; it is more than merely the occasion”.32 While it is obvious that there is great interest in the relationship between suffering and petitionary prayer, it is, to my lights, an unduly narrow way to cast both prayer and suffering. I think we can find greater purchase on the strange continuity between prayer for those we find ourselves in community with and those events and tragedies that bring our life to a standstill. By glancing, at least briefly, on this little tradition I have laid out, I believe we can see why a Christian might not – indeed should not – be terribly bothered to hear of the scientist’s failure to find “proof” of petitionary prayer: there is simply too much going on in the practice of prayer for a study, however robust, to capture its importance. Prayer is perhaps just too deeply embedded in one’s spiritual life (and perhaps social and political life) to be the subject of a successful study. It is important to state, if only as a passing comment here at the end, that the Christian’s persistence in prayer without evidence for its efficacy is not a bug – the idealogue’s resistance to new evidence – but a feature of a faith in an incarnate God who suffered on a cross. We did, I believe, give up something important when churches decided to stop convening in person to pray together. But it would be strange, perhaps even a recapitulation of the modern impulse to see direct effects of prayer in the world, if we thought that we knew exactly what the ramifications of our decision to close our “houses of prayer” during this

published March 15, 2022, ahead of print). 32 Kerr, “Prayer and Community”, 43.

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moment would be. This is precisely what Augustine, Benedict, and Gregory foresaw: prayer rarely ever goes as we expect, but when given enough attention it can be a vehicle for entering into deeper relations with those we have been given to endure this world. Perhaps we would be better off attempting to understand our need for community than our inability to control the divine will.

FURTHER READING Augustine of Hippo. Exposition of the Psalms. Translated by Maria Boulding. New York: New City Press, 2004. Gregory the Great. Moral Reflections on the Book of Job, 6 Vols. Translated by Brian Kerns. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Studies, 2014. Teubner, Jonathan D. Prayer after Augustine: A Study in the Development of the Latin Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. VanderWeele, Tyler J. “Suffering and Response: Directions in Empirical Research”. Social Science & Medicine 224 (March 2019): 58–66. Williams, Rowan. The Wound of Knowledge, 2nd edition. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1990.

Chapter 52

Personified Evil in the Judeo-Christian Tradition GREGORY A. BOYD

EVIL IN THE BIBLICAL TRADITION The authors of the Old Testament (OT) depict evil in three distinct ways. First, ancient Israelites shared with their ancient Near Eastern neighbors the belief that “evil spirits”, “demons”, and “gods” sometimes exerted a malevolent influence on people.1 Second, certain OT authors make use of the ancient Near Eastern haoskampf motif and thus depict Yahweh as mastering a menacing raging sea in order to preserve the order of society and/or of the earth.2 Sometimes OT authors depict this menacing cosmic force as a chaos monster (e.g., Leviathan, Rahab) that Yahweh must continually hold at bay.3 And third, we find in the prologue of Job a figure referred to as “the satan” (ha satan) (Job 1:6-12; 2:1-7), a title which first becomes a proper name in several other OT writings (1 Chron. 21:1; Zech. 3:1-2). The general scholarly consensus is that, at this stage in Israel’s developing theology, Satan was considered to be the member of Yahweh’s “heavenly council” who served as God’s Inspector General and who carried out Yahweh’s dirty work. I have elsewhere critiqued this consensus, though I must nevertheless concede that the Satan we find in the OT is not yet the personification of pure evil that he is revealed to be in the NT.4 Each of these ways of depicting evil is picked up and transformed by the authors of the NT. In sharp contrast to the few scattered references to “demons” and “evil spirits” that we find in the OT, the Gospels depict Jesus’ ministry as a relentless battle to free people from demonic oppression and demonic afflictions.5 Peter could thus sum up Jesus’ ministry by noting “how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power”, and how he “went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil” (Acts 10:36, emphasis added). As is reflected throughout the synoptic gospels, the assumption behind Peter’s remarkable assertion is that whenever people suffer from physical infirmities, they are being directly or indirectly oppressed by the devil. And Jesus On evil spirits and demons, see, e.g., Lev. 17:7; Deut. 32:17; Judg. 9:22-25; 1 Sam. 16:14; 1 Kgs 22:21-23; 2 Chron. 11:15; Ps. 106:37. On rebel gods, see, e.g., Exod. 32:8; Pss. 82:1-7; 89:5-10; Isa. 24:21; Dan. 10:3-20. 2 E.g., Job 7:12; 9:8; 38:8-12; Pss. 29:3-4, 10; 74:10, 13; 77:16; 104:6; Prov. 8:29; Isa. 51:9-11; Nah. 1:4; Hab. 3:8, 15. 3 E.g., Job 3:8; 9:13; 26:12-13; 41:1-34; Pss. 74:13-14; 89:9-10; Isa. 27:1; 30:77; 51:9-10; Ezek. 29:3-5. 4 G. Boyd, God at War: The Bible and Spiritual Conflict (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1997), 143–54. 5 Ibid., 171–237. 1

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uniformly responded to these afflictions by revealing God’s benevolent character as he set them free from their diabolic oppression.6 Reflecting the apocalyptic worldview in which the early church was birthed, the NT replaces the raging waters and chaos monsters of the OT with talk of “rulers”, “principalities”, “Powers”, “authorities”, “dominions”, “cosmic Powers”, “thrones”, “spiritual forces”, “elemental spirits of the universe”, and “gods”.7 In the apocalyptic literature of the time, these various titles refer to different levels of cosmic agents that were widely believed to exercise an oppressive and destructive influence over particular aspects of creation, society, and human-made institutions. Yet, the most distinctive development of the understanding of evil in the NT concerns its views of Satan. However ambiguous Satan’s relationship with Yahweh may have been in the OT, the NT makes it unambiguously clear that Satan is an enemy, both of God and of God’s people. In John, Jesus describes Satan as “the thief who comes only to kill, and to steal, and to destroy” (John 10:10). Peter similarly describes the devil as “a roaring lion, roaming about, seeking who he could devour” (1 Pet. 5:8). Throughout the NT, Satan is described as an intelligent personal agent who devices “schemes” against humanity, which is why Paul warns us not to be “outwitted” by him.8 So too, Satan is associated with the crafty serpent of Genesis 3 that tempts people to sin and to make them “captive . . . to do his will”.9 Indeed, Jesus went so far as to claim that every single duplicitous word a person is tempted to utter “comes from the evil one” (Matt. 5:37). This personalistic understanding of Satan is reflected as well when Jesus debates the proper meaning and application of Scripture with Satan in Matthew’s and Luke’s temptation narratives (Matt. 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-12). And, while the NT offers no speculation about a pre-evil version of Satan, certain NT authors arguably attribute volition to Satan in as much as they trace Satan’s evil character back to a rebellion against God at some point in the primordial past.10 Jesus arguably implies the same when he teaches that a future judgment awaits “the devil and his angels”, just as it does for humans who remain incorrigibly rebellious to the bitter end (Matt. 25:41). There is nothing unique in the fact that the authors of the NT ascribe personality to Satan. What is quite distinctive, however, is the unprecedented authority that Jesus and various NT authors ascribe to this cosmic agent. For example, Jesus three times referred to this enemy as “the prince (archon) of this world” (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11). The word “archōn” was used in political contexts to denote “the highest official in a city or a region in the Greco-Roman world”.11 Hence, while Jesus certainly believed that God

So too, in Luke 13 Jesus describes a woman who was “bent over and . . . quite unable to stand up straight” (v. 11) as one whom Satan had “bound for eighteen long years” (v. 16). 7 Rom. 8:38; 13:1; 1 Cor. 2:6, 8; 8:5; 2 Cor. 4:4; 15:24; Gal. 4:3, 8-9; Eph. 1:21; 2:2; 3:10; 6:12; Col. 1:16; 2:8, 10, 20. Nevertheless, we still find echoes of ancient Near Eastern imagery of a sea monster and of a raging sea in Rev. 12; 21:1. 8 2 Cor. 2:11; cf. 11:3; Luke 22:31. 9 2 Tim. 2:26; cf. Luke 4:2; 2 Cor. 2:9-11; 11:3; 1 Thess. 3:5; 1 Tim. 3:7; James 4:7. 10 1 Tim. 3:6; 2 Pet. 2:4; Jude 1:6; Rev. 12:9. The church has traditionally interpreted Isa. 14:12-23 and Ezek. 28:1-19 as referencing not only the fall of a prideful earthly king but also the fall of Satan, an interpretation that I have elsewhere defended (God at War, 157–62). 11 C. Arnold, Powers of Darkness: Principalities and Powers in Paul’s Letters (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1992), 81. 6

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the Father governs the creation as a whole, he was nevertheless insistent that Satan is the highest ruling authority over our present “world” (or “age”). This same stunning level of authority is reflected in Satan’s claim to own all the authority of the kingdoms of the world and to be able to give this authority to whomever he wants – a claim, we must note, that Jesus does not dispute (Luke 4:5-6). The book of Revelation reinforces this point as it depicts all worldly government as “Babylon”, the political wing of Satan’s empire, which he uses to deceive the world.12 Similarly, the apostle Paul went so far as to refer to Satan as “the god of this age” who blinds the minds of unbelievers (2 Cor. 4:4) and who is “the ruler of the kingdom of the air” who is “now at work among those who are disobedient” (Eph. 2:2). According to the cosmological thinking of the time, the realm of “the air” referred to the domain of spiritual authority directly over the earth. The author of Ephesians was thus essentially reiterating Jesus’ teaching that Satan is the “ruler of this world”. Moreover, in keeping with this warfare worldview, Paul describes the Christian life as a sustained battle against forces of darkness.13 And John goes so far as to declare that “the whole world is under the control of the evil one” (1 John 5:19) and that Satan “leads the whole world astray” (Rev. 12:9, cf. 20:3, 8). Short of embracing a Manichean-type dualism, it is hard to see how NT authors could have ascribed more authority to Satan than they actually did. Given the remarkable scope of authority the early church ascribed to Satan, it’s hardly surprising that several NT authors declare that the primary reason the Son of God came to earth and died on the cross was to destroy the devil and his works and to set humans and all of creation free from his oppressive reign.14 Nor is it surprising to see salvation described in terms of people having their eyes opened “so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God” (Acts 26:17) as well as in terms of being “rescued . . . from the power of darkness and transferred . . . into the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Col. 1:13). In sum, the NT’s conception of Satan and the Powers is that they are intelligent volitional cosmic agents who currently exert a destructive influence in society and throughout the creation. And one of the primary reasons the Son of God came to earth was to finally put an end to their oppressive reign.

PERSONAL EVIL IN THE MODERN AND POST-MODERN AGE While Christians in different times and contexts have conceptualized Satan, the Powers and demons in significantly different ways, their existence as personal agents was not widely questioned until after the Enlightenment. The success of science’s naturalistic methodology led to the widespread view, especially among academics, that the world is a “closed system” of natural causes and effects. And within this naturalistic worldview,

See Rev. 13; 14:8; 17:5; 18. On this, see A. R. Gwyther, “New Jerusalem versus Babylon: Reading the Book of Revelation as a Text of a Circle of Counter-Imperial Christian Communities in the First-Century Roman Empire” (PhD diss., Griffith University, 1999); J. Ellul, Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation, trans. G. W. Schreiner (New York: Seabury, 1977). 13 2 Cor. 2:9-11; 10:3-5; Eph. 4:26-27; Eph. 6:10-17. 14 1 John 3:8; cf. see John 16:11; Col. 2:14-15; Heb. 2:14. 12

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Satan, the Powers, and any other type of spirit-agent could only be understood as mythological relics of our pre-scientific past.15 Not all Western academics bought into the post-Enlightenment skepticism toward the spirit realm, however. For example, the great psychologist and philosophical pragmatist William James boldly criticized his academic colleagues for their close-mindedness toward the phenomenon of demon possession. The refusal of modern “enlightenment” to treat “possession” as a hypothesis to be spoken of as even a possibility, in spite of the massive human tradition based on concrete experience in its favor, has always seemed to me a curious example of the power of fashion in things scientific.16 James looked forward to a time when “the power of fashion in things scientific” would not be so closed-minded about the spirit realm. That the demon-theory . . . will have its innings again is to my mind absolutely certain. One has to be “scientific” indeed to be blind and ignorant enough to suspect no such possibility.17 More recently, the grip that the naturalistic worldview has had on the Western academy has been loosened with the growing post-modern awareness that all worldviews, including the Western naturalistic worldview, are social constructs. As such, it is clearly illegitimate for anyone to assume the superiority of their own worldview and to critique all other worldviews from this allegedly superior perspective. Yet, this is arguably what many Western scholars have been doing when they dismissed all talk of spirit-agents and all reports about people encountering these agents as mythological expressions of a “primitive” worldview. In our current post-modern context, it could be argued that this cavalier dismissal is both chronocentric and ethnocentric, for it presupposes that the modern Western academic way of understanding reality is superior to all ancient, nonEuropean and non-academic ways of looking at the world in so far as these ways conflict with the views of the Western academy.18 Reflecting this same post-modern shift, over the last several decades, an increasing number of scholars in the fields of anthropology, sociology, and ethnography have been arguing that one can only truly understand the worldview of another people-group by “going native”. That is, their conviction is that Western scholars must suspend their own worldview and adopt the worldview of the people-group they are studying, as much as possible, in order to experience their worldview from the inside. The results of this methodological shift have been intriguing, to say the least. Among other things, a number of these scholars have reported that, once they had sufficiently adopted the non-Western worldview of the people they were studying, their eyes were opened to spiritual realities which their naturalistic worldview had blinded them to. More specifically, some scholars

On the increasing skepticism about Satan in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, see J. I. Israel, “The Death of Satan”, in Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 375–405. 16 William James, “Report on Mrs. Piper’s Hodgson-Control”, Proceedings of the English Society for Psychical Research 23 (1909): 2–121, 118. 17 Ibid. 18 A critique that has been pointedly raised by certain African theologians, e.g., E. E. Acolatse, Powers, Principalities, and the Spirit: Biblical Realism in Africa and the West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018). 15

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have reported having encounters with spirit-agents and/or of witnessing some other sort of occurrence that defied any strictly naturalistic explanation.19

RETHINKING THE POWERS Reflecting this same post-modern turn, there has been a renewed interest among NT scholars and theologians over the last fifty years in the NT’s language of the Powers.20 Most famously, Walter Wink’s award-winning trilogy on The Powers attempted to demonstrate that the NT’s language about the Powers captures aspects of group-dynamics which the intense individualism of the Western worldview prevents us from seeing.21 More specifically, Wink interprets the language of “the Powers” to be expressions of the “interiority” or “spiritual dimension” of various people-groups, whether of families, churches, teams, mobs, corporations, political parties, or an entire nation. In each case, the spirit of the group takes on a life of its own, and it influences all the individuals within that group, for better or for worse. According to Wink, this dynamic is precisely what is captured by the NT’s talk about the Powers.22 Arguably, one of the chief advantages of this new way of understanding the Powers is that it integrates the NT’s language of the Powers with contemporary science, and it does so in a way that allows modern Western thinkers to affirm the reality and even the importance of the Powers without requiring them to believe that these Powers exist as personal agents over-and-against humans – namely without requiring them to abandon their Western skepticism toward the existence of personal disembodied spirits. The Powers have been in a sense demythologized, but not in a way that dismisses the language about spirit-agents as merely mythological, primitive, or anti-scientific. For many, this new de-personalized way of conceiving of the Powers has breathed new life into the NT’s language of the Powers, as well as of angels, demons, and Satan. This advantage notwithstanding, there are several possible objections that could be raised against Wink’s thesis. First, it could be argued that the very fact that Wink felt the need to translate the language of the Powers into contemporary scientific categories reflects his belief in the superiority of the Western scientific worldview. Hence, while Wink is certainly far less guilty of ethnocentricism and chronocentricism than those Western thinkers who simply dismiss non-Western perspectives as “primitive”, one could

One groundbreaking example of this is E. Turner, Experiencing Ritual: A New Interpretation of African Healing (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). For a sampling of such cases, see P. Eddy and G. Boyd, The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Jesus Synoptic Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 67–73. 20 For several seminal studies, see C. D. Caird, Principalities and Powers: A Study in Pauline Theology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956); H. Schlier, Principalities and Powers in the New Testament (Freiburg: Herder and Herder, 1961); H. Berkhof, Christ and the Powers, trans. J. H. Yoder (Scottdale: Herald, 1962). For an overview and discussion, see P. O’Brien, “Principalities and Powers: Opponents of the Church”, Evangelical Review of Theology 16, no. 4 (1992): 353–84. 21 W. Wink, Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984); Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986); Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in an Age of Domination (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1992). 22 Several scholars have recently supplemented Wink’s perspective by understanding the NT’s language of the Powers in light of Emergent Property Theory. See, e.g., A. Young, The Spirit of Creation: Modern Science and Divine Action in the Pentecostal-Charismatic Imagination (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011); D. L. Bradnick, Evil, Spirits, and Possession: An Emergentist Theology of the Demonic (Boston: Brill, 2017). 19

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nevertheless argue that Wink is vulnerable to these charges to the degree that he felt the need to demythologize and depersonalize the Powers. Second, it is not clear why so many people who believe in God remain incredulous when it comes to believing in the existence of spirit-agents who possess something analogous to a mind and will. If one is willing to break from the naturalistic worldview by believing in a supreme non-physical personal agent called “God”, what is so difficult about parting from this worldview an inch further to affirm the existence of lesser non-physical personal agents? I suspect this ongoing skepticism is yet another testament to the “strength of fashion in things scientific” that James railed against. At the same time, this ongoing skepticism could to some degree be understood to be a reaction to the medieval way Satan, angels, and demons continue to be imagined. For example, since we obviously can no longer believe that Satan is the spitting image of the ancient Greek God Pan (red, horns and hoofs, pitchfork in hand, etc.), many conclude that we can no longer believe in the existence of Satan. In response, one could argue that this is a classic case of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”. Yes, the traditional depictions of the spirit realm are obviously mythic, as are all of the Bible’s depictions of the spirit realm. Indeed, every mental image we might ever have of the spirit realm is inevitably mythic for the simple reason that, being non-material, the spirit realm isn’t visualizable. But this does not mean the spiritual realm is unreal, for the same can be said for a good deal of what modern physics concerns itself with. We can’t visualize wave-particle duality, for example, yet there is no doubt about the reality of this duality. A third objection that can be raised against Wink’s depersonalized interpretation of the Powers is that it contradicts the perspective of Jesus, for as I noted earlier, Jesus clearly shared the first-century apocalyptic understanding of Satan and the Powers as intelligent and volitional agents. In response, some have argued that, precisely because the personalistic understanding of Satan and the Powers was part of the pre-scientific culture that Jesus was born into, contemporary followers of Jesus should feel no more obliged to accept this culturally conditioned perspective than they do other aspects of the pre-scientific culture that Jesus shared, such as his pre-scientific assumption that people see by light proceeding out of their eyes (Matt. 6:21-22) or his apparent assumption that the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds (Mark 4:31).23 Since Jesus was fully human, there is no need to deny that he likely appropriated all the assumptions of the first-century Jewish culture he was embedded in, including some that were mistaken. But, while he likely shared his culture’s mistaken assumptions, Jesus nevertheless claimed to only teach what he “heard from the Father”, according to the Gospel of John.24 Jesus may have assumed that light came out of the eye and that the mustard seed was the smallest of all seeds, but he explicitly taught that Satan was “the ruler of this world” (John 12:31; 14:11; 16:11) who is a deceiver, a thief, a murderer, and a tempter (e.g., Matt. 5:37).25 Nor is the personalistic understanding of Satan a minor point in the context of Jesus’ ministry. On the contrary, and as I argued earlier, all the Gospels frame Jesus’ entire ministry, culminating with his death and resurrection, as an ongoing battle against Satan.

See, for example, J. H. Walton, Demons and Spirits in Biblical Theology (Eugene: Cascade, 2019). John 7:16-17; cf. 8:38; 14:24. 25 John 12:31; 14:11; 16:11; Matt. 4:3; 5:37; 1 Thess. 3:5. 23 24

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Hence, if we accept that the Son of God could have been mistaken about a teaching as foundational as this, one might legitimately wonder what teachings of Jesus we can be confident of. And my concern is that, once we go down this road, the only teachings of Jesus we will remain confident of are those that agree with what we already believe. Fourth, precisely because this was Jesus’ understanding of Satan and the Powers, it has been the understanding of Christians throughout history going back to the earliest followers of Jesus. In this light, some have argued that belief in Satan and other spirit-agents is simply part of the traditional package of beliefs that orthodox Christians should feel obliged to accept. For example, Carl Braaten has written: True Christianity is stuck with the Devil, like it or not . . . The decision for or against the Devil is a decision for or against the integrity of Christianity as such. We simply cannot subtract the Devil, along with demons, angels, principalities, powers, and elemental spirits, without doing violence to the shape of the Christian faith, as transmitted by Scripture and tradition, our primary sources.26 The fact that Jesus promised that his Spirit would always abide with his disciples and would lead them into all truth arguable re-enforces this argument.27 The fifth and final objection I’d like to raise requires a little more unpacking than the previous four. In the apocalyptic environment of Jesus’ day, the Powers were generally conceived of as rebellious cosmic agents who misused the authority over the creation and over human society that God had originally entrusted them with. The depersonalized interpretation of the Powers is consistent with this perspective as it concerns the Powers corrupting influence on society, but it has no place for the conception of the Powers exercising a corrupting influence on creation except as a consequence of their influence on human society. And this means that the Powers can play no role in explaining “natural evil”, and especially in explaining pre-humanoid “natural evil”. I think this is unfortunate on several accounts.28 First, according to the NT, it is not merely humans but the entire creation that stands in need of redemption.29 And the creation stands in need of redemption because something has gone wrong with it.30 In Paul’s words, the creation has been “subjected to futility” and longs to “be set free from its bondage to decay” (Rom. 8:20-21). With humans, this bondage to decay is manifested primarily in the physical infirmities that people suffer as well as in the fact that we all die. And this is why Jesus, the authors of the NT and the early post-apostolic church taught that infirmities and death as well as all forms of “natural” disasters are the direct or indirect result of the corrupting influence of the Powers.31

C. Braaten, That All May Believe: A Theology of the Gospel and the Mission of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 109, 110. 27 John 14:26; 16:12-13; 1 John 2:26-27. The early disciples were aware that the Spirit was at work even in their disputes (Acts 15:28). 28 I place warning quotes around “natural evil” to indicate my conviction that there is nothing natural about “natural evil”. 29 Rom. 8:18-25; Eph. 1:10; Col. 1:15-20. 30 See D. W. O’Neill and B. Snodderly, eds, All Creation Groans: Toward a Theology of Disease and Global Health (Eugene: Pickwick, 2021). 31 On the central role of Satan, the Powers, and demons in the early church’s approach to the problem of evil, see G. Boyd, Satan and the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2001), 39–49; J. B. Russell, Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (Ithaca: Cambridge University Press, 1981); 26

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But how are we to explain “natural evil”, and especially pre-human “natural evil”, if we reject the conception of the Powers as personal agents who exist over-and-against humans? If we can’t attribute the suffering that nature brings upon humans and animals to either the fall of humans or to the influence of rebel spirit-agents, our only remaining options are to either accept that the violence that permeates nature is part of the Creator’s good plan and/or that this suffering is an inevitable by-product of limitations that are inherent in creation.32 I have elsewhere argued that neither of these options is adequate, and to the degree that my case is compelling, it provides us with yet another reason to reconsider the biblical and traditional conception of the Powers as personal spirit-agents.33

FURTHER READING Acolatse, Ester. Powers, Principalities, and the Spirit: Biblical Realism in Africa and the West. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018. Beck, Richard. Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016. Bilby, Jim and Paul Eddy. Understanding Spiritual Warfare: Four Views. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012. Bradnick, David. Evil, Spirits, and Possession: An Emergentist Theology of the Demonic. Boston: Brill, 2017. O’Neill, Daniel and Beth Snodderly, eds. All Creation Groans: Toward a Theology of Disease and Global Health. Eugene: Pickwick, 2021.

E. Ferguson, Demonology of the Early Christian World (New York: Mellen, 1984); F. Gokey, The Terminology for the Devil and Evil Spirits in the Apostolic Fathers (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1961). 32 For two insightful overviews of a variety of perspectives, see M. J. Murray, Nature Red in Tooth & Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and N. H. Creegan, Animal Suffering & the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 33 G. Boyd, “An Enemy Did This: A Cosmic Conflict Understanding of ‘Natural’ Evil”, in All Creation Groans: Towards a Theology of Disease and Global Health, ed. Daniel W. O’Neill and Beth Snodderly (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2021), 192–213; “Why Creation Groans: Responding to Objections to the Corruption of Nature (CON) Hypothesis”, ibid., 214–34.

PART FOUR

Philosophical and Ethical Issues

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Chapter 53

Neoplatonism ADRIAN MIHAI

Neoplatonism is one of the most important movements in the history of philosophy and theology, as an essential source not only for the transmission of many ancient philosophical fragments (like those of Parmenides) but also for the patristic, medieval, modern, and contemporary reception of the ideas and doctrines of some of its most important representatives, such as Plotinus, Porphyry, and especially Proclus. However, though a lot has been already written concerning the problem of evil in Plotinus and Proclus particularly, a synthesis on the doctrine of evil and suffering in the Neoplatonic movement as a whole still awaits thorough investigation.1 In this chapter I intend to offer at least a concise summary from Plotinus up to Olympiodorus. Due to space, I will only look at Greek Pagan Neoplatonism and will not consider the numerous philosophical and theological elaborations of Christian and Islamic thinkers made on the bases of Neoplatonic categories. Notwithstanding the difficulties and problems that stem from the term “Neoplatonism”,2 as we encounter with any general label that encompasses many original thinkers over a long period of time (around 300 years in the case of the Greek Pagan Neoplatonic movement, from 244, date when Plotinus established his short-lived school in Rome, until 529, the closing of the Athenian school by the order of emperor Justinian, though Olympiodorus was the last pagan teacher of the Alexandrian school), there may be found at least three fundamental tenets which are shared by most, if not all, representatives of the Neoplatonic movement:3 (i) a radical negative henological theology, which posits an ineffable One beyond being, (ii) an allegorical exegesis of myths, which, according

On the concept of evil in Neoplatonism, though in a very restricted way, see Kevin Corrigan, “Neoplatonism”, in The History of Evil in Antiquity: 2000 bce – 450 ce, ed. Tom P. S. Angier (Oxon: Routledge, 2019); and JeanMarc Narbonne, “Matter and Evil in the Neoplatonic Tradition”, in The Routledge Handbook of Neoplatonism, ed. Paulina Remes and Svelta Slaveva-Griffin (London/New York: Routledge, 2014), 231–44. Both articles look only at Plotinus and Proclus. See also John Phillips, Order from Disorder. Proclus’ Doctrine of Evil and Its Roots in Ancient Platonism (Leiden: Brill, 2007), and Jan Opsomer, “Proclus vs Plotinus on Matter (De mal. subs. 30–37)”, Phronesis 46, no. 2 (2001): 154–88. 2 Giovanni Reale has distinguished seven Neoplatonic schools in Storia della filosofia Greca e Romana (Milano: Bompiani, 2018), 2129–30. 3 Adrian Mihai, L’Hadès céleste. Histoire du purgatoire dans l’Antiquité (Paris: Garnier, 2015), 83; see also, for a Neoplatonic view of evil and suffering in the context of the afterlife, 81–148, 225–86, 323–94. 1

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to Proclus, “reveal the principles of reality through symbols”,4 and finally, (iii) the harmonization of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.5 The central Neoplatonic metaphysical outlook is the doctrine of “emanation”,6 or the activity of procession (prohodos) of all things from the First Principle, called the One (to hen) and the Good beyond being, and return (epistrophê) to the One. Thus, for such a philosophy, which upholds that all there is derives in one way or another from the Supreme Principle, the existence of evil and suffering poses an inescapable problem, since then evil itself must, somehow, derive from the One itself. Toward the end of the Greek Pagan Neoplatonic movement, Proclus poses the dilemma that each Neoplatonist faced when talking about evil in the world: “For, on the one hand, if God wishes evil to exist, how can he be good? . . . And, on the other hand, if [God] does not wish [evil to exist], how does evil exist?” (in Tim. 373.28–374.1).7 In his commentary on Plato’s Republic (in Remp. I 37.3-8), Proclus will show even more clearly the implications of evil to the Neoplatonic metaphysics of the One: evil either

1. comes from the gods or



2. comes from something else:



2.1. this something is itself a result of the gods, or



2.2. it is not a result of the gods.

Whichever side we take, the answer will not be completely satisfactory for a philosophy that insists that everything flows or trickles down from the Good beyond being itself. This is the predicament that every Neoplatonist faced when confronted with the problem of evil.

PLATONIC AND ARISTOTELIAN SOURCES Since the Neoplatonists insisted that they are only followers of Plato and the Ancients, and they strongly condemned any originality (kainotomia),8 it is essential to look at the Platonic and Aristotelian passages that structure their doctrines of evil.9 In his Republic (379c2-7), Plato asserts that God is not responsible for evils. Furthermore, the locus classicus for any Neoplatonic discussion on evil is Plato’s Theaetetus 176a5-8: But it is not possible, Theodorus, that evil should be destroyed – for there must always be something opposed to the good; nor is it possible that it should have its seat in heaven. But it must inevitably haunt human life, and prowl about this earth. (trans. M. J. Levett, rev. Myles Burnyeat, 195)

Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Republic I 30.15-16. Ilsetraut Hadot, Athenian and Alexandrian Neoplatonism and the Harmonization of Aristotle and Plato (Leiden: Brill, 2015/1978). 6 Pierre Hadot, Plotin, Traité 38, VI, 7 (Paris: Cerf, 1988), 27, sees in the Plotinian principle of “diffusion dégradée de l’énergie” (principle of diminishing or degraded diffusion of energy) the principle of emanation, which has the following characteristics: necessity, continuity, and finally, degradation. 7 David T. Runia and Michael Share, eds., Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 237. 8 Philippe Hoffmann, “What Was Commentary in Late Antiquity? The Example of the Neoplatonic Commentators”, in A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, ed. Mary Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 602. 9 On the Platonic passages used by the Neoplatonists in their discussions on evil, see Carlos Steel and Jan Opsomer, Proclus, On the Existence of Evils (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 10–12. 4 5

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The Aristotelian concepts of privation (steresis) and of coincidence – accidental combination – are also at the heart of the doctrine of evil in Neoplatonism. Aristotle distinguishes, in his Physics, between matter and privation, that is, a lack or deficiency. Aristotle defines matter as “the primary substratum of each thing, from which it comes to be, and which persists in the result, not accidentally” (192a32-34, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye). Matter, says Aristotle, “comes to be and ceases to be in one sense, while in another it does not”. Privation, on the other hand, is not substantial. Privation “ceases to be in its own nature”. Aristotle even calls privation evil (192a15). Regarding coincidence or chance effects in nature (Met. VI 3), and according to an interpretation by Richard Sorabji,10 Aristotle denies that coincidences have causes because they have no explanations. This idea of uncaused events, even though this exact meaning cannot be proved to be the actual intention of Aristotle,11 will be essential for Proclus’ view of evil (see later discussion on this). Another point that the Neoplatonists will appropriate from Aristotle is that evil does not exist as a whole but only in particular things. In Metaphysics (9, 1051a17-21), Aristotle says that evil is not a Platonic form existing apart from particular empirical things. Evil, as the Neoplatonists will interpret Aristotle, is an anomaly in nature, contrary to or against nature (para phusin), an exception to the rule, like illnesses.

PLOTINUS: MATTER AS EVIL ITSELF Plotinus’ (c. 205–270 ce) treatise on evil, On what evils are and where they come from, which forms Ennead I 8 in Porphyry’s edition, was composed around 268–270 ce.12 In it, Plotinus describes matter as evil itself. The difficulty with this identification is that, according to Plotinus’ system, everything derives from the First Principle, or the One, which is also identified with the Good, and thus all, even evil and matter, participate in good. The universe, according to Plotinus’ metaphysical system, is a separation (apostasis) of everything from the One into order. In oversimplified terms, the three primal hypostases or principles or levels of reality that structure the Plotinian system are as follows: the One (to Hen) or the Good (to Agathon) represents the transcendental, ineffable divinity, from whom everything springs out and to whom everything returns; the Intellect (Noûs) denotes the realm of the Platonic Forms; and, finally, the Soul (Psukhê), which includes the sensible cosmos. Another characteristic of this system is that each realm is a hypostasis of the previous one. Thus, the Soul is a hypostasis of or emanates from the Noûs, while the Noûs, in its turn, is a hypostasis or an unfolding or an effluence of the One. In accordance with this tripartite metaphysical scheme, Plotinus, in his treatise On Matter, identifies matter with evil (II 4.16.16). First, he distinguishes two types of matters, according to the Platonic paradigm – copy model: intelligible and sensible matter. Before the hypostasis of the Intellect, we find intelligible matter, which, together with the One, produces Intellect. Intelligible matter is thus the receptacle or universal substrate of the Richard Sorabji, Necessity, Cause and Blame: Perspectives on Aristotle’s Theory (London: Duckworth, 1980), 9, 10–11, 19, 25, 244. 11 See, for example, Cynthia A. Freeland’s critique of Richard Sorabji: “Accidental Causes and Real Explanations”, in Aristotle’s Physics, ed. L. Judson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 49–72. 12 All of Plotinus’ translations are from Lloyd P. Gerson, ed., Plotinus, The Enneads (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 10

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Forms (II 4.1.1-2). In the physical world, we find sensible matter, which is a copy of intelligible matter. The main characteristic of both intelligible and sensible matter is unlimitedness or apeiron (II 2.15.33-38). Not only does Plotinus distinguish between intelligible and sensible matter, he also distinguishes between two sorts of evils, the primary or essential evil, which is matter, and secondary evils, that is, bodies (I 8.8.38-44). Accordingly, anything that has a body is the origin of secondary evils because they partake of matter (I 8.4.1-6). Following Aristotle, Plotinus will then define evil as privation (steresis), a lack or a deficiency. Thus, evil is absolute lack (elleipsis) and formless. As we have seen, Aristotle had distinguished, in his Physics (I 9, 192a4-34), between matter and privation, and assimilated matter and evil. Plotinus accepts the last identification, but he rejects the distinction made by Aristotle between matter and privation. For Plotinus, evil should be considered a lack of goodness, but the lack of goodness must be here because the good is in another. Matter, then, in which the good is, since it is other than the good, produces the lack (III 2.5.27-32). Not only evil is privation of good, but it has no proper existence (I 8.5.10-12). In Ennead II 4, Plotinus even calls matter “non-being”. However, in Ennead II 5, he says that even if matter “might not be any of those beings that are added to it”, nothing is to prevent it “from being something else, if indeed not all beings are added to matter” (II 5.4.5-11). As he explains in this same treatise, since matter is only potentiality, that is, something that will never be actualized, its existence is, in a way, “deferred to that which is going to be. So, its being potentially is not anything; it is rather everything potentially” (II 5.5.4-6). By contrast with the potentiality of the Intellect, which has the power to develop into a given form, an actuality, the potentiality of matter is a lack of actuality. If then matter is evil, a lack or privation of goodness, even somehow non-being, where does it come from? Since in Plotinus’ “emanationist” system, everything proceeds from the One-Good, where does evil as privation come from? Various solutions have been offered, which can be divided into three main options:13

(1) Sensible matter is pre-existent and non-generated, existing independently of both Soul and the One;



(2) Sensible matter was produced or generated by Soul, or by a partial or particular soul;



(3) Sensible matter falls out of, or is expelled from, the Intellect.

Apart from the first solution, which posits a pre-existent matter, all other solutions agree that for Plotinus even matter as utter evil derives ultimately from the One. What these solutions disagree on is the actual “place” from which evil comes: either the second hypostasis – Intellect, or the third and last hypostasis – Soul. That Plotinus is consistent with his main assumption, and considers that even evil participates in the Good, can be seen from his treatise On the Impassibility of Things without Bodies (III 6), where he says that

13 See Denis O’Brien, “Plotinus on Matter and Evil”, in The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, ed. Lloyd P. Gerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 171; Jean-Marc Narbonne, “The Controversy over the Generation of Matter in Plotinus: The Riddle Resolved?” in Plotinus in Dialogue with the Gnostics, ed. JeanMarc Narbonne (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 44–7. See also Kevin Corrigan, Plotinus’ Theory of Matter – Evil and the Question of Substance (Leuven: Peeters, 1996).

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while being evil, matter desires the Good, since it does not by participating lose what it was before . . . For it does not abandon its nature but, because it is necessary that it participates, it participates in some way as long as it is what it is; but because the manner of its participation keeps it being what it is, it is not harmed in its existence by what gives to it in this way; and it turns out that, for this reason, it is no less evil because it always remains what it is. For if it really participated in and was altered by the Good, it would not be evil in its nature. And so if anyone says that matter is evil, he would be telling the truth if he means it is unaffected by the Good. But this is identical to being incapable of being affected. (III 6.11.33-46) However, as Jan Opsomer has remarked, Plotinus has not resolved the paradox implied in his metaphysical system, which maintains that everything must proceed, in some way, from the absolute Good, absolute evil included. Apparently, Plotinus wants to reconcile the irreconcilable: the cause of evil is the result of a causal chain, yet the cause(s) of the cause of evil should not be called the cause(s) of evil.14

AMELIUS: A FORM OF EVIL Amelius (c. 246–90/300 ce), the closest friend and disciple of Plotinus, has tried to answer this Plotinian paradox. He seems to have been the only Platonist to have maintained that there is a Form, or intelligible Paradigm, of evil, on the grounds that otherwise evil must remain unknown to God. Amelius’ doctrine seems to have been a literal exegesis of Socrates’ words in Theaetetus (176e3-5): My friend [scil. Theodorus], there are two paradigms [paradeigmatôn] set up in reality. One is divine and supremely happy; the other has nothing of God in it, and is the paradigm of the deepest unhappiness. (Mod. trans. of M. J. Levett, rev. Myles Burnyeat) Two Neoplatonic testimonies support this view. According to Asclepius of Tralles (sixth century), a student of Ammonius Hermiae (who had been Proclus’ student), Amelius argued that there were logoi of evil things present to the Demiurge when this one produced the universe.15 Proclus also, in his commentary on the Parmenides (829.22), writes that there are some philosophers who had argued that there are intelligible Forms or Paradigms of evil things.

PORPHYRY: MATTER AS EVIL Porphyry (c. 234–305 ce), the most famous disciple, biographer, and editor of Plotinus, has left little on his doctrine of evil. From the scant passages on the subject, especially from his Aphormai pros ta noeta (in Latin translated as Sententiae), or Pathways to the Intelligible, we learn that he followed Plotinus in assimilating matter to evil, though not to moral evil, which results from the relationship that the soul maintains with the body. In Sentence 20, Porphyry defines matter as incorporeal, lifeless, formless, irrational,

Jan Opsomer, “Proclus vs Plotinus on Matter (De mal. subs. 30-7)”, 160. Asclepius of Tralles, Commentary of Nicomachus of Gerasa’s Introduction to Arithmetic I 44.1-5.

14 15

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unlimited, and powerless. It is both not-being and not not-being (lines 1–5, ed. Erich Lamberz). In Sentence 30, Porphyry says that for particular souls, “matter is an evil, by reason of the fact that they [scil. the particular souls] can turn their attention towards it [scil. matter], when they have the capacity of being turned towards the divinity”.16 From these lines, it can be inferred that for Porphyry, matter is an evil, like for Plotinus, but that this evil-matter is, in a way, actualized by each particular soul through the more or less excessive care they give to their own corporeal existence. Evil thus for every soul is to be in error and to be deceptive (Sentence 20.11-12).

IAMBLICHUS: EVIL AS PARHUPOSTASIS Around the beginning of the fourth century, Iamblichus (c. 240–325 ce), who studied in Rome under Porphyry, became one of the major representatives of Neoplatonism in late antiquity.17 For Iamblichus, and against both Plotinus and Porphyry, matter is not evil, and it is itself derived from the First Principle. The Demiurge took in hand this matter and fashioned from it the heavenly spheres, while its lowest residue “he crafted into bodies which are subject to generation and corruption” (De mysteriis VIII 3.4-8).18 Furthermore, he was the first, according to Simplicius (in Cat. 418.3-6), to pose evil as parhupostasis, that is, as a by-product, or parasitic existence of the good,19 not having itself real existence. These two doctrines regarding the conception of evil will be followed by all the Late Neoplatonists.

PROCLUS: EVIL AS UNCAUSED Before presenting his own view on the nature and function of evil,20 Proclus (c. 412–485 ce), in his treatise on evils, composed rather early in his career,21 and which has been preserved and transmitted through the 1280 Latin translation of William of Moerbeke as De malorum subsistentia, rejects first three doctrines concerning evil:

1. That there is a single source of evil just as there is a single source of good things;



2. That there is an intelligible Form or Paradigm of evil;



3. That “a maleficent soul” is the principle of evil.

In Porphyre, Sentences II, trans. John Dillon, ed. Luc Brisson (Paris: J. Vrin, 2005), 808. On the differences between Iamblichus and Plotinus, see Jean-Marc Narbonne, Plotin, Oeuvres complètes I (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2012), cxxxvi–ccl. 18 Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon and Jackson P. Hershbell, Iamblichus, De mysteriis (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 313–15. 19 On the Greek term and the translation of parhupostasis, see, among others, J. Opsomer and C. Steel, “Evil without a cause. Proclus’ Doctrine on the Origin of Evil, and Its Antecedents in Hellenistic Philosophy”, in Zur Rezeption der hellenistischen Philosophie in der Spätantike, ed. Therese Fuhrer and Michael Erler (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1999), 249–55. 20 On Proclus’ notion of evil, see John Phillips, Order from Disorder; Carlos Steel, “Providence and Evil”, in All From One: A Guide to Proclus, ed. Pieter d’Hoine and Marije Martjin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 229–60; Jan Opsomer and Carlos Steel, “Evil without a Cause. Proclus’ Doctrine on the Origin of Evil, and Its Antecedents in Hellenistic Philosophy”, 255–60. See also the introduction to their translation of Proclus treatise on evil, Carlos Steel and Jan Opsomer, eds, Proclus, On the Existence of Evils (London: Duckworth, 2003), 1–54. 21 See Jan Opsomer and Carlos Steel, Proclus: Ten Problems Concerning Providence (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2012), 165. 16 17

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Regarding the sources of evil, Proclus rejects first the view that there is a single source of evil – for only the good has a single source, the One. As an example of a sole and unique source of evil, Proclus refers to the Plotinian solution, without actually naming Plotinus, that “matter is the origin of all evil; it is evil as such”. For Proclus, matter is produced by the Good, and it is not evil. According to Carlos Steel, for Proclus, “evils occur because of the weaknesses of the inferior causes (bodies, souls) and can exist only insofar as they are connected with good things upon which they parasitize”.22 Thus, evil itself is, in a way, uncaused (anaitios):23 Therefore it is appropriate to call such generation a parasitic existence [parhupostasis], in that it is without end and unintended [askopon], uncaused in a way [anaition pôs] and indefinite [aoriston]. For neither is there one cause for it, nor does that which is a cause in its own right and a principal cause produce something for the sake of evil itself and the nature of evil, nor does anything which is not a principal cause nor a cause in its own right. No, it is the exact opposite: everything that is produced is produced for the sake of the good; but evil, being from outside and adventitious [epeisodiôdes], consists in the failure to attain that which is the appropriate goal of each thing. (50.29-38)24 According to Proclus, parasitic existence (parhupostasis) or a subsistent by-product, belongs to beings “that neither appear through causes in accordance with nature nor result in a definite end”. Aristotle’s distinction (Met. VI‎ 2-3) between causality per se and per accidens is essential here. What is accidental is not necessary and cannot be explained as the determinate outcome of causal factors, and the causes of such an effect are unordered (atakta) and indefinite.25 Evil happens when an agent is without end or purpose (askopon). Proclus accepts, somehow, this problematic solution of an uncaused event in order to eliminate any reduction of evil to the One.26 If there is any causality in the production of evil, then evil will be integrated in Proclus’ emanationists metaphysics, where everything originates causally from the uncaused One. Thus, Proclus has to account for the apparition of aberrations as uncaused events. The procession beginning from on high ceases when it has got as far as those things which can both change and make to subsist along with themselves some sort of aberration [paratropen]. (In Alc. 117.22-25, ed. Segonds, trans. Carlos Steel and Jan Opsomer, Proclus, On the Existence of Evils, 28) In his commentary on the Republic, Proclus briefly summarizes his theory exposed in the treatise on evils: evil comes neither from the gods nor makes its entrance into existent things from some other principal cause [proêgoumenê aitia] . . . Therefore it is in no way necessary to posit either a formal or material cause for evils, nor generally speaking, is there a

Steel, “Providence and Evil”, 255. Opsomer and Steel, “Evil without a Cause”, 255–60. 24 Steel and Opsomer, Proclus, On the Existence of Evils, 95. 25 Ibid., 26. 26 John Phillips accepts this view only qualifiedly (Order from Disorder, 267): according to him, Proclus posits as metaphysical foundation for evil’s coming into being the noeric Paradigm. 22 23

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single origin [archê] for them but rather as he says [scil. Plato, Rep. 379c] one ought to say there are partial and scattered causes that give them the status of a by-product [parupostasis]. (In Remp. 37.24–38.8) And, some lines later, he concludes with his theodicy: The universe utilises these by-products for its needs and they are rendered as good by virtue of the power of the things that use them. It is for this reason that there is no unmixed evil, but instead [all] have been allotted some trace of good. Thus even that which is evil comes from the gods inasmuch as it is, in a way, good, and these things are due to other causes that are partial and plural, arising as something external to the being of those many things themselves. (In Remp. 38.22-30)27 Since all evils are somehow dependent upon what is good, they can therefore be integrated into the works of providence for the sake of the good.

SIMPLICIUS: SOUL AS THE CAUSE OF EVIL Simplicius (c. 490/500–560 ce), a student and friend of Damascius – the last diadochy of the school of Athens – recapitulates in his commentary to Epictetus’ Enchiridion (chapter 27) the Late Neoplatonic doctrine of evil. For the title of this section, Simplicius uses even the corresponding title of Proclus’ treatise, On the existence of evils. I could not do better than to repeat here Antony C. Lloyd’s useful summary:28

(1) form fails to master matter completely;



(2) matter has no qualities;



(3) evil is only apparent inasmuch as in the context of the whole it is no longer evil;



(4) the cause of evil is soul;



(5) it is never caused by God;



(6) privation is not a contrary like a coordinate species;



(7) final causes are forms and entelechies;



(8) failures are without goals because they are unintentional.

Therefore, as for Iamblichus and Proclus, for Simplicius too, evil is a parhupostasis or a by-product contrary to nature, but which derives from, and is caused by, the dual and composite nature of the soul, both rational and corporeal (in Cat. 416.3–418.7).

OLYMPIODORUS OF ALEXANDRIA: EVIL AS WITHOUT END Olympiodorus (c. 500–570 ce) was the last pagan to teach philosophy at the school of Alexandria, which continued after the closing of the Athenian school in 529. Olympiodorus, in his commentary on Plato’s Gorgias, says that evil is non-being because askopos or unintended, and therefore has no proper existence. Dirk Baltzly, John F. Finamore, and Graeme Miles, eds, Proclus, Commentary on Plato’s Republic I, 112–14. Antony C. Lloyd, “The Later Neoplatonists”, in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, ed. A. H. Armstrong (1967; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 317–19.

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We must understand that the good is an end, for it is with [the good] in view that we read and learn and travel and do whatever else we do, whereas evil is neither an end nor a means. That it is not a mean either may be inferred from this: a means is embraced for the sake of something else, whereas evil not only does not lead to the good, but sets one at a distance from it. Hence evil is neither. (16.2)29 Because there is no disorder in the universe, “but providence observes all” (17.2), Olympiodorus goes so far as to even say that it is only our inadequate knowledge that leads us to assume that there is injustice in the world (17.2, 19.3).

CONCLUSION To conclude this brief summary of the doctrines of some of the main representatives of Greek Pagan Neoplatonism on evil and suffering, a word on theodicy will be appropriate here. As we have already seen, from Plotinus to Olympiodorus, any discourse on evil entails also a justification of the goodness of the Supreme Principle, since everything participates in the Good. Around the 530s, Simplicius, in his commentary on Aristotle’s On the Heavens, summarizes very well the function of evil and suffering in the world according to the Neoplatonists: Consequently, God would not wish evils to perish, since he would thus also wish the goods opposed to them to perish and he himself no longer to be the cause of all goodness . . . For there would not be human justice and temperance [sophrosune] if it were not possible for them to be transformed into their privations by being worn down, nor would there be health among the elements of animals if they could not also grow sick. (In Cael. 363.4-11)30 This theodicy would have been accepted even by Plotinus and Porphyry, though the means by which individual souls return to or reunite with the First Principle are quite different. If for Plotinus, and maybe for Porphyry,31 there is a part of us, an undescended part of our soul, still in the realm of the intelligible Forms (though we might not be aware of it), from Iamblichus onwards, there is a radical difference between the realms of Nous and Soul. Thus, the realm of Forms is not situated in us, and there is no part of us that remains above. The soul, says Proclus, is not of the same being (homoousios) as the gods.32 The only way we can access the intelligible realm is through illumination from above, and through the help of theurgic rites. Thus, for Plotinus and Porphyry, escaping evil and its worldly consequences is still up to the powers of each individual soul, since each of us has a direct and perpetual relation to the Forms and to what is Good. For the Late Neoplatonists, the solution is more difficult. Robin Jackson, Kimon Lycos, and Harold Tarrant, eds, Olympiodorus: Commentary on Plato’s Gorgias (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 144. 30 R. J. Hankinson, ed., Simplicius, On Aristotle On the Heavens 1.10-12 (London: Duckworth, 2006), 81. 31 Mihai, L’Hadès céleste, 353–6. For Robbert M. van den Berg, and according to Simplicius, Iamblichus does not seem to have abandoned entirely the concept of undescended soul; cf. Robert M. van den Berg, “Proclus, In Platonis Timaeum Commentarii 3.333.28ff.: The Myth of the Winged Charioteer According to Iamblichus and Proclus”, in Iamblichus: The Philosopher, ed. H. J. Blumenthal and J. F. Finamore (Syllecta Classica 8; Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), 149–62. 32 Proclus, in Parm. IV 949.13-34. 29

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FURTHER READING Narbonne, Jean-Marc. “Matter and Evil in the Neoplatonic Tradition”. In The Routledge Handbook of Neoplatonism. Edited by Paulina Remes and Svelta Slaveva-Griffin, 231–44. London: Routledge, 2014. O’Brien, Denis. “Plotinus on Matter and Evil”. In The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus. Edited by Lloyd P. Gerson, 171–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. O’Meara, Dominic. “Das Böse bei Plotin (Enn. 1,8)”. In Platon in der abendländischen Geistesgeschichte. Edited by Theo Kobusch and Burkhard Mojsisch, 33–47. Darmstadt: ebg Academic, 1997. Opsomer, Jan and Carlos Steel. “Evil without a cause: Proclus’ Doctrine on the Origin of Evil, and Its Antecedents in Hellenistic Philosophy”. In Zur Rezeption der hellenistischen Philosophie in der Spätantike. Edited by Therese Fuhrer and Michael Erler, 229–60. Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1999. Rist, John M. “Plotinus on Matter and Evil”. Phronesis 6, no. 2 (1961): 154–66.

Chapter 54

Evil and Divine Excellence DAVID P. HUNT

THE ISSUE INTRODUCED On the classic problem of evil, what makes evil problematic is the assumption that a being exists who would be expected to prevent it. The reason this being would be expected to prevent evil is that it is good enough to want to prevent it, powerful enough to be able to prevent it, and knowledgeable enough to know how to prevent it. A sub-theistic deity like Zeus is sufficiently limited in goodness, power, and knowledge, that evil isn’t much of a problem, if indeed there isn’t instead a problem of good. For the omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient god of theism, however, evil is a serious problem, providing what is probably the best argument for atheism. The reason why the problem of evil is harder for God than for Zeus is also a reason why it is harder under some conceptions of God than under others. The Anselmian requirement that God be “a being than which none greater can be conceived”, apparently so restrictive, actually accommodates a range of views regarding how the divine attributes should be understood. This includes differences over what an omnipotent being can do and what an omniscient being can know. Different conceptions of omnipotence and omniscience, in turn, can make the problem of evil easier or harder. That is the issue to be explored in this article.

SOME EXAMPLES Does divine omnipotence include the power to change the past, as Peter Damian may have held?1 To deny that God possesses this power is not to deny that God is omnipotent; it is to deny, with Thomas Aquinas, that changing the past is among the possible actions encompassed by omnipotence. So here are two very different ways of understanding the scope of divine power, both of them consistent with the theistic requirement that God be omnipotent. But these two ways of understanding divine omnipotence have differing implications for the problem of evil. If God can change the past, then he gets, in effect, multiple drafts of creation before settling on one to receive his final imprimatur; but if God cannot change the past, because changing the past is unavailable even to an omnipotent being (perhaps because it’s conceptually incoherent), then he is stuck with his first draft. Damian also asserts that God cannot change the past, so his position is not as clear as it could be – see Peter Remnant, “Peter Damian: Could God Change the Past?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8 (1978): 259–68. Whatever Damian’s considered view may have been, recent developments in the metaphysics of time, such as the theory of “hypertime”, offer resources for explicating a changed past that Damian could never have imagined. 1

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On either account of divine power, God could have, e.g., prevented the Holocaust, or at least stopped it in its tracks, but failed to do so. That’s enough of a problem. But a God who could also postvent the Holocaust, having seen its full horror, yet failed to do so, seems to present us with an even more serious problem of evil. Does God have the power to cause a creaturely agent to perform a certain action freely? If he does, then we would expect the world to include more cases of agents doing the right thing of their own free will (something that is widely thought to have special moral worth) than if God lacked this power. But different positions on this question typically turn on disagreements over the requirements for genuine free agency – in particular, whether it is compatible with causal determination by conditions over which the agent has no control – rather than alternative conceptions of divine omnipotence. If they are compatible, there is no bar (on this score, at least) to including free actions within the scope of divine omnipotence. But Christian philosophers (this is less true of theologians) tend to be incompatibilists, endorsing a “libertarian” conception of free will. This leads to a new question: Does God have the power to cause a creaturely agent to perform an action instancing libertarian free will? It has seemed obvious to most philosophers that God lacks this power, not because he is not omnipotent, but because causing another agent to perform an action that isn’t causally determined by external conditions is self-contradictory, and so lies outside the scope of divine omnipotence. But then we have at least a partial explanation of why the world contains moral evil, alongside the great moral good of people doing the right thing of their own free will – hence the “free will defense”, famously associated with Alvin Plantinga.2 Suppose, however (as Hugh McCann has argued3), that divine omnipotence does include the power to cause a created being to perform a libertarianly free action. In that case, it is a mystery why God caused so many creaturely actions that are morally evil, and how God, as the divine author of these actions, can escape responsibility for them. These questions may have good answers, but the need to address them imposes an additional burden on defenders of this view. Whatever theological advantages it may enjoy, augmenting the scope of divine omnipotence to include control over others’ libertarian agency makes the problem of evil harder. The same pattern emerges when we look at divine omniscience. An omniscient being, by definition, must know all truths, but there are significant differences of opinion over what categories of propositions are candidates for truth. Most Open Theists, for example, maintain that the category future contingent truth is empty. In this case, divine omniscience includes exhaustive knowledge of the past and present, but only partial knowledge of the future (the non-contingent part). Some Open Theists have claimed an advantage on this score when it comes to the problem of evil. John Sanders, for example, speaks movingly of the death of his brother in an auto accident and the false comfort of Christians who assured him that it was all part of God’s providential plan. The idea that God chose this world in full knowledge that it would include his brother’s death only made the problem of evil, as Sanders experienced it, more acute.4 “On the Open view”, writes Dan Speak, though God may have some advance knowledge that a particular evil e1 is going to occur, he “did not know that e1 would occur from time immemorial. Thus, it won’t Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977). Hugh McCann, “The Author of Sin?” Faith and Philosophy 22 (2005): 144–59. 4 John Sanders, The God Who Risks: A Theology of Divine Providence, rev. ed. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2007). 2 3

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be as if God has built e1 into the basic structure of the actual world . . . On Openism, at least, the occurrence of e1 is not entailed by the initial creative act”.5 This arguably eases the concern over God being the author of evil; it can also alleviate some of our surprise that things have not turned out better in creation, since God may have fewer resources to respond to events if they come into view only at the last moment, rather than being anticipated from the beginning via a knowledge of future contingents. Of course, if there are future contingent truths, an omniscient deity must know them, and the theodical chips will have to fall where they may. But the question of future contingent truth is highly contested, and it’s not easy to know what to think about it. In that case, the fact that denying future contingent truth makes the theodicist’s job somewhat easier could tip the balance in favor of denial. While Open Theists typically include fewer truths within the scope of divine omniscience (relative to theists who grant God knowledge of future contingents), Molinists include more truths. These additional truths are the so-called counterfactuals of freedom – statements of the form, If condition C were to obtain, agent S would freely perform action A. Molinists (who take their name from Luis de Molina, the father of this view) hold that there is always a truth of the matter when it comes to such statements: given C, S will either do A or not do A. Just as there is a vast literature on whether future contingent truths exist, there is a considerable (if not quite vast) literature on whether there are true counterfactuals of freedom. If there aren’t, they won’t be included in divine omniscience, because there’s nothing there for God to know; but if true counterfactuals of freedom do exist, an omniscient God must know them. Such “middle knowledge”, as it’s called, makes God not only smarter than he would be without it but also better equipped to bring about the world he desires, since he knows how any possible or actual agent would respond in any situation the agent might face, and God can use this knowledge to place agents in situations in which they will freely respond in keeping with God’s purposes. Insofar, then, as the world does not reflect God’s purposes, the affirmation of middle knowledge would appear to exacerbate the problem of evil. Critics of Molinism have made this very point.6 But so has Alvin Plantinga, a friend of middle knowledge, whose use of it in his formulation of the free will defense was largely responsible for the contemporary revival of interest in Molinism. “Without the assumption of middle knowledge”, Plantinga writes, “it is much harder to formulate a plausible deductive atheological argument from evil; and it is correspondingly much easier, I should think, to formulate the free will defense on the assumption that middle knowledge is impossible”.7 Surely things could have been arranged so there would be less

Dan Speak, “On an Advantage of Open Theism”, unpublished paper. Open Theists who hold not only that middle knowledge makes theodicy harder but who also cite this as (partial) grounds for rejecting middle knowledge include Richard Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 127–30, and especially William Hasker – see, e.g., his “Providence and Evil: Three Theories”, Religious Studies 28 (1992): 97–100, and God, Time, and Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 199–205. Non-openists who reject middle knowledge at least in part because of the greater difficulties it poses for theodicy include W. S. Anglin, Free Will and the Christian Faith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 80; David P. Hunt, “Middle Knowledge and the Soteriological Problem of Evil”, Religious Studies 27 (1991): 3–26; Bruce R. Reichenbach, Evil and a Good God (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), 68–73; and Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 150. 7 Alvin Plantinga, “Replies”, in Alvin Plantinga, ed. James E. Tomberlin and Peter Van Inwagen, (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), 379. Not all Molinists would join Plantinga in this concession. Ken Perszyk’s paper, “Free 5 6

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evil, and the more God knows, the harder it is to understand why he could not figure out what this arrangement is.

THE HYPOTHESIS OF THEISTIC MINIMALISM In each of these four examples, the more capacious understanding of the power and knowledge belonging to divine omnipotence and omniscience is associated with a more grievous problem of evil. There may be good theological reasons for favoring the more capacious accounts, such as the impressive resources they offer for divine providence and sovereignty, but they do come at a cost. As William Hasker writes, the more complete and detailed we suppose God’s control over earthly events to be, the more difficult it becomes to reconcile the evils that occur with the love and justice of God. Thus, I judge the problem of evil to be insoluble for Thomists and other theological determinists; to be slightly easier, but still extremely difficult, for Molinists; and to be considerably easier for proponents of the open view of God.8 Ken Perszyk neatly sums up the apparent situation this way: “The more God-like God becomes, the more difficult it seems to be to get God off the hook for evil; conversely, the easier it is to get God off the hook for evil, the less God-like God seems to become.”9 Let’s call this hypothesis, for want of a better term, “Theistic Minimalism”. Theistic Minimalism is the view that the problem of evil, just by itself and apart from other considerations, favors minimalist over maximalist conceptions of God – or, somewhat more precisely: given two conceptions of deity, both of which arguably satisfy the requirements of theism, the problem of evil can only be less (never more) problematic for the one ranking lower in Anselmian greatness. There are at least three assumptions undergirding this hypothesis. We need to identify them, understand why they are plausible, and review the support they provide for the hypothesis of Theological Minimalism.

A DEFENSE OF THEISTIC MINIMALISM In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume has Philo respond as follows to Cleanthes’ insistence that human life involves a net surplus of good over evil: But allowing you . . . that animal, or at least, human happiness, in this life, exceeds its misery; you have yet done nothing: For this is not, by any means, what we expect [emphasis added] from infinite power, infinite wisdom, and infinite goodness. Why is there any misery at all in the world? Not by chance surely. From some cause then. Is it from the intention of the Deity? But he is perfectly benevolent. Is it contrary to Will Defense with and without Molinism”, cited in note 9, is a critical examination of Plantinga’s position. See also Thomas P. Flint, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 106. Interestingly, these defenders of middle knowledge are joined in this assessment by the anti-Molinist David Basinger, who maintains that the denial of middle knowledge might worsen God’s situation vis-à-vis evil, a liability which (in the mirror-image of Plantinga’s position) he regards as outweighed by other advantages in Open Theism; see The Case for Freewill Theism: A Philosophical Assessment (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 92. 8 William Hasker, “Review of Thomas Flint, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account”, Faith and Philosophy 16, no. 2 (1999): 248–53, 253. 9 Kenneth J. Perszyk, “Free Will Defense with and without Molinism”, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 43 (1998): 29–64, 30. Perszyk, it must be noted, goes on to challenge this assessment of the situation.

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his intention? But he is almighty. Nothing can shake the solidity of this reasoning, so short, so clear, so decisive.10 Putting to one side the question whether Hume’s reasoning in this passage is quite as solid as he claims it to be, it’s clear that he is understanding the problem of evil in terms of a gap between expectations and reality. This understanding is especially useful when thinking about what it is for the problem of evil to be more or less problematic under different concepts of God. Let “OMNI” stand for the three “omni-attributes” relevant to the problem of evil: omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence. OMNI should generate certain expectations for the kind of world God would create, including (most notably for our purposes) its relative goodness, broadly construed. (If it doesn’t, the problem of evil is stillborn.) But then there’s the world God did create, and all the apparent facts about it that contribute, positively or negatively, to our assessment of its relative goodness. Though human cognitive limitations mean that our assessment of reality and expectations based on OMNI must be partial and imprecise, and the matters being judged are too complex for reduction to a single metric (e.g., that reality contains more “turps” of evil than we expected), it should nevertheless be possible to compare them for purposes of determining whether they are significantly out of sync with each other. (If this isn’t possible, the problem of evil is again stillborn.) This suggests, in agreement with Hume, that the problem of evil can be usefully defined as the existence of a gap between expectations and reality, where expectations exceed reality. We can now formulate the first assumption behind Theistic Minimalism accordingly: Assumption 1: The problem of evil (under different background assumptions) can vary in the degree to which it is a problem, and the degree of the problem is directly proportionate to the size of the gap between expectations and reality. Though a large part of the problem of evil is the sheer amount of evil belonging to reality, the reference here to the relative “size” of the gap does not presuppose that the gap is quantifiable, or that larger gaps correspond to larger numbers, any more than the expectations and reality that define the gaps are quantifiable. Assumption 1 only presupposes that it is sometimes possible to judge that one expectations–reality gap is more or less serious than another. If expectations exceed reality, the gap can be narrowed only by adjusting expectations downward, reassessing reality upward, or both. Since expectations are a function of OMNI, they can be lowered only by revising the values assigned to the three omni-attributes. Consider, for example, the theodical implications of middle knowledge. Some counterfactuals of freedom – for example, that Jones would knit his brows if asked to put money in the Salvation Army bucket outside the grocery store – are such that God’s knowing them would probably leave our expectations unaffected. Knowledge of others – for example, that Jones, were he to read the Little Flowers of St. Francis, would freely sell all that he has and give it to the poor – would prima facie raise our expectations for the sort of world God would create, since God then knows that he can increase a world’s moral worth by including Jones and dropping the Little Flowers in his lap. But it’s unclear how any counterfactual of freedom could be such that God’s knowing it would lower David Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, ed. Norman Kemp Smith (1779; reprinted Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), 201.

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our expectations for the world. The same is surely true for any augmentation of the divine attributes. In cases like this, where two conceptions of the theistic omni-attributes, OMNI1 and OMNI2, differ only in that one or more of the attributes constituting OMNI2 is “greater” (ranks higher in Anselmian excellence) than the corresponding attribute(s) in OMNI1, it follows that OMNI2 itself (that entire conjunction of attributes) is “greater” than the conjunction constituting OMNI1 – that is, that OMNI1 < OMNI2. It’s trickier when some omni-attributes increase in Anselmian excellence while others decrease (how much loss of knowledge outweighs a gain in power?), but there should also be at least some “mixed” cases in which we can say with some confidence that OMNI1 < OMNI2 overall. The moral we drew from God’s middle knowledge of Jones’s counterfactuals of freedom can now be stated as follows: Assumption 2: Given two distinct conceptions of the theistic omni-attributes, OMNI1 and OMNI2, if OMNI1 < OMNI2, then (all other things being equal) expectations1 (based on OMNI1) ≤ expectations2 (based on OMNI2). Of course it should sometimes (often?) be possible to argue that expectations1 < expectations2, and not simply that expectations1 ≤ expectations2, given further details about the conceptions of God on which these expectations are based. Again, it won’t always be possible to determine which of two distinct conceptions of the theistic omni-attributes conveys more Anselmian greatness, and Assumption 2 applies only when this is possible. So much for the effects on expectations of differing conceptions of the divine attributes. But this is relevant to the problem of evil only to the extent that it affects the gap between expectations and reality, and it will affect this gap only if changes in expectations reflecting alternative conceptions of the deity are not matched by compensating changes in how we understand reality. This result can be secured with the assumption that a fair, unbiased assessment of reality must consider the world on its own merits (and demerits), untainted by expectations regarding the sort of world God would create; that is, Assumption 3: The value of reality must be determined independently of the value of expectations. This is the principle behind blind review, whether practiced by wine critics or referees for philosophy journals, and it’s a principle that guides good reviewers even when (as is usually the case) blind review is impossible. Prejudgments are often unavoidable, but they should carry through to the final review only insofar as they are validated by the work itself. According to Assumption 3, this is no less true when the author is God and the work is the world. Pangloss’s mantra in Voltaire’s Candide, that “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds”, famously violates this principle. What makes Pangloss such an absurd figure in Voltaire’s novel is not his belief in a Leibnizian God, nor even his belief that we are living in the best of all possible worlds, either of which would have to be taken seriously if supported by argument. Rather, it’s the fact that Pangloss doesn’t really see the world around him; he sees only his expectations. This Panglossian approach doesn’t solve the problem of evil – it simply avoids it, something that none of the world’s great theistic religions can be accused of doing (see, e.g., the book of Job). These three assumptions, taken together, entail the following presumption in favor of Theistic Minimalism: Given two distinct conceptions of the theistic omni-attributes, OMNI1 and OMNI2, if OMNI1 < OMNI2, then (all other things being equal) the

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problem of evil is at least as if not more serious under OMNI2 than it is under OMNI1. What the argument for this conclusion does, in effect, is forge the following links between divine excellence and the problem of evil:

(1) As God’s excellence increases, expectations can only go up; as God’s excellence decreases, expectations can only go down. (See Assumption 2)



(2) As expectations go up, the expectations–reality gap widens; as expectations go down, the gap narrows. (See Assumption 3)



(3) As the expectations–reality gap widens, the problem of evil worsens; as the gap narrows, the problem of evil gets (relatively) easier. (See Assumption 1)

These links are not, however, as strong as they appear.

QUESTIONING ASSUMPTION 2 The problem with the first link concerns how expectations behave at the margins, when plotting them on the expectations–reality comparison scale. At the lower margin, consider a truly minimalist theism, in which the values assigned to OMNI are as low as they can go while still underwriting a passably theistic conception of God. According to Assumption 2, this should lower expectations, thereby narrowing the gap with reality. But this ignores the possibility that expectations might sink so low that we would expect God not to create a world at all: given the limited resources at his disposal, it is just too risky! This is not a merely theoretical concern. Critics of Open Theism, for example, have wondered how a perfectly good God could proceed to create a world populated with libertarianly free agents, without the guarantee provided by a knowledge of future contingent truths and, especially, of counterfactuals of freedom. Yet reality is evidently such that God did create a world. How does one plot an expectations–reality gap like this one? At the upper margin, consider an extreme version of theistic voluntarism on which God is so powerful that he can make what is now good evil and what is now evil good. There are two possible effects this might have on expectations, and neither one involves their going up, as they should under Assumption 2. If we stick with our current understanding of goodness as the standard of judgment, expectations must go down, inasmuch as we will expect a world exemplifying less goodness, so understood. Alternatively, this augmentation of OMNI might simply make expectations go haywire. (What should we expect from creation, if God has this kind of power?) This cannot be explained simply on the grounds that omnipotence is now being asked to encompass the metaphysically impossible, like God’s creating round squares or married bachelors. Even if – better, though – changing the past is conceptually incoherent, we can see how it would raise expectations if (per impossibile) it were added to God’s repertoire. We just have no idea what to think if God reversed the polarity of good and evil. Assumption 2 represents the behavior of expectations as tidier than it really is, at least at the upper and lower margins.

QUESTIONING ASSUMPTION 3 The problem with the second link is that Assumption 3, in requiring that reality be determined independently of expectations, does not rule out the possibility that

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expectations and reality are mutually dependent on some third factor – at least it shouldn’t, if it’s to constitute a plausible stricture on determinations of reality. Aesthetic appraisal provides a rich vein of examples. An adequate appraisal of a work of art depends, at least in part, on the very information about the work that also determines what we expect from the work. Philosophers of art like Kendall Walton have stressed the importance, for proper aesthetic appreciation, of the category to which a work belongs.11 Knowing that the piece I am listening to is a symphony, not an oratorio or piano concerto, helps determine not only what I expect to hear but also how I assess what I hear. (It might be a good symphony but a lousy oratorio.) Is Lars von Trier’s film Breaking the Waves a romantic comedy or a saint’s life? Realizing that it’s the latter can help couples avoid disappointment on date night, and also provide a framework for understanding the work should they choose to view it. Did someone leave a note on the refrigerator explaining why the plums are missing? Or did a poetry lover in the household attach William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just To Say” to the refrigerator door? If the latter, and I know it, I’ll expect and find something very different when I read it. And what about that ceramic piece on the wall in the Tate Modern? If it’s a urinal, it’s a complete failure; after all, it’s upside down, detached from the plumbing system, too public for anyone but an exhibitionist to use, and so on. But if it’s Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, those defects, at least, don’t count against it. Plato’s notorious critique of art in Book X of The Republic – essentially, that a painting of a bed is a failed bed – rests on his misunderstanding of what a painting is. If Plato were right, we should come to Van Gogh’s painting Bedroom at Arles with very different expectations, and come away with a very different assessment, than we actually do. Another factor that can influence our assessment of a work as well as our expectations for it is information about the work’s creator. Knowing that the symphony’s composer is Gustav Mahler primes my expectations in certain ways. One way this knowledge might affect my judgment is if the high expectations based on this knowledge simply usurp my critical faculties, short-circuiting direct consideration of the work itself: “It’s by Gustav Mahler, so it must be great!” That would be to approach Mahler’s symphony the way Pangloss approached the world. But another way this knowledge might affect my judgment is by providing me with an interpretive framework. Insofar as this framework directs my attention to stylistic and thematic elements of the work that help me make sense of what I am hearing, I might appreciate the symphony more than if that interpretive framework had been unavailable. Here the very factor (knowledge of the composer’s identity) that pushes my expectations higher than they would otherwise be also nudges my assessment of the work higher than it would otherwise be. The role of interpretive frameworks is no less significant when it comes to the problem of evil. God stands to the world as the artist stands to the work, and assessing a world is like assessing a work of art. (That’s the idea behind the aesthetic theodicy, defended by Augustine and others.) Here’s how I developed the point in another place: It is impossible to arrive at any global estimate of good/evil without relying on various background theories and commitments. How much should animal pain count in the equation? Not much, if you adopt Descartes’ mechanistic account of animals; a whole lot, perhaps even more than human pain and suffering, if you are a follower of Peter Singer. How about my pain versus the pain of others? That depends on whether you Kendall Walton, “Categories of Art”, Philosophical Review 79 (1970): 334–67.

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are an egoist or an altruist. Will pain and suffering even constitute the largest part of evil? Not if you take the Stoic view that no (real) harm can come to a good man. How about the pointlessness of so much human striving? For some this may be the chief ground of complaint against the cosmos; for Camus, on the other hand, Sisyphus is to be judged “happy”. Add to this list Cleanthes’ cheerful optimism, Philo’s sober realism, Victorian sentimentalism, postmodern transgressivism, the theories of de Sade v. Masoch . . . It is unreasonable in the extreme, and will surely never be acceptable to the theist, to allow [our assessment of reality] to be influenced by any of the items on this list, but not at all by theistic frameworks like Thomism, Molinism, Calvinism, and so on. But this means that the very concept of God which determines [expectations] might also contribute to the interpretive framework by which [the assessment of reality] is established.12 If the “primary and overriding purpose [of creation] is not immediate pleasure but the realizing of the most valuable potentialities of human personality”,13 as John Hick has argued, we will expect the world to be a vale of soul-making, and our assessment of reality will attend to very different facts about it than if we expected a hedonistic paradise. If expectations and reality can both vary in response to a third factor, this leaves open the possibility that an elevated conception of the divine attributes might produce a rise in expectations which is more than matched by a rise in our assessment of reality. Stopping to observe a chess game in a local park, the level of play I expect to see from the bearded but boyish-looking thirty-year-old to my left shoots up stratospherically when I learn that it’s Danish grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, visiting a friend who lives in the neighborhood. If this jump in expectations leaves my assessment of his play unaffected, a yawning expectations–reality gap should open up, since I hadn’t noticed anything remarkable about his play during the two minutes I’d been watching, and his opponent had just taken his queen. But of course that does not happen; instead, I now look for, and perhaps find (depending on how knowledgeable I am about chess), evidence that Carlsen’s queen sacrifice is only tightening the net around his opponent. What is happening in this example is that I must determine reality from a position of limited knowledge, and changes in knowledge will often lead to changes in both my perception of reality and my expectations. When the hypothesized excellences of the person whose behavior is being assessed are increased, this will certainly not reduce a problematic gap between expectations and reality from the expectations end (expectations, in this case, can only go up); but it might reduce it from the reality end. Make the chess player more skillful, and this might help me see, even if I can’t fully understand, how his moves constitute a winning line of play (where “winning” is defined in terms of the game of chess). Make OMNI more impressive, and this might help me see, even if I can’t fully understand, how God’s arrangement of conditions in the actual world constitutes a winning line of play (where “winning” is defined in terms of the ends of a supremely good creator).

David Hunt, “Evil and Theistic Minimalism”, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 49 (2001): 133– 54, 146f. 13 John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978), 258. 12

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QUESTIONING ASSUMPTION 1 Finally, does the problem of evil always worsen when the expectations–reality gap widens, as Assumption 1 maintains? Not necessarily: there is more than one way to understand what is problematic about a particular expectations–reality gap, and the argument for Theistic Minimalism elides the difference between these understandings. Let’s shift from chess to weight-lifting for our next example. A contestant in a weight-lifting competition completes a clean and jerk of 150 kilograms. Checking the program, I see that it’s Hans, who was expected to lift closer to 180 kilograms. That is quite a shortfall, and it is puzzling. But then Franz, who is expected to lift around 200 kilograms, comes on the stage and also manages only 150 kilograms. That’s a yet more striking shortfall. Is the problem it poses also more puzzling? That depends on how we measure problems. Since the problem at hand is one of excess (unused) lifting capacity, it’s natural to make this the measure and to think of Franz’s performance as being even more problematic than Hans’s, inasmuch as it exhibits more of this excess capacity. But suppose the best solution to the Hans problem, offering the best explanation of why he did so poorly, is that he was bribed to underperform by another contestant. If the same explanation is equally available and equally adequate to account for the shortfall in Franz’s performance, then there is a very good sense in which neither case is more (or less) problematic than the other. Franz’s underperformance is more sizable, but it isn’t for that reason more puzzling. The God of the Open Theists occupies the position of Hans, and the God of the Molinists the position of Franz. (In such company, Zeus would be the 90-pound weakling who defies all expectations and manages to lift 150 kilograms as well!) Solving the problem of evil for the God of Open Theism is already so difficult that any solution, supposing one to exist, might turn out to be adequate for the God of Molinism as well – in which case evil would provide no ground for preferring the former over the latter. The Openist God, omniscient with respect to the past and present, had more than enough knowledge to save Sanders’ brother. He had more than enough knowledge to save my nephew, who was born with cancer and spent the entirety of his one year on Earth dying of it. But God didn’t save Sanders’ brother, and he didn’t save my nephew. Why not? Perhaps he doesn’t exist; but if he does exist, there must be a reason why he didn’t intervene. What is that reason? Whatever it is, it’s not that God lacked the middle knowledge, or the knowledge of future contingent truths, that would have enabled him to prevent these deaths. Since it’s hard to know what this reason could possibly be, let’s call it “X”. Then we can say that the problem of evil is less serious for the Openist God than it is for the Molinist God only if X – the reason why the God of Open Theism allowed Sanders’ brother and my nephew to die – cannot provide a reason why the Molinist God would allow them to die. It is hard to see what can be said on behalf of this suggestion. (One thing that makes it hard, of course, is that we have no idea what X is!) The Open Theist can certainly claim (and he might be right) that he faces a smaller expectations–reality gap than the Molinist. But this favors the God of Open Theism only if the solution required to close this gap is not also sufficient to close the larger gap confronting the Molinist, and this would require additional argument that no one (to my knowledge) has successfully provided. This problem may be easier to solve for Zeus; but it is not clear that it is easier to solve for a minimalist God who is at least big enough to qualify as the God of theism.

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CONCLUSION The problem of evil is manageable for Zeus, and it’s manageable because Zeus’s goodness, power, and knowledge fall so far short of Anselmian greatness. That is surely indisputable. What’s less certain is whether the problem of evil always varies in its seriousness in direct proportion to divine excellence. Theistic Minimalism proposes that it does, but the argument for this thesis fails, in sum, at three points: (1) even when expectations change in response to changes in OMNI, they might not change in ways that make the new expectations–reality gap comparable to the old gap (as when, e.g., divine risk-taking becomes an issue); (2) even if the gaps are comparable, a rise in expectations might not generate a wider gap (given that the theistic theory-adjustment driving the rise in expectations might also have consequences for how reality is assessed); and (3) even if the expectations–reality gap does widen, the problem of evil might not worsen, since the wider gap might be amenable to the same range of solutions as the smaller gap. This isn’t to say that there won’t be cases in which the problem of evil is harder because the ante for divine excellence has been raised. But even if this is often so, it isn’t always so. Theological theory-construction cannot be guided by a simplistic rule here.

FURTHER READING Hasker, William. Providence, Evil and the Openness of God. London: Routledge, 2004. Plantinga, Alvin. God, Freedom, and Evil. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1977. White, Heath. Fate and Free Will: A Defense of Theological Determinism. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020. Dilley, Frank B. “A Finite God Reconsidered”. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 47 (February 2000): 29–41. Sanders, John. The God Who Risks: A Theology of Divine Providence. Revised edition. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2007.

Chapter 55

Skeptical Theism DANIEL SPEAK

Here is a natural thought: if there is a God roughly like the one envisioned by traditional theists (a maximally powerful and benevolent creator and sustainer of the universe, let’s say), then there is bound to be a wide epistemic gulf between human beings and this God. On the assumption that God exists, that is, we should expect the ordinary cognitive limitations of human beings to impose deep constraints upon what these human beings could come to understand about God and divine purposes in the created order. Further, this natural thought seems to be underwritten not by unwarranted overreach but rather by an attractive form of intellectual humility. Skeptical theism is a philosophically defensive posture that seeks to leverage this natural thought into a forceful response to particular versions of the argument from evil for atheism. Put tersely, the strategy is to show that such atheistic arguments fail to mind the cognitive gap when they insist on a confident judgment regarding the absence of reasons for divine permission of some evils. Thus, the skeptical theist is not skeptical about theism but instead about the ability of human beings to understand and appreciate the full panoply of reasons that God may have for allowing the horrors that our world clearly contains. Given its popularity among many contemporary philosophers of religion confronting the problem of evil, and given some vocal opposition to its popularity among others, the skeptical theistic strategy deserves particular attention in this volume. The central purpose of this entry, then, is to contextualize the defensive posture and explain its content and appeal. We will conclude, all too briefly, by recognizing some of the most important challenges facing the skeptical theistic position.

SKEPTICAL THEISM IN CONTEXT Doubt about the human ability fully (or even substantially) to grasp the intentions and machinations of God have a long and venerable tradition, with echoes of the prophet Isaiah reverberating through religious intellectual history: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways”, declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”1 Whether in God’s confrontation of Job from the whirlwind, in the impulse toward the via negativa of medieval theology (and beyond), in the broader skeptical elements of

1

Isa. 55:8-9 (NIV).

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early modern thought, or in ordinary religious piety, it has not been difficult to uncover an intellectual respect for the vast difference between human beings and God – a vast difference taken to have profound epistemic implications.2 Presumably, it is also no accident that our sensitivity to these implications has been commonly piqued by our experience with various forms of innocent suffering. As a contemporary argumentative strategy, however, skeptical theism has sought to put these putative implications to work in a rather specific context – a context with which we need to familiarize ourselves before we are able to understand and appreciate the strategy itself. About forty years ago, as logical versions of the argument from evil for atheism were being confronted by powerful objections, evidential versions of the argument from evil began to take root among analytic philosophers of religion.3 The central thought was this: even if the general existence of suboptimality cannot be shown to be strictly inconsistent with the existence of God, the kinds or amounts or distributions of suboptimality can nevertheless be shown to be strong evidence that God does not exist. William Rowe’s seminal article “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism” can reasonably be taken to be the headwaters of the flow, from the later part of the last century up to the present day, of new efforts to demonstrate that the existence of evil in certain of its concrete forms counts against the existence of God even if it does not render theism formally incoherent.4 Though this influential essay introduced Rowe’s central strategy, it was redeveloped and redeployed in many others, giving us, in point of fact, a family of evidential arguments rather than a single canonical account. Still, given the strong family resemblances among them, it won’t do too much harm to our contextualization of the skeptical theistic response to treat Rowe’s contribution to the contemporary debate as single line of reasoning. Rowe’s argument is based on the supposed existence of what have come to be known as “gratuitous evils”. What makes an occurrence a gratuitous evil is, roughly, that it is an instance of intense suffering that makes no essential contribution to a greater good or to the obstruction of a worse evil. Put another way, the gratuitousness of an evil is a matter of its serving no necessary purpose that could function as a moral justification for its divine permission. If an evil is gratuitous, then an omnipotent and omnibenevolent being lacks a morally justifying reason for allowing it to occur. With this account in place, it is not hard to feel the force of the evidential argument from gratuitous evils, which runs as follows:

1. If God exists, there are no gratuitous evils.



2. There are gratuitous evils.



3. Therefore, probably there is no such being as God.5

For treatment of some of this intellectual history, especially with regard to its import for skeptical theism, see Justin McBrayer, “Skeptical Theism: An Historical View”, in The History of Evil, Volume 6, Evil From the Mid20th Century to Today, ed. Jerome Gellman, Chad Meister, Charles Taliaferro (New York: Routledge Press, 2018), 45–58. 3 For appreciation of the logical problem of evil and the objections to it that ultimately provoked the development of evidential versions, see Chapter 2 of Daniel Speak, The Problem of Evil (Malden: Polity Press, 2014). 4 William Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism”, American Philosophical Quarterly 16, no.4 (1979): 335. 5 Why only “probably” in this conclusion about God’s existence? Because the support for premise 2, as we will soon see, is inductive. Thus, the conclusion will have to be probabilistic. 2

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The first premise is intuitively compelling. While a maximally good and powerful being might have to allow some evils, it is plausible that such a being would do so only with sufficient moral justification. If there is a sufficient moral justification for permitting a particular instance of evil, then it is, by definition, not a gratuitous one. Thus, we can be confident that there will be no gratuitous evils in a world overseen by God. Here it is worth marking that most critics of Rowe’s argument have accepted this theological premise, saving their complaints (as does the skeptical theist) for the second, empirical premise.6 Rowe motivates this second crucial premise by way of appeal to specific concrete cases. The two cases that have come to be nearly canonical are these: E1: A fawn is trapped in a forest fire that was started by a random lightning strike. It is badly burned but is not immediately killed. Instead, the fawn lies in excruciating pain on the forest floor for a number of days until it finally succumbs to the trauma of its wounds. E2: A five-year-old girl in Flint, Michigan, is brutally beaten, raped, and strangled to death by her mother’s boyfriend on New Year’s Day, 1986.7 How E1 and E2 are supposed to support Rowe’s claim that there are, indeed, gratuitous evils is crucial to our context for the skeptical theistic reply. This is because Rowe uses these concrete cases to support a kind of inductive strategy to get to the second premise of his argument. Notice that Rowe has carefully selected these cases in large part because of how extraordinarily implausible it would be to appeal to standard modes of theodicy to justify God’s permission of them. A free-will theodicy, for example, seems to be a nonstarter, both because the fawn’s situation doesn’t seem to involve any serious free will and because the boyfriend’s free will won’t strike us as nearly valuable enough to allow his horrendous actions. Similarly, a soul-making theodicy will seem to fall desperately flat because we are at a loss to see how this could be relevant to the fawn’s situation in E1 and because, again, whatever possibilities for soul-making that might exist in E2 simply do not seem weighty enough to justify the permission of the young girl’s suffering. Given these points, Rowe enjoins us to consider the following kind of inductive reasoning. When we think as hard as we can about what could justify God in permitting E1 and E2, we come up empty. We can’t come up with any good reasons that God could have for allowing these events to occur (again, holding fixed omnipotence and omnibenevolence). Further, from the fact that, try as we might, we can’t come up with any even prima facie and minimally plausible reasons for God to permit these horrors – and here’s the crucial step – we should inductively infer that there probably are no such reasons. That is, Rowe urges us to make the following inference: From (A) We are unable to identify any morally justifying reasons for God’s permission of E1 and E2.

Of course, not all critics of Rowe’s argument have accepted the theological premise. Peter van Inwagen, for example, has objected to it. See his The Problem of Evil (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), especially 98–112. 7 E1 is an imaginative construction but E2 is based on an actual newspaper account. Rowe emphasizes that we have every reason to believe that cases like these are ubiquitous. 6

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Infer (B) There probably are no morally justifying reasons for God’s permission of E1 and E2. For ease of reference, we can call this inferential move from (A) to (B) Rowe’s Inference. And it should now be clear how Rowe comes to the second premise of his argument. After all, (B) is equivalent to this premise – since, if there are no morally justifying reasons for the permission of E1 and E2, then these evils are gratuitous in the relevant sense. Thus, the force of the second premise of Rowe’s argument turns essentially on whether Rowe’s Inference is a good one. And here we have reached the base soil of skeptical theism; because, at this ground level, what the skeptical theist is principally skeptical about is the legitimacy of Rowe’s Inference. Memorably, Stephen Wykstra has characterized Rowe’s crucial move as a form of “noseeum” reasoning, since the idea is that with such inferences we conclude that particular items are not present in virtue of the fact they have not been perceived.8 We do not see them; therefore, they probably are not there. Further, we should be clear that there are, indeed, good noseeum inferences – cases in which it is perfectly legitimate to infer that something is not present from its not presenting itself to an observer. For example, we will have no serious complaint about a professor’s judgment that, in virtue of seeing no full-sized horse in her classroom, there is no full-sized horse in her classroom. Similarly, it seems quite reasonable to conclude that I have no further move to make in a game of tic-tac-toe on the basis of my seeing no further move that I can make. However, it is also clear that there are many cases of objectionable noseeum reasoning. The fact that the professor sees no germs in her classroom does not give her any reason to conclude that there are no germs. And the fact that I (a mere novice) do not see the strategic advantage a chess master has achieved by sacrificing her queen gives me no good reason to conclude that there is no such advantage. According to the skeptical theistic response to Rowe-style evidential arguments, then, the crucial question is whether Rowe’s Inference is a good bit of noseeum reasoning or a bad one. It is probably fairly clear why the skeptical theist is inclined to judge it to be a case of bad noseeum reasoning. When such reasoning is legitimate, as in the cases of the horse in the classroom and the move in tic-tac-toe, we are confident that the observer has what it takes, in the context, to succeed in identifying such things as horses and available moves in a simple game. That is, we confidently judge that the following is true of the observer: if the unseen object had been present, then it is very likely that the observer would have seen it. Or, to put it negatively, we judge it to be false that, had the object been present, appearances would have remained the same. When we move to the germs or chess move case, however, the parallel judgments do not seem at all reasonable. That is, we do not think that, had there in fact been germs in the classroom, the professor would very likely have seen them. And, given my chess limitations, it is very tempting to suspect that if the chess master did, in fact, have excellent strategic reasons for sacrificing her queen, things would look the same to me as they do in the case where there is no strategic advantage. Wykstra tells us that this terminology comes from its use among US Midwesterners to identify “tiny flies which, while having a painful bite, are so small you ‘no see um’”. See Stephen Wykstra, “Rowe’s Noseeum Arguments from Evil”, in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 126–50.

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In these cases, we do not think that the observers have what it takes to be properly discerning regarding the objects in question. To this point, the skeptical maneuver has been expressed as something of a negative impulse toward epistemic humility in this domain – an impulse that drives the skeptical theist to resist Rowe’s Inference. But we can do better than this, since skeptical theists have, in fact, attempted to specify heir central claims and defend them in various ways worthy of note. The skeptical theist is not, after all, simply rejecting a particular claim but offering a positive thesis (or collection of theses) that she endorses. There have been a number of efforts to characterize this collection of theses but we can make a decent start by identifying the skeptical theist’s Claim9 thusly: STC: It is reasonable to be in doubt about whether the value of the states of affairs that we know to be connected to evil events (like E1 and E2) are representative of the values of the states of affairs actually connected to these events.10 If one has good grounds for accepting STC, one will also have good grounds for being suspicious of Rowe’s Inference.

JUSTIFYING SKEPTICAL THEISM: ANALOGIES, LIMITATIONS, PRINCIPLES Do we have good reason to adopt skeptical theism? In particular, do we have good reason to accept the principle, STC, that we have characterized as the central distinctive claim of the skeptical theist? Strategies of justification here have been diverse. In fact, we have already had occasion to see the outlines of a couple of them in the context of our initial presentation. As our chess master example illustrates, appeals to analogy have played a crucial role in justifying skeptical theism. The parent analogy has been most common, but cases of special expertise are almost nearly as common. The idea here is clear enough. Every parent has had the experience of having to subject a child to a treatment or discipline, the justification of which is beyond the capacity of the child to fully (or even partially) understand. Similarly, each of us has come to see, in some domain or other, that a scientific expert or strategic gaming genius or the like can have reasons for her actions that are beyond our local purview at a given time. To the degree, then, that – in relation to God – human beings are taken to be like young children in relation to a mature parent or like mere novices in relation to an expert, the central skeptical claim will get some traction. In a similar spirit, many skeptical theists have appealed directly to intuitions about human cognitive limitations.11 In some cases, the focus here has been upon the boundaries of perspective, as in the case of the germs in the classroom. Human capacities may not be up to the task because the domain is too vast for them. In others, the focus is upon the complexities facing any human agent trying to make the kinds of judgments To be clear, this purports to be the skeptical theist’s distinctively skeptical claim. Of course, the skeptical theist is also a theist and, therefore, also endorses the claim that God exists. 10 This formulation owes debts both to Mike Bergmann, “Skeptical Theism and the Problem of Evil”, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology, ed. Thomas Flint and Michael Rea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 374–99 and to Perry Hendricks, “Skeptical Theism Proved”, TAPA 6, no. 2 (2019): 264–74. 11 For a widely repeated list of the kinds of limitations mentioned here, see William Alston, “The Inductive Argument from Evil and the Human Cognitive Condition”, Philosophical Perspectives 5 (1991): 29–67. 9

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that Rowe-style reasoning requires us to make. In more pointed cases, philosophers have attempted to animate the skepticism by emphasizing specific potential limitations regarding, for example, our ability to make reliable modal judgments of the cosmic variety required by Rowe’s argument (e.g., that it was possible for God to make a world that contained creatures like us but that did not also contain a long and bloody history of Darwinian predation) or about our ability to make reliable value judgments about the comparative value of possible worlds very different from the actual world (e.g., that a world containing stable natural laws and the suffering ours contains is better than a world with less suffering and massive irregularities among the laws).12 Perhaps the most influential defenses of skeptical theism – defenses that also invoke a number of the foregoing considerations – have attempted to show that doubt about Rowe’s Inference is supported by some independently plausible epistemic principle. Stephen Wykstra, for example, has been defending some or another version of his CORNEA principle (Condition Of ReasoNable Epistemic Access) for more than three decades.13 According to this principle, roughly put, a person is entitled to infer that “there is no x” from the fact that she sees no x only if it is reasonable for this person to believe the following: if there had been an x present, then she would probably have seen it. Once this principle is accepted, the skeptical theist then insists that the necessary condition has not been met in the context of evidential argument. That is, she argues that there is no particular reason to be confident that, had there been a good reason for God to permit E1 and E2, we would probably have recognized it. Michael Bergmann has defended another kind of epistemic principle in defense of the skeptical theistic strategy.14 Like CORNEA, it seeks to identify a necessary condition for a good inductive inference of the kind Rowe’s argument requires. According to Bergmann, legitimate inductive inferences of this kind depend upon justified confidence that our inductive sample is representative. That is, we can properly infer that there are no values (whether pursuit-worthy goods or avoidance-worthy evils) that justify God in permitting E1 and E2 from our inability to ascertain any such values only if we are rightly confident that the values accessible to us are representative of the values there are. With this principle in place, the skeptical theist insists, once again, that this necessary condition has not been met in the context of the evidential argument. That is, she argues that there is no particular reason to suppose that the values that are accessible to human beings are representative of the values there actually are.

AN ARGUMENT FOR THE CENTRAL SKEPTICAL THESIS Despite the decades of important work on the skeptical theistic strategy of response to the evidential problem of evil, including the interventions we have just enunciated, no formal argument for the central skeptical thesis (STC) had been offered – that is, until quite recently. Perry Hendricks has developed a positive argument for STC that is worthy

The modal and moral skepticism glossed here is borrowed from van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil. Stephen Wykstra, “The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: On Avoiding the Evils of ‘Appearance’”, IJPR 16 (1984): 73–93. 14 Bergmann, “Skeptical Theism and the Problem of Evil”. 12 13

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of our attention.15 This argument, which Hendricks calls “the Preclusion Argument” depends on three principles that we can gloss like this:16 Connection: If S knows nothing significant about a state of affairs, then the value of the state of affairs is inscrutable to S. Event: For any event E, it is reasonable for S to be in doubt about whether E is connected to states of affairs about which S knows nothing significant. Preclusion: If it is reasonable for S to be in doubt about whether E is connected to states of affairs the value of which are inscrutable to S, then it is reasonable for S to be in doubt about whether the value of the states of affairs S knows to be connected to E are representative of the values of the states of affairs that are actually connected to E. With these principles in place, the first premise of Hendricks’ argument follows from Connection and Event taken together: (1’) For any event E, it is reasonable for S to be in doubt about whether E is connected to states of affairs, the value of which are inscrutable to S (from Connection and Event). The second premise is the Preclusion claim: (2’) If it is reasonable for S to be in doubt about whether E is connected to states of affairs the value of which are inscrutable to S, then it is reasonable for S to be in doubt about whether the value of the states of affairs S knows to be connected to E are representative of the values of the states of affairs that are actually connected to E (Preclusion). This gives us the conclusion: (3’) It is reasonable for S to be in doubt about whether the value of the states of affairs S knows to be connected to E are representative of the values of the states of affairs that are actually connected to E (from (1’) and (2’)). And now it should be clear that this conclusion, applied specifically to Rowe’s E1 and E2 for us, just is our core skeptical thesis: STC: It is reasonable to be in doubt about whether the value of the states of affairs that we know to be connected to evil events (like E1 and E2) are representative of the values of the states of affairs actually connected to these events. Thus, Hendricks has either usefully gone beyond the intuitions and analogies that have been animating theistic attraction to STC or has regimented them in a way that appears to add force to the central skeptical claim. The Preclusion Argument, together with one or another of the epistemic principles developed by Wyskstra and Bergmann, contributes to a fairly tight defense of the rejection of Rowe’s Inference. From this point of view, resistance to the evidential argument from gratuitous evils can look to be quite reasonable.

Hendricks, “Skeptical Theism Proved”. I have taken some liberties with the formulations of these principles both for ease of expression and to connect the conclusion specifically to my formulation of STC.

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DISSATISFACTION WITH SKEPTICAL THEISM A number of objections have been raised to skeptical theism, nevertheless – too many, indeed, to do much more than canvas their basic outlines. One unifying theme among many of the concerns is skeptical expansion. Many opponents of skeptical theism have suggested that the skepticism cannot be kept within the narrow limits the theist will insist upon. For example, some have argued that the skeptical theist’s skepticism will open the door for a quite broad and radical form of doubt about our knowledge of the external world on the order of Cartesian Skepticism17 – or, in a similar spirit, at least of doubt regarding much of our ordinary knowledge.18 Less expansively, but still with considerable breadth, others have argued that the skepticism will infect the forms of reasoning that have traditionally supported theism. In other words, they claim that principled doubt about the crucial premise of Rowe’s argument will have to extend to doubt about the premises of cosmological and fine-tuning arguments that purport to provide support for the claim that God exists. Or perhaps such doubts will have to extend to central claims of religious life – for example, that God wants what is best for one, that God can be trusted, and so on.19 Such doubts, as critics have pointed out, could seriously threaten the integrity of religious life. Perhaps the most common and forceful worries about skeptical expansion, however, concern the domain of morality. At the level of theory, some have insisted that a consistent application of the skeptical principle would involve unlimited openness to the possibility that any evil event can be counterbalanced by a greater good; and a commitment to such openness would amount to a commitment to consequentialism in our moral theory. This would surely be an unhappy result for the vast majority of theists who are characteristically (though by no means universally) averse to consequentialism. More pointedly, at the level of moral practice, the opponents of skeptical theism have argued that a form of moral stultification will be generated by a commitment to the skeptical theistic outlook. For any supposedly morally worthy act (whether, say, telling the truth or saving a drowning child or helping a friend move) the very same considerations that undergird doubt about the gratuitousness of evils will also support doubt about whether the act is, in point of fact, a morally worthy one.20 In short, what such critics allege is that the moral life requires us to have confidence, at one point or another, in the legitimacy of noseeum inferences precisely like the ones that the skeptical theist insists on challenging. Proponents of skeptical theism have developed rich and detailed responses to these concerns, at the heart of which are various efforts to demonstrate that any untoward

Bruce Russell, “Defenseless”, in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 193–206 and Justin McBrayer, “CORNEA and Inductive Evidence”, Faith and Philosophy 26. no.1 (2009): 77. 18 Ian Wilks, “Skeptical Theism and Empirical Unfalsifiability”, Faith and Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2009): 64. 19 Ian Wilks, “The Structure of the Contemporary Debate on the Problem of Evil”, Religious Studies 40, no. 3 (2004): 307. Stephen Maitzen, “The Moral Skepticism Objection to Skeptical Theism”, in The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil, ed. Justin McBrayer and Daniel Howard-Snyder (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 444–57. 20 Michael Almeida and Graham Oppy, “Sceptical Theism and Evidential Arguments from Evil”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81, no. 4 (2003): 496. Daniel Howard-Snyder, “Epistemic Humility, Arguments from Evil, and Moral Skepticism”, in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, vol 2, ed. Jonathan Kvanvig (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1–35. William Hasker, “All Too Skeptical Theism”, IJPR 68, no. 1 (2010): 15–29. 17

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skeptical expansion could not be the result of the limited epistemic humility enshrined in resistance to Rowe’s Inference.21 If worries about skeptical expansion are aimed at undermining the case against Rowe’s Inference, another family of responses proceeds by granting the legitimacy of resistance to the crucial noseeum inference. Proponents of this brand of response attempt to restrict the reach of skeptical theism by insisting that the evidential argument for atheism can succeed even if the inductive inference is rejected. Consider, for central example, the commonsense atheist. What the common-sense atheist claims is that her confidence in the empirical premise of the evidential argument (the premise asserting that there are gratuitous evils) is grounded not in the problematic inductive inference but rather in a direct recognition of the gratuitousness of evils like E1 and E2. That is, he claims that we can see directly – by immediate common-sense – that there can be no good reason for God to permit either the fawn’s suffering or the suffering of the little girl in Flint, Michigan. To the degree that this reasoning is forceful, skeptical theistic humility will simply be bypassed, demonstrating that a commitment to STC does not undermine Rowe-style evidential arguments. The temptation to be in doubt about the purported seemings of the common-sense atheist may be strong.22 In part, this is likely because the seemings in question have a kind of abstraction or attenuation to them. What the common-sense atheist claims is not just that the perceived events appear to have a certain singular property – like a particular color or truth-value or moral valence. What he claims to observe directly in the relevant event is the property of being such that a morally perfect and omnipotent creator and sustainer of the universe could not possibly have a good reason to permit it. Doubt about such observability may be reasonable. In any case, it appears to be an open question just how much leverage common-sense atheism can get against skeptical theism. Continuing with concerns regarding the reach of the skeptical theistic strategy, the abductive atheist insists that evidential arguments from evil need not rely on a noseeum inference even if an inference is involved. As Paul Draper has emphasized in a series of important papers, a powerful evidential argument can be grounded in a form of inference to the best explanation that at least purports to bypass the strategy of leveraging STC. With a tip of his cap to Hume, Draper develops the strategy of comparing the explanatory power of theism with an alternative and incompatible thesis, which he calls “the hypothesis of indifference”. According to this hypothesis, the structure of the world with respect to the effects of pain and suffering is not due to any intentional actions of non-human persons. What needs explaining, according to Draper, is not just the amount and kind of pain and suffering the world contains but also how it appears to be distributed – namely, more or less willy-nilly. It is not as if suffering serves only to help organisms flourish biologically, nor does it befall only those who are morally bad. Indeed, how organisms (including human persons) suffer seems to bear no interesting probability relationship to moral qualities at all. In short, then, what needs explaining is that suffering and pain do not seem to be distributed in such a way as always to contribute either

See Bergmann, “Skeptical Theism and the Problem of Evil”; Howard-Snyder, “Epistemic Humility, Arguments from Evil, and Moral Skepticism”; Michael Rea, “Skeptical Theism and the ‘Too-Much-Skepticism’ Objection”, in The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil, ed. Justin McBrayer and Daniel Howard-Snyder (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 482–506. 22 For development of such doubts, see Perry Hendricks, “How to be a Skeptical Theist and a Commonsense Epistemologist”, Faith and Philosophy 35, no. 3 (2018): 345–55. 21

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to biological or moral well-being. Further, Draper claims, on theism we would expect suffering to be distributed so as to contribute in one of these two ways. By contrast, there would be no particular reason to expect this distribution on the hypothesis of indifference. Put slightly more formally, Draper claims that the probability of this distribution of pain and suffering is lower on theism than it is on the hypothesis of indifference. If this is right, then the distribution is evidence against theism. This abductive version of the argument purports to reach the same evidential conclusion as Rowe’s inductive argument (that the world’s evil is evidence against theism) but without the controversial noseeum move. One line of reply to this abductive species of the evidential argument involves seeking to identify some surreptitious way in which, appearances notwithstanding, it depends upon the kind of illicit inference that STC is tailor-made to undermine.23 Another is to argue that while the distribution is evidence against simple theism, it is not evidence against a more subtle form of theism that predicts our observations of pain and suffering just as well as the hypothesis of indifference. The dispute here is complex, involving extremely delicate evaluation of the nature of evidence and confirmation.24 A final (for our purposes) species of concern with skeptical theism has to do with its implications across possible worlds, possibly leading to a reductio ad absurdum. As Rowe himself, among others, has pointed out, the claim that a commitment to something like STC undermines the force of the inductive argument from evil appears to entail that almost no amount or kind of evil could ever count as evidence against theism. Consider, for example, a world in which sentient beings come into existence for only twenty minutes, during which they experience only excruciating pain (say, as for a woman during un-anesthetized breach childbirth), and after which they simply pass out of existence. Many will be powerfully inclined to conclude that, if such a world were actual, the suffering in it would be very good evidence that there is no God. What the critic of skeptical theism can point out here, however, is that the skeptical strategy should be just as effective here as in the actual world. That is, given STC, it seems we should consider it inscrutable whether God could have a good reason to allow the grotesque and (nearly) transparently pointless evils in this world. Thus, to the degree that one is tempted to conclude that the evils of the purely painful world would be evidence against the existence of God, one also has reason to be suspicious of skeptical theism. Though the skeptical theist could, of course, bite the bullet here and simply accept that even the suffering of the purely painful world is no evidence against theism, another route of response would be to reconsider what Dougherty has usefully characterized as the skeptical theist’s “No Weight Thesis”, according to which evil makes no contribution at all to the disconfirmation of theism.25 Since there are unpleasant consequences for both of these responses, this reductio ad absurdum argument against skeptical theism continues to have force.

For a reply, see section 6.1 of Trent Dougherty, “Skeptical Theism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2014, https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/entries​/skeptical​-theism/. 24 For some of the delicacy, see the essays by Timothy Perrine and Stephen Wykstra (“Skeptical Theism, Abductive Atheology, and Theory Versioning”), Paul Draper (“Meet the New Skeptical Theism, Same as the Old Skeptical Theism”) and Lara Buchak (“Learning Not to be Naïve: A Comment on the Exchange between Perrine/Wykstra and Draper”) all in Skeptical Theism: New Essays, ed. Trent Dougherty and Justin McBrayer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Mathew Benton, John Hawthorne, and Yoaav Isaacs, “Evil and Evidence”, Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 7 (2016): 1–31. 25 Dougherty, “Skeptical Theism” (section 1.2). 23

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CONCLUSION The intellectual humility enshrined in the philosophical dispositions of the skeptical theist is not without its attractions. Given the traditional concept of God, the existence of an apparently relevant epistemic chasm between the human and the divine is all but inevitable. The central question facing both proponents and opponents of skeptical theism is whether this inevitable chasm can be put to good use in defending the rationality of theistic belief in the face of evidential arguments from evil.26

FURTHER READING Bergmann, Michael. “Skeptical Theism and the Problem of Evil”. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology. Edited by Thomas Flint and Michael Rea, 374–99. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Dougherty, Trent. “Skeptical Theism”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2014, https:// plato​.stanford​.edu​/entries​/skeptical​-theism/. Dougherty, Trent and Justin McBrayer, eds. Skeptical Theism: New Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. McBrayer, Justin. “Skeptical Theism: An Historical View”. In The History of Evil, Volume 6, Evil From the Mid-20th Century to Today. Edited by Jerome Gellman, Chad Meister, and Charles Taliaferro, 45–58. New York: Routledge Press, 2018. Wilks, Ian. “The Structure of the Contemporary Debate on the Problem of Evil”. Religious Studies 40, no. 3 (2004): 307–21.

For fruitful conversations about the issues addressed in this chapter, I thank Tom Crisp and Gregg Ten Elshof. Further thanks are due to Manuel Vargas for comments on an earlier draft.

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Chapter 56

Anti-Theodicies STEPHEN TORR

INTRODUCTION Inevitably, when a term is prefixed with “anti”, the definition of the term is going to depend on how one defines what the “anti” is rejecting. In this case, what is being rejected is theodicy as a response to the so-called problem of evil and suffering. I describe the problem as “so-called” because, arguably, it is not clear that there is a singular problem to which all can respond. This chapter will focus on responses that conclude that not only is the best response not one of theodicy but that the very presence of a theodicy makes the situation/s in question worse. The chapter will be divided into three sections: the first will provide definitions of relevant terms exploring the key critiques anti-theodicists level at theodicies; the second will outline responses to evil and suffering proposed by antitheodicists, noting some possible problems with them; the third will offer suggestions for further exploration.

WHY REJECT THEODICIES? In order to map anti-theodicy responses, some general definition of theodicy is required. Zachary Braiterman, one of the first to use the term “anti-theodicy”, defines theodicy – from the Greek theos (god) and dikē (justice) – as “any attempt to justify, explain, or find acceptable meaning to the relationship that subsists between God (or some other form of ultimate reality), evil, and suffering”.1 In this chapter, “theodicy” is understood to include what Michael Peterson has categorized as theodicy and defense. Peterson states that a defense proposes “merely possible reasons God might have for permitting evil, a theodicy seeks to articulate plausible or credible explanations that rest on theistic truths and insights”.2 The key issue for anti-theodicists is the issue of justification and explanation rather than proof of actualization and so the two approaches can be addressed together here. In contrast to theodicy, Braiterman defines anti-theodicy as “refusing to justify, explain, or accept that relationship”.3 An “anti-theodicy” does not simply refer to a single unified

Zachary Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 4. 2 Michael Peterson, God and Evil: An Introduction to the Issues (Oxford: Westview Press, 1998), 85. See also, Sarah Pinnock, Beyond Theodicy: Jewish and Christian Continental Thinkers Respond to the Holocaust (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 3. 3 Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz, 4. For more detail regarding influences on Braiterman’s development of the term “antitheodicy”, see 4 n. 3 of the same work. 1

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response to evil and suffering that rejects theodicy but is an umbrella term that describes a variety of approaches to evil and suffering that have rejected the theodic approach. Rather than trying to find the flaws in such a solution with a view to presenting a more robust alternative, “[a]n ‘antitheodicy’ . . . aims to show that all theodicies are by nature defective in some important respects, and that these are not the kinds of deficiencies that could be remedied if only we knew more about, say, God’s intentions or the workings of the world”.4 Proponents of anti-theodicies thus reject all and any attempt at theodicy, seeing the various projects as contributing to suffering rather than alleviating it. But how are theodicies thought to do this? Generally, theodicies are underpinned with a “greater good” foundation. This means that they seek to “argue that any evil present in the world is ultimately necessary, from God’s point of view, for the production of some greater good that would not be possible without this evil”.5 The first objection is therefore born out of a moral discomfort at justifying experiences of evil and suffering alongside belief in an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God by appeal to a greater good that is thereby achieved. Although there may be some instances where the suffering encountered may pale into insignificance compared to the good achieved because of it, not all suffering has such positive outcomes and many occurrences of suffering, at face value at least, are gratuitous and destructive.6 If the objection to this is that we do not have God’s perspective on the merits of the situation,7 then the response would be that this neither proves nor disproves the argument. And, given the commonplace negative categorization of such situations where greater goods seem unlikely, by humans who are considered to be made in the image of God and who retain, even in spite of sin, some sense of a divinely created moral compass, the burden of proof must surely rest with the theodicist.8 A further moral objection is that if occurrences of evil and suffering are understood to enable a greater good, can they continue to be labeled as evil and suffering? At best, such a view justifies the unjustifiable occurrences of evil and suffering; at worst it removes any claim to the existence of such occurrences as they become important moments in the process of achieving greater goods that otherwise could not be achieved. The practical result of this approach is apathy because any imperative to stand against occurrences of evil dissipates due to the requirement of such occurrences in order for these greater goods to be achieved. Greater good theodicies thus prove morally and practically unacceptable to the anti-theodicist.9

N. N. Trakakis, “Antitheodicy”, in The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil, ed. Justin P. McBrayer and Daniel Howard-Snyder (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2013), 363–76, 363. 5 J. Richard Middleton, “Why the ‘Greater Good’ Isn’t a Defense: Classical Theodicy in Light of the Biblical Genre of Lament”, Koinonia 9, vols 1–2 (1997): 81–113, 83. 6 See John Hick’s discussion of “dsyteleological” evil in Evil and the God of Love (London: Macmillan and Company, 1966), 363–7 and Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca and London: Cornell University, 1999), 26–9. 7 See Richard A. Shenk, The Wonder of the Cross: The God Who Uses Evil and Suffering to Destroy Evil and Suffering (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2013), 61–3. 8 See Trakakis, “Antitheodicy”, 365–9 and John Swinton, Raging with Compassion (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2007), 20–1. 9 See Swinton, Raging, 17–28; N. N. Trakakis, “Anti-Theodicy”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil, ed. Chad Meister and Paul K. Moser (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 124–43, 126–7; Trakakis, “Antitheodicy”, 368–9; Middleton, “Why the ‘Greater Good’ Isn’t a Defense”, 86–93. 4

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Another moral issue raised by anti-theodicists is the way greater good theodicies perceive persons. Rather than treating individuals as ends in themselves, viewing them as created beings to be respected and treated with dignity, there is a danger that persons can be treated as a means to something else. An oft-referred-to example is an encounter between brothers Ivan and Alyosha in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan challenges the greater good argument by asking Alyosha, imagine that you yourself are erecting the edifice of human fortune with the goal of, at the finale, making people happy, of at last giving them peace and quiet, but that in order to do it, it would be necessary and unavoidable to torture to death only one tiny little creature, that same little child that beat its breast with its little fist, and on its unavenged tears to found that edifice, would you agree to be the architect on those conditions, tell me and tell me truly?10 Underlying this critique is the distaste at the notion that God would knowingly create a world where greater goods are only possible at a cost to individuals. Ivan asks, is the cost of one small child worth that greater good? To answer “yes” is to treat persons as disposable means. If the counter to this is post-mortem compensation, the problem still holds as an individual is still being treated as a means rather than an end and God still appears to have created the world with this potential, even if there is eschatological compensation. If a good is to be made possible for some through the suffering of another, this may be more palatable if the sufferer also gets to benefit in the here and now. However, even then the risk of treating persons as means rather than ends does not fully subside, and it is not clear that that is the kind of world in which we live or is justifiable as the creation of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God.11 A further practical problem is how little use theodicies are to those who are suffering and those who are trying to help and support them.12 A rebuttal to this could be that humans have an innate need to make some sense of what they are experiencing in order to find meaning.13 However, arguably, there are some experiences that are simply senseless and some things that are beyond our comprehension. To seek to explain too much is to give evil unwarranted meaning and thus fall foul of the moral critique noted earlier.14 As Hart observes, such “metaphysical disputes come perilously close to mocking the dead”.15 A further rebuttal is that aiding the sufferer is not the aim of a theodicy.16 To which the anti-theodicist may question what use a theodicy is if it has nothing useful to

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David McDuff (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 321. It is worth noting that much ink has been spilled over definitions of the divine character and nature. Such debates are too vast to enter into in the limits of this chapter and it is generally regarded by anti-theodicists that regardless of where one lands on this subject, the resulting theodicies continue to be too problematic to be of much use. 12 See Nicholas Wolterstorff ’s reflections after the tragic death of his son in Lament for a Son (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 68. 13 This point is argued by Richard Rice in his defense of theodicies. See Suffering and the Search for Meaning (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2014), particularly ch. 1. 14 For differing views on the challenge of discerning meaning amidst suffering, see Karen Kilby, God, Evil and the Limits of Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2020), ch. 6; David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 35. Pinnock, Beyond Theodicy, 130–8. 15 Hart, The Doors of the Sea, 6–7. 16 See Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), 29. 10 11

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offer the one suffering or those trying to care for and support them.17 This opens up the deeper question of what the role of theology and the philosophy of religion is. However, exploring such a tangential question rests beyond the bounds of this chapter. Following on from the critiques of the practical outworking of theodicies there is one further critique regarding the culture and context from which understandings of, and responses to, evil and suffering emerge. Thus far the views outlined in this chapter have been described in rather general terms and have not referred explicitly to a particular religion, worldview, sacred text, or God. Some scholars have highlighted that this timeless, abstract approach is of little use to humans who are embedded in particular cultures and contexts, requiring greater definition for application. Ironically, the fact that the discourse is characterized by abstract, timeless debate is symptomatic of an Enlightenment influence and portrays a specific way of engaging that emerges from a particular time and place. It is, therefore, not as timeless and abstract as it appears!18 How one defines evil and suffering and how one understands and responds to it is contextual, embedded within a particular worldview and will vary from place to place, community to community, and person to person. So, a singular, abstract problem of evil and catch-all response is somewhat of a mirage.

ANTI-THEODIC ALTERNATIVES In the wake of the previous critiques, the challenge for the anti-theodicist is to construct something of use for those suffering, or else the danger is that what remains is a meaningless, hopeless abyss. Given the variety of responses from under the anti-theodicy umbrella, focus in the following paragraphs will be on proposals that emphasize the nature of God and what God does in response to evil and suffering, and those that emphasize human responses to evil and suffering.19 In response to the last of the critiques noted earlier, I will also be focusing specifically on those embedded within an explicitly Christian worldview.

THE NATURE AND ROLE OF GOD IN RESPONSE TO EVIL AND SUFFERING Although this is a broad field, the focus of discussion regarding the nature and role of God in response to evil and suffering is usually about God’s method of overcoming evil and suffering and God’s presence or solidarity with the sufferer. The key areas of discussion are, therefore, divine im/passibility and the revelation and role of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Loosely described, at one end of the spectrum are those who favor a passibilist understanding of God. Such a view understands the God who is love (1 John 4:16) to

See Kenneth Surin Theology and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 3; Terrence W. Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2000), ch. 9 and Swinton, Raging, ch. 1. 18 For various accounts of the emergence and historical context of the contemporary theodical project, see Kilby, God, ch. 6, Pinnock, Beyond Theodicy, ch. 1, Surin, Theology, 1–69, Swinton, Raging, chs. 1–2. Tilley, Evils, 221–9. 19 This is a categorization adapted from ch. 2 of Surin, Theology. I have previously used the same adapted categorization in a more extended discussion of the same material. See Stephen C. Torr, A Dramatic Pentecostal/ Charismatic Anti-Theodicy: Improvising on a Divine Performance of Lament (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2013), 45–57. 17

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mean that God must therefore be vulnerable to suffering due to the relationship God has with the object of God’s love. As Sölle states, “In his emptied, abased form God shares the suffering of his people in exile, in prison, in martyrdom. Wandering, straying, dispersed, his indwelling rests in things and awaits the redemption of God through his creatures. God suffers where people suffer, God must be delivered from pain.”20 To love is to suffer with, and to suffer for, the object of God’s love. God is thus the co-sufferer present with the victim but also the one whom Moltmann describes as experiencing suffering in the Godhead at the cross and thus experiencing at God’s deepest level the effects of evil in creation.21 But, in so doing, God also transforms and overcomes that evil, bringing salvation to creation through the outpouring of the Spirit, post-resurrection. There is something perhaps comforting about a divine co-sufferer that seeks to break down the wall of isolation often felt by those experiencing the effects of evil. However, it is not clear how this aids the one suffering and whether what Moltmann speculates is happening at the cross is an accurate description of the Godhead. Although a theodicy is not explicitly attempted here there may well be an implicit move to justify God and the effects of evil by arguing that God suffers for and with a suffering creation to overcome evil. However, as Kilby notes, a situation where the abuser also abuses themselves does not justify the abuse! Neither does it reduce the horror of evil. But, it may well inadvertently encourage a sense of apathy if perceived as part of God’s plan to overcome evil.22 Further problems emerge when one considers the implications for the doctrine of God. If the economic trinity is the immanent trinity, then, following Moltmann’s argument, the eternal nature of God is determined by creation, and evil and suffering have an eternal existence within that. This makes for a potentially uncomfortable conclusion regarding the nature of God.23 However, Vanhoozer notes, “As concerns passibility, the reflex of classical theists is to limit God’s suffering in the Incarnation to Jesus’ human nature”.24 This is toward the other end of the spectrum where the argument presented is that only an impassible God can overcome evil and suffering and provide hope for creation. The divine life is able to envelop the fallen creation within itself only because the love at the heart of the divine life is one that is not coerced or driven by outside forces and the divine life is unchangeable and self-determining.25 However, such an extreme position risks downplaying the impact of evil on the Godhead as revealed at the cross, as well as offering an unhelpful misunderstanding of how the two natures relate to one another in the Incarnation. The incarnate Son seems to be impacted by the suffering of creation in his entire being in his life and death. Such an emphasis on apatheia may provide a God who overcomes evil, but the cost may be the relational aspect of God’s nature, contra the revelation of Scripture. Like Hart, Vanhoozer maintains belief in a God who is not moved by outside forces, a God who is entirely self-determined. However, Vanhoozer also argues for a God who

Dorothee Sölle, Suffering, trans. Everett R. Kalin (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 146. See Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 2001), 243–58 for his Trinitarian approach. 22 Kilby, God, 76–8. 23 See Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion and Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 109–12, for a more extensive critique. 24 Vanohoozer, Remythologizing, 423. 25 See David Bentley Hart, “No Shadow of Turning: On Divine Impassibility”, Pro Ecclesia 11, no. 2 (2002): 184–206, for one such example. 20 21

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freely enters into a particular covenant with creation that results in God destroying evil and suffering at the cross and in so doing, freely choosing to feel and experience life within that covenant, alongside the human partner, in a way fitting for God. Therefore, Vanhoozer proposes something of a via media where the communicatio idiomatum is understood to result in assigning “the suffering [of Christ] neither to the divine nature nor to an abstract human nature but rather to the divine person”.26 God then offers the Holy Spirit in the life of the sufferer, in solidarity, uniting the Church in and with Christ whereby “God preserves the saints, enabling them patiently to endure”.27 Vanhoozer continues, “A company of communicants, the church has the Spirit and mind of Christ, and thus a share in his life, even (especially!) as it is being transformed into his living image through suffering”.28 All this is done with the end of the story in view, which “communicates grace – hope and strength – for the journey”.29 Although only a snapshot of a rich and complex area of theology, what all proponents hold in common is a focus on God’s intent and method of overcoming evil and suffering within creation and for creation rather than justifications as to why such suffering exists.

THE ROLE OF HUMANS IN RESPONSE TO EVIL AND SUFFERING As noted earlier, there seems to be something deeply human about finding meaning and trying to make sense of experience. This drive, as many have noted, finds expression in the creation and recounting of stories. To be more precise, humans appear to be storied creatures. This becomes apparent when some anti-theodicists address the question of how humans respond to evil and suffering. Stanley Hauerwas has brought attention to the uniqueness of an individual’s culture, context, and story construction. How one defines and understands one’s suffering is shaped by these factors, which means it may well be a significant error to presume a universal interpretation of any one occurrence of evil and suffering. “[T]here is no experience without mediation by a story. There is no primal experience of God, of suffering, or even the death of a child.”30 Hauerwas also highlights the presence of a common Christian story that all other stories come into contact with and maybe re-interpreted in the light of. In this sense, one human response to evil and suffering is to place the narrative of that occurrence in the light of the Christian story that offers eschatological hope through the defeat of evil at the cross. The intent here is not to force an interpretation onto the sufferer that they are not wanting to own for themselves, neither is it to explain or justify the experience of suffering as with a theodicy. Instead, it is simply to provide a vision of a bigger story of eternal possibility despite the current experience. Such an approach also draws in the possibility of shared stories and the opportunity to bear witness to and help reinterpret one another’s stories with fresh insights, offering community solidarity and

Vanhoozer, Remythologizing, 423. Ibid., 467. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. For a further exploration of what it might mean for God to experience emotions, see Rob Lister, God Is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion (Wheaton: Crossway, 2013). 30 Stanley Hauerwas, Naming the Silences (London: T&T Clark Ltd., 2004), 29–30. 26 27

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the removal of isolation in suffering. In this sense, Hauerwas argues for the construction of communities that can “absorb evil”.31 Swinton develops this idea further by suggesting specific practices that Christian communities can seek to pursue. These practices consist of lament, forgiveness, thoughtfulness, and friendship and are intent on forming communities that can “absorb evil” in preparation for the eschaton.32 These human responses recognize the unique narrative nature of individual experiences of suffering but also seek to place them within the wider narrative of Christian salvation history that opens up eschatological horizons of hope. In addition, there is also the desire to participate in the inauguration of the eschatological Kingdom by way of practices that embody and proclaim the in-breaking Kingdom of God.33 In drawing this brief survey of anti-theodicy together, what follows is a critical reflection on what is outlined in this section and some suggestions for further exploration.

AVENUES FOR FURTHER DEVELOPMENT Chad Meister has recognized that although anti-theodicy is a recent phenomenon as a formal category, the “intuitions” of some of its proponents “have been around for a very long time” and can be found “in some of the earliest religious writings”. He concludes this note of recognition by suggesting that “it is high time that theists and theodicists take them seriously”.34 I could not agree more! My first point here, therefore, builds on Hauerwas’ observation that any understanding and response to evil and suffering is always embedded within a story, an interpretation of a situation that is shaped by and shapes the worldview of the characters involved and their communities and culture. If one is attempting to define and respond to evil and suffering from within a Christian worldview, I want to suggest one must begin with the revelation of Scripture. This may sound overly simplistic given the hermeneutical challenges of interpreting Scripture in the desire to live out a faithful Christian life, however, those complexities are no excuse to dismiss this hard but rewarding challenge. My proposal is that if we want to have a clearer understanding of evil and suffering and how best to respond from a Christian perspective, there is no better or more vital place to start than with the primary revelation of the drama of God’s relationship with creation. My critique of Hauerwas is that he does not go far enough in pursuing this avenue. Swinton goes considerably further, but I suggest there is still work to do here. My first point, put simply, is that any Christian response to evil and suffering must begin by exploring how the Christian God defines evil and suffering, how that God is responding or has responded and how God’s creatures are called to respond – all of which we discern by starting with Scripture as the primary source of revelation. Hauerwas, Naming the Silences, 29–30. See Swinton, Raging, chs 5–8. Further examples that emphasize resistance and solidarity as well as protest are those that might be labeled Liberation theologies. Again, here the emphasis is on the specific context of the suffering community as well as the structural evils that have contributed to the suffering and how these might be exposed, resisted, and overturned. Sarah Pinnock explores some political examples in Beyond, but further exploration can be found in work such as Rebecca S. Chopp, The Praxis of Suffering (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1986). 33 See N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2006), ch. 4 for an introduction to what an “inaugurated eschatology” might include. 34 Chad V. Meister, Evil: A Guide for the Perplexed, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 89. 31 32

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My second point is that, arguably, when such an approach is pursued, what we discover is a call to respond to evil and suffering, with Spirited guidance, support, and empowerment, in ways that are distinctly anti-theodical. Although there are certainly cases in Scripture where there is justification for certain experiences of suffering, the emphasis appears to be less on explanation and justification and more on the response of God, the call and expectation on humans and the promise of eternal, divine resolution. The identity and actions of the Church that reads the Scriptures and responds are constantly being formed in this ongoing process of reading, acting, and reflecting, in relationship with the Father by way of the Son and the Spirit. The response pursued is thus anti-theodical and is done after the pattern of, and in relationship with, the triune God. My third point follows the second in that such a response needs to be Christologically shaped.35 The clearest guidance for right human living is found in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. This is the pattern we are to be conformed to, eschatologically, and that is no less the case in how we respond to evil and suffering in the here and now – individually and corporately, while recognizing the unique nature of the Son and his part in the missio Dei. My final point involves strengthening Swinton’s suggested practices with the addition of two further practices. Noteworthy in the life of Jesus and the early Church is the practice of healing. My first suggestion is therefore a more proactive emphasis on the Church’s involvement in divine healing. I am not suggesting a reductionistic, narrow definition of healing that simply involves the “miraculous” curing of ills by God, although my proposal includes that. Instead I am proposing something broader and less well defined, whereby in the broadest possible way the Church places an emphasis on being communities of healing. This would include some of the practices Swinton includes but would also include working with professionals in other disciplines (medical, psychological, etc.) in appropriate ways as conduits for divine healing. The second practice involves “testimony”, often understood as the recounting of God’s provision that has led to a positive change in a situation. However, biblically there is also the presence of what Brueggemann has referred to as “countertestimony” when Israel questions the positive beliefs they had about God in the light of experiences of suffering that seem to run counter to such beliefs.36 If lament is to be retrieved, as has been argued by numerous scholars in recent years, as a practice within the Church, then perhaps there is an argument to say that more exploration should be made into the use of countertestimony in communities. This is so because it is the coming together of testimony and countertestimony in the life of Israel in a refusal to let go of either the positive beliefs and stories or the experiences of suffering that leads to lament, and in turn, honest and healthy communication with God in the midst of suffering. Reflecting on how communities use personal and corporate testimonies in their prayer and worship in the explorations around the use of lament as well as how safe space is created to do this might also, therefore, be a further way to engage in Christian anti-theodicy.37

Swinton, Raging, 71–2. See Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), part II. 37 For a more extensive discussion of this point, see Torr, Dramatic, 200–18. 35 36

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CONCLUSION Having begun with a critique of theodicy from the perspective of anti-theodicy proponents, we then explored what constructive responses to evil and suffering such proponents might offer. These are varied and not without the need for further reflection but have a unified desire to respond to evil and suffering in practical ways. Further avenues to pursue were then outlined. Something that is almost certain is that all of us will in some way and to some extent be affected by the impact of evil and suffering. What proponents of anti-theodicies do is offer us solidarity, hope for the present and future, and tools for the journey, without shutting the voice of the sufferer down or justifying evil. Such responses are vital and are to be ignored at our peril.

FURTHER READING Blumenthal, David R. Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993. Roth, John K. “A Theodicy of Protest”. In Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy – A New Edition. Edited by Stephen T. Davis, 1–20. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. Warner, Megan, et al., eds. Tragedies and Christian Congregations: The Practical Theology of Trauma. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020.

Chapter 57

Free-Will Theodicies CHAD MEISTER

INTRODUCTION At the time of writing this article, over four-and-a-half million people have died worldwide from the novel coronavirus Covid-19 outbreak. As enormous as that number is, it is fairly small compared to other pandemics in world history. HIV/AIDS has killed more than 32 million; the flu pandemic of 1918 brought about the deaths of between 20 and 50 million; the Black Death in the twelfth century brought about an estimated 75–200 million deaths. To top them all, from 1900 to 1975, more than 300 million died from the smallpox virus. The amount of human pain, suffering, and death reflected in these numbers are staggering. But this is not limited to the human experience, of course. The number of members of the animal kingdom beyond homo sapiens who have suffered and perished is far greater and has been occurring for billions of years on this planet. The pain, suffering, and death noted earlier are often referred to in the philosophical literature as “natural evil”. It is natural because there is no intentionality behind it; no conscious agent is bringing it about. There is another category of evil that is referred to as “moral evil” – a category in which the evils that occur are the result of an intentional moral agent. Moral evil is the kind of evil for which a moral agent is culpable, including one’s actions (such as lying, raping, and murdering) as well as certain character traits developed over time (such as maliciousness, greed, and envy). One might consider, for example, the vast amounts of genocidal evil leveled against Native Americans, European Jews, Cambodian peasants, and so many others. Philosopher John Hick puts the categorical distinction this way: “Moral evil is what we human beings originate: cruel, unjust, vicious, and pervasive thoughts and deeds. Natural evil is the evil that originates independently of human actions: in disease . . . earthquakes, storms, droughts, tornadoes, etc.”1 Given the vast amounts of natural and moral evil in the world, a common question for those who affirm the existence of God – in particular, those in the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam who maintain that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent – is this: given the existence of a divine reality with such knowledge, power, and goodness, why does evil, especially great evil, occur? Furthermore, are not the two claims, that God exists and that evil exists, incongruent if not logically inconsistent? This raises the problem of evil that philosophical skeptic David Hume expressed so concisely:

John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977), 12.

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Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?2 In discussions of evil, the term “theodicy” is often invoked. Its etymology can be traced to the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who wrote on evil in a book entitled Theodicy (published in 1710). In doing so, he coined a new term, conflating two Greek words: theos (God) and dikē (justice). A theodicy, then, is an attempt to defend, or justify, God, given the evil in the world. As such, a theodicy is not quite the same as a defense. A defense is a response to antitheistic arguments from evil in which the aim is to demonstrate that such arguments fail. Defenses are offered in response to a variety of arguments from evil, though they are commonly coupled with logical arguments. For example, Alvin Plantinga’s frequently cited “free-will defense” is an attempt to offer a rebuttal to one version of the logical problem of evil.3 A defense such as Plantinga’s is not straightforwardly an attempt to justify God, but rather to rebut the argument against the logical coherence of belief in God, given the reality of evil. There are, then, free-will theodicies and free-will defenses. This chapter will focus on free-will theodicies.

AUGUSTINE’S FREE-WILL THEODICY A central idea of most free-will theodicies is that the world is a better place with agents who have free will, even though they may misuse that freedom and commit evil. The notion that evil arose through the use (or misuse) of human free will has an extensive history. The type of free will entailed by most recent versions of free-will theodicies is generally an incompatibilist version according to which free will and determinism are mutually exclusive and that to act freely is not to act deterministically.4 This is a form of indeterminism in which the future is open, not determined by the past, and human agents have the power to shape that future. An advantage of this type of theodicy is that it can be used to reinforce the claim that it is human beings who are responsible for moral evil and for their own destinies, not God. Earlier free-will theodicies – those prominent in the Middle Ages, for example – while including the concept of free will, did not define free will in a way that is clarifying with respect to whether they were affirming incompatibilism, though they did generally affirm that because of human free will, humans are responsible for evil, not God.5 However, it has been argued that prior to the Middle Ages, Christian theologians and philosophers affirmed a view that appears to reflect some form of libertarian free will.6 One of the earliest developed free-will theodicies was crafted by Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century ce. Augustine has been widely recognized as one of the most influential Christian philosophers/theologians of Western history. His writings on free will spanned

David Hume, Dialogue Concerning Natural Religion (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), 63. Alvin Plantinga has offered two slightly different versions of the free-will defense in his God and Other Minds: A Study of the Rational Justification of Belief in God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 131–55 and The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 164–95. For a fairly non-technical form of the argument, see God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), 7–64; note esp. 29–34. 4 Incompatibilists disagree among themselves about what else is required for free will. 5 See, for example, Eleonore Stump, “Augustine on Free Will”, in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 124–47. 6 For more on this, see Richard Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), ch. 2. 2 3

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his career and most major medieval Christian philosophers engaged with his work. He wrote on this subject before the compatibilist and incompatibilist forms of free will had been formulated, and there are ongoing debates about what Augustine’s view of free will actually entailed.7 Nevertheless, Augustine wrote extensively on free will and its role regarding the origin and existence of evil, from his earlier works, chiefly On the Free Choice of the Will, to his more mature works, including The City of God and the Confessions. His work on the subject included two central questions: What is the nature of evil? And, from whence does evil arrive? Augustine affirmed the widely held view of Christian thinkers that the universe was created by God ex nihilo and that it was created good. Indeed, for Augustine everything created by God is fundamentally good and has a good purpose. Yet, we find evil within that created order. What could evil be, then, and how could it have arisen? Augustine’s response builds upon the work of the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus (204/5–270 ce). In Plotinus’ Enneads he develops a notion of evil as privation – an absolute absence or lack that has no share in the Good (for Plotinus, the Good or the One is the immaterial and perfect ground of all that is). Augustine adapts Plotinus’ notion of privation and incorporates it into his own theodicy. He argued that God is the creator of all things, all substances, but evil is not a thing or substance; it is a privatio boni – a privation of the good. To illuminate this idea, he used the example of a person who is blind. Blindness is not in itself a thing – not a substantial reality – let alone a good thing. It is a privation of seeing. Evil, he argues, is like blindness in that sense. It is a lack of the good.8 Nevertheless, we are still left with the question of if God created a very good world, whence evil? Whence the privation? For Augustine, the state of the world in which human beings first found themselves was one of absolute perfection and goodness. Unlike its unlimited and immutable Creator, however, human beings were created ex nihilo (brought into being out of nothing), and as such they are finite and mutable. It was this mutability, this potential for change, that opened the door to privation and corruption. Augustine’s narrative on the topic begins with the creation of the Garden of Eden, as depicted in the opening chapters of the book of Genesis, as an idyllic paradise in which there exists no evil, no suffering, no pain. Adam and Eve, the first human beings, were created de novo (anew) and placed in the Garden in a state of moral innocence. How, then, did evil arise in such a context? The story is a familiar one. Some of God’s creations, most notably this first human pair, were created in God’s image – an image that reflected God in creativity, love, and moral choice. But at some point this pair exercised their free will in an act of rebellion toward God, the summum bonum, choosing to act contrary to what God had instructed them and turning to lesser goods. This turning of the will from God to lesser goods was the origin of evil. Augustine referred to this event as “the Fall” because in this act the first humans fell from their state of moral innocence and into a state of sin. There are, then, two dimensions of evil for Augustine: evil’s ultimate origin, which is misdirected will, and evil’s nature, which is metaphysical deprivation, or privation, of the good. This Primeval Fall of humankind, the first sin, the turning of the will against God and the good, brought with it shame, guilt, and punishment for the first human beings, but it

For more on this topic, see Stump, “Augustine on Free Will”. Augustine, City of God, Book 12, ch. 1.

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also had tragic universal consequences, for it brought with it pain and suffering for the rest of humankind as well. Yet, Augustine’s theodicy does not end without resolution. For in the eschaton God will rectify matters when God judges the world in righteousness, ushering into God’s eternal kingdom those persons who have been saved through the atoning work of Christ and sending to eternal perdition those persons who are wicked and disobedient. One difficulty with Augustine’s theodicy is that it raises the following dilemma: If God created humans in a perfect state, then why did they turn their will against God and sin in the first instance? On the other hand, if God created humans who were less than perfect – flawed in some way that enabled them to sin – then how is God absolved from blame? Augustine’s response to this dilemma is to affirm what he calls a “mystery finite freedom”.9 Through some mystery, while the first humans were created “very good”, with the exercise of their free will they were able to choose evil. This exercising of free will and its resultant evil raises a second difficulty with Augustine’s theodicy. While in his earlier writings, he maintained that the misuse of free will by human beings is the origin of evil, in his later writings he appears to deny that humans actually have the sort of freedom of the will requisite for choosing evil over good. This is especially emphasized in his dealings with the Pelagians in addressing the doctrines of election and predestination. Consider this passage: Let us therefore understand the calling by which the elect are made. They are not chosen because they have believed, but in order that they may believe . . . And so they were chosen before the foundation of the world, by that predestination by which God fulfilled what He had preordained. For those whom he had predestined, he also called, by that calling according to His plan, and not therefore any others, but those whom he called, he justified (Rom. 8:30). Nor did He call any others but those whom He had predestined, called and justified, those also he glorified, by that end which has no end. God therefore chose the faithful; but in order that they might be faithful, not because they were already faithful.10 There appears to be a glaring problem in Augustine’s thought in that while human beings, through their free will, originated and perpetuated evil, yet human beings (at least after Adam and Eve)11 had and still have no real choice in whether they are faithful to God in choosing to follow God and the good or in choosing to commit evil. God chooses individuals in order that they will be faithful, not because they already are. In so choosing them, it seems that God causes them to be faithful – that God determines who will be faithful and who will not be. Throughout Augustine’s later writings, such as the one quoted earlier, he affirms the notion that without God’s choosing people to be faithful, they would be unable to be faithful (non posse non pecarre; not able not to sin). In God’s choosing only some to be faithful, God seems to be, for all intents and purposes, choosing that the others will sin. This implicates God in evil. This conundrum remains an unresolved tension in Augustine’s thought. As such, it does not appear to adequately

Augustine, City of God, Book 12, ch. 7. Written one year before his death in a work entitled De Praedestinatione Sanctorum (On the Predestination of the Saints), as quoted in Gerald Bonner, “Augustine and Pelagianism”, Augustinian Studies 24 (1993): 30. 11 Augustine maintained that Adam and Eve were posse peccare, posse non peccare (able to sin, able not to sin), but after the Fall human beings were non posse non peccare (not able not to sin). See Augustine, On Rebuke and Grace, extract from Augustine’s Retractions, ch. 33.

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address the moral evil that exists in the world. While some contemporary defenders of Augustinian-type theodicies argue that Augustine was utilizing a compatibilist view of free will and argue that such freedom is satisfactory for moral culpability,12 it is not clear how human agents could be morally culpable for events that are preordained and causally determined by God to occur.13 Despite this and other challenges to Augustine’s free-will theodicy, the idea that moral evil has entered the world through the exercise of human free will continues to play a central role in more recent theodicies.14 Richard Swinburne, for example, develops an Augustinian-type free-will theodicy utilizing a libertarian conception of free will.15 In doing so, the theodicist is able to provide an explanation for the existence of moral evil as a result of the misuse of human freedom whereby the culpability of moral evil lies with human beings and not with God. While God is culpable for creating the conditions within which moral evil could arise, it can be argued that it need not be inevitable that humans would misuse their free will in this way. Other key thinkers who followed in the Augustinian tradition regarding theodicy include Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.

A MOLINIST THEODICY Molinism is a philosophical view of how God can exercise sovereign control over the world while also providing genuine freedom to human agents. It is so named after the sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina (1535–1600 ce), who developed it. Molina was a defender of free will in the ensuing debates of his day over human free will and divine providence. Molina contended that the two positions could be consistently affirmed. Once a person grasps the manifold knowledge God possesses, Molina argued, she will see that God can consistently maintain providential control of the world while permitting human freedom – even using some of that freedom to bring about God’s sovereign intentions. In delineating God’s knowledge of the world, Molina noted several types.16 First, there is what he referred to as natural knowledge. This is God’s knowledge of all necessary truths. Statements of this sort are not true because God wills them to be; rather, they are true by the very nature of God. Since God’s nature is necessary, so also is everything that is known via that nature. Thus, the content of God’s natural knowledge includes all necessary truths. Consider the proposition that 2 + 2 = 4. Mathematical statements such as this are the kinds of truths that could not have been other than they are in any possible world, and they are not the result of any free decision of God. See Phillip Cary’s chapter, “A Classic View”, in God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views, ed. Chad Meister and James K. Dew, Jr. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 13–36. 13 For a sustained argument that libertarian free will is necessary for moral culpability, see Robert Kane, The Significance of Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). See also Timothy O’Connor, Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 14 One example of a recent Augustinian-type theodicy has been developed by Phillip Cary (see note 13). Cary affirms a compatibilist version of free will. 15 Richard Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil. Swinburne states that while he accepts a historical Fall, and gives it some role in his theodicy, he does not give it the kind of prominence that Augustine did. See ibid., 41. 16 The following works offer concise delineations of Molina’s account: William Lane Craig, The Only Wise God: The Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1987), 119– 31 and Thomas P. Flint, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 35–71. 12

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In addition to God’s knowledge of necessary truths, God also has knowledge of the actual world that God created. This includes, on Molina’s account, knowledge of everything that has happened is happening and will happen. Such knowledge is logically posterior to God’s decision to create the world. It follows then that God has control over which statements are true and which ones are not in the actual world. If God would have created a different world, say one in which horses never existed, then all true statements about what horses do in the world would be false. Truths of this kind are thus contingent and they are true because God freely permitted them to be. God’s knowledge of these kinds of truths Molina referred to as God’s free knowledge. Which statements are true and which ones are not are dependent on the free decision of God regarding which world God creates. Thus, if God would not have created this world but a different one instead, the content of God’s free knowledge would not be the same as it is. There is yet a third kind of knowledge that Molina called God’s middle knowledge. This type of knowledge occurs between natural and free knowledge in God’s deliberations about creation; it follows (logically, not temporally) natural knowledge but precedes free knowledge. With this type of knowledge, God knows what every possible individual would do in every possible situation.17 Consider the example of King Henry VIII having his wife, Queen Anne Boleyn, executed by beheading on May 19, 1536. With God’s natural knowledge, God knew that Henry could have his wife executed. But with God’s middle knowledge, God knew that Henry would have her executed if he existed in the circumstances that he was indeed in, and he would do it freely. This type of knowledge is not simple foreknowledge in which God knows the future (like looking ahead on a movie reel to see what will happen down the line). For it could well have been the case that God decided not to create a world with Henry VII in it! However, it would not be possible for God to create this world, the one that had Henry VIII in it, in the circumstances in which he had Anne executed, and that Henry chose not to have her executed. That was Henry’s free decision, and God could not cause that decision to be otherwise and it still be free. In sum, natural knowledge informs God about what must be the case. Free knowledge informs God about what will be the case (though need not be). And middle knowledge informs God about what would be the case in different circumstances. This Molinist theory of middle knowledge, then, provides a view of divine omniscience in which God has exhaustive knowledge of the past, the present, and the future. This includes knowledge of what individuals would have freely chosen if things had been different than they are. Together, this knowledge, along with God’s natural knowledge, informed God’s decision about what world God would create. So, on the Molinist account, God is providentially sovereign over all events. God brought about this world out of a myriad of possible worlds. Yet, not all events that occur in this world are willed by God. God wills only the good, but God allows individuals to freely choose both good and evil. Molina explains it this way: All good things, whether produced by causes acting from a necessity of nature or by free causes, depend upon divine predetermination . . . and providence in such a way that each is specifically intended by God through His predetermination and providence, whereas the evil acts of the created will are subject as well to divine determination and providence to the extent that the causes from which they emanate Such situations are referred to as “counterfactuals of creaturely freedom”. A counterfactual is a statement of the form “if it were the case that P, it would be the case that Q”.

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and the general concurrence on God’s part required to elicit them are granted through divine predetermination and providence – though not in the order that these particular acts should emanate from them, but rather in order that other, far different, acts might come to be, and in order that the innate freedom of the things endowed with a will might be preserved for their maximum benefit; in addition evil acts are subject to the same divine predetermination and providence to the extent that they cannot exist in particular unless God by His providence permits them in particular in the service of some greater good. It clearly follows from the above that all things without exception are individually subject to God’s will and providence, which intend certain of them as particulars and permit the rest as particulars.18 Everything is thus under God’s providential control – either by God’s direct will or by God’s permission. While evil is not desired by God, it is permitted by God on the Molinist account, and it is only permitted if there is a morally sufficient reason for doing so. Among Molinists there are different answers to what a morally sufficient reason might be, one response being akin to that suggested by Augustine that free will is a great good even though it allows for the possibility (and in this world, the actuality) of evil. One significant challenge for Molinism is the grounding objection in which it is argued that there seems to be no good response to the question of what grounds the truth of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom.19 They appear to have no truth value because there is no fact of the matter regarding what an individual, acting with libertarian freedom, would actually do in counterfactual situations. For example, consider this statement being made in the year 2024: “If Donald Trump were to run for the presidency, he would lose the election.” Is this a statement that is now, in the year 2021, true or false? If it is true or false, what makes it so? Such statements could not be grounded in God, it is argued, because the necessity intrinsic to God’s nature would apply to the counterfactuals, and determinism would ensue. But neither can they be grounded in the individuals to which they refer. So, what is its truthmaker – what is that in virtue of which such a statement is true (or not true)? The grounding objector says there is nothing that can make counterfactuals of creaturely freedom true or false, so they have no truth value. Therefore, not even God could know the future of such events. Alvin Plantinga offers a simple retort to this objection: “It seems to me much clearer that some counterfactuals of freedom are at least possibly true than that the truth of propositions must, in general, be grounded in this way.”20 Thomas Flint and William Lane Craig offer more developed responses to the grounding objection.21 Debates regarding this objection to Molinism, among other criticisms, are ongoing and the plausibility of the Molinist position hangs in the balance. Such challenges to Molinism have been recently and ardently raised by adherents of Open Theism.

Luis Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge, 4.53.3.17, trans. Alfred J. Freddoso, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), as quoted in William Lane Craig, “A Molinist View”, in God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views, ed. Chad Meister and James K. Dew, Jr. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2017), 39–40. 19 Thomas Flint argues that this grounding objection is for many philosophers “the principle objection” to endorsing the Molinist doctrine of middle knowledge. See Flint, Divine Providence, 123. 20 Alvin Plantinga, “Reply to Robert Adams”, in Alvin Plantinga, ed. James E. Tomberlin and Peter Van Inwagen (Profiles 5; Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), 378. 21 See Flint, Divine Providence, and Craig, The Only Wise God. 18

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AN OPEN THEISM THEODICY The final free-will theodicy to be explored is an Open Theism theodicy. The term “Open Theism” became familiar after the 1994 publication of a book entitled The Openness of God. The book was co-authored by Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker, and David Basinger, and helped foster the publication of a significant body of literature on the topic. While the general idea of Open Theism is much older than the late twentieth century, dating back to ancient Greek, Roman, and then medieval Jewish and Islamic thinkers, the central idea is that human agents have genuine freedom and that the future is “open” in the sense that there are multiple possible futures, not just one. Open Theism emphasizes God’s agape relationship with the creation, notably human agents whom God desires to see flourish. In so flourishing, there is also emphasis placed on the genuine (libertarian) freedom of human beings – a freedom that is not consistent with God’s knowing the future. Thus, while God has complete knowledge of past and present events, God does not have knowledge of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. God does not know, in 2021, whether Donald Trump will run for reelection for president in 2024, nor does God know, if Trump does run, whether he will win or lose. There have been a number of books published on theodicy by Open Theists.22 One especially significant defender of an Open Theism theodicy is William Hasker.23 In developing his theodicy, Hasker utilizes a version of John Hick’s “soul-making” theodicy,24 arguing that the character growth that can occur from exercising morally significant freedom outweighs the accompanying moral evils. Furthermore, he argues that since it is not unreasonable to maintain that the operations of the world in accordance with the laws of nature are requisite for soul-making, even given the evils that arise in such a world, God is justified in creating and sustaining such a world. He summarizes his theodicy as follows:

1. The world contains persons who are intelligent and free, living in communities within which they are responsible to and for one another. Human societies have developed by actualizing the inherent potentials of persons and utilizing these potentials for the development of progressively more complex social and cultural systems and progressively increasing control over the material environment.



2. The human world so constituted offers great potential for good in the realization and fulfillment of the potential of human persons and the development of human culture; beyond that, persons have the opportunity to become children of God, enjoying the ultimate fulfillment of which human beings are capable. The human world also offers the possibility, and indeed the reality, of great evil, as

The following are books on theodicy written by Open Theists: Gregory Boyd, Is God to Blame? Beyond Pat Answers to the Problem of Suffering (Downer’s Gove: InterVarsity Press, 2003); Terence Fretheim, Creation Untamed: The Bible, God, and Natural Disasters (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2010); William Hasker, Providence, Evil and the Openness of God (London: Routledge, 2004) and The Triumph of God Over Evil: Theodicy for a World of Suffering (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2008); Richard Rice, Suffering and the Search for Meaning (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2014). 23 Versions of Hasker’s theodicy can be found in the following works: Providence, Evil and the Openness of God, The Triumph of God Over Evil, and “An Open Theist View”, in God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views, ed. Chad Meister and James K. Dew, Jr. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Academic, 2017), 57–76. 24 See Hick, Evil and the God of Love. 22

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persons utilize their freedom to choose evil over a good, short-term gratification over the common interest, hatred over love.

3. So far as we can see, no alternative world that does not share these general features could offer a potentiality for good comparable to that offered by the actual world; only free and responsible persons are eligible to become sons and daughters of God.



4. Frequent and routine intervention by God to prevent the misuse of freedom by his creatures and/or to repair the harm done by this misuse would undermine the structure of human life and community intended in the plan of creation; accordingly, such intervention should not be expected to occur.



5. In virtue of the first four points, it is good that God has created a universe containing human society as described; there is no basis for holding God morally at fault for doing so, or for supposing that a perfectly good Creator would have acted differently.25

Hasker maintains that a soul-making theodicy of this sort has not been refuted, and that unless and until such a refutation can be demonstrated, the existence of evil does not warrant a rejection of theism. In demonstrating the value of Open Theism over other God-world models in reference to theodicy, he contrasts Open Theism with Theological Determinism and Process Theism, in particular with regard to divine power. Determinists maintain that God controls all events in the created order, while Process thinkers deny that God controls any such events. If God is controlling all events, then evil would have been a part of the divine preordained plan. But this raises two concerns. First, why would God apparently speak out against the very events God has ordained to occur? And second, it seems quite difficult to make sense of how God could hold human agents morally accountable for the things God has preordained that they would do. Molinists attempt a rapprochement, affirming the divine preordination of all events on one hand, and genuinely free, morally culpable human agents on the other hand. However, in maintaining that God has pre-creative awareness of all counterfactuals of creaturely freedom – and thus guaranteeing that much of what God desires to occur in the world does in fact happen – the problem of the existence of so much evil in the world still looms large on their account. For Open Theists, God has not (pre)determined the evils that occur in the world. God could (and may well) control some events, but God does not control human actions for which they are morally culpable, for such control would undermine genuine freedom and thus undermine their culpability. Given genuine freedom, however, means that God did not and does not know in advance the outcome of those free choices – some of which have resulted in evil. Permitting genuine freedom allows for moral culpability, but it entails that God gives up full control of the events that will occur in the created order. Human beings are thus responsible for moral evil, not God. A number of criticisms of Open Theism have been offered. A standard criticism presented by Process Theists is that if God had the power to intervene more frequently in the world, God would do so. Hasker responds in ways similar to those who have affirmed versions of the soul-making theodicy, namely, that routine intervention in the world by God may well undermine the very purposes for which the world was created.

Hasker, “An Open Theist View”, 73–4.

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Furthermore, while it might appear to be easy to identify particular cases where divine intervention would be beneficial, there are no apparent objective criteria for discerning when God would be obligated to do so.26 Another criticism of Open Theism is that God’s knowledge on this account is not a form of omniscience, for omniscience entails that God knows all things, including exhaustive knowledge of the future. Furthermore, if God does not know the future, how does this provide comfort for those seeking the assistance of God in their lives during times of distress? And what becomes of prayer? Open Theists generally affirm that God is omniscient, but omniscience means that God is all-knowing in that God knows all that can be known. However, since the contingent future is open, God cannot know it. Omniscience is often compared with omnipotence in this context. Omnipotence means that God is all-powerful and can do anything that can be done. But God cannot create a square circle or make 7 + 5 = 12. Despite God’s not having knowledge of future contingents, Open Theists have argued, this does not negate the role God can play in one’s life, including during times of pain and suffering.27 These are just some of the ongoing debates about Open Theism as a God-world model for advancing theodicy.28

FREE-WILL THEODICIES AND THEISM A comprehensive list of free-will theodicies is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, this sampling of several significant approaches demonstrates some of the main themes utilized in free-will theodicies in an attempt to justify God, given the reality of evil. A common theme among them is that God would create a universe with evil as a crucial or even necessary aspect of bringing about greater goods or an essential element of those goods. Such goods might include, for example, there being a cosmos that is rational and ordered and in which there is rich organic life, even if within that ordered cosmos there are inexorable evolutionary processes and suffering. For such theodicies to be successful, it appears that at least two concerns must be addressed. One concern is whether a plausible account of libertarian free will can be demonstrated. On the libertarian account, a free action or decision cannot be determined; there cannot be any prior determining causes, neither internal nor external, to the agent that brought about the free action or decision. While reasons may be provided for such actions or decisions, reasons do not determine that they have a certain outcome.29 This subject continues to engage the efforts of philosophers, neuroscientists, and others. A second concern is whether a free-will theodicy (or any theodicy, for that matter) can satisfactorily address the existence of the suffering and death of countless life forms, notably conscious life forms, that putatively are unable to experience any benefits of that suffering. Even with an approach to theodicy that brings in the importance of character formation, or soul-making, such as that developed by John Hick, it seems that God would

On this point, see Hasker, Providence, Evil and the Openness of God, ch. 9. Greg Boyd responds to the matter of prayer for Open Theists in his God of the Possible: A Biblical Introduction to the Open View of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000). 28 For additional work on the debates about Open Theism from a classical theist, see Millard Erickson, What Does God Know and When Does He Know It: The Current Controversy over Divine Foreknowledge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006). 29 Timothy O’Connor, in Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will, articulates the role of reasons in libertarian free will. 26 27

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have created a world with countless creatures who experience pain and suffering for purposes of mere evolutionary expediency – creatures who lived and died in order to bring about the evolution of human beings who can themselves enter into the process of character formation. Yet it seems highly anthropocentric (and even a form of speciesism) to maintain that the operations of the natural world, including suffering and predation, exist for the advancement of human perfection. It would seem that from a theistic perspective, all creatures are valuable, and all creatures, at least all sentient ones, should experience eschatological fulfillment. Theologian John Wesley claimed that there might be an objection made against God for the suffering of animals. “But”, he argued, “the objection vanishes away if we consider that something better remains after death for these creatures also; that these likewise shall one day be delivered from this bondage of corruption, and shall then receive ample amends for all their present sufferings”.30 Philosopher Keith Ward makes a similar point: Theism would be falsified if physical death was the end, for then there could be no justification for the existence of this world. However, if one supposes that every sentient being has an endless existence, which offers the prospect of supreme happiness, it is surely true that the sorrows and troubles of this life will seem very small in comparison. Immortality, for animals as well as humans, is a necessary condition of any acceptable theodicy; that necessity, together with all the other arguments for God, is one of the main reasons for believing in immortality.31 Neither Wesley nor Ward speculates about what such an afterlife might be like, for humans or for animals. Yet it does seem to be an important element of theodicy to include an afterlife in which every sentient creature has the opportunity to experience its own individual flourishing. Two concluding caveats are relevant here. First, an analysis of the justification of God, given evil, should take into consideration factors related to one’s worldview, for whether it is reasonable to believe that God is justified will depend at least in part on whether one’s worldview – one’s set of beliefs, experiences, and understanding of God and the world – is itself warranted. The problem of evil, taken as an argument against the plausibility of the existence of God without considering other factors, may make belief in God improbable. However, if a certain claim A is improbable relative to a certain claim B, it does not follow that one who accepts both A and B is irrational or guilty of epistemic impropriety (even granting that she believes that A is improbable given B), for B may be probable with respect to other things she knows or believes.32 The relative background information provided by a worldview is central to this discussion. For theism, there are arguments provided by natural theology that may provide evidence for the existence of God. And there may also be non-propositional forms of evidence or grounds for believing that God exists, such as a natural knowledge of God, as suggested by Thomas Aquinas, or a sensus divinitatus – a cognitive process in which God reveals God’s reality and presence to an individual – as described by John Calvin. Conversely, there may be forms

John Wesley in a sermon entitled “The General Deliverance”, in Sermons on Several Occasions, Vol. 2 (London: J. Kershew, 1825), 131, as quoted in Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Pain (London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 78. 31 Keith Ward, Rational Theology and the Creativity of God (New York: Pilgrim, 1982), 201–2. 32 For more on this point, see Alvin Plantinga, “Epistemic Probability and Evil”, in The Evidential Argument from Evil, ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 69–96. 30

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of evidence against theism beyond that proffered by the reality of evil, such as whether the attributes of God can be coherently affirmed,33 and whether the problem of divine hiddenness, sometimes considered to be a version of the problem of evil, counts against the plausibility of belief in God.34 Second, even if a free-will theodicy can provide what William Hasker calls a general-policy theodicy,35 one that provides a justification of God’s permitting some evils as the consequence of a general policy that a wise and benevolent God could adopt, it does not follow that the theodicy can provide a specific-benefit of any particular evil that occurs. For example, God might permit the evil of a volcanic eruption in which a village is destroyed as a possible consequence of a global geological system that most of the time and in most places produces conditions that are advantageous for the thriving of sentient life. But this may not provide an existentially satisfying account for why some particular individual who experienced the eruption ended up, say, with third-degree burns over most of his body. In such cases as these, a specific-benefit policy – one that appeals to some specific benefit that results, or some particular harm that was averted – may be applicable. Nevertheless, neither form of theodicy seems to be fully satisfactory in providing an account of every particular example of evil that occurs (e.g., why some particular individual, say a three-month-old baby, perished in the eruption). But even so, this should not count against the overall value of the theodicy in question. Furthermore, it may well be that a cumulative case approach – one that includes a matrix of theodical accounts – is needed for a more comprehensive and satisfying explanation of evil for the theist.

FURTHER READING Hasker, William. The Triumph of God Over Evil: Theodicy for a World of Suffering. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2008. Hick, John. Evil and the God of Love, 2nd edition. London: Macmillan, 1977. Meister, Chad and James K. Dew, Jr., eds. God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2017. Swinburne, Richard. Providence and the Problem of Evil. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

John Howard Sobel examines arguments for and against the coherence of theism in Logic and Theism: Arguments for and Against Beliefs in God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 34 John Schellenberg, for example, develops an argument for atheism from the notion of divine hiddenness in his Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). 35 See Hasker, “An Open Theist View”, 59–63. 33

Chapter 58

Suffering and the Meaning of Life CLIFFORD WILLIAMS

One way to think about suffering and the problem of evil is to ask whether one’s life can be meaningful even though one has undergone significant suffering. Kristin may have thought about her suffering in this way. She fell out of a tree at seventeen and instantly became a quadriplegic. She could maneuver a motorized wheelchair with her right hand, and she could write fairly well with that hand if a pen were strapped to it. But she could not enjoy the everyday activities that most humans take for granted or many of the major goods in human life. Meaning, of course, comes in degrees. So the question about suffering and the meaning of life can be made more specific: Can one’s life be meaningful enough to outweigh or compensate for the suffering one has experienced? Did Kristin have enough meaning to outweigh the suffering she constantly endured? These questions presuppose that one has a conception of meaning. In what follows, I shall describe four conceptions of meaning that have been held by various philosophers and state what must be the case in each conception for meaningfulness to outweigh suffering. My aim is not to show that meaningfulness actually does outweigh the suffering in Kristin’s or anyone else’s life. It is the more modest enterprise of explaining what it would look like, in each conception of meaning, for meaningfulness to outweigh suffering if it were actually to do so. Interestingly, this modest enterprise may encourage some people actually to live meaningfully. Sometimes knowing how to do something can prompt one actually to do it. My aim is also to show how meaningfulness, in each of the four conceptions, would be enhanced by believing in a loving creator. Again, my aim is not to show that anyone’s life actually is enhanced by believing in a loving creator, but to describe what it would look like for one’s life to be so enhanced. First, though, here are two general features of the experience of meaningfulness that are pertinent to the question of the chapter.

MEANING The first feature is that for one’s life to be meaningful, one must be “engaged” with something – an activity, a project, a cause, a job, a person’s welfare. Susan Wolf unpacks the idea:

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A person’s life can be meaningful only if she cares fairly deeply about some things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged [. . .]. One must be able to be in some sort of relationship with the valuable object of one’s attention – to create it, protect it, promote it, honor it, generally to actively affirm it in some way or other.1 The point is that one must be captivated by something for one’s life to be meaningful, or absorbed by it, or at least interested in it. It is hard to imagine someone not interested in anything, but let us try. Imagine that when Kristin went to college some years after becoming quadriplegic she was not interested in doing so. Nothing in college captivated her or gripped her. Would we say that being in college was meaningful for her? To be sure, we probably would say that what she did was worthwhile. But we would surely hesitate to say that she experienced her college years as meaningful. And, therefore, we would hesitate to say that what she experienced by going to college outweighed the suffering she experienced. Wolf seems right when she states that “meaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness”.2 A second feature of the experience of meaningfulness is that it involves the satisfaction of desires for intrinsic goods and right pleasures. Consider a few of the intrinsic goods and pleasures involved in a rich friendship: comfort at knowing that one is valued, delight in the presence of the other, gratitude for knowing that one is understood, feeling sustenance when discouraged. When we have our desires for these goods and pleasures satisfied, we feel that the friendship is meaningful. And more generally, if we were to have our desires for goods and pleasures in a variety of situations satisfied, we would regard our lives as meaningful to a high degree. Here, again, we could try to imagine someone who experienced intrinsic goods and right pleasures but not as a product of their desires for them. Steve, a college senior when I knew him, seems to typify such a person. At one of the rehearsals for the college play he was in, he evidently was not energetic enough when uttering his lines. The director declared, “Steve! Can you give that more oomph – like living [. . .]. You do like living, right?” Steve hesitated, cocked his head a bit, and with a reflective look that was characteristic of the philosophy major that he was, replied, “I can take it or leave it”. With this indifference, we would wonder whether Steve’s acting was meaningful to him, though we could well regard it as worthwhile. One could, of course, be mistaken about whether something is truly an intrinsic good or a right pleasure. In this case, one would be mistaken about regarding one’s life as meaningful even though it would feel meaningful. But if one were not mistaken, one would truly have a meaningful life. And if the overall significance of that meaningful life were greater than the gravity of one’s suffering, one could say that, on balance, one had a meaningful life. So if the intrinsic goods and right pleasures Kristin experienced in college, graduate school, and subsequent employment in an institution for troubled girls were a product of her desire for these goods and pleasures, she would have experienced a good deal of meaningfulness. And if the amount and quality of that meaningfulness were at a sufficiently high degree, she would have experienced enough meaningfulness to outweigh her ceaseless suffering.

Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 9–10. Ibid., 10.

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These two features of meaning can be set in a context of believing in a loving creator: This loving creator, whom I shall refer to as the Divine One, made us humans with desires for intrinsic goods and right pleasures, gave us the ability to satisfy these desires, and wants us to satisfy them. In addition, so as to avoid the view that meaningfulness is based solely on desires, that is, solely on something subjective, we need also to say that the satisfaction of the desires is itself an intrinsic good. We ought to care about meaningfulness, and we ought to work toward having meaningful lives, because doing so is an objective good. It also pleases the Divine One, and pleasing the Divine One is an objective good as well.

ACHIEVING A GOAL This first conception of meaning is embedded in the ancient myth of Sisyphus. After Sisyphus died, he was condemned by the gods to roll a large rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down again, forever.3 He would never be able to achieve anything, and thus his life in the underworld would be pointless. Richard Taylor interprets the myth of Sisyphus in this way. Because Sisyphus’ labors “come to nothing”, Taylor says, they are meaningless.4 Susan Wolf also adopts a goal conception of acquiring meaning: “A meaningful life”, she states, “is one that is actively and at least somewhat successfully engaged in a project (or projects) of positive value”.5 For both, a remedy for Sisyphus would be for him to have been able to make something with the rocks he rolled up the hill, that is, to have an achievable goal. By so doing, his underworld life would have meant something. In this goal conception of meaning, a person’s suffering would be outweighed by meaningfulness if the following six conditions were to exist: (1) One “cares deeply” and is “gripped, excited, interested, engaged” in achieving certain goals. (2) One is at least somewhat successful in achieving these goals. (3) One desires to achieve the goals because one regards them as intrinsically good or as means to bringing about something that one regards as intrinsically good. (4) The goals are actually intrinsically good or means to an intrinsic good. (5) One regards the intrinsic goodness of the achieved goals as having more weight than the harm of one’s suffering. (6) The intrinsic goodness of the achieved goals actually has more weight than the harm of one’s suffering. Achieving goals would be an especially significant way of outweighing suffering if one’s suffering had involved impairing the ability to achieve goals. Kristin’s fall at age seventeen certainly impaired this ability. This fact may have caused her to value her college experience highly. And this valuing may have caused her to regard the goodness of going to college as having more weight than the harm of her suffering, thus satisfying condition (5). This sense of having more weight could be increased if one were to believe, rightly, that a loving creator made us humans with the ability to achieve goals that are intrinsically good and who is pleased when we do. The increase is due to the fact these two assertions provide a wider context for meaningfulness than there would be without a loving creator, Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 119–23. 4 Richard Taylor, “The Meaning of Life”, in Good and Evil (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2000), 319–34. 5 Susan Wolf, “The Meanings of Lives”, in Introduction to Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary Readings, 5th ed., eds John Perry, Michael Bratman, and John Martin Fischer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 794–805. 3

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a context that adds to the weight of the meaningfulness. This last claim is supported by what might be called the Context Principle, enunciated by Thomas Morris: “The appropriateness of a form of behavior is always a function of its context.”6 This Context Principle applies to meaningfulness, as stated by Lars Svendsen: “Meaning consists in inserting small parts into a larger, integrated context.”7 A theistic context can enhance one’s sense of meaningfulness by giving one who believes in a loving creator an additional motive for pursuing meaning, namely, to please the loving creator. More strongly, this additional motive can be love for the Divine One, a love that responds to the love of the Divine One for humans and to the valuing of the Divine One for humans’ achieving intrinsically good goals. Accordingly, one who believes in a loving creator and who acquires meaning by achieving goals can have a personal attachment to the Divine One. The additional motive and personal attachment to the Divine One would increase the subjective component of meaningfulness. And this increase would bring about a greater sense of overall meaningfulness. In a non-theistic conception of reality, this additional motive and sense of personal attachment would be absent, because there would be no creator whom one could please or to whom one could feel attached.

BEING CREATIVE The myth of Sisyphus can also be interpreted as illustrating the meaninglessness that arises from uncreative repetition. Richard Taylor once interpreted the myth in this way. The remedy for Sisyphus’ meaningless activity, he said, was for Sisyphus to roll rocks up the hill “for the very purpose of seeing them converted to a beautiful and lasting temple. Most important of all, this temple must be something of his own, the product of his own creative mind, of his own conception, something which, but for his own creative thought and imagination, would never have existed”.8 The creativity in achieving goals, Taylor asserted, is “what gives our lives whatever meaning they have”.9 It is not, of course, creativity for the sake of creativity that confers meaning, but creativity to produce something having objective value – “a beautiful and lasting temple”. And creativity is not the exclusive domain of rare individuals, for it is exemplified in numerous everyday activities, including “gardening [. . .], woodworking [. . .], witty conversations [. . .], the making of a poem of great beauty or depth of meaning [. . .], and the raising of a beautiful family”.10 In this creativity conception of meaning, a person’s suffering would be outweighed by meaningfulness if the six conditions listed in the goal conception of meaning were satisfied but with creativity incorporated into them. Thus, in condition (5), one must regard the goodness of being creative in doing valuable things as having more weight than the harm of one’s suffering. This condition would be an especially significant way of compensating for one’s suffering if the suffering had involved a restriction of that creativity in some way.

Thomas Morris, Making Sense of It All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 24. Lars Svendsen, A Philosophy of Boredom, trans. John Irons (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 29. 8 Richard Taylor, “Time and Life’s Meaning”, The Review of Metaphysics 40 (1987): 675–86, 681. 9 Ibid., 686. 10 Ibid., 683. 6 7

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Joni also became quadriplegic when she was a teenager – she dove into shallow water and hit her head on a large rock. Amazingly, though, she has been able to paint by using paintbrushes held in her teeth. If she regards the goodness of her artistic creativity, along with the goodness of her other creative enterprises, as outweighing the harm caused by her diving accident, then she would regard her life as having more meaningfulness than the harm caused by that accident.11 Believing in a loving creator would, again, enhance the meaningfulness of being creative by giving it a wider context, namely, a context in which the Divine One has made us humans to be creative and is pleased when we are. Believing in a loving creator would also enhance meaningfulness by helping cure both the everyday and whole-life boredom that can result from one’s suffering. Everyday boredom occurs when our interest in what we are currently doing fades, whereas whole-life boredom occurs when our interest in everything fades. Nothing interests us in whole-life boredom, there is nothing we care about, and our lives do not feel meaningful to us. Suffering and pain can certainly cause both kinds of boredom. Believing in a loving creator who values creative activities could prompt one to value those activities more. And that could prompt a zest for living in creative ways, which in turn could mitigate everyday and whole-life boredom that result from suffering. Also, simply wanting to please a loving creator could prompt one to be “excited, gripped, interested, engaged” with creative activities that bring about intrinsic goodness. One could, of course, be excited by and engaged with creative activities without believing in a loving creator, but having such a belief can add an absorbing and fervent element to that excitement and engagement.

EXEMPLIFYING VIRTUES The virtue conception of meaning is based on the virtue ethics tradition in philosophy that was first described extensively by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics. Although Aristotle never used “meaning”, he did say that a life well lived is one in which a number of virtues are exemplified. In the virtue conception of meaning, then, a person’s life would be meaningful when it exemplifies a wide array of virtues – the objective component – and when one is suitably captivated by exemplifying those virtues – the subjective component. This characterization of meaningfulness can be modified to say that one’s life is meaningful when it is dominated by the active and engaged pursuit of just one or two virtues, such as justice, compassion, or generosity, provided other virtues are also present. One who devotes a large share of her life to fostering racial equity or compassion for those who live in the margins, for instance, could be said to have as meaningful a life as one who cultivates equally the “love, joy, peace, patient endurance, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” mentioned by Paul in Gal. 5:22-23. It is important to note that the virtues and their corresponding emotions that contribute to a meaningful life need not be only the moral virtues I have mentioned in the previous paragraph. They can be nonmoral as well, such as enjoying sweet fruits, pleasing sounds, or the smell of Queen Anne’s Lace, a delicately fragrant flower that sometimes grows beside roads. In fact, it may be that having nonmoral virtues and engaging in the

See https://amb​assa​dora​dver​tising​.com​/portfolio​-posts​/joni​-eareckson​-tada/ for a picture of her, with a paintbrush and one of her paintings. 11

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corresponding nonmoral activities play a large role in one’s sense of meaningfulness, and thus a large role in compensating for suffering. This conception of meaning is decidedly not a goal conception of meaning. One could, of course, have as a goal to exemplify certain moral and nonmoral virtues. And one is not likely to pursue certain goals without having a relevant virtue. But being virtuous is different from planning and executing what needs to be done to accomplish a goal. This difference comes through clearly when it is observed that some virtues consist of having inner states, such as emotions or attitudes. Gratitude is an emotion, and so is awe, both of which are virtuous in the right context. Respect for others and admiration for others’ talents are virtuous attitudes. The basic idea is that being virtuous is a characteristic of a person, and achieving a goal is something a person does. The ways in which these two are intertwined does not undermine their difference. If six conditions analogous to the six mentioned earlier under the goal conception of meaning are satisfied, then suffering would be compensated for on this virtue conception of meaning. There would be enough engagement with objectively valuable virtues, moral and nonmoral, to outweigh one’s suffering. Kristin may have overcome her affliction in this virtue way, for she had become gracious, gentle, and kind, unlike the wild teenager she once was. Meaningfulness in a virtue conception of meaning can be enhanced by believing in a loving creator in the two ways described earlier – by having a wider context for living virtuously and by helping to mitigate everyday and whole-life boredom. The latter can happen when one becomes captivated by exercising virtues that one especially values. In addition, acquiring meaningfulness through exemplifying virtues can be enriched significantly when believing in a loving creator because there are additional virtues and emotions one can acquire – reverence for the creator, a sense of belonging to the creator, love for the creator, gratitude to the creator for being able to experience intrinsic goods and right pleasures, joy at the fact that one is loved by the creator, and a sense of cosmic security, to name a few. Clearly, these virtues and emotions cannot be had in a naturalist universe. In a theist universe, though, these additional virtues and emotions can be had, and the enriched meaningfulness that derives from having them can aid in compensating for suffering. Moreover, the urge to “transcend oneself” can be satisfied in an additional way by believing in a loving creator. It is often said that humans possess this urge. Julian Baggini writes: “There does seem to be a widespread, if not universal, human urge to achieve transcendence. Life seems unsatisfactory when it concerns only our individual existence.”12 One way in which one can escape being concerned only with one’s own existence is by exemplifying other-directed virtues involving humans, such as generosity, empathy, kindness, and patience. Baggini, who is a naturalist, says that the drive to transcend oneself can be satisfied in this way, namely, by being altruistic toward other humans.13 He is right, to a degree. The drive can also be satisfied by believing in a loving creator toward whom one can have the other-directed virtues and emotions mentioned in the previous paragraph. This fact means that suffering can again be compensated for more intensely by believing in a loving creator.

Julian Baggini, What’s It All About? Philosophy and the Meaning of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 87. 13 Ibid. 12

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Satisfying the urge to transcend oneself sometimes has special efficacy in compensating for suffering. Expressing the altruistic emotions of sympathy, care, and concern toward those who are in deep pain can sometimes heal one who themselves experiences deep pain. Something about stepping outside oneself causes one to be able to deal with one’s own suffering better.

LOVE GIVEN AND RECEIVED The fourth way of acquiring meaning is actually part of the third way, for giving and receiving love are virtuous activities. But love has played such a central role in some ethical systems that it is worth listing separately. It has also been thought by many people to be the most important feature of a satisfying life. Plus, some philosophers have resisted the tendency to think of achieving goals as the only thing that confers meaning. Susan Wolf falls into this last category when she states that a number of non-goal-aiming activities give meaning to life in addition to goal-aiming ones. These include “ongoing relationships and involvements – with friends, family, the scientific community, with church or ballet or chess”.14 The basic idea is that the love, care, and concern given and received within families and between friends, acquaintances, and strangers is intrinsically good. And having this intrinsic good in one’s life gives it meaning. Much has been said about giving love, but more needs to be said about receiving love, for it is an important component of living meaningfully. It is especially important for dealing with the emotional suffering and moral pain of the sort experienced by Ivan Ilyich as he lay dying in Leo Tolstoy’s story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Ivan’s physical suffering was terrible, “but more terrible than his physical sufferings were his moral sufferings, and these were his chief torment”.15 They consisted of the fact that Ivan finally realized that he had lived his whole life “not right”. Accepting another’s love, care, and concern, either human or divine, prompts one to feel valued. Without this sense, it is hard to believe that anything one does is valuable, and without believing this, it is hard to be motivated to do anything that one regards as meaningful. Accepting another’s love, care, and concern can also impart an abiding contentment, which can help mitigate loneliness, anxiety, and despair. Last, accepting another’s love, care, and concern, can give one a sense of self-acceptance, which can help undo self-rejection. These three – feeling valued, having an abiding contentment, and feeling self-acceptance – can play an important role in dealing with the crippling depression that often accompanies affliction and suffering. I found that this last point was pertinent to the fifty-five people I interviewed for Choosing to Live: Stories of Those Who Stepped Away from Suicide, each of whom had attempted to kill themselves.16 A significantly high percentage of these people said that at the time they were suicidal they had no one they felt they could talk to, no one who would listen to them, no one who would love them. No one was there for them, they felt.

Susan Wolf, “Happiness and Meaning: Two Aspects of the Good Life”, Social Philosophy and Policy 14 (1997): 207–25, 211–12. 15 Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009), 50. 16 Clifford Williams, Choosing to Live: Stories of Those Who Stepped Away from Suicide (Springfield: Charles C Thomas Publisher, 2017). 14

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It may be that some of these suicidal people only felt that they were not loved, not that they actually were not. This is because accepting another person’s love, care, and concern is sometimes one of the hardest things anyone can do. One may feel unlovable or feel that one has to prove one’s worthiness to be loved. One might have had abusive parents or been constantly criticized by others and consequently been pushed away from genuine care and concern. Accepting love, care, and concern often requires as much work as does giving love. This love conception of acquiring meaning is pertinent to what might be called the comfort solution to the problem of evil. This solution covers cases in which suffering is so horrific that it does not seem possible for any good either to result from it or to outweigh it. William Rowe’s fawn that dies in a forest fire appears to be an instance of such suffering.17 No one observes the fawn’s dying, no one has empathy because of its death, no one’s life is enriched because of the lingering and painful dying of the fawn – in short, no greater good comes from the death. Some human cases of severe suffering seem to be like the fawn’s painful death. People whose friends and relatives died in Nazi concentration camps have also died in it. Someone’s self-worth is so damaged by constant criticism that she kills herself. A young mother dies, leaving a child to be brought up by an irresponsible and abusive father. A debilitating mental illness causes one to live an acutely unfulfilled life. Any enrichment that is brought about by these cases does not appear to come anywhere close to outweighing the suffering experienced in them. In such cases, a “comfort theodicy” states that a loving creator can offer empathetic care both to those who have undergone horrific suffering and to engaged witnesses. The situation is like a child who has scraped her hand and is comforted by a parent who kisses the hand where it hurts and offers soothing words. No greater good comes from the injury, just comfort from one who gives love. I sometimes wonder whether Kristin experienced this comfort, whether from friends or from her faith in a loving creator. Tragically, she lost her job when the nonprofit institution at which she worked lost funding. She died some years later, at fifty-three, having spent the intervening years almost entirely in bed. According to many theists, life after death in the presence of a loving creator can give comfort to those who cannot secure it before death, and the comfort it can give them is better than any pre-death comfort they might experience. This is because obstacles to the giving and receiving of love between humans and the Divine One will be gone then. The resultant intimacy with the Divine One will give one a “retrospective comfort” for one’s pre-death suffering.18 Although giving and receiving of love between humans and the Divine One is a prominent way in which life after death is conceived by theists, we can also conceive of humans doing things after death, in which case the goal and creativity conceptions of meaning will also give meaning to life after death. The virtue conception can give meaning to life after death as well, for part of the point of continuing to live after we die

William L. Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism”, American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979): 335–41. 18 For an exposition of a “beatific intimacy with God” theodicy, which is like a comfort theodicy, see Marilyn McCord Adams, “Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplemental Vol. 63 (1989): 297–310, and her Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 1999). 17

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is to be “new creatures” who no longer struggle against evil and pain. These post-death experiences of meaningfulness can outweigh suffering in the same way that pre-death experiences of meaningfulness can.

SUFFERING AND MEANING I have been saying that having a meaningful life can compensate for suffering, not that every person is fully capable of acquiring such compensation. A number of conditions can impair one’s ability to achieve goals, acquire virtues, and give and receive love. One is that circumstances can make it hard to do these, including extensive faultfinding by parents, racial or gender identity, social or economic deprivation, an unloving family, or emotional turmoil. The physical or emotional pain can be so severe that all one can think of is that pain. In these cases, one will have to fight for meaning. Given that everyone has suffered in some way, to some degree, and at some point in their lives, and given that everyone has experienced impairing conditions of some sort, everyone will need to fight to obtain what they regard as meaningful lives. A realistic assessment of humans and their interactions with the conditions in which they find themselves results in the observation that, prior to death at least, some of us humans will win the fight while some will not. Some will experience wonderfully beautiful lives. They will have numerous meaningful experiences derived in all four ways. Some will experience tragically meaningless lives. They will not achieve goals, have virtues, or give or receive love, or will not do enough of these to outweigh their suffering, and also will not feel that these have enough value to outweigh their suffering. The rest, probably the majority of us, will be somewhere in between.19

FURTHER READING Cottingham, John. On the Meaning of Life. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Lewis, C. S. The Problem of Pain. New York: Harper San Francisco, 1996. Seachris, Joshua W. and Stewart Goetz, eds. God and Meaning: New Essays. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

The framework for this chapter is derived from my Religion and the Meaning of Life: An Existential Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), ch. 4, “Acquiring Meaning”, 56–78, and ch. 5, “The Divine One”, 97–111. I have used an occasional word, phrase, and sentence from these chapters. Writing this chapter has been enriched by conversations with Tramaine Suubi, Liz Pantle, Elim Shanko, and Kendall Jones Stanley.

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Sometimes social media rants identify problems in how people think about God and evil. The following quote expresses in common language the concerns I address in this chapter: If God created men, women, all creatures, and the universe in six freaking days, why is He so powerless to change the horrible things that happen on earth? He’s freaking God!!! With a wave of hand, He should be able to prevent evil. I have to conclude God does not exist. The point: A God able to create a universe ought to be able to prevent evil “with a wave of hand”. And yet, genuine evils occur. These evils make the world worse than it might have been. Why doesn’t the Creator prevent evil? Why doesn’t God instantaneously create barriers to stop Covid-19, for instance? Or create barriers to other diseases? Or create obstacles that stop rapists, murderers, and torturers? Or prevent freak accidents? And so on. The social media post assumes God faced no limits when creating. Many theists share this assumption. They think God created the universe from absolutely nothing (creatio ex nihilo). God once existed alone and, for some reason, began creating from no materials whatsoever. The assumption God can create from nothing raises three questions. We must answer each well to convince our friend that God exists and yet does not prevent evil “with a wave of a hand”. The first question concerns God creating at the beginning of our universe. According to contemporary science, that beginning – a big bang – occurred roughly 13.8 billion years ago. How did God create at the start? Was this creating from absolute nothingness? Or from something? The second question addresses what divine creating says about what God can do today. How does God create moment by moment now (creatio continua)? Does God create from nothing? The third question asks why God creates? Earlier questions ask about the manner or mode of divine creating. This question asks about God’s motives. Why would God create at all? I will answer these questions by arguing creating is an essential divine attribute. God necessarily creates. This argument is uncommon among theists. I will also say love is God’s

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primary motive for creating. In fact, God everlastingly loves creation. This argument is also uncommon. And I will say the manner or mode of God’s creating is persuasive love. God always creates uncontrollingly in relation to or alongside creation; divine creating is never unilateral. Again, an uncommon claim. These claims involve rejecting creatio ex nihilo. Setting aside this longstanding view proves crucial to solving the problem of evil. The creation from nothing theory also fails on biblical, philosophical, empirical, and ethical grounds. I suggest God everlastingly creates and essentially loves creaturely others. With these ideas in place, we can respond cogently to the social media rant and to sophisticated claims both theists and atheists make.1

A MERRY-GO-ROUND ANALOGY Imagine city officials commissioned a contractor to build a play park for children. Officials told the contractor to include playground equipment, water features, game areas, healthy food dispensers, and more. They envisioned the perfect park. Suppose, when creating, the contractor put a merry-go-round at the center. Next to it, however, he posted signs saying, “Don’t Play on This Merry-Go-Round!” “KEEP OUT!” When construction was complete, city officials inspected it. They liked what they saw. But officials wondered about the merry-go-round. “Why did you include a merry-go-round”, they asked, “but warn children not to play on it?” “I’ve designed this park to be immense fun”, answered the contractor, except for this merry-go-round. Children must not play on it. If anyone does, calamities will ensue. I’ve placed knives throughout the park, and they will cut children the moment anyone plays on the merry-go-round. I’ve inserted sink holes to suck down and suffocate children. The vending machine will offer methamphetamine and crackcocaine. Loaded handguns will be distributed to kids the moment anyone gets on the merry-go-round. Water fountains will periodically spout poison and acid, and every blond-haired child will be bullied. Would we consider this contractor a good builder? Many people think the Genesis creation story presents an analogous situation. They assume God existed in isolation and decided to create a universe with no help and without using any materials. Being unconstrained, God singlehandedly designed creation: its systems, laws, causal structures, creaturely diversity, and possibilities. The world was good, except for a tree God planted at the center. It bore fruit that, if eaten, brought calamity. After creating it, God warned humans that death would come if they ate from the tree. The God who designed the world from nothing “rigged” it so that calamity would come if forbidden fruit were eaten. The humans, whom God created to be attracted to fruit, could not resist the fruit. But upon eating, all manner of calamity and evil occurred. All creation suffered and continues to suffer now.

I’ve laid out a fivefold solution to the problem of evil. See The Uncontrolling Love of God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2015); God Can’t (Grasmere: SacraSage, 2019); Questions and Answers for God Can’t (Grasmere: SacraSage, 2020).

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Should we consider a God who created a universe – from absolutely nothing – and added features with immense potential for evil a good Creator? Even if we say the tree and fruit are symbolic, why would God create from nothing an evil-prone universe?

CREATION FROM NOTHING REJECTED Theists today and throughout history have claimed God created the universe from absolutely nothing. Many look to the first chapters of Genesis when thinking about God’s initial creating. The first lines say, In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. These verses do not say God created from absolute nothingness. References to “the face of the deep” and “the face of the waters” suggest something was present when God began to create our universe. Many of the most influential biblical scholars say the idea God created from nothing is not in Genesis. Let me quote several: ●

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“Creation out of nothing is foreign to both the language and the thought of the unknown author of Genesis”, says Claus Westermann. “It is clear that there can be here no question of creatio ex nihilo.”2 “God’s creating in Genesis one”, says Terrence Fretheim, “includes ordering that which already exists . . . God works creatively with already existing reality to bring about newness”.3 “Properly understood”, says Jon Levenson, “Genesis 1:1–2:3 cannot be invoked to support the developed Jewish, Christian, and Muslim doctrine of creation ex nihilo”.4 “‘Nothingness’ is not the picture of the situation at the beginning”, says Mark S. Smith. “Unformed as the world is, tohu va bohu is far from being nothingness or connoting nothingness.”5 “It can be said that Yahweh is the creator of the world”, says Rolf P. Knierim, “because he is its liberator from chaos”.6

The list of Bible scholars saying creatio ex nihilo is not in Genesis is long. It includes liberal and conservative voices, and it includes those who reject creation from nothing and those who accept it for nonbiblical reasons. It is hard to overemphasize this point, so I will say it again: Genesis does not support the creation from nothing view. The only biblical verse to mention God creating from nothing is 2 Macc. 7:28, a passage not recognized in the Protestant canon. The verse comes from a passage in which a mother speaks to her son: Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–11, trans. John J. Scullion (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1994), 110. 3 Terence E. Fretheim, God and World in the Old Testament (Nashville: Abingdon, 2005), 5. 4 Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 121. 5 Mark S. Smith, The Priestly Vision of Genesis 1 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2010), 50. 6 Rolf P. Knierim, Task of Old Testament Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 210. 2

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She leaned over close to him and, in derision of the cruel tyrant, said in their native language: “Son, have pity on me, who carried you in my womb for nine months, nursed you for three years, brought you up, educated and supported you to your present age. I beg you, child, to look at the heavens and the earth and see all that is in them; then you will know that God did not make them out of existing things. In the same way, humankind came into existence. (27–28) Some claim the Maccabean phrase “God did not make them out of existing things” refers to creation from nothing. But the context conflicts with this interpretation. The mother witnesses to carrying, nursing, and educating her son. “In the same way”, says the writer of 2 Maccabees, “humankind came into existence”. In other words, mothers play a key role in creating. But we also know that mothers require fathers; sperm and egg are needed. This is not creation from nothing. A better analogy says God created the heavens, earth, humans, and all creatures in the divine womb. The sexual connotations lead a contemporary person to wonder what other factors were involved. In short, the natal analogy requires multiple causes, not just one. We find no explicit reference to creatio ex nihilo in New Testament writings. The book of Peter offers the most explicit statement about God’s initial creating. God “created out of water and by means of water” (2 Pet. 3:5). Other biblical passages speak of God creating out of “unseen things” (Heb. 11:3), un-grouped people (Rom. 4:17), and creation generally. Early Christian and Jewish theologians believed God created the world out of something. Philo, for instance, postulated pre-existent matter alongside God. Justin, Athenagoras, and Clement of Alexandria spoke of God creating the world out of something. Origin of Alexandria and John Scotus argued God has always been creating. “These theologians”, says historian Gerhard May, “could hold an acceptance of an unformed matter was entirely reconcilable with biblical monotheism and the power of God”.7 For these reasons (and others I will address), theists should reject creatio ex nihilo. Biblical writers assume God creates from or in relation to something. That something may be chaos, unseen actualities, unformed matter, disparate entities, and more.

OTHER PROBLEMS WITH CREATION FROM NOTHING The creation from nothing theory leads to a host of problems. A God who can create a universe from nothing – “with a wave of his hand” – is culpable for failing to prevent evil. The God who creates the universe from absolutely nothing is responsible for the fundamental structures, laws, and possibilities of existence. This God should be able instantaneously to create obstacles to prevent evil today. Because evils occur that a loving God would want to prevent, we should reject creatio ex nihilo and the view of divine power it implies. The creation from nothing theory has other problems. Below, I list nine. I include among them the problem of evil and the problem of lack of biblical support. Some problems will strike readers as more acute than others. But considering the whole, even less consequential problems contribute to our justification for rejecting creatio ex nihilo.

Gerhard May, Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of “Creation out of Nothing” in Early Thought, trans. A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 74.

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1. The Theoretical Problem – Absolute nothingness cannot be conceived. It’s intellectually impossible to fathom.



2. The Historical Problem – Creation out of nothing was first proposed by Gnostics. Most forms of Gnosticism assume creation is inherently evil, so a good God doesn’t act in relation to evil creation. Most theists today think creation is intrinsically good.



3. The Empirical Problem – We have no evidence that our universe originally came into being from nothing. While we ought to affirm the big bang, science doesn’t tell us from out of what the big bang came.



4. The Creation at an Instant Problem – We have no evidence that creatures or creaturely entities can emerge instantaneously from absolute nothingness. “Out of nothing comes nothing” is the old saying, ex nihil, nihil fit.



5. The Solitary Power Problem – Creation out of nothing assumes God once acted all alone. But power is a social concept and only meaningful in relation to others outside the powerful actor.



6. The Errant Revelation Problem – A God who can create something from absolutely nothing could guarantee an unambiguous, inerrant revelation. But such revelation does not exist.



7. The Evil Problem – If God once could create from absolutely nothing, God would essentially retain that ability. But a loving God with this ability would be morally culpable for failing to use it to prevent genuine evil.



8. The Empire Problem/Status Quo Problem – The power necessary to create from nothing supports the idea that God causes or allows the establishment of empires. This God apparently wants the status quo, all its injustices.



9. The Biblical Problem – The Bible does not explicitly support creation from nothing. Writers speak of God creating out of something: water, the deep, chaos, invisible things, and so on.

CREATION FROM NOTHING NOW One might claim God once created from nothing, but does so no longer. After initially creating ex nihilo, God chooses never or rarely to interrupt, intervene, or control creation. I call this the “voluntary self-limitation” view of divine power. The God who voluntarily self-limited retains the capacity to control others, of course. Alvin Plantinga puts it nicely: “There is nothing to prevent God from . . . creating ex nihilo a full-grown horst in the middle of Times Square.” An ex-nihilo creating God can do so, Plantinga adds, “without violating the principle of conservation of energy”.8 If God can create something from nothing in an instant, one wonders why God does not use this ability to prevent genuine evils.9 Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 78–9. 9 David Ray Griffin has argued this point in a number of publications, including “Creation out of Nothing, Creation out of Chaos, and the Problem of Evil”, in Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, 2nd ed., ed. Stephen T. Davis (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 108–44; Evil Revisited: Responses and Reconsiderations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). 8

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Let me illustrate. Suppose a mentally disturbed individual enters a restaurant with a semi-automatic pistol and begins firing. The God who can create something out of nothing could create miniature walls to deflect each bullet. In this ex-nihilo creating, God would not violate the assailant’s free will. Even if creating such walls violates the laws of nature – laws this God decided ex nihilo – such violation would be justified for the sake of saving lives. Once we begin to imagine the ways a God capable of creating ex nihilo might prevent genuine evil, the problem of evil becomes overwhelming! God seems asleep on the evil-preventing job. We may think of reasons God would allow suffering that is not genuinely evil. But it is impossible for me – and I think for most people – to believe a loving God capable of creating obstacles out of nothing allows all suffering because it makes the world a better place. To believe this is to believe God permits every actual rape, holocaust, genocide, murder, torture, or other evil. The way we live our lives suggests we do not believe this. The voluntary divine self-limitation view coupled with creatio ex nihilo leads us to wonder why God does not create obstacles to evil or control creatures who do evil. A stronger voluntary self-limitation view says that after creating from nothing, God never interrupts, intervenes, or controls creatures. This God cannot create from nothing after doing so initially. Philip Clayton and Steven Knapp advocate this option and call it the “not even once” view.10 According to them, a loving God cannot control creation after creating it ex nihilo. God does not control when doing miracles, resurrecting Jesus, or bringing about an eschatological fulfillment. The “not even once” view overcomes problems that arise when saying God can create from nothing today. But it cannot overcome other problems. For instance, it cannot provide a good reason God created the universe. And a reason why God didn’t create earlier. One also wonders why this “not even once” God can no longer control creatures. If God once existed alone and voluntarily created from nothing, it stands to reason creating is not something God must do. God has not always been creating. Creating is not a necessary attribute for this deity. God may or may not create, on this view. So why didn’t God create earlier than 13.8 billion years ago? If God once existed alone and voluntarily created from nothing, it stands to reason loving creatures and creation is not something God must do. Loving creatures is not a necessary attribute for God. God could have existed and yet loved nothing other than Godself. We should wonder: What grounds do we have to believe God will always love us and creation? If God once existed alone and voluntarily created from nothing, it stands to reason acting as sufficient cause is something essential to God. God can control, if God wants to do so. God’s decision not to control, in other words, is contingent for this “not even once” God. But if God can control, aren’t the evils we experience awful enough to prompt a loving God to prevent them? In sum, God loving creatures, creating, and acting noncoercively are contingent activities for the “not even once” God. God’s “not even once” policy is always subject to God’s revision, rejection, or occasional exceptions. Nothing about the divine nature prevents God from having a change of mind to use controlling tactics.

Philip Clayton and Steven Knapp, The Predicament of Belief: Science, Philosophy, Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 66.

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To overcome these problems, we need a view that says God never has and cannot control creation. This view would say God never has and cannot create something from nothing. To put it positively, the alternative would say God always and necessarily creates, loves, and persuades creaturely others. I turn to lay out this alternative.

GOD EVERLASTINGLY CREATES AND ESSENTIALLY LOVES Pointing out problems in the traditional view of how God creates the universe is important. But it’s not enough. A constructive theologian should offer an alternative. An adequate replacement overcomes the problems inherent in creatio ex nihilo and answers the concerns we found in the social media rant. I call my alternative creatio ex creatione sempiternalis in amore, which is Latin for “God always creates out of creation in love”. Here are the basic components: ●

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God everlastingly loves creaturely others. “Love for creation” is a necessary attribute of God. God cannot fail to love creatures, because it’s an essential aspect of the divine nature. Love motives God to create, and God always wants the best possible, given the circumstances. God’s loving nature is the ground for both God’s initial and ongoing creating of our universe. God everlastingly has been creating others. “Creating others” is a necessary attribute of God. God must create, so I call deity the “Ever Creator”. God was creating other universes before ours, and God will create subsequent universes after ours. God may even be creating universes while simultaneously creating the one in which we live.11 God always creates out of or in relation to that which God previously created. Even at the big bang, God created in relation to what God created earlier. Because divine creating is everlastingly, there have always been creatures and creation out of or in relation to which God creates. God’s creating is always uncontrolling; God never acts as a sufficient cause. This is the manner divine creating.

The theory God creates out of creation everlastingly in love overcomes problems arising from creatio ex nihilo. It does not ask us to conceive the inconceivable: absolute nothingness. We do not have to embrace the Gnostic view that creation is inherently evil. This new theory better fits the empirical nature of science, which says something always emerges in relation to something else. It overcomes creation-from-nothing-atan-instant problems we saw in Plantinga’s view. Saying God creates out of creation everlastingly in love assumes God’s power is social, not unilateral, which is how we typically understand power. A God who creates alongside others whom God previously created cannot guarantee inerrant revelation, which fits the errant scriptures we have.

The claim God creates an infinite number of universes simultaneously has numerous metaphysical problems. Those problems do not apply to my claim God everlastingly creates a succession of universes. Some problems revolve around the idea of infinity itself, a concept with no positive meaning. Other problems emerge if, as I claim, God necessarily creates in a loving manner. The Creator I propose as most plausible cannot create in unloving ways. Consequently, the universes that could actually exist will be characterized by the action of a loving Creator, which is not the same as the logically possible number of universes.

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The God whose creative power is never singlehanded cannot singlehandedly establish empires or by fiat maintain the status quo. And this theory matches the witness of God’s creating in sacred scriptures: God always creates in relation to something, according to biblical texts. Creatio ex creatione sempiternalis in amore provides a plausible answer to the social media rant. God did not create the universe “with a wave of a hand”. God never creates singlehandedly nor controls others. Divine creating never starts from absolute nothingness. And God’s love is essentially uncontrolling – now and at the beginning of our universe. God’s creating always involves contributions by creaturely factors and actors that God cannot control. An uncontrolling Creator who always creates in relation to others is a Creator who cannot control anyone or anything.

NO UNIVERSE EVERLASTINGLY EXISTS New theories are often misunderstood. To conclude, I address the most common misunderstandings of this alternative to creation from nothing. To say God necessarily creates and loves creaturely others leads some to think the view requires our universe to exist everlastingly. If true, this would deny the big bang, a theory widely embraced by scientists. The God who exists everlastingly and everlastingly loves creatures, some might say, requires our universe to be everlasting. This new theory does not say our universe is everlasting. I affirm with most contemporary cosmologists that our universe had a beginning roughly 13.8 billion years ago. But contemporary science offers no empirical evidence for or against what existed prior to the big bang. Creatio ex creatione sempiternalis in amore speculates that the chaos of a previous universe existed prior to our universe. God created at the beginning of our universe in relation to a chaotic universe God previously created. The chaos of a previously dissipating universe would be comprised of quarks, subatomic particles, and the most basic entities of existence. While no single universe exists everlastingly, a succession of chaotic elements, entities, creatures, or universes has always existed. The everlastingly creative God creates each in this everlasting succession. Every creature and universe is temporary, however; all creaturely others have a beginning. Consequently, neither our universe nor any other is eternal. No analogy can explain perfectly what I am proposing, but let me offer something approximate. I spend time with and photograph wild horses in Idaho. Sometimes, a stallion can father generations in a herd. He impregnates mares, the fillies of those mares, the fillies of those fillies, and so on. Imagine a stallion who lived a million years. Suppose it is this stallion’s nature to bear offspring, and he always relates to at least one mare but often to many. Suppose the lifespan of a typical mare is twenty-five years. The stallion in this analogy goes through a succession of relationships with mares who bear offspring. Those offspring bear more offspring. And so on. But no single mare lives a million years alongside the stallion. Apply this analogy to God and creation. An everlasting God who by nature always creates and loves creatures will always have others with whom to create and love. But no creaturely other – whether single entity or universe – is itself everlasting. Each comes and goes. The succession of creations is everlasting, but no single creation exists forever.

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In this way, God can necessarily create out of what God previously created and yet no universe exists everlastingly or necessarily. In sum, no universe is eternal. But because God always creates in relation to what God previously created, there will always be creaturely others.

CREATION DOES NOT PREDATE GOD To deny God creates ex nihilo might lead some to worry creaturely entities existed before God. According to this worry, God “stumbled upon” preexisting materials from which God fashioned a universe. These materials predate God. My alternative to creatio ex nihilo denies that any materials predate God. The view I offer says God always loves and creates in relation to, alongside, or out of what God previously created. Whatever existed just before our universe must have been highly diffuse, chaotic, and simple. God created the elements in the chaotic and dying universe preceding ours. In other words, God created something new at the big bang from that which God created previously. Creatio ex creatione sempiternalis in amore says God always creates in each moment out of that which God created in the previous moment. This means no universe, world, creature, or “thing” predates God’s creating. God does not create out of “stuff” God had never previously encountered. God never “stumbles upon” something uncreated. The stallion analogy helps us to understand this. But we’ll have to expand it. Remember that we speculated this stallion lives a million years and, by nature, relates and procreates alongside mares. But the mares with which he procreates came from his previous procreation with their mothers. The stallion co-creates in relation to what he previously co-created. The hypothetical stallion who lives a million years came into existence, of course. He will eventually die. In God’s case, however, procreating in relation to creation had no beginning and has no end. God exists, loves, and creates everlastingly. But just as the stallion relies upon co-creating mares, God also relies upon the contributions of creaturely others when creating. This analogy works just as well if we speculate God is a mare who lives a million years but mates with stallions who live twenty-five years. It may work even better if we think the gestation of the prenatal colts is like the God whose existence is a womb in which creatures arise. But the mare analogy has the limitations of the stallion analogy. Mares do not exist everlastingly. Only God is an everlasting creator, and God’s co-creators come and go. In sum, no universe, creature, or chaos predates God.

GOD DOES NOT NEED CREATION FOR GOD TO EXIST To say God always loves and creates sounds like God needs creaturely others. To some, saying, “God needs . . .” is like saying a circle is square. In their view, God has no needs. As they see it, a needy God cannot be sovereign or a se. Some accept creatio ex nihilo to safeguard their view God does not depend upon creation in any respect. My alternative says God needs creation in some respects but not in others. Creatio ex creatione sempiternalis in amore says God does not need creation for God to exist. God exists necessarily, and nothing can end divine existing. God is a se, in the

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sense that God requires nothing external for God to exist. But God can exist necessarily in this respect and depend upon creatures in other respects. God depends upon creation in the sense that relational love is never solitary. God depends on others with whom God lovingly gives and receives. To put it succinctly, because God always loves, God always needs others with whom to share a loving relationship. God also depends upon creatures in the collaborative creative process. This dependence is not about whether God creates. God necessarily does so. And the divine motive to create comes from love. But the results of God’s creating depend upon creaturely forces, factors, and choices. God’s co-creating depends upon the existence of co-creators. Creatio ex creatione sempiternalis in amore rejects pantheism. God and creation are distinct. Creatures depend upon God’s initiating action in each moment, and they respond by joining, to the extent possible, in the creative process God initiates. There is no logical contradiction in saying God does not need creation for God to exist and yet God needs creation in each moment of loving and creating. So long as there are always creaturely others whom God creates and loves, God can both necessarily exist and necessarily create through dependent relations.

GOD FREELY CREATES When saying God always creates out of that which God previously created in love, I’ve used the words “necessary” and “essentially”. God necessarily creates, in the sense of must create in relation to creatures. To say God necessarily does something means God is not free to do otherwise. This might lead some to worry God is not free. My view says that when creating, God is free in some respects, but not in others. Few theologians believe God is free to do anything. Most think God cannot freely do what is logically impossible. God cannot make a married bachelor, for instance, or make 2 + 2 = 73. Many also believe God is not free to act against God’s own nature. God cannot deny himself, to use the language of the Apostle Paul (2 Tim. 2:13). God can’t freely tell a lie, for instance, or freely decide to stop existing. It’s also fairly common to say God isn’t free to change the past. And so on. My alternative theology of creation says it’s God’s nature to love and create. God must love; God must create. God is not free to stop doing either any more than God is free to stop existing. By nature, God loves and creates, so these activities are necessary. God is free, however, when choosing how to create, given the creaturely conditions. God is free in choosing how to love, given what’s possible in each situation. God freely creates in relation to creation and to whatever is possible that would also be loving. God cannot create something not possible to create – given circumstances also generated by creaturely causes, factors, and actors. God freely chooses while creating in relation to the past and a yet to be determined future. Let me illustrate. Each of us is human, and we are not free to be otherwise. We cannot breathe exactly like fish, for instance, nor fly exactly like eagles. Our freedom is limited by what it means to be homo sapiens. We have a degree of freedom, however. At least libertarian free-will theists like me think so. Humans act freely in human ways, given what is possible in each moment. We are free to use scuba gear, fly airplanes, and more. Our freedom is contingent upon circumstances.

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Similarly, God is not free to be something other than God. To be God means having particular divine attributes. I am claiming that one divine attribute entails that God must create; God is not free not to create. But God is free to create in relation to creatures and creation, given what’s possible. Assuming the future is open and yet to be determined, God is free to create in relation to what might be most beneficial for the whole. In sum, God must create but is free in choosing how to create, given God’s nature and what is possible among creaturely conditions.

CONCLUSION I began with a social media rant. The author of that rant wondered why a God who created the universe “with a wave of a hand” does not prevent evil. In response, I told a story of a contractor building a park with a merry-go-round that could cause disaster. I compared this builder with the God who allegedly created the universe from nothing. I questioned whether we should consider this Creator good. I argued theists ought to reject creatio ex nihilo. I listed nine reasons for doing so. I proposed creatio ex creatione sempiternalis in amore as an alternative. This view says God always creates out of that which God previously created in love. This alternative overcomes a host of problems in creatio ex nihilo, not the least of which is the problem of evil. It says God has always been creating alongside creation through uncontrolling love. In fact, love is God’s primary motive for creating. A God who by nature essentially loves and everlastingly creates in relation to creation is a God who does not singlehandedly set up the conditions for, cause, or even permit genuine evil.

FURTHER READING Griffin, David Ray. “Creation out of Nothing, Creation out of Chaos, and the Problem of Evil”. In Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, 2nd edition. Edited by Stephen T. Davis. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001. Oord, Thomas Jay, ed. Theologies of Creation: Creatio Ex Nihilo and Its New Rivals. London and New York: Routledge, 2014. Oord, Thomas Jay. The Uncontrolling Love of God. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2015. Oord, Thomas Jay. Pluriform Love: An Open and Relational Theology of Well-Being. Grasmere: SacraSage Press, 2022.

Chapter 60

Science and Theodicy CHRISTOPHER SOUTHGATE

INTRODUCTION In what follows I take the problem of evil to consist of the suffering of creatures capable of experiencing suffering, and the harms inflicted by conscious agents that cause or exacerbate that suffering. I write within the framework of Christian theology, presuming the existence of the Christian God but seeking to explore what, coherently, may be said of such a God in the context of harms and suffering. There are three principal ways in which science (which I take for the purposes of this chapter to mean modern Western science) has affected the debate about evil in Christian theodicy. The first is that science has contributed to the development of technologies that have expanded human capacities to harm both other human beings and non-human creatures. I considered this in a recent essay, using specific examples such as chemical warfare and nuclear weapons, so I will not pursue this further here.1 The second respect in which science has shifted theodicy is through changes in the way the flux of events is understood in relation to divine providence.2 Typically, the biblical authors regarded all natural events, both positive and negative, as being sent by God. A science-informed understanding of the flow of events sees them rather as being caused by natural processes. Exploration of God’s involvement in those events (and hence the question of God’s justice in respect of profound harms to creatures) now presumes this scientific account. This tends to divide issues of theodicy into those concerned with special providence and those concerned with the general character of the world. The third effect science has had on theodicy is through specific forms of data about the world that were not available to the biblical writers, or to the great premodern theologians whose work has done so much to shape both Christian doctrine and theological method. There is a body of knowledge available to us (e.g., in relation to biological evolution) that the ancients and the medievals simply did not know. Here I shall suggest that this both generates new forms of theodical argument, and may shift the weight that may be attached to different approaches to suffering.

Christopher Southgate, “Science and Evil”, in The History of Evil, Volume V., ed. Victoria Harrison, Chad Meister, and Charles Taliaferro (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 81–96. 2 For a general treatment of the theology of providence, see David Fergusson, The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), especially “Providence in Nature”, 167–240. 1

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SCIENCE, PROVIDENCE, AND THEODICY In the center of the radical manifesto of monotheism that is the text of Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 40–55) comes this verse, which deserves much more attention in debates about providence and theodicy than it often receives: I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things. (Isa. 45:7 NRSV) This not only coheres with the later Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo in affirming God’s ultimate responsibility for all creaturely existents, including the suffering caused by the harms that befall creatures. It goes further in affirming that both harms and flourishing are the results of God’s activity. Typically in the Bible God is depicted as either actively sending harms on human beings (as in the plagues of Egypt, Exodus 7–12), or allowing harms to come to them because of their sin (as in Rom. 1:28-32), or for some other mysterious reason (as in Job 1–2). The ultimate purpose of these divine decisions tends to be seen as the revelation of the holiness and glory of God (cf. John 9:3). It is very hard for modern, scientifically informed readers to recover this sense of God’s direct involvement in the flux of natural events. Already in the thought of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, there is the sense that although God is the primary cause of all events, there are secondary causes, which include natural processes as well as human choices. Aquinas holds that “it is more in accord with divine greatness to say that God communicates His power to creatures. Moreover, [Aquinas] claimed that it is simply evident to the senses that creatures have the power to bring about effects”.3 Thomas here is already resisting forms of occasionalism, the philosophical view that God is the only cause of events. And from the seventeenth century onwards systems of understanding the physical world emerge that do not give any place to divine causation. In Newton’s puzzling over the force of gravity he can be seen wondering if God has a direct involvement in bodies falling. Indeed, Newton would have held to six forms of God’s involvement in events,4 but his vastly influential system of mechanics does not depend on invoking the divine. A century later, Pierre Simon de Laplace, correcting Newton’s understanding of the solar system, famously explained to Napoleon that his celestial mechanics had no need of hypotheses involving God. The sense that the universe unfolds in a way describable through scientifically characterized processes, and that theology has to frame its account accordingly, is very strong in the recent debate about providence. It gives rise to the distinction between “general divine action” – God’s creating and maintaining the laws and processes of the universe, of which science gives us descriptions – and “special divine action”, what God might be understood to cause in response to particular situations, with results that would not otherwise have happened. A classic exposition of this type was John Polkinghorne’s Science and Providence: God’s Interaction with the World, published in 1989.5 All such formulations presume the power and comprehensiveness of scientific explanation. They

Tad Schmaltz, “Nicolas Malebranche”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 edition), last modified on November 28, 2017, https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/entries​/malebranche/. 4 Christopher Kaiser, Creation and the History of Science (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 178–87, 191–5. 5 John Polkinghorne, Science and Providence: God’s Interaction with the World (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1989); republished Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2005. 3

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also necessarily imply some position on theodicy, since they beg the question: Why does God’s “very good” creation (Gen. 1:31) contain so much creaturely suffering?6 But they also suggest a new type of strategy in theodicy, namely to break down the question of God’s relation to creaturely suffering into two sub-questions. First, why does God not undertake more acts of special divine action to alleviate creaturely, especially human, suffering? Second, why is the world created and sustained by general divine action so replete with suffering? To the first question, theodicists might respond with a combination of traditional appeals to creaturely free will, together with reference to God’s faithfulness to the laws and processes by which God creates and sustains the world. Although (in a position such as Polkinghorne’s) those processes are open and flexible enough to allow for some special divine action, God’s particular providence in particular situations is typically limited by the way the world generally works. Exactly how limited and exactly how providentially active God is thought to be, and exactly therefore the burden on theodicy, of course, varies between theories of special divine action. For an impressive analysis of these theories, see the project run jointly by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences at Berkeley from 1988 to 2003.7 But this whole debate, and the reformulation of theodicy into these two sub-questions, is a product of the modern scientific worldview. I develop this line of thinking by reference to the two most important contemporary theorists of a scientifically informed theodicy: Wesley Wildman and Philip Clayton. Wildman’s view is that no model of special divine action, indeed no model of personal theism, can survive the problem of theodicy. In particular he points to “the Argument from Neglect” (AN) and “the Argument from Incompetence” (AI). AN states that a personal deity active in the world fails the standards we would require even of a moral creature, let alone a perfectly morally good being. Human parents allow their children freedom (progressively more as time goes on) but do not hesitate to intervene to educate, or to rescue from harm. So in Wildman’s view “God should intervene to educate and guide, to punish and redirect . . . [but] [i]f it is claimed that this does in fact occur, then it certainly does not occur often or effectively enough for God to avoid the same charge of negligence that we would bring upon a human parent acting in similar fashion”.8 AI states that a God who allows all this suffering in the world “is not powerful enough to merit our worship and allegiance”.9 Together AN and AI form a powerful double charge, one which causes Wildman himself to defend instead a “ground-of-being theism”, not based on the notion of a personally benevolent God.10 Clayton, sometimes working with his collaborator Steven Knapp, has been the major Christian respondent to Wildman’s charges. Their responses to AN are threefold.

Against responses to this question that simply load the whole burden of fault onto the sin of the first humans, see e.g. Bethany Sollereder, God, Evolution and Animal Suffering: Theodicy without a Fall (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019). 7 Summarized in Robert J. Russell, Nancey Murphy, and William R. Stoeger, S.J., eds, Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action: Twenty Years of Challenge and Progress (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). 8 Wesley. J. Wildman, “Incongruous Goodness, Perilous Beauty, Disconcerting Truth: Ultimate Reality and Suffering in Nature”, in Physics and Cosmology: Scientific Perspectives on the Problem of Evil in Nature, ed. Nancey Murphy, Robert J. Russell, and William G. Stoeger, S.J. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 267–94, at 278. 9 Ibid., 278–9. 10 Ibid., 279–94. 6

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If God desires that there be rational moral agents in the world, the world must be rational and predictable, not the sort of world where speeding bullets turn into flowers. Clayton and Knapp ask: Could rational and autonomous beings – beings, that is, at least as rational and autonomous as we human beings appear to be – evolve in such a universe? Perhaps they could reach our level of biological complexity, as long as God preserved enough physical regularity to sustain the right mechanisms of mutation and selection. But could they function in the universe with the kind of self-determination or autonomy we seem to have?11 Clayton and Knapp go on to consider whether God could intervene occasionally (e.g., to prevent the catastrophic tsunami of December 2004, or to minimize the loss of life by providing some at least with a warning of impending catastrophe) and conclude that even one such action would place on God the moral responsibility to intervene on every occasion when creaturely well-being was threatened. This is Clayton and Knapp’s “Not Even Once” precept (NEO).12 They then ask whether special divine action is therefore altogether ruled out, and conclude (controversially) that God could exert “a divine influence at the mental or spiritual level that does not require making an exception to any natural laws”.13 This is controversial because many of those working at the interface of theology and psychology would argue that mental effects are always mediated through the physical. Clayton and Knapp go on to suggest that this sort of divine influence would have to be of a particular kind – it could not be propositional (e.g., warning an individual about the tsunami) without violating NEO. But it could be “axiological”, the (non-coercive) communication of virtue rather than information. Such a God of “gentle guidance, growing illumination, and persistent attraction”14 would – they claim in effect – survive not only AN but also AI. Finally, Clayton and Knapp point to the eschatological dimension to divine action – the possibility that those who suffer in this life will have their reward in the final epoch. So the God who works with such restraint with the present world-will act with great power and goodness in making that consummated existence possible. Two objections to this are the telling question – why did God not just create heaven? – and the query as to whether God is rendered inconsistent by acting differently in different epochs. To this Clayton and Knapp suggest that God’s desire for “finite persons with the capacity to enter into loving fellowship with him”15 must have led God to create a world in which such persons could develop as autonomous subjects, and that that is not inconsistent with God’s ultimate sovereignty and moral purpose. An illustration of this debate could be derived from consideration of the Covid pandemic that spread throughout the world in early 2020. Wildman would presumably hold that the pandemic, occasioned by coronaviruses just being themselves, coupled with the particular ways human beings now live on Earth, leaves nothing to be explained. The God of weal and woe alike, a fountain of creativity if not of benevolence, would very plausibly have given rise to this sort of world. Clayton and Knapp would no doubt Philip Clayton and Steven Knapp, The Predicament of Belief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 47. Ibid., ch. 3. 13 Ibid., 58. 14 Ibid., 65. 15 Ibid., 67. 11 12

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point, as others have, to the courage and sacrificial self-giving of so many, especially in the healthcare professions, as indicative of the axiological lure of a God who yet could not morally step in to prevent even one infection, one death. Well, that model of special divine action might not be robust enough for some Christian thinkers. Some would want to say that one of the errors of the enterprise of theodicy is of subjecting God to the moral standards of humans. Others might want to point out that the God of the Christian tradition is a God of partiality, who designates certain humans and groups for special treatment (albeit with a larger salvific goal). What is important to note here is that the more vigorous the model of special divine action, the more unbearable the problems of theodicy. And that the severity of the essentially natural phenomenon of Covid (albeit exacerbated by various elements of human folly), combined with the general sense that this is the way the natural world works (rather than being a special message from God) seems to recommend a very attenuated view of special divine action. At this point it is important to introduce the work of Christopher Knight, who, writing from an Orthodox perspective, has sought to undermine the plausibility of the general versus special divine action distinction. He points out that it seems to imply the relative absence of God from some events, whereas it must be sounder to re-emphasize God’s immanent involvement in every event. This leads Knight to a form of “sacramental naturalism” that stresses the incompleteness of scientific descriptions of reality. Science is important but cannot be determinative in understanding divine action.16 Science is fundamentally incomplete because God-descriptions need to complement it. Knight combines this with a reassertion of the classical sense of God being outside time. God has created “fixed instructions”17 such that the (God-pervaded) creation responds to human choices as if God were responding specially and particularly to those choices. But as Sarah Lane Ritchie remarks in her survey of contemporary options in the divine action debate, many will ask “if God can arrange fixed instructions in the form of laws of nature to respond to the anticipated needs of God’s creatures, it is difficult to imagine why God has not done so more often or more effectively”.18

A “PACKAGE DEAL” WORLD? This leads me back to the second of the sub-questions I posed earlier: Is this type of world, created and sustained by God in God’s “general divine action”, a good enough world, a world sufficiently fit for God’s purposes, to withstand the charge against God’s benevolence? Here the way modern science has characterized that world is of great importance. Polkinghorne, a scientist of great distinction, says this in relation to general divine action: The more science helps us to understand the world, the more clearly we see its inextricable entanglement of fertility and wastefulness. I have suggested that there is a Free-Process Defence in relation to natural evil, parallel to the familiar free-will defence in relation to moral evil. Natural evil is not gratuitous, something that a Creator who

For an analysis of different extents of influence of science on theological questions, see Neil Messer, Science in Theology: Encounters between Science and the Christian tradition (London: T&T Clark/Bloomsbury, 2020). Messer’s ch. 2 treats the question of divine action. 17 Christopher Knight, The God of Nature (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 29. 18 Sarah Lane Ritchie, Divine Action and the Human Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 295. 16

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was a bit more competent or a bit less callous could easily have eliminated. Created nature is a package deal, with the emergence of new forms of life and the shadow side of malformation and extinction necessarily intertwined.19 This passage illustrates the confusion that has arisen over the term “free-process defense”. On the one hand, Polkinghorne claims that it is a parallel argument to that mounted in respect of the freedom of moral creatures. On the other hand, he claims that the freedom of natural processes is necessary for the development of certain goods. These are two different types of argument. The free-will defense regards the freedom of the freely choosing creature as a good in itself, one that justified God in allowing the harms that would stem from the exercise of that freedom. A developmental argument regards the good as being what the freedom makes possible.20 It is by no means clear that the freedom of natural processes is a good in itself, so it is better to disregard the supposed parallel with the free-will defense, and analyze the free-process defense outlined in Polkinghorne’s last two sentences quoted earlier. This brings him into line with other “package deal” formulations.21 These have been deployed especially in relation to the suffering of non-human creatures (discussed in more detail in Bethany Sollereder’s chapter in this volume). This type of argument is also known as an “only way” argument, in that it proposes that the scientific processes concerned were the only type of way in which God could have given rise to the values that have arisen in this world.22 Such arguments derive support from both scientific and theological sources. The scientist may look at the nature of life, with its very particular chemistry, the only way we know in which life “works”, and the properties of that life honed by billions of years of evolution, and conclude that the processes that have led to complex life, with all its diversity, beauty, and ingenuity of behavior and adaptation, were the only way in which God could have given rise to such a world. The theologian may reason that if God could have given rise to a world with a greater balance of values over disvalues,23 the loving creator God that Christianity confesses would surely have done so. Both of these arguments are familiar in form in the history of theodicy. The notion of a constraint on God’s creative action goes back to Plato’s Timaeus and his language

John Polkinghorne, “Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker”, in God and the Scientist: Exploring the Work of John Polkinghorne, ed. Fraser Watts and Christopher Knight (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 1–12, 8–9. 20 Christopher Southgate and Andrew Robinson, “Varieties of Theodicy: An Exploration of Responses to the Problem of Evil based on a Typology of Good-Harm Analyses”, in Physics and Cosmology: Scientific Perspectives on the Problem of Evil, ed. Nancey Murphy, Robert J. Russell, and William R. Stoeger S.J. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 67–90. 21 E.g., Niels H. Gregersen, “The Cross of Christ in an Evolutionary World’”, Dialog: A Journal of Theology 40, no. 3 (2001): 192–207; Denis Alexander, Creation or Evolution – Do we Have to Choose? (Oxford: Monarch, 2008). This type of argument is essentially the approach defended by Michael Ruse, Can a Darwinian be a Christian? The Relationship between Science and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 130–8. 22 For further analysis, see Christopher Southgate, “‘Free-Process’ and ‘Only Way’ Arguments”, in Finding Ourselves after Darwin Conversations on the Image of God, Original Sin, and the Problem of Evil, ed. Stanley Rosenberg, Michael Burdett, Michael Lloyd, and Benno van den Toren (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), 293–305. 23 Terminology that derives from the eminent naturalist Holmes Rolston III, see his “Disvalues in Nature”, The Monist 75, no. 2 (1992): 250–78. 19

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of “necessity” (anangkē).24 The theological argument outlined earlier has parallels with Leibniz. But I suggest that it is the combination of the two arguments, with the science putting flesh on Plato’s original instinct, that is especially significant. This is despite the fact that philosophical theology has generally held that a constraint on God as creator must be a logical constraint (such as that 2 + 2 cannot equal 5). What the science offers us is not a logical argument but a guess, albeit one informed by a huge amount of data about the universe and how it works.

SUFFERING AND THE CHRISTIAN LIFE In my last main section, I turn to a major debate in contemporary theology to which reflection on scientific evidence can contribute. In important collections of essays on suffering and the Christian life,25 which seek to avoid the neat systems that too many theodicies have attempted, Karen Kilby argues that suffering and loss are not intrinsic to the life of the Trinity, or to the character of love. Julian of Norwich is her key witness. Although the anchoress finds a role for Christ’s suffering in her writings, the “positive quality [of God’s love] is unalloyed, linked only to joy, gladness, delight”.26 The Father’s gift to the Son has no element of risk, emptying or loss. Christ only suffered once, and though he was clearly not emotionally indifferent to his sufferings, there was, Kilby claims, an ultimate indifference – the actions are taken as if there were no suffering and loss attached, as though the forces of death and destruction had no real existence. She calls this a kind of enacted privatio boni; suffering and loss are accorded no weight or influence. What Kilby seems to insist on is an overall comic genre to the Christian narrative. Comedy, as James Hopewell notes, “projects a world that ultimately integrates its seemingly antithetical elements”.27 The denouement is that all suffering is banished in the final union of God and creatures, in which God will “be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). Where this relationship runs into difficulties (at the Passion of the Christ), these difficulties prove ultimately illusory. Kilby’s (very Johannine) Christ accords no weight or influence to what is not ultimately real, even the evil that engenders the agony of the Passion. She contrasts this with Hans Urs von Balthasar’s insistence that we learn of the Trinity from the Cross. What we get from von Balthasar is that the love and self-giving in the Trinity is costly kenosis; there is within the Trinity an incomprehensible distance that in the economy of salvation becomes alienation and abandonment. Love and suffering are mutually internal to one another. For Kilby this effort to make sense of the world through a kind of integrated vision pays too high a price, and jeopardizes the claim that the Gospel can really be good news. Picking up on Kilby’s use of Julian, Paul Murray writes beautifully about God as “the fully actualised eternal act of joyous love, in which there is no lack, no un-actualized

Christopher Southgate, “Values and Disvalues in Creation”, in The T&T Clark Handbook of the Doctrine of Creation, ed. Jason Goroncy (London: T&T Clark/Bloomsbury, 2023, in press). 25 Karen Kilby and Rachel Davies, eds, Suffering and the Christian Life (London: T&T Clark/Bloomsbury, 2020); Karen Kilby, God, Evil and the Limits of Theology (London: T&T Clark/Bloomsbury, 2020). 26 Kilby, God, Evil, 126. 27 James Hopewell, Congregation: Stories and Structures (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1987), 58. 24

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potential and no possibility of diminishment”,28 [therefore the] “divine dynamic of life-giving, self-giving should not be understood as a self-emptying but always being from fullness unto fullness in the one eternal act of God’s trinitarian love”.29 This Julian-inflected restatement of classic premodern Christian positions allows Murray to conclude that sufferings can become “living prayers and effective channels of the Trinity’s sustaining, transforming being-with creation”,30 a transformative being-with that he describes as working in “imperceptible, pebble-smooth slow ways”.31 (Note how God’s action in the world is reduced to this undramatic companioning, not so dissimilar to the axiological lure proposed by Clayton and Knapp.) There are, then, two very different narratives in competition here, one that majors on the comic resolution of God’s project of creation and redemption, in which apparent difficulties prove ultimately illusory, and the other that places the tragedy of the Cross at the center and works outward from there to understand the ways and character of God. The first is informed by the way the tradition, from the Fathers onwards, articulated a Trinitarian understanding of God that would minimize the chance of slipping into what had come to be seen as various heresies and blind alleys. Having resolutely asserted on metaphysical grounds the absolute goodness of God, it is less interested in the ways reflection on creaturely life, struggle, and suffering might challenge that view. The second is fueled by the sheer extent of suffering evident in the twentieth century, in particular the need for Christian theology not to minimize or gloss over the horrors of the Holocaust.32 Rowan Williams has also touched on this polarization in contemporary theology.33 For Williams, “the Christian activity of representing the most serious possible disruption of what is meant to be ethical and political community – the killing of the human form of God by the process of human law – is a paradigm of tragic performance”.34 He sees a schism between “God as the eternal will for healing and God as the compromised and vulnerable agent within history who can change history only by renouncing power or security or success”.35 Judiciously as ever, Williams sees that “the issue is not whether ‘resolution’ is ever possible but whether we can craft or imagine a resolution that embraces the narrating of what cannot be mended – rather than a resolution that explains and so nullifies the tangles and injuries of what has been done or suffered”.36 I suggest, however, that this is a theodical faultline where scientific evidence can weigh the argument in one direction more than another. The massive extent of evolutionary suffering over deep time37 has led Holmes Rolston to characterize the long evolutionary Paul D. Murray, “Living Sacrifice: Is There a Non-Pathological Way of Living Suffering as Sacrifice?”, in Suffering and the Christian Life, ed. Karen Kilby and Rachel Davies (London: T&T Clark/Bloomsbury, 2020) 189–206, 191. 29 Ibid., 202. 30 Ibid., 203. 31 Ibid., 205. 32 A concern most characteristically expressed in Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. Margaret Kohl (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1972). For an important application of this line of thinking to the theology of creation, see Paul S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 33 Rowan Williams, The Tragic Imagination: The Literary Agenda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 34 Ibid., 143. 35 Ibid., 133. 36 Ibid., 114. 37 See John R. Schneider, Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 20–2, 24–6. 28

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history of the natural world, with creaturely suffering and sacrifice threaded through it, as “cruciform”,38 and in recent work I have taken up this description.39 And if this is the character of creation as science now reveals it to us, that, arguably, adds weight to formulations of the Christian narrative as having an inescapably tragic dimension at its core.

CONCLUSION There are many other areas into which this chapter could have delved. Scientific questions as to the reality of human free will (and the weakness of that will as revealed in the Milgram experiments of the 1960s) cast doubt on the reality of the character of “moral evil”. If even human creatures do not have any true freedom of choice, that throws the whole burden of the problem of human-caused suffering yet more firmly onto the responsibility of God. A complementary question concerns climate change. If humans, out of their weakness of will or its perversity, are using the natural processes of the world to render much of that world uninhabitable, where then is the providence of a benevolent creator God? This chapter has argued that modern science has reshaped key debates about divine providence, and hence also about theodicy. It has also shown how science gives rise to arguments that, while not completely new in form, acquire new force through new understandings of the cosmos. Finally, it has suggested that reflection on science may weigh the balance of larger debates about suffering and the Christian life.

FURTHER READING Clayton, Philip and Steven Knapp. The Predicament of Belief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, Chapter 3 “Divine Action and the Argument from Neglect”, 44–68. Messer, Neil. Science in Theology: Encounters between Science and the Christian Tradition. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Murphy, Nancey, Robert J. Russell, and William G. Stoeger S.J., eds. Physics and Cosmology: Scientific Perspectives on the Problem of Evil in Nature. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Rosenberg, Stanley, Michael Burdett, Michael Lloyd, and Benno van den Toren, eds. Finding Ourselves after Darwin Conversations on the Image of God, Original Sin, and the Problem of Evil. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018.

Holmes Rolston, III, Science and Religion: A Critical Survey (1987; Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2006), 144. 39 Christopher Southgate, Theology in a Suffering World: Glory and Longing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), ch. 3 “Glory in the Natural World”, 96–148. 38

Chapter 61

Pain and the Mind–Body Problem J. H. W. CHAN AND JOSHUA R. FARRIS

INTRODUCTION Pain reveals the reality of both the mental and the physical. It is fundamental to the nature and experience of suffering and constitutes it, so any discussion about the problem of suffering presumes the problem of pain. It is the dual nature of physical pain which consists of both the private state of pain and the appearance of physical locatedness that must be accounted for in any ontology of mind. It is these apparently contradictory properties of pain that we examine and aim to shed some light on through a consideration of the various metaphysical responses. The approach we take is this: through a brief survey of the general problem of pain, we focus our attention on different ontologies that might undergird the phenomenon of pain. There are, broadly speaking, three basic ontological responses: physicalism, dualism, and idealism. Despite the common belief that physical pain is some real feature of consciousness yet not a feature of “phenomenal” consciousness, we argue that physicalists deny the conscious reality of pain by deeming it, as one philosopher would call it, a “fiction written by our brains”.1 Some physicalists make the point that consciousness and how it is defined is real only as a function of the brain, but is not to be conflated with “phenomenal” consciousness.2 This is a confusion because intuitively to be a conscious subject means to experience something of what it is like to be conscious. The challenge faced is that consciousness just is “phenomenal” in nature and this is not something that one can easily disregard with a wave of the hand as a Gettier illusion.3 Thus, we explore two alternatives to physicalism – dualism and idealism – and present the advantages of Keith Frankish, “What If Your Consciousness is an Illusion Created by Your Brain”, Aeon, September 26, 2019, https://aeon​.co​/essays​/what​-if​-your​-consciousness​-is​-an​-illusion​-created​-by​-your​-brain. (Phenomenal consciousness can be thought of as the overall structure of experience which includes not only sensory qualia but also encompassing “much of the spatial, temporal and conceptual organization of our experience of the world and of ourselves as agents in it”, SEP – Pain). 2 This applies to the one mentioned along with other eliminativists and identity theorists. See: J. J. C. Smart, “The Mind/Brain Identity Theory”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/spr2017​/entries​/mind​-identity/. 3 Where justified true beliefs about a sense perception of an object are undermined under closer inspection, thus requiring more than justified true belief to arrive at knowledge. 1

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both. We conclude with the modest claim that in accounting for the phenomenon of pain, idealism fares slightly better than dualism, and both fare better than physicalism. Our arguments are summarized here: The first argument:

1. Pain has a unique phenomenal character (the feature of private access).



2. Physical substances (described as publicly accessible) lack this phenomenal character.

3. Conclusion: Pain is not a property of physical substances. The second argument:

1. Pain has a unique phenomenal character which physicalism cannot account for.



2. Immaterial substances bear the properties of phenomenal character and private access.

3. Conclusion: Pain is best explained as a property of immaterial substances. The explanatory advantage of substance dualism (SD) and idealism with respect to the nature of physical pain lies in the feature of immateriality in their respective ontologies. We lay out one advantage of SD, a distinct advantage of idealism, and one additional advantage idealism has over SD. Despite idealism’s advantage of a singular explanation of pain (with its dual features), we do not rule decisively in favor of SD or idealism, to do so, would require a deeper exploration into the metaphysical structures of each respective view which is beyond the scope of this chapter.

THE MIND–BODY PROBLEM AND PHYSICAL PAIN One of the central concerns in the philosophy of mind is known as the mind–body problem. It addresses the relation between a person’s mental life and her physical body, between her respective physical and mental properties. The difficulty in explaining the internal qualitative feel of experience, the “what it is like” characteristics of experience and why it is so inexplicably different from the underlying physical causes is known as the hard problem of consciousness.4 This can be distinguished from the so-called easy problem of consciousness which is the explanation of phenomena in terms of physical or neural mechanisms.5 Given its unique characteristics, pain exemplifies the challenge of trying to understand the gap between physical phenomena and experience. Most instances of pain are said to have location, duration, and intensity: properties that are commonly attributed to physical objects and events.6 Thus, pain looks very much like a thing that ought to be categorized as physical or something that supervenes upon the physical. But

Named by David Chalmers in his seminal paper on consciousness. See David Chalmers, “Facing up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness”, Journal of Consciousness Studies 2, no. 3 (1995): 200–19, 201: “The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect . . . here is something it is like to be a conscious organism.” 5 David Chalmers, The Character of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4. 6 Murat Aydede, “Pain”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/spr2019​/entries​/pain/. 4

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on the other hand, there are a number of properties of pain that seem to escape a purely physical description. First, the experience of pain is private. It is perceived directly and immediately in consciousness; there is a qualitative feel to pain that is not directly known by any other person other than the one whose pain it is.7 At first blush, this appears to be similar to other sensory experiences such as sound, taste, or sight. But what is unique about pain is the inseparability of its felt quality from its appearance. Saul Kripke differentiates pain from other sensations in this way: Pain . . . is not picked out by one of its accidental properties; rather it is picked out by its immediate phenomenological quality . . . unlike the sensation of heat or cold, we cannot make the distinction between the qualitative feel itself and the way it appears to us, the experience or very sensation of pain counts as an instance of pain itself.8 Thus, when compared to other sensations, pain is unique in its felt quality, in that it just is phenomenally experienced. For various reasons pain is not identical to physical correlates such as c-fibers firing in the brain. Given the notion of multiple realizability and the argument that mental states may be instantiated in various ways, the identity thesis has been mainly rejected.9 In addition to this, it is the qualitative feel of the pain, absent in the “cause” that is real to minds. Here we can speak distinctly about the cause of pain, which may in some cases indeed be c-fibers firing, from the actual experience of pain itself – something that is unable to be observed or experienced through publicly accessible information such as an MRI brain scan. Pain, while often caused by external objects and having a referent to a physical event, nonetheless has a private quality that is immune to Gettier defeaters. Christopher S. Hill writes: “It is generally possible to distinguish between the appearance of an empirical phenomenon and the corresponding reality.” But this is not the case with bodily sensations, in particular with pain.10 For example, one can be mistaken regarding the appearance of water in the desert – there is a disconnect between what is perceived and the reality that becomes obvious when one reaches what turns out to be a mirage. Here something appears to exist without a corresponding physical reality. The converse of this can also be true, where an empirical phenomenon exists but without its appearing to anyone.11 However, this is unlike pain where the private appearance or phenomenal sensation just is the reality. Hill continues, “there is no substantive distinction between the appearance of pain and the corresponding reality . . . it is of the very essence of perception that there be a distinction between its See David Lewis in O’Connor, Timothy, and David Robb, eds, Philosophy of Mind: Contemporary Readings: Routledge Contemporary Readings in Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2003), 197: “besides physical information there is an irreducibly different kind of information to be had: phenomenal information”. 8 Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford/Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 148–53. 9 See Jaegwon Kim, “Multiple Realization”, in Philosophy of Mind: Contemporary Readings, Routledge Contemporary Readings in Philosophy, eds Timothy O’Connor and David Robb (London/New York: Routledge, 2003), 159: “And there is an influential and virtually uncontested view about the philosophical significance of MR [multiple realizability]. This is the belief that MR refutes psycho-physical reductionism once and for all.” See also John Foster’s criticism of token-identity physicalism in The Immaterial Self (New York: Routledge, 1990), 158: “The token-identity thesis claims that each mental item is identical with a neural item. The prima facie objection to this, as we have seen, is that we simply cannot understand how things of such seemingly different types can be identical . . . to the effect that the psychological character of a mental item is essential to it, but not to its neural correlate.” 10 Christopher S. Hill, Meaning, Mind, and Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 155. 11 Ibid. 7

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seeming to a perceiver that such and such is the case and its being true that such and such is the case”.12 In the case of pain, no such distinction exists which results in a tension when we consider a second property of pain, namely “location”. As alluded to earlier, pain is generally thought to be “locatable” in specific parts of the body, for example, when you accidentally stub your toe on the table, it is in that particular part of the body where you feel the pain. However, in certain situations as in the cases of phantom limb pains, the location of the pain is illusory: the site where the pain is supposedly felt does not exist, but the pain felt is real. In addition to this, there are other examples where there is an absence of physical correlates to pain sensations as in the case of chronic pains and hallucinations of pain.13 When we consider the nature of pain, it just is the experiential qualia. Given the foregoing, one might ask “where” can pains be found: Are they located in our bodies or do they exist only in our minds? The fact is that not only does there exist a feature of pain that is not local, but, in some cases, there is no mind-independent object that correlates with a particular first-person experience of pain at all. But objects that are essentially private (as discussed in the first point) or exist only when they are being perceived (as discussed in the second point) are not physical objects.14 Physical objects are public, and objective, existing even when no one is aware of them. How then do we reconcile the apparently contradictory properties that pain appears to have? The motivation of physicalism is obvious enough: if we can understand pain and other mental phenomena in terms of physical states, then one need not account for non-physical features and explain how such things could be part of the natural world. A physicalist view of the mind then does not include a separate realm of mental states which avoids the problem of non-physical interaction with bodies, which preserves the causal closure of the physical. But, the dilemma here is, given reflection on pain among other things, “physicalist views of consciousness strike many as little short of unintelligible”.15 Not least because of the difficulty in maintaining the distinction between the mental and the physical.16 As Thomas Nagel writes: “We have at present no conception of how a single event or thing could have both physical or phenomenological aspects, or how if it did they could be related.”17 At this juncture a second challenge for a physicalist view of mind might be raised. This focuses on the particular nature of phenomenal concepts and contends that certain features of these are incompatible with their referring to physical states. The thought is that if physicalism were true, the intentional directness of phenomenal concepts ought to render the falsity of mental states inconceivable under certain physical conditions – yet this is not the case. Consider a “zombie”, a being who possesses all the same physical

Hill, Meaning, Mind, and Knowledge, 155. The chronic pain we have in mind here (no pun intended) is that which persists even after whatever the initial cause of pain has healed, namely “conditions characterized by the persistence of pain in absence of a known aetiology without putting the emphasis on the supposed psychological or organic source of the suffering”. See Elisa Arnaudo Pain, “Pain and Dualism: Which Dualism?”, Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 23 (2017): 1084. 14 Murat Aydede, “Naturalism, Introspection and Direct Realism about Pain”, Consciousness & Emotion 2, no. 1 (2001): 32. 15 Uriah Kriegel, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 17–18. 16 Valerie Gray Hardcastle, The Myth of Pain (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1999), 35. 17 Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York/London: Oxford University Press, 1989), 47. 12 13

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properties as you, but is missing an inner conscious life. It looks like physicalists must deny that zombies are possible, given that the mind is ontologically inseparable from the brain – identical physical states ought to yield identical mental states on physicalism – but it seems zombies are at least in theory conceivable. If phenomenal concepts are directly accessible, and feelings are therefore not a priori derivable from physical properties, then there should not be any conceptual contradiction in ascribing a being which has all of your physical properties, but denying its mental properties – something which physicalism has difficulty doing.18 The argument against physicalism now hinges on the thesis that impossibilities are only conceivable when presented using concepts that refer indirectly, that are not directly available or accessible to the agent in question in the way that experiences like pain are. For example, take the fact that salt is sodium chloride (NaCl). Even though this could not be otherwise – salt is NaCl – someone can certainly conceive of NaCl not being salt. However, according to the argument at hand, they can only do this because they are thinking of salt “second hand”, as the substance, whatever it is, that is white, crystalline, and so on. This way of thinking leaves it open whether or not salt is in fact NaCl, and thus whether it is necessarily identical to that substance. The structure of physicalism suggests that all aspects of the universe, including personal aspects of qualia or subjectivism, can be explained by the functions, structures, or dynamics that fit within a causally closed universe. What is left out from such a description of reality, however, is the relation between functions, complex physical parts, and the qualitative experience of them – this is the problem of the explanatory gap. For instance, if we were to say that pain was caused by the firing of certain c-fibers, what is left unexplained is why these physiological causes result in that particular felt quality of pain, and why it feels the way it does. It is the connection between the two and its felt contingency that we understand as the “gap”.19 Thus these features of pain might be seen as a problem for physicalism.20 As we have briefly noted, the nature of pain is at its core something that is private, only mentally accessible, and the empirical data gives us very little additional information on the experience of pain itself. By this, we mean that empirical information collected from brain scans, x-rays, and physiological descriptions of the black and blue color of a knee say very little about what it means for the owner of said knee to be in a painful state or what the nature of that particular pain state caused by a bruised body part is. The private feature is primarily what is known about pain and it is this feature that physicalists struggle to capture. Reductive physicalism entails an elimination of painful states because it supplies no content to consciousness of a phenomenal character which are counterintuitive. Non-reductive physicalism only fares better on the surface as it, too, lacks an adequate ontology that takes seriously the private qualitative feature of pain.21 It The physicalist, however, is not without reply, though it is beyond the scope of this chapter to address such defenses, see Robert Kirk’s book-length treatment Robert Kirk, Zombies and Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 2007). 19 Joseph Levine, “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64 (1983): 354. 20 The type of physicalism implied here is global – that there are no immaterial objects or beings at all. Some ontologies may be locally physicalist, for example, trees and humans, but do not rule out the possibility of immaterial agents like God or angels. The difference between humans and angels or God is that humans are commonly or normatively embodied beings and God and angels are not. 21 Jaegwon Kim, Physicalism or Something Near Enough (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Herein, Kim expands on an earlier paper arguing that non-reductive physicalism lacks the resources to explain qualia, and 18

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is a feature that has no basis or place in a physicalist ontology because it is phenomenal consciousness that requires a basis in something other than quantitative analysis of which qualitative phenomena will never reduce. As Jaegwon Kim has shown, it only finds a reductive explanation if, in fact, qualia is an illusion – but it is hard to see how it could be.22 Furthermore it is the fact that there is a novel power to it that is explained not by physics, but by something else. Quale has no basis in physicalism and cannot give an explanation for the power of access attributable to minds. The distinction that is relevant here is one between mental access as a power that is solely mental which has neither a basis in the neural structure nor a causal relationship to neurology, but is a capacity that is sui generis from the mind-self. There are of course a wide range of different physicalist approaches and responses to these issues in the literature. A thorough survey is beyond the scope of this chapter but here we have attempted to outline some of the prima facie difficulties faced by physicalism. In the remainder of the chapter, we suggest two alternative, non-physicalist solutions. This includes a version of SD (i.e., the view that the physical and the mental – or some aspects – are non-reducible to the other) and an idealist option, namely the view that there are no mind-independent physical entities, that is, that all physical objects are objects of thoughts or perceptions. These two accounts of reality presume that there is some difference, ontologically, between the physical parts, and the subject who has experiences. It might be thought, then, that some variety of dualism or idealism has an easier time arriving at a solution, insofar as they posit something altogether distinct from the public properties of the physical universe, properties that cannot be studied empirically. With respect to qualia, SD and idealism posit a substance that is said to bear private properties and provides an explanatory ground for that which is non-quantitative.

SUBSTANCE DUALISM According to standard interpretations of SD, a human being consists of an immaterial soul contingently attached to a physical body. The key feature of the soul is that it is a pure mental substance. Given the difficulties outlined earlier, it might be thought then, that dualism has an advantage when trying to account for those properties of pain that a physicalist worldview struggles to make sense of – namely the aspect of privateness. SD provides an intuitive explanation of the problem of pain exemplified in the shortcomings of physicalism given its ontological construal of a person. Second, the SD view is also the common-sense position on pain. By this we mean that the way we talk about pain in everyday life is to treat it as a feature experienced by the mental and not a purely physical particular.23 Our cognitive apparatus naturally disposes us to believe that there exists two property-bearing substances (i.e., body and mind), but only one of them is the subject of experiences (i.e., the mental substance). When we experience the various parts of our

by extension mental causation. These therefore need to be excised from a physicalist ontology. 22 For the argument that non-reductivists are actually reductivists and qualia should be excised from the materialist ontology, see Jaegwon Kim, “The Myth of Non-reductive Materialism”, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 63, no. 3 (1989): 31–47. Also see: Andre Melnyk, “Can Physicalism Be NonReductive?”, Philosophy Compass 3, no. 6 (2008): 1281–96. Andrew Melnyk advances a systematic summary of the state of the discussion and argues favorably for Kim’s original argument against non-reductive physicalism. 23 Aydede, “Pain”.

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body, and as we move through space and time, we are naturally led to believe that “I” am distinct from my bodily parts; “I” persist through material change.24 On the surface, this applies here to the qualitative experience of pain. Let us explain. As discussed previously, the common-sense position holds that there are various features of pain that are in tension. This “naive” position is held with no attempt to explain how the two different types of properties might be unified or reconciled. The intuition is that when one experiences physical pain, it is a private qualitative experience that only that particular person experiences. The experience is incorrigible with respect to the privately experienced and accessible pain state. We will grant that it is possible, in some cases, that the subject of experience can be wrong about the source of pain and can be misperceived what physical conditions are met, but when those perceptions accurately represent the private and public aspects, SD provides a plausible explanation.25 What this means is that I not only have the private experience of pain that is not available to others (hence, non-public), but I also experience physical pain in a particular place, for example, say in my knee when I bump the table after rising up, hitting it on the edge of the table accidentally. That pain seems to be extended because what I feel covers a specified space in my knee, which may be measured in some sense, as there exists degree and intensity of the pain felt, which is not a shared property. While this tension is a feature shared by all ontologies, there is something unique about how SD is construed with respect to this tension. Not only is it a good fit with the common-sense position on pain, but it seems to buttress reality and the certain unique features that produce the tension in question. What then are we to make of SD and pain – are both simply naive implications from our common-sense experience or is there anything more we can say about them? There are two additional items to make clear. First, one might identify an unusual disconnect that is reflected more acutely in the problem of pain that is already found in SD generally (i.e., physical and mental). Second, one might turn this on its head and argue that SD grounds the mystery – a mystery that profoundly captures the reality that physical pain really is both locatable and private. There is something about the private experience of pain that is not properly captured in physicalism even with reduction or elimination, that finds a natural belonging with a SD’s immaterial ontology.26 While this is not wholly distinct from the problem of qualia that yields the hard problem of consciousness (where

Often the natural (pre-theoretic) view is that we persist through time and maintain our diachronic identity in one way or another and are distinct from our respective bodily parts. But there are views that dispute both the former, for example, stage theory, and the latter, that is animalism. Discussion of these metaphysical theories takes us beyond the scope of this chapter but see Ted Sider, “All the World’s a Stage”, in Persistence: Contemporary Readings, eds Sally Anne Haslanger and Roxanne Marie Kurtz (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2006) and Eric T. Olson, “An Argument for Animalism”, in Metaphysics: The Big Questions, eds Peter van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman (London: Blackwell, 2008). 25 We have in mind here counter examples to the supposed “incorrigibility” of pain like those presented by Michael Tye, Ten Problems of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1995), 184. He gives the example of someone being tortured. The victim believes he has had a red-hot poker touched on his back nine times, and he feels excruciating pain each time. But before the tenth time, he catches a glimpse of the object in the torturer’s hand and realizes that what is being pushed into his back was simply an ice cube. The pain he thought he was feeling was merely a localized feeling of coldness. This is therefore an intuitively plausible case of painfulness, the experience of pain, without the corresponding stimuli: the man being tortured appears to have been mistaken about the intensity and nature of his pain. 26 See Aydede, “Naturalism, Introspection, and Direct Realism about Pain”, 29–73, 46: “The qualities of our experiences we seem to be aware of in introspection are resistant to physicalist treatment in that they seem to be irreducibly mental.” 24

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qualia is eliminated on physicalism), it imposes itself upon our conscious experience with great impact. This is not any different in one sense from other quale, but pain as an experiential quality is so profoundly experienced by persons that it makes the point all the more acute. For this reason, SD is superior as an explanation not just of qualia in general, but of pain in particular – this is so because with SD the soul has the potency as an explanatory ground for the two features of pain (i.e., its locatedness and phenomenal character of “what it’s like”) that we experience so clearly in our consciousness. Taking a page from Richard Swinburne’s access argument for SD, we suggest that pain is just the type of property described that finds no basis in physicalist ontology, whether of a reductive or non-reductive sort.27 For Swinburne, the property of pain is not a public property of the physical world or some property accessible to another. There is no paradigm example in the physical world that exemplifies this sort of property, but rather the presumption of science is that the physical world is investigable in principle. The fact is that when I am in a pain state, it is my pain state and not anyone else’s. Moreover, for Swinburne, the idea is that privileged access is justified by the fact that an “informative designator”28 is picking out the property of pain. There is a pure property of the mental substance that is attached to the property being referred to. Swinburne defines it as such: Since the informative designators of any physical properties are not logically equivalent to those of any mental properties (since there are different criteria for applying the designators), no mental property is identical to a physical property. The criteria for being in pain are not the same criteria for having some brain property, e.g. “having one’s ‘c’ fibres fire”) or behaving in a certain way in response to a bodily stimulus (e.g. crying out when a needle is stuck into you).29 Accordingly, Swinburne argues that qualitative states are not merely higher-order states of the brain, but they are properties that are only accessible by a substance. If one can conceive of doing this without the body’s help or disembodied, then one has a ground for an actual state of affairs that informs how it is that and what it is like for persons to think about their own thoughts, experiences, emotions, and dispositions. This directs us intentionally to see that there is something of which the cognitive powers are instantiated – that is not the body. But the substance that has access to the qualitative state of pain is something that is not only felt but something that presumes a novel property and power that is unlike anything in the physical realm. It is neither capturable by lowerlevel physical parts (hence a denial of epistemological and linguistic reductionism), nor is it identical to or causally dependent on lower-level physical properties interacting, but it is something that conceivably acts without use of the lower-level properties and parts interacting (hence a denial of non-reductive physicalism). The property of access is sui generis and only predicable of minds, but a non-reductive physicalist does not understand the mind to have sui generis powers of access. Instead, the property of qualia is a higher-order state of the physical substance. Non-reductivists claim that qualia is a novel property non-reducible to the lower parts interacting, but Swinburne shows that this novel property, as power, is not only non-reducible it requires a different ontology 27 Richard Swinburne, “From Mental/Physical Identity to Substance Dualism”, in Persons: Human and Divine, ed. Peter Van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 143–65. 28 When I say it is my pain, I refer to myself in which I accurately reference using the designation “I” to myself of which the property is instantiated. 29 Richard Swinburne, Mind, Brain, and Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 69.

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from that which purports to provide a basis for something it is not. The property is non-reducible insofar as the informative designator actually refers to a pure mental property – that is, a mental substance. But, it is not simply that the substance bears a pure property, but the pain-event is privately accessible to the pure substance itself and not by any other substance – hence, what we appear to have here is something instantiated by the mental substance alone and not exhibited by the body for the body itself does not actually feel pain. The most common objection to SD is of course the problem of interaction. Alluded to earlier, this is the problem of how material and immaterial subjects could possibly interact with one another, given their distinctive natures and its related issue, namely the violation of the principle of causal closure. Given concerns of space, a thorough defense of this is for another paper, though John Foster answers this criticism by stating that if we are able to accept physical cases of action-at-a-distance without conceptual issues, then “dualistic causation should not be excluded, or regarded as conceptually problematic, purely on the grounds that there is no spatial contact between the non-physical mind and the body. And if there are other grounds for challenging the dualist’s position a priori, these have still to be made clear”.30 An objection specific to the discussion at hand might also be raised: if it is the case that pain is an indication of an immaterial soul as the dualist argues, then either it is the case that animals do not have souls and therefore cannot feel pain, a position which seems most unlikely, or they genuinely do feel pain and have an immaterial component. On this view then it looks like the dualist has to accept one horn of the dilemma, either animals and other creatures are not able to experience pain or they have immaterial souls.

IDEALISM The other metaphysics of persons that might be thought to properly capture the private qualitative character of pain is idealism. Similar to substance dualism, ontological idealism of a realist sort (i.e., that holds that there are minds, ideas, and that which we experience in the world as mind-extrinsic or mind-independent) could posit that a human being is constituted by a substance of an immaterial kind that has private access to her own qualitative states of awareness (as distinguished from epistemic versions; i.e., that minds are central with respect to how we understand these things, not necessarily that there is no ontological status given to material substance). Minimally, ontological idealism is the view that all of reality has its foundation on that which is mental. Further, this is the idea that all of reality is completely mental in nature. All that exists is a mind or minds and their ideas.31 As with physicalism, it is also a version of monism in which there is only one kind of thing or “stuff”. On ontological versions of idealism, there exists only minds and their ideas. Physical sensations are ideas that are products of minds that are experiential. Minds are substantial with novel powers and properties on which “physical” properties depend. Physical bodies are, themselves, not mind-independent, material substances, but rather properties of minds. When applied to the problem of pain, ontological idealism may be Foster, The Immaterial Self, 160. Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, “Idealism”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato​.stanford​.edu​/archives​/spr2021​/entries​/idealism/. Also see: Joshua R. Farris and Benedikt Paul Goecke, eds, Routledge Handbook of Idealism and Immaterialism (New York: Routledge, 2021). 30 31

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thought best to capture both features of pain – the fundamental quality of privateness and accessibility through introspection by the person experiencing the pain. In addition to this, variations of ontological idealism also have explanations for sense-qualia: a macroidealist view that holds that all of reality is grounded in mental states (where we have subjects that comprise the items in the world; not to be confused with micro-idealist, i.e., panpsychism). Physical truths are grounded in singular minds, that is, as in the case of a global mind like God or the plurality of minds properly coordinated. When taken together with classical phenomenalism, truths about physical things are grounded in possible experiences. This is a semantic truth that yields a metaphysical truth. A weak version of phenomenalism would permit the existence of mind-independent facts that are physical, so it is not necessarily idealist. On a strong version of phenomenalist, all physical things are grounded in minds as possible experiences. The explanatory problem of physical pain for physicalism is clear when we consider the problem of the fundamentality of the phenomenality of pain that is privately accessible to minds and not something that is public. Consider again the case of the hitting of a knee on the edge of the table. On weak versions of phenomenalism, there exists no physical table that causes the pain experienced by the hitting of a knee, but there exists non-physical facts that bring it about, that is, the table as an abstracta that is felt and has causal power. Stronger versions of phenomenalism, as idealism, do not supply an obvious explanation of the causal structure, unless we invoke something like Berkeley’s solution of a Divine mind simply communicating his ideas to created minds. Some argue that there is a hidden structure that causes these facts about sensory objects that cause what we experience, but the problem is that these seem to reduce to a version of weak phenomenalism where other structural entities exist beyond what is directly grounded in mental states.32 The same is potentially true of Berkeley’s view (a strong version of idealism) that grounds all things in the Divine mind. Though seemingly ad hoc given the invoking of God, the explanation still roots the causal relation between the table, a respective knee and mind in some hidden structure – yet one that is Divinely designed. However, the complexity of this solution and metaphysical cost might leave the view less than satisfying. While it has the characteristic of coherence and synthesis in the Divine mind – better than alternative strong phenomenalist idealist views, it still leaves the Berkeleyan having to explain the underlying causal structure where God coordinates minds via phenomena. On other versions, it is not clear what causal structure is present that causes the coordination relating our minds to objects of experience. Moving in an epistemological route that these phenomenal experiences are Divinely communicated in the world of created minds yields something that on the surface appears to have the same merits as substance dualism. Epistemically, created minds experience the pain caused by tables (phenomenal sensations communicated) hitting the knee, which like substance dualism entails that something beyond the existence of created minds experiencing something causally real (hence the avoidance of solipsism or the rendering of pain as not real).33 In other words, from our vantage point the objects causing physical pain are extrinsic from the mind. Experientially, there is an equivalence between substance See Michael Pelczar, Sensorama: A Phenomenalist Analysis of Spacetime and Its Contents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 33 For additional exposition of idealism variants and challenges to them, see David Chalmers, “Idealism and the Mind-Body Problem”, in Routledge Handbook of Idealism and Immaterialism, ed. Joshua R. Farris and Benedikt Paul Göcke (New York: Routledge, 2021), 519–613. 32

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dualism and this version of phenomenal idealism. The advantage, however, is that the quantitative measurement of these properties is reducible to a mental explanation. It is rather like looking at the pixels on a television screen and realizing that the pixels themselves do not comprise the picture projected by the screen, but the pixels are the products of the screen itself. With respect to a Berkeleyan vision of phenomenal idealism, there is a concern with the complexity of the view regarding the physical world that places the nature of macroscopic objects outside the purview of created minds. Another challenge is that the view requires a complex analysis that is not the product of common sense. However, these are not directly relevant to the problem of pain under consideration. It is this subsequent point that seems relevant to the problem of pain considered: pain is something that God, like all other sensory experiences, directly communicates to the created mind.34 Pain, then, is an occasion of the Divine mind communicating to human minds. This common unpalatable, albeit pressing, concern presents itself most clearly in pain. And, this problem is not applicable to an ontology where two substances exist, but it is an apparent problem on a Berkeleyan account. The issue here is that pain on idealism is a version of the problem of evil because God is directly acting to bring about pain-states. Whereas with the existence of two interacting substances, one can posit a causal relation from physical objects to minds as the cause of pain. But, there may exist another concern arising from the complexity of the causal structure supplied that may render idealism, even of the Berkeleyan sort, less than fully satisfying. How is it that one weighs the complexity concern of the causal structure of the universe that brings about the experiences we feel? The challenge of pain may point to the fact that some causal feature is less apparent than on SD given common-sense experience. In the end, SD and idealism have a similar benefit over physicalism in explaining the phenomenal character of pain in general and the power of private access to pain – something physicalism struggles to do (and we believe is incapable of doing). The apparent benefit of SD over idealism is its respective explanation of both physical features of pain and the mental features – where an intuitive causal structure exists. The apparent weakness of SD is in the ability to explain the phenomena of pain with a singular explanation, as we find with idealism. However, the desire to explain the multifaceted and complex phenomena of reality with a singular explanation may be unrealistic. For, if we have two substances that are conjoined by a singular relation that causally interact, then it might be expected that we cannot map out all the correlations that exist between the substances: purportedly there are not generalizable laws that explain all aspects of our consciousness that also map on to the brain. What we know is that there exists a common and an apparent tight set of correlations between phenomenal states of awareness with neural events. Seen from another perspective, SD as the ontological explanation for physical pain may yield a picture that respects the tension by placing them in a mystery in a way that does not eliminate either feature that creates the tension. Variants of idealism, however, may have ready solutions to the causal structure problem of physical pain without resorting to the belief that physical substances exist and are necessary to supply a causal relation between the body and the mind. This takes us into a deeper issue about the ontological structure of the natural world and which view (SD or

Theistic idealism of this sort where physical objects are phenomenal projections of the Divine mind communicating to human minds entails a version of Divine occassionalism.

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idealism) does a better job in explaining it, and how it is that we are to make determinate the underlying structure of physics. In this sense, stepping back from the specific problem of pain to the more general problem of the underlying metaphysical structure of the universe that underlies pain-events, we are left with other problems that need addressing in a distinct context. An analogy for the problem of physical pain parallels may be the various thought experiments from quantum mechanics concerning wave/particle duality. We know from quantum mechanics that there is a problem with explaining how it is in double-slit experiments that under certain conditions we see the electrons behaving as particles but, in other cases, as a wave. Dualists (and physicalists) explain this as an epistemic problem to be solved where physics, at least in part, provides a solution. Idealists take this as exemplifying an ontological problem with physics as fundamental to explaining the natural world. The answers to the remaining questions ought to shed light on the physical problem of pain discussed earlier. Do we have an actual physical particle that, in part, comprises the wave or is the particle a product of the wave? In other words, to use an illustration of a television, are the pixels somehow composing the picture projected or are the pixels the product of the projection? To these sorts of questions, we are not able to give answers in this chapter. We hope to have given some reasons as to why physicalism is an ontology that is found wanting for explaining the phenomenal character of consciousness most acutely reflected in the problem of pain. We are convinced that something like an immaterial or mental substance, that is distinct from the body, is required. Both SD and idealism provide plausible alternative explanations for the phenomenal character of pain.35

FURTHER READING Farris, Joshua R. and Benedikt Paul Göcke, eds. Routledge Handbook of Idealism and Immaterialism. New York: Routledge, 2021. Hill, Christopher S. Meaning, Mind, and Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Kim, Jaegwon. Physicalism or Something Near Enough. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Kirk, Robert. Zombies and Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Swinburne, Richard. “From Mental/Physical Identity to Substance Dualism”. In Persons: Human and Divine, edited by Peter Van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman, 143–65. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

We would like to thank Jordan Wessling and Dorcas Chua for their helpful comments, and the Humboldt Foundation for granting Joshua time to work on this chapter. Any remaining errors are our own. 35

Chapter 62

Evil and Moral Realism A Problem of Evil for Atheism JAMES K. DEW, JR.

Virtually all philosophers and theologians recognize that the existence of evil serves as a problem for Christian theism. Whether framed as a logical, evidential, or existential problem, atheists and theists tend to treat evil as a distinct problem for Christian theism. Commenting on the logical problem specifically, William Rowe says: For if two statements are logically inconsistent, it is impossible for both of them to be true. If one of them is true, then the other must be false. Moreover, since we could hardly deny the reality of evil in our world, it seems we would have to reject belief in the theistic God; we would be driven to the conclusion that atheism is true.1 In response to these kinds of objections, philosophers of religion have debated defenses and theodicies for centuries. Throughout these debates, it is normally assumed that the problem of evil is a problem only for the Christian theist and no one else, especially not for atheists. Not everyone is convinced, however, that atheism is off the hook with the problem of evil. As the debate about God and evil continues to advance, some philosophers have noted that there may be some problems for atheism as well. Yujin Nagasawa, for example, has recently argued that atheists have an existential problem of evil. According to him, there is an apparent conflict between the way atheists affirm that “the entire biological system on which human existence is based is evil”2 and the way they embrace existential optimism – the idea that we are happy to exist and feel that life is good. The atheist cannot have it both ways. He cannot insist that all of the material world is bad and have reason to be glad he is here and say that life is good. Nagasawa believes that “atheists find themselves at a significant disadvantage relative to theists because their (the atheists’) ontology is much more limited and there is nothing to which they can appeal beyond the material universe to solve the problem”.3 He then adds: “We normally take for granted that the problem of evil provides a reason to give up theism and a motivation to adopt atheism. Yet, if I am right, it might be the other way around. The problem of evil, or at

William Rowe, Philosophy of Religion (Belmont: Thomas Wadsworth, 2007), 113. Yujin Nagasawa, “The Problem of Evil for Atheists”, in The Problem of Evil: Eight Views in Dialogue, ed. N. N. Trakakis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 151. 3 Ibid., 175. 1 2

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least the existential problem of systemic evil, provides a reason to give up atheism and a motivation to adopt theism.”4 I find Nagasawa’s general take to be convincing. It seems that atheism cannot make sense of the good and the bad within their metaphysical frameworks. But where Nagasawa makes this case with respect to an existential issue, I want to suggest a similar, but much deeper, problem for atheism with respect to evil. It is perhaps a riskier problem to state, or case to make, but it is nevertheless one that I think is there. The problem is this: atheists’ arguments against God from evil require the existence of moral principles that their account cannot properly explain or objectively ground. For their arguments to succeed against Christian theism, there must be objective moral principles like “goodness” and “justice” that their complaints about “badness” and “evil” seem to require. The problem is, however, their ontology either rejects such principles or simply fails to explain them. C. S. Lewis, for example, suggested that the language we use in moral debates seems to require moral realities that are difficult for atheism to fully explain or ground.5 More recently, philosophers like Gregory Ganssle have said, “what we observe about evil in the world, and our deep drive to resist and overcome it, fits what we would expect if Christian theism is true. As a result, evil points strongly in the direction of God’s reality”.6 Chad Meister agrees, saying: In order to have a consistent and reasonable objective moral stance – a moral stance in which you can substantiate the claim that this is right and that is wrong, this is good and that is evil – you need an objective moral basis. Objective moral values require an objective foundation and explanation, and it seems that none of the atheistic accounts [atheism describes] provides us with one.7 I suspect that Lewis, Ganssle, and Meister are right. There is a problem for atheism related to the concepts of “good” and “evil”. We could state atheism’s specific problem of evil very simply. Discussions about the problem of evil depend on moral terms (like “good”, “bad”, “evil”, and such) that Christian theism better explains than atheism. According to Christian theism, goodness is a real moral property that evil negates or corrupts. We may struggle to understand why this is allowed by God, but at least we know what the terms mean and have a metaphysical framework that supports our gut-level affirmations that insist on these moral properties being real. Furthermore, given the existence of a God that exists a se and is himself good, at least we have some sense about what grounds these concepts and why we feel obliged to them. Atheism, by contrast, has a far more difficult situation. With no God as described by Christianity, atheism is left to either deny moral properties or affirm them within a metaphysical framework that is insufficient to support them. Indeed, it seems that any argument against God from the problem of evil – an argument the atheist is quite fond of making – depends on concepts that atheism cannot articulate or ground. In short, unless atheists can succeed in providing an adequate metaethical framework for the moral concepts they employ, it looks like they have a problem of evil of their own. In what

Nagasawa, “The Problem of Evil for Atheists”, 175. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2001). 6 Gregory Ganssle, “Evil as Evidence for Christianity”, in God and Evil: The Case for God in a World Filled with Pain, eds Chad V. Meister and James K. Dew, Jr. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2013), 223. 7 Chad V. Meister, Evil: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Continuum, 2012), 75. 4 5

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follows, I will briefly consider what I take to be the atheist’s best metaethical options for making sense out of the moral terms they need.

NON-COGNITIVIST ANTI-REALIST ACCOUNTS OF “GOOD” AND “EVIL” Non-cognitivist anti-realist accounts of moral terms are deflationary in nature. These antirealist accounts of moral concepts attempt to strip moral terms of any ontological reality and recategorize them as particular kinds of experiences we have, emotions we might express, or commands we might give. In either case, a moral concept like “goodness” is stripped down and deflated of any objective, ontological substance (hence anti-realist). Such concepts do not reference moral principles that can be shown to be true or false (hence non-cognitivist). Rather, they merely express our thoughts about particular moral states of affairs. For example, atheists are at times hesitant to use the terms of “good” and “evil” as these terms seem to imply an ontological reality which they firmly deny. Instead, they sometimes offer alternative semantic reductions that might not carry the same ontological freight as “good” and “evil”. Graham Oppy, for example, says: “Common usage could – and, indeed, surely does – establish that ‘evil’ can be a synonym for words like ‘bad’, ‘harmful’, and the like.”8 He later adds that “we could simply recast the subject matter of our discussion in terms of suffering”.9 In his essay showcasing a problem for atheism, Nagasawa avoids the term “evil” and offers an argument that focuses on terms like “pain” and “suffering” that do not imply any form of moral agency. He notes that atheists might claim that natural systems “cannot be good and evil because these properties apply only to moral agents. I can safely set this point aside because what I say in this essay can be formulated without the term ‘evil’. For example, we can describe nature as a system that involves intense, undesired pain and suffering rather than a system that is evil”.10 Historically speaking, A. J. Ayer’s emotivism is an example that falls into this non-cognitivist anti-realist deflationary category. On this view, moral statements are neither true nor false, they merely express our emotions about particular states of affairs. Ayer says, “the function of the relevant ethical word is purely ‘emotive.’ It is used to express feeling about certain objects, but not to make any assertion about them”.11 For example, if I were to say that “it is wrong to steal”, I am simply expressing my negative feelings about people taking the property of others. And if I were to say, “it is morally appropriate to steal”, I am simply suggesting that I have positive feelings, or perhaps neutral feelings, about taking other people’s property. Furthermore, functionally speaking, moral statements of this kind are designed not just to express the feelings of the one saying them but also to stimulate others to have the same feelings about such states of affairs.12 Such semantic moves by atheists, or reductions to emotive or prescriptive statements, are understandable as attempts to provide clarity and intellectual honesty within their Graham Oppy, “Problems of Evil”, in The Problem of Evil: Eight Views in Dialogue, ed. N. N. Trakakis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 74. 9 Ibid. Emphasis his. 10 Nagasawa, “The Problem of Evil for Atheists”, 152. 11 A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (New York: Dover, 1952), 108. 12 See C. L. Stevenson, Ethics and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944). 8

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view. The question, however, is whether these deflationary adjustments to the terminology satisfactorily account for the concepts of good and evil. I suggest that they do not for several reasons. First, it is deeply problematic to say that such moral concepts are neither true nor false in an objective sense. If this is so, the implications for law, justice, and civil society are crippling. If such terms merely express the kind of experiences or feelings, then we do not have the ability to have moral dialogue, execute laws, or implement justice. Morality is simply a matter of feelings and there is no oughtness or obligation to moral norms. Second, and most importantly, this approach simply does not adequately account for what we experience in the face of evil. This is particularly true in the cases of horrendous evils. When a child is raped or tortured, for instance, an account of evil that reduces it to the expression of pain or suffering comes nowhere near close enough to accounting for what has taken place. The child suffering is not just feeling pain, she is actually experiencing something evil. The near universal outrage shared by most humans in the face of such horrific evils – no matter what their religious perspective might be, including atheism – indicates something greater than mere subjective terminology, demanding a moral framework that exceeds the limits of terms like “pain” and “suffering”. In fact, some situations in life are so horrific that they force us to affirm moral frameworks that include the moral values of good and evil. When we suffer at the hands of some horrific person or event, we do not just simply say that we are in pain. Rather, we protest that such cases are in fact evil. These moments incline us to say that things are not as they should be, that some things are not just painful, but actually evil, and that goodness is lost in the face of evil. Because of this, deflating evil to be nothing more than pain or suffering does not cut it. Perhaps such inclinations are nothing more than the product of our emotions in moments of pain and suffering. Or, perhaps they are indications of a moral framework that atheists cannot adequately explain. I take it that the latter is more likely than the former. Our experience of good and evil is so strong that the atheist must provide a viable explanation of our basic moral categories. As such, the semantic reduction of “good” and “bad” that recasts the problem as a problem of pain and suffering is inadequate. If atheism cannot provide a better alternative, then it looks like their view has a significant problem. As such, the deflationary accounts of moral concepts are a dead end. Unless atheists can provide a better account of these moral terms then it seems they have a problem of evil of their own. In what follows, I will consider two additional broad approaches that atheists might take to provide a viable explanation of good and evil – cognitivist anti-realist accounts and moral realist accounts.

COGNITIVIST ANTI-REALIST ACCOUNTS Deflationary accounts described earlier can be thought of as non-cognitivist in nature – they deny that moral claims can be proven true or false. An alternative way of conceiving moral terms is still committed to anti-realism but is cognitivist in nature – it affirms that a moral statement like “murder is wrong” can be proven true or false. Cognitivist antirealist accounts of moral terms are perhaps a promising approach that atheists take in making sense of moral terms like “good” and “evil”. While there are several different atheistic accounts that would fit into this category, the common theme throughout those versions is that there are no objective moral values that terms like “good” refer to, but it is

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nevertheless true that we can prove a moral statement to be true or false. These accounts all agree that moral values are not part of the mind-independent world. Instead, these accounts suggest that moral properties are rooted in our preferences, survival habits, or the practical utility of a set of actions. One common example of a cognitive anti-realist account is relativism. On this approach, there are no objective moral standards that underpin moral statements (hence anti-realist), but it is possible for a moral statement to be proven true or false (hence cognitivist). How might they be proven true? Here the truth value of a moral statement depends on the subjective perspective of the individual making the claim. If a person believes that it is wrong to steal, then it is true for that person that stealing is wrong. And if a person believes that it is morally acceptable to steal, then it is true that it is acceptable to steal. One major problem with this idea is that it lends itself to universal infallibility – everyone is right about everything. If all that is required to prove a moral statement true is that it reflects the perspective and disposition of a person’s psychological states, then every belief is true. This, however, is clearly absurd. Perhaps the subjective psychological state of an individual is not the way to determine the truth values of moral statements. Alternatively, relativism can also be reformulated, not based on an individual’s perspective but on the basis of a society or culture’s perceptions. Here it is not an individual’s belief that determines the truth of a moral statement. Rather, it is the larger consensus of a culture or people-group that helps us to see if a moral statement is true. If, for instance, a moral statement like “it is wrong to murder” properly reflects the beliefs of a particular group, then that moral statement is true. However, I see two clear problems with this account. First, it suffers from a vagueness problem. Just how many people need to be in a group to use their collective belief as a basis for determining the truth value of a statement? Two? One hundred? Two million? No matter how an atheist answers that question, his answer is arbitrary. A second, more damaging problem with this approach is that it leaves open the possibility that horrible atrocities can be morally acceptable. For example, we can never forget that it was once culturally acceptable in many parts of the Western world to imprison innocent people and hold them as slaves. In fact, there are many places in the world today where this is still acceptable. As such, it seems any form of relativism is bankrupt from the start. Another approach that could be understood as a cognitivist anti-realist account is utilitarianism. On this approach, morality is understood in terms of actions that produce the greatest amount of good (pleasure or happiness) for the greatest number of people. When, for example, we suggest that it is morally right not to steal or murder, we are essentially saying that refraining from such actions will produce the most amount of happiness, pleasure, or well-being for the greatest number of people. This approach is cognitivist in that such statements can be affirmed as either true or false. But they are also anti-realist in that they deny that there are objective moral values that are mind-independent. Of course, this account of morality does no better than relativism mentioned earlier. It leaves open the possibility that suppressing or taking advantage of a small group of people – for sexual, economic, political, or cultural ends – is morally acceptable in a given situation, provided such actions produce happiness for most people. So, for example, on this view, it is acceptable to take advantage of small children who work in horrific conditions in sweat shops around the world simply because it provides convenience for the masses in the West. It seems like utilitarianism is deeply problematic. Thus far we have considered both non-cognitive anti-realist and cognitive anti-realist accounts of morality. In both cases, however, there seem to be major problems with their

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accounts of moral terms and morality itself. The non-cognitivists (what I have referenced as deflationary accounts) are not able to make sense of the actual goodness and badness of our actions and therefore fail as compelling understandings of moral terms. And the cognitivist accounts leave open the possibility that morally reprehensible actions can be counted as morally appropriate. If the atheist wants a better metaethical framework for his moral terminology employed in his argument against God, he will have to look elsewhere.

MORAL REALIST ACCOUNTS Both of the previous categories described are anti-realist in nature in that they deny that moral principles are objective features of the world. While these seem to be more common for atheistic accounts, they are not the only options that atheism has available to it. In some cases, atheists have opted for metaethical theories that affirm a version of moral realism. Without any reference to the God of Christian theism, these accounts suggest that there are in fact moral principles that are mind-independent features of the world. That is, this view says that moral claims such as “murder is wrong” reference moral principles that are objectively true for all people everywhere. Two specific examples are worth mentioning here: ethical naturalism and Erik Wielenberg’s non-natural non-theistic moral realism. According to ethical naturalism, moral properties are reducible to physical properties of the world that are studied by the natural sciences such as biology, physics, or chemistry. This approach is often attached to evolutionary accounts of morality that see moral principles as an evolutionary mechanism that enhances gene replication.13 But what would a statement like “helping the poor is right” mean on this approach? Or more specifically, what does the word “right” mean in this case? Since ethical naturalism ultimately reduces moral terms to some natural or physical reality, terms like “right” or “good” simply refer to something that can be demonstrated by one of the natural sciences. As such, to say that “helping the poor is right” is just to say something like “helping the poor helps people survive”, “helping the poor creates social advantages”, or “helping the poor enhances gene replication”. Notice here that such statements are objectively true (hence realism), but they are grounded in physical realities that science helps us to speak about (hence naturalistic). Ethical naturalism simply seeks to ground moral principles in objective realities, making it a naturalist form of moral realism. The problem with ethical naturalism, however, is that it does not actually seem to be about morality. It may be a form of realism, but it is not moral realism. It describes physical fact, not moral realities. As such, it does not provide an adequate basis for our normative behavior and decision-making. More specifically, it cannot account for the way moral principles motivate our actions. Paul Gould notes the following: Given the fact that cheating is wrong, it follows that you ought not to cheat. Given the fact that it is right to keep promises, it follows that you should keep your promises. In other words, when we make moral judgments there is an inherent “oughtness” to the judgment and it is for this reason that we rightly ascribe blame or praise to our actions. The problem for the ethical naturalist is that natural properties are not normative; they

See Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford, 1989).

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don’t motivate us in the right way. They don’t tell us what we ought to do or what is worth pursuing or what reasons we have for doing anything.14 In other words, ethical naturalism does not really explain what motivates a given action, or why that action is morally right. It simply reduces the moral principle to a physical reality, and in the process, it fails to explain morality itself. This view may be a form of realism in that it grounds its concepts in objective facts of the world. But it fails as an account of moral realism because it never actually explains morality itself. An alternative realist model that atheists might employ to ground moral principles is Erik Wielenberg’s non-natural non-theistic moral realism. It is a version of moral realism because it affirms objective moral properties. Unlike theistic accounts, it affirms such moral properties without any reference to God, making it non-theistic. And unlike ethical naturalism, it does not reduce moral properties to natural properties in the physical world. Instead, according to Wielenberg, these moral principles are just brute moral facts that exist. “Goodness”, on this view, just exists as a brute fact. It does not depend on God and it is in fact not reducible to physical properties like there are with ethical naturalism. As such, this account is similar to Plato’s account of moral properties. Wielenberg describes it this way: [Basic ethical facts] are the foundation of (the rest of) objective morality and rest on no foundation themselves. To ask of such facts, “where do they come from?” or “on what foundation do they rest?” is misguided in much the way that, according to many theists, it is misguided to ask of God, “where does He come from?” or “on what foundation does He rest”? The answer is the same in both cases: They come from nowhere, and nothing external to themselves grounds their existence.15 Most theists would not take exception to the idea that some things just exist on their own as brute facts. After all, according to Christian theism, God exists a se as a brute fact in his own right. And because of this, atheists might appeal to theism’s appeal to God as a brute fact as a basis for saying that perhaps moral principles are brute facts in their own right. If the theist claims that something (God) exists on its own and depends on nothing outside itself, why can’t the atheist do the same with regard to moral principles? In this case, atheistic and theistic explanations reach a stopping point that we cannot go beyond. For atheists, moral principles are a brute fact stopping point, whereas God is the stopping point for theism. The problem here is not with positing some brute fact as a stopping point for explanation. Rather, the problem for atheists is that this move is more problematic than it is for the theist. Entailed within the very concept of the God of Christian theism are attributes such as omnipotence, omniscience, aseity, and the like. Atheists and theists may debate whether such a being actually exists, but at least the concept of self-existence is a natural aspect of the concept. Because of this, it is far easier to see how such a being could exist as a brute fact, given that the concept of self-existences is entailed within the very concept of the Christian God. But in the case of moral principles, however, the concept

James K. Dew, Jr. and Paul M. Gould, Philosophy: A Christian Introduction (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2019), 234. The referenced book is coauthored by Paul Gould and me. This particular chapter, however, is authored by Gould. 15 Erik J. Wielenberg, “In Defense of Non-Natural Non-Theistic Moral Realism”, Faith and Philosophy 26, no.1 (2009): 26. 14

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of self-existence as some brute fact is ad hoc, having no natural connection to the moral principle itself. Truths, principles, and values are fundamentally different kinds of things than personal beings. Moreover, Christian theism also has the advantage of showing how moral principles originate from moral beings and are directed toward them, such that moral principles impose “oughtness” to our lives. Since God is himself a moral being and created us in his image, then we should expect there to be moral norms to which we are obligated. In short, given Christian theism, morality makes sense. But on non-natural non-theistic moral realism (aka Platonic Atheism as Gould calls it), moral principles are just free-floating rules that are there with no explanation beyond them. Gould is again helpful: The issue between the theist and the Platonic Atheist boils down to the question of stopping points. Which is a better stopping point to ground moral facts: God or Platonic moral properties? We find the following consideration persuasive on behalf of theism. Consider, I (Paul) am under no obligation to my chair to weigh less than 500 pounds. If I did weigh 500 pounds and sat on my chair and it broke, I would not have wronged the chair. Granted, it would be unfortunate that the chair broke, but I am not obligated to the chair to not sit in it were I to weigh 500 pounds. (I would have obligations to myself and others to not weigh 500 pounds, but not to things such as chairs.) I do, however, have obligations to my students: to tell the truth, to treat them fairly, to not steal their money, and so on. We may ask, why am I obligated to my students but not my chair? A plausible answer is this. We are obligated to persons, not things. But, according to Platonic Atheism, at rock bottom, my obligations are directed toward things: Platonic moral properties such as the property being just or being honest or being fair and the like. This story strikes many as implausible. We are obligated to people partly because value ultimately resides in persons. Theism accounts for this common moral intuition. Moral properties are ultimately grounded in the supreme person, God himself. The only brute fact is the fact that God exists and has the moral character he has. This, we submit, is the proper stopping place for explanation. Thus, theism, and not Platonic Atheism, best explains the fact of objective morality.16 As such, it does not look like either of the moral realist options is helpful to the atheist. Both ethical naturalism and non-natural non-theistic moral realism fail to provide a basis for the “oughtness” of morality. Additionally, non-natural non-theistic moral realism is an inferior stopping point for the brute facts of reality itself.

CONCLUSION Atheists who use the problem of evil against the God of Christianity seem to have a metaethical problem on their hands. My survey of metaethical options available to them is not exhaustive. Perhaps there are other options available to them that would be better. But this survey of metaethical options does represent what I see to be some of the best options available to them, and in each case, there are significant problems. In the end, I suggest that atheism has a problem related to the moral concepts and principles their arguments require. By contrast, while Christian theism must continue to cultivate

Dew and Gould, Philosophy: A Christian Introduction, 234.

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theodicies and defenses, at least it has the ability to make sense of our common-sense understanding of morality itself.

FURTHER READING Campbell, Ronnie. Worldviews and the Problem of Evil: A Contemporary Approach. Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2019. Davies, Brian. The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil. New York: Continuum, 2006. Speak, Daniel. The Problem of Evil. Malden: Polity Press, 2015. Trakakis, N. N., ed. The Problem of Evil: Eight Views in Dialogue. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Chapter 63

Christian Ethics JOSHUA HORDERN

INTRODUCTION: ETHICS, SUFFERING, AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL Ethics covers “the whole range of intellectual attention that is given to moral thinking and moral teaching by philosophy and theology”.1 Ethics, as a discipline of normative reflection on normative thinking which seeks to distinguish and communicate good reasons for acting from bad ones, is not owned by either theology or philosophy. Whether ethical reflection on suffering and evil inspired by theology is more illuminating than that which eschews such sources lies outside the scope of this chapter. For disciplined Christian theological reflection on ethics – Christian ethics – terms such as “good”, “justice”, “evil”, and “suffering” are necessary for scholarly and everyday ways of thinking and talking about how to live before God. Indeed, Christian ethics must pay close attention to the phenomena and categories upon which discussions of suffering and the problem of evil have focused. Were evil and suffering completely absent, ethics of almost any imaginable sort would be unnecessary. For Christian ethics, in particular, there would be no reason for God to act to deliver creation from evil; there would be no uncertainty as to how human agency should conform itself to God’s purposes and therefore no need for a sifting of good and bad reasons for acting; and there would be no need to pray “deliver us from evil”. However, the task of ethics, as we know it, is saturated by “our keen awareness that things are, or can go, terribly wrong”.2 Discerning and communicating what is good and bad in a state of affairs and what is right or wrong in a course of action are necessary burdens laid upon human creatures in our sorry circumstances. For Christian ethics at least, these burdens are aspects of human vocation, summoning agents to the tasks of right thinking and sober judgment whereby a living and pleasing sacrifice of their agency may be offered in service to God (Rom. 12:1-3). Responding to this call, humans must find right paths or “paths of righteousness” (Ps. 23:3) amidst even “horrendous evils” and sufferings in the hope that evil has been and will be overcome by good (Rom. 12:21). Success in finding and following such right paths is served by this distinction between thinking and teaching (or “communication”). One chorus with which Christian ethics can add its distinctive voice concerns the relationship between pastoral care and theodicy.

Oliver O’Donovan, Self, World and Time (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 67. Jeph Holloway, The Poetics of Grace: Christian Ethics as Theodicy (Eugene: Cascade, 2013), 5.

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Many have remarked on the seeming tone-deafness of much theodicy literature to therapeutic or pastoral matters.3 For Christian ethics to be illuminating it must be both well-reasoned and pastorally attuned. Much of Christian ethics emphasizes this through ensuring its reasoning is closely integrated with the practical affairs of those who commit sins or suffer evils. For example, discussions of conscience as a form of pastoral theology is a longstanding aspect of Christian ethics. In more recent times, Christian ethics has displayed a marked tendency to deny that ethics can be well conceived and practiced if it is not closely attentive to people’s everyday moral thinking, speaking, and acting amidst evil and suffering.4 This pastoral emphasis suggests that a particular contribution of Christian ethics will be to reflect on how to communicate well with someone who is suffering. It can do so normatively, posing critical questions about the quality of the trains of reasoning given for this or that thought, word, or action. Weaving together its reflective and pastoral dimensions, Christian theological ethics requires that people pose such questions as neighbors “alongside the moral thinker”,5 walking through life amidst suffering and evil. What difference might this pastoral accompaniment make to ethics? Some frame theodicy in terms of harm and benefit, often in ways characteristic of utilitarian ethics.6 However, a utilitarian approach is by no means the primary or necessary form of intellectual attention to suffering in relation to ethics. Christian theological ethics cannot be comprehensively conceived in terms of a calculus in which God is justified if more benefit than harm follows from some event or situation. Instead, it must incorporate an exploration of how the compassion of Christ should discipline forms of Christian speech and action which faithfully follows God’s avowed attentiveness to God’s people. If the testimony of the prophet Jeremiah is to be believed, then God intends to prosper God’s people and not to harm them, to give them hope and a future. God makes good on that intention by keeping covenantal company with them as they journey in hope amidst the most lamentable and even horrific circumstances.7 In the Psalms, a voice cries out amidst distress: Who will show us some good? Lift up the light of your face upon us, O Lord!8 Such cries frame an answer to the question “What is God doing about evil?”9: namely that God, through covenant faithfulness, keeps illuminating company with creatures, showing them good amidst evil. Reflecting this divine responsiveness, attentiveness to cries of distress is a proper beginning to ethics. With this introduction in mind, the rest of the chapter will adopt the following structure. The first section will consider moral thinking by discerning four generic foci which arise for Christian ethics in relation to suffering and evil. It will accomplish this by exploring one particular stream of theodicy, closely associated with aspects of

E.g., Toby Betenson, “Anti-Theodicy”, Philosophy Compass 11, no. 1 (2016): 56–65. E.g., Michael Banner, The Ethics of Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 5 O’Donovan, Self, World and Time, 72. 6 See Peter Forrest, “Why Richard Swinburne Won’t ‘Rot in Hell’: A Defense of Tough-minded Theodicy”, Sophia 49, no. 1 (2010): 37–57. 7 See Jer. 29:10-14. 8 Ps. 4:6. 9 Holloway, The Poetics of Grace, 6. 3 4

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ethical enquiry, namely “non-identity theodicy”, as developed by Vince Vitale.10 The second section will consider moral teaching or speaking – the communication between people concerning suffering and evil – by exploring negatively what kinds of speech are themselves in some way evil. The third section will consider how to find right paths amidst evil, with an emphasis on faith, hope, and compassionate, company-keeping love, with particular reference to healthcare. The overall argument is that ethics must pay normative attention to both how people think and how people teach or otherwise communicate amidst suffering and evil and that doing so requires close, pastorally sensitive companionship.

MORAL THINKING: FOUR FOCI FOR ETHICAL REFLECTION ON SUFFERING AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL Differences between theodicies matter for Christian ethics. But to chart how ethics should engage in detail with distinct theodicies is beyond the scope of this chapter; still less will it be possible to judge whether one theodicy is more ethically illuminating than any other through an extensive survey. A promising candidate, however, for discerning important generic foci for moral thinking about suffering and evil is Vitale’s non-identity theodicy, which holds that “God’s reasons for allowing suffering are to be found . . . in our present and enduring status as objects of divine love”.11 Classical Augustinian ethics and the revival of Anglophone Christian ethics in the last century have taken love and its objects as an overall lens through which to read human life. Love refers both to God’s love for creation and to human loves, ordinate or inordinate, through which a community may be united or divided, healed or sickened.12 A first focus for Christian ethics is the nature of love’s entanglement with the world’s suffering and evil. Non-identity theodicy holds that the people who exist and are thus available to be loved by God could not have existed had the evils which preceded their lives been even slightly different: a man and a woman may come to be married on account of the specific evils which have thrown them together. Similarly, children born of their union only come to exist partly because of those evils. Accordingly, if people have beloved and loving lives, they do so because of the evils which have made their existence possible. God should not be blamed for permitting evils without which no actual individuals could have come to exist and become objects of God’s love. Thus, on this view, it makes little rational sense to wish away the world’s evils or that God had given one a better life. I cannot rationally wish to have been someone else. The life I live temporally and indeed eternally is inextricably entangled with evils and loves which preceded my existence and proceeded from my coming to be.

10 Vince Vitale, Non-identity Theodicy: A Grace-based Response to the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 11 Ibid., 199. 12 See John Burnaby, Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2007); Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

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For Vitale, the question is how to justify God’s role in allowing suffering and evil in such circumstances. He answers by understanding the ethical core of theodicy in parental terms: A good parent is not the one who never allows suffering in a child’s life; a good parent –whether human or divine – is the one who creates children out of love, who is committed to suffering alongside those children, and who is willing to make whatever personal sacrifices necessary to ensure that one day suffering can be overcome.13 God’s parental love is particular – it is not any possible human that God loves; but rather God’s actually existing children. By a different route, Eleonore Stump advocates a similarly parental approach to God’s love amidst suffering. She extrapolates from God’s parenthood of the non-human creation in Job to God’s parenthood of human creatures, complementing Vitale’s approach, which moves analogically between human procreation and divine creation.14 By either route, God’s parental love, suffusing all creation, human and non-human, is basic to ethical discernment of what God is doing amidst and about suffering and evil. What such divine love requires of human love is then decisive for Christian ethical thinking. Human sexual love, which normally precedes procreation, is implicated within non-identity theodicy, making sexual and procreative ethics of central concern for reflecting on love’s entanglement with suffering and evil. Augustine’s reckoning that procreation is no longer strictly necessary because of the advent of Christ but nonetheless good is complicated by non-identity theodicy’s articulation of precisely why (pro)creation of new human creatures is not evil even though they are born into suffering.15 For this theodicy, divine love works in and through other forms of parental love: to be – and thereby be objects of divine love – is a great good that is only possible for those who exist. Such, on this view, is the “justificatory power of a worthwhile human life”.16 Moreover, what proceeds from the arrangement of evils which led to our births and continue through human life is also a matter of loves or, as Stump puts it, drawing on the Psalms, “the desires of the heart”.17 In this sense, loves concern what one is committed to amidst suffering and evil – for example, the well-being of a sick spouse and justice for the oppressed. To make any progress in ethics, understanding the God-permitted and necessary conditions under which human loves direct the lives of individuals and communities is essential. The generic ethical focus arising from this theodicy, therefore, concerns love. This gets ethics off on the right foot, focusing intellectual attention on sustaining right loves of what is good amidst the evil and suffering which is both permitted and necessarily constitutive of the conditions in which people make the venture of love. A second focus for ethics follows, namely concerning the evils which have preceded and the evils which now characterize a person’s existence – evils which arise out of the human loves (whether good or bad) which have led to conception and birth. These provide the (inter-)generational context within which God’s call may be heard. The specificity

Vitale, Non-identity Theodicy, 231. Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 187–93. 15 See Augustine, De Bono Coniugali. 16 Vitale, Non-identity Theodicy, 203. 17 Stump, Wandering in Darkness, 7. 13 14

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of sufferings and evils provides the detailed backdrop not for some timeless ethics but ethics in individuals’ and generations’ concrete histories. A key requirement of ethics, on this view, is a close reckoning with how evil has shaped people’s lives before and during their earthly existence as an aspect of the allotted vocation God has for them. For people accepting God’s call on their lives, their response is intimately interlinked with a conviction of God’s love for them in their particularity. God’s love connects their calling to the particular evils they suffer which they may confront in the course of their lives. Inasmuch as love is bound up with the precise context of their procreative acts, their moral thinking must engage in trans-generational suffering and evil, giving due weight to the promise that the effects of sin will be carried from generation to generation. Discerning which evils should be borne by one generation for the sake of future generations is then a key aspect of ethics. The generic focus for ethics, therefore, is upon the evil conditions of an individual’s or community’s life. These are not marginal to the call of God to an upright life. Rather, engaging reflectively and pastorally with those evil conditions will be vital to the discernment of vocation. To be clear, however, this claim does not explain the evil conditions themselves but rather gives expression to an important aspect of Christian ethical reflection in response to evil, that concerned with vocation. A third important focus for ethics concerns how ethical reasoning should engage with aspirations for the elimination of suffering. Vitale and Stump’s parental framing of God’s relationship to the particular creatures, whose beloved existence, worthwhile nature, and vocation are owed to suffering and evil, suggests that completely ridding one’s own or others’ existence of suffering and evil is not a rational goal. This claim makes sense of ethics’ place in theodicy not only at the personal or familial level but also at a political level, at which the ethical reasoning commonly directs the force of coercive authority and law. Oliver O’Donovan has argued for political ethics as a form of theological apologetics, not as a distinct form of religious thinking but rather as a particular form of doctrinal exposition.18 Clearly, theodicies may differ in their implications for how politics should operate in relation to suffering and evil. For example, an extrapolation of non-identity theodicy would be a politics in which, since the existence of beloved shared traditions, institutions and societal inheritances upon which human existence depends are owed to the evil conditions of the world, the elimination of all suffering could not be a rational aim. Thus, political ethics takes its cue from what may be discerned from reflection on the conditions of human procreation, applying it across the full horizon of human enterprise. Such a view chastens the prideful tendency common to politics that Saint Augustine famously observed.19 However, it also affirms the role of temporal justice in providing the conditions for meaningful life even in the midst of suffering, for example through healthcare. Politics’ important but provisional place in human affairs indicates the importance of eschatology to Christian ethics’ interrelation with suffering and the problem of evil. The elimination of suffering cannot rationally be a work of human agency – transhumanist aspirations should be chastened by the perennial all-too obviously imperfect practice of politics. Instead, such a happy ending can only be hoped for as an achievement of divine agency. In sum, non-identity theodicy raises the generic question of

Oliver O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), xiv. See Augustine, City of God, passim.

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what principled limit should be placed on the goals to which ethical, including political, agency is directed. A fourth and final focus for ethics follows from the third: namely, how reflection on suffering and evil positions ethics within such divine salvific agency. If it is right for Christian ethics to attend, with due realism, to inter-generational evils and sufferings, it must also be led, with ordinate hope, by the promise of God’s love which endures to the thousandth generation. Amidst evil and suffering, how one thinks of human agency in relation to divine agency matters for ethics. Ethics which is attentive to the story of Christ must be properly evangelical, that is, defined and energized by the hope of the good news revealed definitively in Jesus Christ. Vitale remarks that “love in its preeminent form includes meaning-makers being willing to risk their whole selves for one another”.20 Humans are a type of being whom God could love in sacrifice and who also can love sacrificially. On this view, the entanglement of love with suffering and evil inspires not personal or political quietism but the venture of risky action, even to the point of complete self-sacrifice for love of God and neighbor, against the eschatological horizon of God’s promised action to end evil and suffering, which has been guaranteed in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. The call on human creatures to be a living sacrifice is a normative summons that all their ethical thinking should respond to fellow creatures as God does, though with far less certainty of rectitude or success. In summary, whether or not non-identity theodicy (or any particular version of it) is judged plausible, it provides a way of raising to prominence focal questions for ethics which should follow from consideration of suffering and the problem of evil. Christian ethics as a form of moral thinking will need to incorporate (i) reflection on the role of God’s love and human loves in the world, (ii) reflection on evil in constituting the precise conditions for the vocation of human moral thinking, (iii) modesty about personal and political capacities regarding the elimination of suffering, and (iv) energetic, hopeful commitment to participate in the suffering creation as a living sacrifice, in anticipation of God’s eventual salvific agency. With these observations about generic issues for moral thinking in mind, we turn to certain generic problems which attend communication – moral teaching or speaking – regarding suffering and evil.

MORAL TEACHING: AVOIDING EVILS OF SPEECH Ethics’ normative reflection on moral thinking has significance for the attention it pays to moral teaching. Moral thinking involves normative reflection on how people share in common objects of love. As such, it involves an exercise in the communication of moral understanding whereby individual thought, consisting in some combination of affective insight, reflective analysis, deliberative discernment, and resolution toward action, becomes intersubjective.21 Such is what is properly incorporated under the heading “moral teaching”. However, the term “teaching” may mislead if it suggests unidirectional speech rather than the conversation, contests, and afflictions of human interchange. While the end of ethics is some resolution about action, the necessary journey which ethics must

Vitale, Non-identity Theodicy, 200. Joshua Hordern, Political Affections: Civic Participation and Moral Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), ch. 2.

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take en route to action aims to bring order to moral understanding, principally (though not solely) through verbal articulation. Ethics then is not properly solitary or solipsistic but a corporate enterprise of thinking, teaching, and learning, a multidirectional sermo (conversation) in which understanding may grow. Such sermo may be human divine as well as human-human (and indeed non-human). Its paradigmatic theological context is ecclesial. The moral quality of speech, by which teaching occurs, is therefore itself a core concern of ethics. “Speech” means not only the kind of communication in which Job’s friends engaged but also that which constitutes letters, books, podcasts, articles, or any other kind of written or spoken word. Such speech can be bad or good not only in the reasons it proffers for action but in several other respects. We have already noted the problem of some theodicies’ unpastoral speech. Here are four further evils of speech from which ethics – when worked out in moral teaching – needs to be delivered. Reckoning with these is the precursor to considering a positive ethical vision in the section entitled “Finding the paths of righteousness”. First, speaking too quickly: amidst suffering and evil, there is a temptation to be quick to speak and slow to listen; to pronounce on what should be done before hearing what has been done or endured; without listening to those who have been hard done by or sinned against, upon whom evils have fallen; or with the assumption that there is anything to be done at all. This evil that threatens ethics as a corporate endeavor requires patient endurance and sustained intellectual attention, an immersive experience in which the contours of suffering and evil in a person’s or community’s biography are sensitively charted and traversed. The questions “What kind of evil is this?” and “How precisely has suffering taken form?” might be first words. But they should precede the questioners’ attentive silence, succeeded primarily by further, exploratory questions. Second, not speaking at all: in avoiding the Scylla of hasty speech, there is yet a Charybdis toward which ethics might be dragged, namely making no articulate response at all to evil and suffering. It might be thought that evil and suffering are so inherently subjectively experienced as to be impenetrable to intersubjective ethical reflection, or any ethical reflection by anyone other than the sufferer: “this is my experience of evil and only I can interpret and act upon it.” On this view, to claim ethical standing, others’ speech should be an echo that reaffirms and in no way troubles the sufferer’s self-consciousness. Moral teaching would be evacuated of content other than what obedience to a sufferer’s self-perception requires. A response containing innovation or surprise – an “answer rather than an echo”22 – would be impossible. Such refusal to speak seems liable to connive in evil, allowing it to lie in the shadows or in the half-light which a single perspective – even that of a sufferer – may throw.23 This is why, politically speaking, legal and other public authorities lift the grievances of those who allege wrongdoing out of the private realm to make them matters of public concern so that the fullest light possible may be shed upon them.24 Third, speaking without judgment: a related evil is to speak without judgment as to the causes of evil and suffering. Jesus taught both “Judge not” and “Judge for yourselves”.25 It is true that speaking too quickly may be a “rush to judgment”, as illustrated by Job’s O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment, 113. Hordern, Political Affections, 77–81. 24 Ibid., 123. 25 Matt. 7:1-5; Luke 12:57-59. 22 23

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friends’ ascription of his suffering to his sin. Such evils involve speaking of what we do not know or can only know dimly. For example, on a skeptical theist view, this would include God’s motives or intentions in specific circumstances. That there must be a limit to any talk of blame has been established by Vitale.26 This should caution moral teaching against irresponsible judgmentalism. At the threshold of speech crouches an unkind moralizing. While one cannot rule out considerations such as punishment and character formation in addressing the problem of evil, yet the warning to “judge not” calls ethical reflection to an epistemological modesty in charting such factors’ influence on events. On the other hand, people judging for themselves – as distinct from leaving judgment to others such as political authorities – matters for ethics. Human judgments of what is right should be attentive to God’s judgments as to what has gone wrong and how, so far as is discernible. The temptation is to limit speech solely to “the evils which befall” our neighbors – to non-intentional evil – rather than to speak of evils which follow because of their own or other humans’ intentional action. Against this tendency, Christian ethics will insist on conceiving evil and suffering, at least partly, in terms of sin and righteousness. Even the evils which befall humans as a result of so-called natural disasters are commonly, though not always, entangled with the disordered loves of humanity: for example, a selfish refusal to change a way of life in order to correct an injustice. A task of theological ethics, therefore, is to discern how the doctrine of sin – seen in human frailty, error, folly, and wickedness – which the church confesses, has worked out in detail and, where possible, to provide accompaniment on the path of repentance. Fourth, not speaking of God. The particular task of theological ethics, with respect to suffering and evil, is to provide moral teaching which will aid those who will listen to accept God’s call. As the Psalms frequently say, teaching can keep sufferers upright even amidst evil or set them on their feet again when struck down so that they can walk the path of righteousness.27 Non-theological speech is not necessarily evil speech any more than theological speech is necessarily good. However, a consistent omission of theological speech with its peculiar offer of healing or insight is a form of evil, a deficiency of intellectual attention to divine love. As noted at the outset, this chapter must be largely silent concerning strictly non-theological philosophical ethics, for reasons of space; save to say that, while issues of theodicy only apply necessarily for theological ethicists, nonetheless constructive reflection on suffering and evil between philosophical and theological ethicists is important. In summary, in such conversation, theologians themselves should not be too quick to speak but also should avoid not speaking at all, speaking without judgment or speaking without reference to God.

FINDING THE PATHS OF RIGHTEOUSNESS Christian theological ethics involves thinking on and communicating right paths in hope of God’s deliverance from and in response to suffering and evil. Human participation in deliverance requires the renewal of corporate human reasoning toward agency. In short,

26 Vitale, Non-identity Theodicy, 11: “[T]he extent of one’s responsibility for something depends on one’s ability to conceive how bad it is, and it is not clear that anyone other than God could have conceptual abilities great enough to bear primary responsibility for horrendous evils.” 27 Psalm 119, passim.

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ethics requires not only disciplining speech away from corrupting evils but also finding right paths toward healing in the company of others. In classic Christian terms, this is a matter of peregrinatio or pilgrimage which allows for patient, multi-perspectival reckoning with evil and suffering, while resolutely insisting on there being an eschatological horizon toward which all creatures are summoned and against which their thoughts, words, and deeds are evaluated. By the time the horizon becomes the present reality, the plurality of perspectives on evil, both conceptual and existential, will have become fully focused upon the Lamb, who brings a unity of perspective around a single throne. In the meantime, to think and teach about suffering and evil apart from ongoing, pastoral engagement in the sorrows and joys of God’s creatures will not qualify as theological ethics. The pilgrimage through this life which Jesus took in incarnation, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension should now be the way of the church, in company with the Holy Spirit. Such ecclesial pilgrimage incorporates fellow travelers’ speech and attentive listening, requiring faith, hope, and, above all, love in the form of compassion. Faith involves the shared recognition that, while humans participate in evil, as doers of evil, sufferers and comforters, only God can account for and address evil decisively, both now and in eternity. Freed from ultimate responsibility, an active faith freely commits a people to loyally following Christ, facing and penetrating the depths of evil without turning their faces away, blocking ears, or speaking of what they do not know. Faith commits the self in the church to a Christological beginning, middle, and end to its ethical reflection when faced with evil and suffering. In the midst of evil and suffering, ethical thinking and teaching inspired by Christian faith are coordinated to the enduring yet corrupted created order held together now by Christ as creator, with its ultimate horizon in the renewed creation. Such faith sets ethics off on the right footing as a corporate, thinking, communicative way of life amidst evil and suffering. On this account, Christian ethics is pursued in company with God in Christ and with others who share the same faith. Faith like this requires hope that evil will not encompass the final future of the earth’s creatures. Ethics is sustained by the hope that human agency can be incorporated within God’s salvific purposes. Through hope, evil and suffering in a personal or community narrative may be reinterpreted to enable thought and agency to gain fresh energy and direction. The task of projecting the human gaze forwards defines ethics as a hopeful task, demonstrating in practice that suffering and evil will not have the last word on a life’s meaning but will be overcome and ended. Therefore, accompanying faith and hope in moral thinking and moral teaching is the form of love most apposite to relationship with those who suffer evils, namely compassion. Compassion is, by its nature, corporate: it is paradigmatically a quality of relationships and central to ethics as a corporate, peregrine response to evil and the problem of suffering. While also being a reasonably reliable trait of a person – a virtue – compassion’s chief function is to decenter individuals from self-regard and toward interpersonal relationship. A self-consciousness of the agent as one who is compassionate is liable to obstruct rather than assist with establishing a community that will bless the afflicted.28 It is not for nothing that it is the relationships between Job and his friends that the Scriptures especially scrutinize.

Joshua Hordern, Compassion in Healthcare: Pilgrimage, Practice and Civic Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 102–15.

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Consider how healthcare provides a useful context for grasping compassion’s nature. As one theological ethicist observes, “[B]ioethics [is] the paradigmatic field of . . . contestation”29 about suffering’s significance in this world’s time. Consider especially the pain of miscarriage, a heartsore reality for many, which Vitale thoughtfully addresses.30 To my mind, compassion’s relational nature is cognitive, affective, consensual, and often intercorporeal.31 For compassionate healthcare relationships to form around a miscarriage requires the consent of those who lose a little one to make their thoughts available to a clinician. To understand loss will require affective-cognitive processes whereby the affections which are the beginnings of shared understanding enable someone’s sorrow to be apprehended by another. Through “interaffectivity”, reflective pastoral understanding of what evil has been suffered and collaborative deliberation as to what, if anything, is to be done, may be ventured. This consensual, cognitive-affective journey is often intercorporeal, making the proximity of somebody to another vital to the formation of compassionate relationship. As a sonographer scans for a fetal heartbeat, such intercorporeality is multiply instantiated. While compassion’s nature frames ethics’ work amidst suffering and the problem of evil, there is also compassion’s content. In every compassionate encounter there are at least two ways of seeing the world – two doctrines of life – which specify that content. Doctrines might be relevantly different: for example, in respect of how distinct concepts of time change individuals’ interpretation of evil and suffering. The horizon of bodily resurrection places a specific significance on a little one lost in miscarriage, incorporating them by faith and hope into future, intercorporeal relationship. The nature of evils suffered, therefore, is not only dependent upon the affections of those who have loved and lost but on the discordance between such loss and God’s purposes for human life toward resurrection. Where doctrinal differences encounter one another, conversation may follow, leading to the possibility of a change of mind for one or more party.32 Similarly, differing notions of justice and injustice, and therefore of theodicy, may individuate the content of compassionate encounter. Ethics seeks primarily to fit reasoning and agency to God’s justice – to find right paths rather than primarily defend God against critique. Nonetheless, as noted earlier, ethics – including political ethics – may operate in a mode of apologetic exposition. Compassion addresses evil both by reckoning with those at fault for evil and by caring for those who suffer evil. In either case, justice is inseparable from compassion: for those who work evil, there is yet mercy; for those who suffer evil, what is due to them as satisfaction or recompense is not unlimited but must be calibrated to the scale of evil suffered. In political terms, one task of ethical speech is to articulate what justice means in practice: assigning and applying tariffs as punishments for wrongs done. Such a reckoning, though a necessary good, is yet an incomplete representation of God’s judgment. Compassionate company-keeping amidst suffering and evil will differ from and surpass what even the finest judgment of temporal justice can provide. For those who have become trapped by others’ evil abuse into seeing themselves as less than God sees them, human justice may bring appropriate temporal satisfaction and protection. However, only the unity of divine compassion and justice can heal forever. Whether

29 Hans Ulrich, “God’s Story and Bioethics: The Christian Witness to The Reconciled World”, Christian Bioethics 21, no. 3 (2015): 303–33, 313; for discussion, see Hordern, Compassion in Healthcare, 13 and ch. 5. 30 Vitale, Non-identity Theodicy, vii–ix. 31 Hordern, Compassion in Healthcare, 74–93. 32 Ibid., 96–102.

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in the political context or not, it is in following Christ amidst suffering and evil that those engaging in ethical reflection may seek to approximate that unity and thus confess, however feebly, the loving righteousness of God.

CONCLUSION As noted earlier, Christian theological ethics may properly begin with the question: What is God doing about evil? The claim here has been that a theological answer will require a social theory which incorporates accompaniment, affection, and action, an ecclesiology which is reflective, compassionate, and concerned with justice. There can be no ecclesiology without that group of people assembled by God to live in faith, hope, and, above all, compassionate love. Those who would practice ethics in the midst of suffering and the problem that evil poses to pastoral care must pray: “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil”. Such deliverance matters for all of ethics, from moral thinking through to moral teaching or communication. Deliverance will necessarily begin not from announcing one’s judgments on others but from the confession of one’s own sinful participation in generating the evil that the world suffers. After that, the task of keeping company, thinking judiciously, listening well, and speaking rightly is laid upon the church and all humankind by the One who suffered for sin, was delivered from death, and whose goodness was not overcome by evil.

FURTHER READING Adams, Robert M. “Love and the Problem of Evil”. Philosophia 34, no. 3 (2006): 243–51. McCord Adams, Marilyn. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. London: Cornell University Press, 1999. Vitale, Vince. “Non-Identity Theodicy”. Philosophia Christi 19, no. 2 (2017): 269–90.

Chapter 64

Non-Human Suffering BETHANY N. SOLLEREDER

Who trusted God was love indeed And love Creation’s final law Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriek’d against his creed – Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam The problem of non-human animal suffering finds its most poignant examples in the extreme amounts of innocent suffering and violence experienced in a world created by a benevolent and omnipotent God. Whether we consider a fawn caught in a forest fire or a baby pelican chick born only as insurance for its older sibling who is neglected until its early death, the wild world is full of troubling suffering.1 The problem of nonhuman animal suffering has been amplified by the discovery of a long earth history and the process of evolutionary development. Suffering and death have been around in the animal world nearly as long as there has been an animal world. The earliest evidence for predation, for example, dates to the Cambrian, some 500 million years ago, when basic animal body patterns were only just being established. To make things more difficult, it is not obvious how to apply the two strongest Christian theodicies to non-human suffering. Neither the free-will defense (we suffer because of the moral wrongs we commit) nor the “vale of soul making” (we can be morally transformed by our suffering) solutions can be offered in relation to non-human suffering without significant translation. In this chapter I will set out the debate as it has been held in Christian circles both in historical sources and in the contemporary debate. I will not deal with the environmental or agricultural questions surrounding animal suffering; the harm we do to animals. Instead, I will focus on the question of animal suffering within the boundaries of natural evil. Until the period of the Reformers, there were two main approaches to animal suffering. The first approach assumes that God never intended for harm or death to touch non-human animals. For blood to be shed in nature is a transgression of God’s intentions for the world. The second approach takes the life and death cycles of non-human animals to be part of God’s design for the world. To eat and in turn to be eaten is part of God’s design for the relational exchange of the world. These two views have exchanged prominence over the centuries and continue to define a key part of the debate today. These examples are used in William L. Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism”, American Philosophical Quarterly 16, no. 4 (October 1979): 335–41; Jay B. McDaniel, Of God and Pelicans: A Theology of Reverence for Life (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1989).

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Early Christian writers like Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 125–200 ce) and Theophilus of Antioch (c. 120–190 ce) thought that animal violence was a result of the punishment laid on the sin of Adam and Eve. These theologians believed the creation was originally and universally vegetarian, in line with Gen. 1:30: “And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” Prior to human sin, animals lived in peace with each other, and all animals only ate plants. Others, such as Augustine (354–430 ce) and Lactantius (240–320 ce), thought that animals had always been created mortal, and the bloodshed of the animal kingdom was part of God’s secret ordering of all things.2 Augustine saw the violence of animals as a conflict of inherent goods being expressed in ways that caused harm, but there was no evil to be found in their actions.3 Basil the Great thought that fearful and dangerous creatures could serve to teach and discipline us,4 while their variety and fierceness displayed the wonders of God’s creation.5 Only humans had access to immortality through the Tree of Life, while other animals were always meant to live and die, eat and be eaten according to the natural cycles of life. Lactantius even suggests that some animals were meant to be food to humans prior to the sin of Adam and Eve.6 Thomas Aquinas followed Augustine in seeing non-human suffering as a simple privation of good due to the clash of otherwise good creatures.7 Violence in nature was perhaps bad, but it was not evil. The Reformation marked a significant break with this second interpretation of the naturalness of harm. Nearly universally, Protestant theologians defended a prelapsarian world that did not include any type of death or predation. John Calvin is characteristic in this sense: All created things in themselves blameless, both on earth and in the visible heaven, undergo punishment for our sins; for it has not happened through their own fault, that they are liable to corruption. . . In all these, I say, there is some deformity of the world, which. . . proceeds rather from the sin of man than from the hand of God.8 Calvin was followed by Martin Luther, who likewise asserted that the fabric of creation was changed due to sin. “I believe”, Luther writes, that Adam could command a lion with a single word, just as we give a command to a trained dog . . . I also believe that in those days the beasts were not as fierce as they are now. But this condition is the fault of original sin, and from it all the remaining creatures derive their shortcomings. I hold that before sin the sun was brighter, the water purer, the trees more fruitful, and the fields more fertile.9

2 Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Vol. 1, trans. J. H. Taylor (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1982), 92f.; Lactantius, Divine Institutes, Book II, ch. 10. See Augustine, City of God, Book 11, ch. 22. 3 Joel C. Daniels, Theology, Tragedy, and Suffering in Nature: Toward a Realist Doctrine of Creation (New York: Andrew Lang, 2016), 9–19. 4 Basil the Great, Hexaemeron 9.5. 5 Basil the Great, Homilies on Creation, IX.III. 6 Lactantius, Divine Institutes, Book II, ch. 11. 7 Daniels, Theology, Tragedy, and Suffering in Nature, 19–26. 8 John Calvin, Commentaries upon the First Book of Moses called Genesis (1554) in Calvin’s Bible Commentaries: Genesis, Part I, trans. J. King (1847; London: Forgotten Books, 2007), 113. 9 Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis: Chapters 1–5, trans. George Schick, vol. 1 of Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslave Pelikan (Saint Louis: Concordia House, 1958), 64.

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It is not clear if Luther thought animals would die – he only writes of immortality as proffered to humans. Yet, if they did die, the circumstances of their deaths would have been vastly different. However, almost as soon as defending a death-free world became ubiquitous theologically, the rise of deism and the ascendancy of the architect metaphor for God began to revise that view. An insistence on the perfection of God’s design in nature was not compatible with seeing the natural order as irretrievably marred by the Fall. Increasingly, natural theology relied on the intricacies of creaturely function – including predatorial and parasitic mechanisms – to display the glory of God.10 This tradition found its culminating voice in the English-speaking world in William Paley’s 1802 Natural Theology. In Paley, the first camp found in the early church – that all apparent evils exist by God’s providential care – found a revival with the added benefit of scientific authority to bolster the argument. “It is a happy world after all.” Paley argues, “The air, the earth, the water, teem with delighted existence”.11 He imagines fish fry “so happy, that they know not what to do with themselves”, and shrimp bounding for joy.12 Where death is imposed on an animal due to another preying upon it, a violent death is seen as preferable to a slow death by starvation, aging, or disease.13 Although Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species overturned Paley’s design argument by showing that the order in nature could be accounted for by natural selection, he still echoes this particular argument of Paley’s: “When we reflect on this struggle [of life], we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.”14 The challenge of Darwin to the question of animal suffering was twofold. First, it meant that animal suffering and death had long pre-dated the existence of humans. The violence they experience could no longer be blamed on the sin of Adam and Eve, at least, not easily.15 Second, if one wanted to embrace evolution as God’s method of creation, it meant embracing death and competition as parts of God’s toolkit of creation, rather than unwanted errors in God’s plan. While many Victorian Christians (particularly Methodists and those of the Low Church) rejected evolution, they tended to do so on account of the seeming damage it did to human ancestry and society rather than because it highlighted the problem of non-human animal suffering.16 Other early adopters of evolutionary theory immediately began to rethink the place of creaturely suffering in light of divine providence. Charles Kingsley, writing to F. D. Maurice, complained, “I have long ago found out how little I can discover about God’s absolute love, or absolute righteousness, from a universe in

Christopher Roedelle, The Beasts that Perish: The Problem of Evil and the Contemplation of the Animal Kingdom in English Thought, c. 1660–1839 (PhD Dissertation, Georgetown University, 2005), 76–90. I am also grateful to Piet Slootweg, whose doctoral work on this topic, “Teeth and Talons Whetted for Slaughter”: Divine Attributes and Suffering Animals in Historical Perspective (1600–1961) (Kampen, NL: Summum, 2002) has been an important source for this history. 11 William Paley, Natural Theology, 12th ed. (London: J. Faulder, 1809), 456. 12 Ibid., 458. 13 Ibid., 474. 14 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (London: John Murray, 1859), 79. 15 See William Dembski’s attempt on page 504. 16 See, for example, the response to Darwin in contemporary periodicals. Alvar Ellegård, Darwin and the General Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 98–101. 10

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which everything is eternally eating everything else”.17 But soon, he flipped this narrative on its head, teaching: We must soften our sadness at the sight of the universal mutual war by the sight of an equally universal mutual help. But more. It is true – too true if you will – that all things live on each other. But is it not, therefore, equally true that all things live for each other? That self-sacrifice, and not selfishness, is at the bottom the law of Nature, as it is the law of grace, and the law of bio-geology, as it is the law of all religion and virtue worthy of the name?18 Kingsley moved from interpreting the violence and predation in creation as a theological problem to it being the key to understanding the beautiful and difficult exchange of God’s good world. Contemporary scholars are still divided between these two historical approaches. Is the suffering of non-human animals caused by God or by something opposed to God? Christopher Southgate has called this question a “key fault-line in theology’s response to Darwinism”,19 but as we have seen, it is a debate that extends back to the earliest theological reflections. We will move now to the contemporary scholarship that continues the debate.

RETAINING A FALL Scholars who maintain that violence cannot be part of God’s good world must find something else to account for the violence in evolutionary life. For most, the historical attribution of non-human animal violence and suffering to the sin of Adam and Eve has to be abandoned since the chronological evidence of death in the long pre-human history of life is too strong. There are two notable exceptions. The first is William Dembski, who argues for a retroactive application of sin’s influence on the early world. Dembski writes: To make us realise the full extent of human sin, God does not merely allow personal evils (i.e., the disordering of our souls and the sins we commit as a result) to run their course subsequent to the Fall. In addition, God allows natural evils (e.g., death, predation, parasitism, disease, drought, floods, famines, earthquakes, and hurricanes) to run their course prior to the Fall.20 The whole of the natural world is subjected to the evil effects of sin even before sin happened in order that all life may bear eloquent testimony to the gravity of evil in the human heart. The second contemporary attempt to link human sin with natural evil is by Stephen Webb. He advances a thesis in which a dome (the “firmament” created on day 2 in Gen. 1:6-8) was placed over the Garden of Eden, which he takes to be a real geographical

Frances Kingsley, ed., Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life (London: MacMillan, 1899), 181f. Ibid., 282f. Italics in original. This was a lecture Kingsley gave to the Winchester Scientific Society in 1871. 19 Christopher Southgate, “Re-Reading Genesis, John, and Job: A Christian Response to Darwinism”, Zygon 46, no. 2 (June 2011): 370–95, 378. 20 William Dembski, The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World (Nashville: Broadman Holman Publishing, 2009), 145. Italics in original. 17 18

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location on earth.21 Inside the Garden was a paradise, lacking suffering or disease. Outside the dome was “an anti-world, a mockery or demonic parody of everything God wanted for his creation”.22 There, evolution developed through competition and natural selection under the corrupting work of Satan. Human sin broke the boundary between these two locations, introducing death and suffering to the whole creation, including the Garden. The remainder of scholars who explain natural evil by reference to the fallenness of the world ascribe either to a view of Satanic corruption of the natural world or to a mysterious fallenness of the cosmos whose origin is difficult to define. The Satanic corruption view is held by scholars ranging from C. S. Lewis and Wolfhart Pannenberg to Michael Lloyd and Gregory Boyd.23 For these thinkers, God cannot be the source of harm or suffering. The legend of the fall of Satan, however, offers a way to accept evolution without attributing its violence and bloodshed to God. Satan could have corrupted the process long before humans were around. Drawing on the biblical passages that depict God as embattled with foes, particularly great monsters of the ocean such as the Leviathan, these scholars see the earth as a battlefield between cosmic forces.24 The effect of the battle between God and the forces of evil is the corruption of the cooperation and altruism that were intended to be the driving forces of evolution. A fundamental opposition to God’s good creative work stands at the center of the story of the problem of evil. A final option is that of affirming the fallenness of creation without attributing it to Satan. The world is less than it should be, but the roots of evil are mysterious. Nicola Hoggard Creegan still personalizes evil and skirts the edges of the Satanic corruption thesis, writing, “In the end I believe there is something opposed to God, which must in some sense be God’s creation, and that this something is beyond our story”.25 Neil Messer, by contrast, draws on Karl Barth’s concept of “nothingness” to argue that evil is that which God did not will and which stands against the “yes” of God’s creating will.26 Celia Deane-Drummond argues that creaturely violence is the shadow-side of creation, the shadow-sophia that counteracts the wisdom (sophia) of God’s work.27 She writes that “evil is not a ‘substance’ or a ‘principle’ of creation . . . but in many situations operates as

Stephen Webb, The Dome of Eden: A New Solution to the Problem of Creation and Evolution (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2010). 22 Ibid., 165. 23 C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: HarperCollins, 1940, 1996), 138; Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromily (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), 2:274; Michael Lloyd, “Are Animals Fallen?”, in Animals on the Agenda, eds Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamamoto (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1998), 147–60; Gregory A. Boyd, “Evolution as Cosmic Warfare: A Biblical Perspective on Satan and ‘Natural Evil’”, in Creation Made Free: Open Theology Engaging Science, ed. Thomas Oord (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2009), 125–45; Gregory A. Boyd, Satan and the Problem of Evil: Constructing a Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2001). 24 Passages that include such battle imagery include Pss. 29:3-4; 18:15; 74:10-13; 89:9-10; 104:3-9; 106:9; Prov. 8:27-29; Job 9:13; 38:6-11; Hab. 3:8-15. 25 Nicola Hoggard Creegan, Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 77. 26 Neil Messer, “Natural Evil after Darwin”, in Theology after Darwin, eds Michael S. Northcott and R. J. Berry (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2009), 149. 27 Celia Deane-Drummond, “Shadow Sophia in Christological Perspective: The Evolution of Sin and the Redemption of Nature”, Theology and Science 6, no. 1 (2008): 13–32; Celia Deane-Drummond, “Perceiving Natural Evil through the Lens of Divine Glory? A Conversation with Christopher Southgate”, Zygon 53, no. 3 (2018): 792–807. 21

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an absence or privation of the good”.28 Christopher Southgate has recently extended his thinking in this direction in this year’s Boyle lecture, speaking of creaturely “resistances” to the “gentle overall bias” that God exerts over creation toward life and “complexity and beauty and interdependence.”29 The origin of the fallenness is unknown, but the effects are felt in every fang and fire that mars innocent animal lives. There are two main critiques of the fallenness narratives given evolution. The first challenge is biblical. The world is constantly proclaimed “good” and is attributed to God’s work and delight.30 This is true both before and after “the Fall” in Genesis 3. Even where divine struggle with creation is depicted,31 the battle is over and God is victorious; it is not an ongoing struggle. Far from God being depicted as the enemy of the more somber or violent aspects of creation, passages like Psalm 104, Job 38–41, and Isa. 45:732 explicitly identify these “shadow” elements of predation, death, and darkness with God’s work. The second challenge is scientific. Elements such as suffering and predation are not intrinsic to life, but they are necessary for the development of the complex skills we value. Early life did not include these harms. When cyanobacteria filled the earth’s oceans for billions of years there was neither predation nor suffering. But neither was there thought, movement, intentional relationship, or love. The ability to suffer was not the creation of an absence in life – quite to the contrary, it was actively evolved in every form of complex mobile life because it is such an immense aid to survival. Some people are born without the ability to feel pain and others lose their ability to feel pain through infections like Hansen’s Disease (what was once known as leprosy).33 Far from being a superpower, the inability to feel pain and emotional suffering disables complex creatures from being able to live flourishing lives. Would it be Satan’s work to give creatures precisely what they need to live flourishing lives? Is it an absence of creaturely creativity that creates the swiftness of the cheetah or the strength and stealth of the lion? No. Rather, these beautiful aspects of creation are born directly from the long history of violence, suffering, death, and development. In light of these two challenges, numerous scholars have chosen to pursue the question of non-human animal suffering without reference to a fall.

ANIMAL SUFFERING WITHOUT A FALL Those who see the world as good, though often ambiguous, wrestle with what it means for God to create a world where pain and death are ubiquitous. Scholars such as Holmes Rolston III, Elizabeth Johnson, Loren Wilkinson, John Schneider, Niels Gregersen, Christopher Southgate, and myself all affirm the basic intuition that the existence of lamb-eating lions is not a failure of divine providence, but sits within the will and love of God.34 Deane-Drummond, “Shadow Sophia”, 21. Christopher Southgate, “God and a World of Natural Evil: Theology and Science in Hard Conversation”, Zygon (early release, November 3, 2022), 7–8. Available online: https://doi​.org​/10​.1111​/zygo​.12849. 30 See Deut. 10:14; Ps. 24:1; 1 Cor. 10:26. 31 See footnote 25. 32 Isa. 45:7 (NRSV): “I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things.” 33 See Philip Yancey and Paul Brand, The Gift of Pain (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997). 34 Holmes Rolston III, “Does Nature Need to Be Redeemed?” Zygon 29, no. 2 (1994): 205–29; Elizabeth Johnson, Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 181–210; Loren Wilkinson, “A Christian Ecology of Death: Biblical Imagery and the ‘Ecologic Crisis’”, Christian Scholar’s Review 5, no. 4 (1976): 319–38; John R. Schneider, Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge 28 29

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One popular strategy, taken by Elizabeth Johnson, maintains that “affliction arose from below, so to speak, rather than being imposed by direct divine will”.35 Instead of a world carefully controlled in all its outcomes, the creaturely agents of the world are given freedom to grow and develop according to their own pleasures and goods. Animals may harm each other, but competition and death lead to more skill and speed and strength among those who survive. As Holmes Rolston wrote so poetically, “the cougar’s fang has carved the limbs of the fleet-footed deer, and vice-versa”.36 John Polkinghorne coined the term “free process” to describe the freedom of the world, creating a parallel between the human moral free-will defense and the freedom that God gives the world to evolve on its own terms.37 The free-process defense recognizes that the values of creation stem in large part from its disvalues. Similarly, non-organic processes and entities are allowed to have consistent attributes, even when they might cause harm. Rock remains hard when it falls on soft-bodied creatures below. Water, the life-giving substance all living creatures rely on, also has the power to drown those adapted to breathing air and the force to batter creatures into coastal rocks. The same properties that allow water to give life also take life away. Michael Murray calls this consistency “nomic regularity” and sees it as essential to creatures being able to form intentions.38 The existence of harms in the world is inseparable from the flourishing of creatures, and as Christopher Southgate has defended, the violent evolutionary process “was the only, or at least the best, process by which creaturely values of beauty, diversity, and sophistication could arise”.39 However, God creating the world with such significant suffering raises the problem of neglect or incompetence. We would condemn a parent who allowed their children to experience as much suffering as evolution entails: why not God?40 Two approaches attempt to temper this objection. The first approach argues that God has not volunteered creatures for severe pain for God’s own purposes, as if creatures were laboratory experiments. God created in the only way possible, but then also, in Jürgen Moltmann’s words, “The Creator suffers the contradiction of the beings he has created”.41 Moltmann argues that God not only feels the suffering of creation but guides its progress through God’s own suffering: “It is not through supernatural interventions that God guides creation to its goal, and drives forward

University Press, 2020); Niels H. Gregersen, “The Cross of Christ in an Evolutionary World”, dialog 40, no. 3 (2001): 192–207; Christopher Southgate, The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008); Bethany Sollereder, God, Evolution, and Animal Suffering: Theodicy Without a Fall (London: Routledge, 2019). 35 Johnson, Ask the Beasts, 191. 36 Holmes Rolston, Science and Religion (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 134. 37 John Polkinghorne, Science and Providence: God’s Interaction with the World (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1989), 66f. 38 Michael J. Murray, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 135–41. 39 Southgate, The Groaning of Creation, 48. This has also become known as the “package deal” argument. See Gregersen, “The Cross of Christ”, 197–201. 40 This argument is most eloquently stated by Wesley J. Wildman, “Incongruous Goodness, Perilous Beauty, Disconcerting Truth: Ultimate Reality and Suffering in Nature”, in Physics and Cosmology: Scientific Perspectives on the Problem of Natural Evil, ed. Nancey Murphy, Robert Russell, and William R. Stoeger, S.J. (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory Foundation, 2007), 267–94. 41 Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 210.

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evolution; it is through his passion, and the opening of possibilities out of his suffering.”42 The Cross of Christ becomes the central interpretive key to evolutionary history, with Holmes Rolston calling creation “cruciform”.43 The suffering of God means God takes responsibility for the suffering the animals endure and that they never suffer alone. The second approach suggests an animal eschaton as a way for God to redeem the suffering of innocent animals. As this is also suggested by the Satanic corruption thinkers, I will give it its own section.

REDEMPTION OF NON-HUMAN SUFFERING Speculations on the redemption of non-human animals form common ground between those who think animal suffering was intended and those who think of it as a result of sin. Everyone agrees that if God is going to be justified for the level and severity of harm that befalls creatures, there must be some renewal of life for them. How this is achieved is borne out in different ways. Some scholars, like Ruth Page and Holmes Rolston III, see part of the story of redemption for animals in the relationships they create while on earth and the lives they make possible by their death. Page writes: “when God is believed to be present, then every moment becomes eschatological”,44 and redemption is found in God’s creative work making new possibilities out of the present suffering. Loren Wilkinson and Rolston write of redemption in the exchange of energy through trophic levels: like Charles Kingsley, every lost life supports new life, so every life is redeemed in its contribution to new life.45 There is also speculation that animals may have life beyond death. For some, this means only that creatures are remembered by God: held in the divine life for eternity. For others, such as Jay McDaniel, David Clough, John Schneider, and Christopher Southgate, there is hope for subjective redemption – an animal heaven where creatures who have not flourished will be given that chance.46 Disagreements range around the amount of continuity non-human animal eschatological life would have with life on earth. Would predators and parasites still be themselves? To what extent would stripping them of their violent instincts end up stripping them of their very identity? For example, could hunting continue in a different form, without pain or fear, but with a sense of play?47 Would eternal life be necessary to redeem temporary suffering, or could creatures exist for a while, flourish, then pass away? I suggest that the primary question around the redemption of non-human creatures is not how much one has suffered, nor if that suffering was “worth it”, as if the New Creation is an apologetic recompense for suffering endured. Rather, the key question is “How wide is the circle of God’s love?”. The New Creation’s logic is not found primarily in righting wrongs but in the fulfillment of creatures in the love of God. Therefore, any creature who is loved by God – that is, all creatures – will find perfect fulfillment in the Moltmann, God in Creation, 211. Holmes Rolston III, “Kenosis and Nature”, in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed. John Polkinghorne (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 58–61. 44 Ruth Page, God and the Web of Creation (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1996), 63. 45 Wilkinson, “A Christian Ecology of Death”, 319–38; Rolston III, “Does Nature Need to Be Redeemed?”, 205–29. 46 McDaniel, Of God and Pelicans, 42; Southgate, Groaning of Creation, 82–5; Schneider, Animal Suffering, 241– 68; David Clough, On Animals, Vol. 1 of Systematic Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2012), 158–9. 47 See Bethany Sollereder, “When Humans Are Not Unique: Perspectives on Suffering and Redemption”, The Expository Times 127, no. 6 (2016): 269–76. 42 43

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community of the New Creation. This approach sets aside the attempt to measure the intensity or severity of either suffering or sentience and sets redemption in its proper theocentric context of God’s love for the individual.

Compound Theodicy and Future Directions Christopher Southgate and Michael Murray both made the important move of suggesting that no one explanation could account for the existence of suffering and have moved toward a “compound theodicy”. These wind together several strands of explanation into a larger whole instead of placing the whole weight of argument on one approach.48 Introducing more than one strand of argument has now become commonplace.49 What new strands of argument can we expect in future? As the theological discussion of non-human animal suffering has developed, new research has begun to challenge the assumed insentience of plant life. Suzanne Simard, who discovered the “wood wide web” of mycelial networks that allow trees to send resources to each other,50 has more recently discovered that trees can recognize their kin, and the mycelial networks link trees together into architecture that closely resembles neural networks.51 Research in non-brain cognition has exploded in recent years,52 and has given new life to questions of plant consciousness. If plants are conscious, can they suffer? If they can suffer, the problem of non-human suffering will explode from the limited focus it has had on the tiny percentage of highly developed animals to include the majority of biomass on earth. The question of suffering will also gain new importance as the advent of climate change begins to make life as we have known it during the Holocene impossible.

FURTHER READING Murray, Michael. Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Robinson, Andrew and Bethany Sollereder, eds., “Essays in Honor of Christopher Southgate: Evolutionary Theodicy”. Zygon 53, no. 3 (2018): 680–835. Schneider, John R. Animal Suffering and the Darwinian Problem of Evil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Sollereder, Bethany N. God, Evolution, and Animal Suffering: Theodicy without a Fall. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. Southgate, Christopher. The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil. London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008.

Southgate, Groaning of Creation, 15–17; Murray, Nature Red, 193–9. Schneider, Animal Suffering, 268–9; Robert John Russell, “Southgate’s Compound Only-Way Evolutionary Theodicy: Deep Appreciation and Further Directions”, Zygon 53, no. 3 (2018): 711–26; Sollereder, God, Evolution, and Animal Suffering, 92f. 50 Suzanne Simard et al., “Net Transfer of Carbon between Ectomycorrhizal Trees Species in the Field”, Nature 388 (1997): 579–82. 51 Rowan Hooper, “Suzanne Simard Interview: How I Uncovered the Hidden Life of Trees”, New Scientist, April 28, 2021, https://institutions​.newscientist​.com​/article​/mg25033320​-900​-suzanne​-simard​-interview​-how​-i​ -uncovered​-the​-hidden​-language​-of​-trees/. 52 See František Baluška and Michael Levin, “On Having No Head: Cognition Throughout Biological Systems”, Frontiers in Psychology 7, no. 902 (2016). Available online: https://doi​.org​/10​.3389​/fpsyg​.2016​.00902. 48 49

Chapter 65

Bioethics and Suffering YECHIEL MICHAEL BARILAN

INTRODUCTION Suffering is a universal concept, found in all known human cultures. People have always tried to alleviate suffering and avoid it. People also have tried to make suffering intelligible and to find in it some value, such as edification, dignity, and resilience. The dominant theories that explain suffering are interpersonal malice (e.g., witchcraft, political oppression), religious (e.g., punishment for sins, Divine trials), psychological (e.g., wrong attitudes, stress), sheer luck (e.g., an unfavorable astrological map), and biomedical (i.e., mechanistic chains of causality within a scientific paradigm). Even though the biomedical paradigm is less common, all humans employ biomedical means to relieve suffering, sometimes in addition to other means, such as mindfulness and magic. Sufferers are more likely to seek a biomedical therapy than to seek biomedical explanations for suffering.1 The therapeutic approach has become dominant in coping with suffering, expanding the metaphors of “pathology”, “the normal”, “adherence to care”, and “professional therapy” to a wide range of personal and social problems. Until the Enlightenment, suffering as such had not been a target for medical interventions. Care givers would try to overcome the source of certain kinds of suffering, such as disease, the best they could, while painkillers, tranquilizers, and anesthesia did not exist at all. Prior to an excruciating procedure, patients were given alcohol, not much more. The advent of “humanitarianism” as a distinct moral calling in the late eighteenth century, the invention of anesthesia in the nineteenth century, and the maturation in the twentieth century of drugs that control pain and mental agitation delineated a special role of medical care – the mitigation of suffering. This may take place independently of the source of suffering, and it targets all suffering, even if disease and death remain beyond containment. The human rights discourse was born in the second half of the twentieth century. It is patient oriented and equality bended. It coincided with the triumphant moments of biomedicine as a positive science that speaks that language of measurement and statistics. With visual analogue scales and similar instruments, pain medicine has construed pain as a quantitative phenomenon2 – thus rendering pain as an ideal template for equal and

Richard A. Shweder, Nancy C. Much, Manamohan Mahapatra, and Lawrence Park, “The ‘big three’ of Morality (Autonomy, Community, Divinity) and the ‘big three’ Explanations of Suffering”, in Morality and Health, eds Allan M. Brandt and Paul Rozin (New York: Routledge, 1997), 119–69. 2 E.g., as a “fifth vital sign”; Debra B. Gordon et al., “American Pain Society Recommendations for Improving the Quality of Acute and Cancer Pain Management. American Pain Society Quality of Care Committee”, JAMA 274, 1

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rational treatment of all sufferers. The implied message is that when pain is measured independently of other factors, it can be treated independently and scientifically. Bioethics is an academic discipline and a style of public discourse, which has developed in the affluent West during the second half of the twentieth century, especially from 1970s onwards, when the word “bioethics” was coined and the first bioethics institutes, departments, and titles were established. Bioethics is an attempt to mobilize and somehow synthesize pluralistically major discourses, including traditional medical ethics, religious morality, secular enlightenment modes of reasoning, the emergent human rights discourse, and environmental concerns. Bioethics strives to criticize and guide medical research and practice. Bioethics and critics of modern medicine, along with political activism, helped humanity realize that poverty is the greatest source of suffering, including medical suffering.3 Much of the poverty and suffering in the world is a product of human action and recklessness. Thus, while medicine strives to focus on the uses of its instruments and authority, understanding of the sources of suffering pulls attention beyond the biomedical realm. This chapter surveys the medical discourse on suffering in the era of bioethics (1960– 2020). I first review the key insights on suffering in bioethics. I present utilitarian modes of reasoning as central to contemporary bioethics and then explicate a thesis of “suffering exceptionalism” which is about the power of suffering in biomedicine and bioethics to exact exceptions from social and legal norms.

THE NATURE OF SUFFERING Theories of suffering rely on a dichotomous anthropology. The human person is a body and a mind. Many people tend to associate “pain” with the body and “suffering” with the mind. In this chapter, “suffering” is something beyond mere pain and annoyance. Within this discussion, “suffering” refers to significant suffering, a complex personal event that is construed as a disruptive and noxious experience in one dimension (body or mind) that is powerful enough to disrupt also the other. When prolonged, suffering erases and recreates this division. An influential idea is that the suffering of the chronically ill causes “loss of self” by means of social isolation, low self-esteem, and a sense of burden on others while the patient’s inner world of suffering is often discredited by his or her social circles. Remedying any of these steps is of great help in overcoming suffering and in transforming its meaning into less intolerable experience. Chronic suffering involves the locus of suffering, such as back pain, accompanied by a penumbra of depression, anxiety, and disability. Suffering tends to distort thought and emotion, narrowing the personal spans of attention, care, empathy, planning, and valuation up to a point in which the sufferer becomes overtly self-absorbed by his or her suffering. Suffering can alienate the self from its own perspective and identity, especially when the sufferer has no explanation or purpose (see Matt. 27:46). Successful coping with suffering may not be rooted in the biological processes at the heart of a suffering, but in five reactive perceptions: existential threat, bereavement, loss of self-control, humiliation, and meaninglessness. All four may culminate in the

no. 23 (1995): 1874–80. 3 WHO, The World Health Report 1995: Bridging the gaps (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1995).

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disintegration of the self as a goal-pursuing and value-driven agent (see Exod. 6:9; Nicomachean Ethics 1119a23). Not only does suffering tend to extend from its locus and permeate the whole person, but it also tends to stretch in time and sometimes to reshape perceptions of the past. Even after the physical event of suffering has resolved, many people are haunted by intrusive memories, anxieties, and incapacity to rehabilitate self-esteem, social skills, and purposefulness. Suffering distorts the ordinary perceptions of time and the phenomenology of consciousness as flying in time. Suffering distorts attention, sucking mental energies as to render a sense of internal emptiness. Suffering creates temporal distortions, as an hour of anguish is experienced years long. These distortions undermine the phenomenology of the self as an agent in society, as a person sharing society’s spatial and temporal dimensions. Whereas the actual event producing suffering, such as an attack of pain, might be short, people are tormented by the specter of the next event. One more distortion is the tendency of suffering to cast its shadow on “everything that matters”, even successes and joys. When these distortions are extreme, the threat to the person is found in the loss of synchronization with non-suffering experiences of the self. At this point, psychiatric suffering, physiological suffering, and social suffering converge in “suffering” as a social phenomenon, with much personal variety. Little do we know why people suffer so differently similar situations of suffering, from sexual trauma to rheumatic pain. It seems that there is much less variety in the phenomenology of the primary physiological events (suffering’s continuity hypothesis), such as dyspnea and nausea, than the phenomenology of suffering as a holistic experience that includes the patient’s perceptions and the penumbra. The prospect of endless suffering may constitute the worst experience; it may break the person, especially his or her willpower (Talmud Kethubot 33b). Different people break up by different kinds of suffering (e.g., George Orwell’s 1984). Whether these assertions are true psychologically, we do not know. They clearly reflect suffering as reaching beyond the extremes of physical experience and into its destructive impact on the person as an agent with identity and dignity. The absolute sufferer is in absolute submission to suffering and the powers that control it. Being with the sufferer, and treating her or her with respect, redeems the sufferer from the perception of absolute submission. Hence, restoration of a sense of worth is key to coping with human suffering, even when the biological processes of suffering are irreparable. Rational reflection on suffering is blighted by paradoxes. On the one hand, as Nietzsche asserts, “What we most deeply and most personally suffer from is incomprehensible and inaccessible to nearly everyone else; here we are hidden from our nearest, even if we eat from the same pot” (Gay Science #338). Too often the suffering is far from comprehensible to the sufferer. Suffering may undermine the capacity to comprehend anything4. Yet, humans cannot help but talk about suffering and about their own suffering and to invest their best energies in bringing wisdom to suffering. This wisdom tends to hover over hazy transitions from sense to non-sense and backward.5 The Greeks defined the human being as “life that talks rationally” (zōon logon echon). When we say that suffering mutes the sufferer, we imply that the sufferer is dehumanized and reduced to biological existence of misery. The struggle to make sense of suffering, to build explanatory and conciliatory narratives around it, is an attempt to reclaim one’s humanity.

Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992), ch. 9.

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Nietzsche warns that compassion (or: pity or empathy – not clear) “strips the suffering of what is truly personal”.6 However, one cannot imagine caregiving without compassion and rationality. Research has shown that humans and even animals exercise an innate capacity to feel anguish when they witness another creature suffering. The experiences of suffering and of empathy have similarities and are found across most conscious creatures. Humans feel compassion for animals too. Sharing experiences of suffering and being with the sufferer is necessary for extracting the patient from a maddening feeling of isolation and degradation. The authority invested in the medical establishment as a validator of suffering is key to the social recognition that the sufferer seeks in his or her plight. Especially in secular and multicultural societies, biomedicine gives the vocabulary and taxonomic structures that are needed for coping with suffering as personal and social events and the ability to share it verbally. Medicine and bioethics have been accused of imposing a “tyranny of meaning” and displacing spirituality and other semantic systems and cultural structures with their own jargon and clout.7 The ubiquity of the word “trauma” illustrates that even religious, poetic, and political discourses on suffering recourse to its conceptualization in biomedical terms. The appropriation of suffering by biomedicine has special implications in the West, in which religion (mainly Christianity) had already defined the human person and life’s ultimate values through the prism of the suffering body, humiliated person, and the vision of overcoming death (see 1 Cor. 15:14). Medicine has been criticized for its power over suffering, being the technical and legal gatekeeper to pain control and similar measures. Intentional and non-intentional suffering result from medical policy and from caregivers’ conduct. Some patients use their own suffering to manipulate caregivers and the “system”.8 The association of suffering with power in human relationships enhances suffering even when pain and distress are mitigated. Culture domesticates suffering and place it in a safe distance from ordinary life, while events of suffering burst in, defy, and challenge cultural frames. Medicine is a sub-culture that is closer to events of suffering, using more powerful means to contain and understand suffering. All the while, too often, events of suffering shake the iron cage of biomedicine. The hospice movement, which evolved in parallel with bioethics, is dedicated to the suffering which agonizes people after all biomedical means of cure have been exhausted, and all hopes for healthy life have been quenched. The hospice movement defined a phase in which suffering takes over as “total pain”, the response to which is “total care”.9 While highly burdened medical interventions and curative intentions are abandoned, in this context “care” is medicalization and bureaucratization of the end of life. Many traditions teach that suffering brings personal growth. This growth must be distinguished from deliberate submission to risk and hardship for the sake of some goal. Here is another paradox. To achieve the personal growth special to suffering, one must endure unwanted, unplanned, and inescapable significant suffering. Paradoxically, people strive to transform suffering that is alienating into a source of personal growth. But what is suffering? Taussig, The Nervous System, ch. 9. Arthur Kleinmann, “‘Everything That Really Matters’: Social Suffering, Subjectivity, and the Remaking of Human Experience in a Disordering World”, Harvard Theological Review 90, no. 3 (1997): 315–35. 8 David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 190–7. 9 Cicely Saunders, “Care of the Dying”, The Guy’s Hospital Gazette 80 (1966): 136–42. 6 7

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THE NATURE OF SUFFERING IN BIOETHICS DISCOURSE A contemporary bioethicist defines suffering thus: Suffering results from profound loss that impairs a life. Loss is profound when it forecloses the satisfaction of values that define and drive a life. When lost values can be redeemed by other values that give life integrity and vitality, suffering can be accepted and could be ennobling.10 I find this definition too abstract and quite disconnected from suffering as an intrusive and physically noxious experience. Moreover, definition of suffering that is satisfaction related misses the primary noxiousness that medical suffering usually embodies. Perhaps older and broader approaches might help. The examples given for situations of suffering have not changed much throughout ages and cultures. An old canonical Buddhist text describes the “ennobling truth of the origin of suffering” (stress, dukkha): Birth is suffering, aging is suffering, death is suffering; sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, and despair are suffering; association with the unbeloved is suffering; separation from the loved is suffering; not getting what is wanted is suffering.11 A contemporary academic book in psychology and sociology defines suffering thus: To suffer is to experience a disvalued and unwanted state of mind, body or spirit. The experience might be an acute disease, a recurrent nightmare, an obsessive thought, an incapacitating sadness, a skin rash, a miscarriage, or a cancer.12 Surgeon and pioneer theoretician of suffering in bioethics, Eric Cassell adds that suffering involves a perception of threat to the integrity of the person in addition and by means of its distressful quality of experience. The contemporary academic emphasis on suffering’s erosive effects on self and agency helps elicit a synergistic effect from the two major drivers in contemporary moral theory – rationality (i.e., autonomy) and experiential life (i.e., suffering and joy). Whereas the Buddhist definition embraces diverse kinds of unwanted situations, the contemporary academic definition is highly medicalized. All the listed examples are conditions treated by medicine. They are formulated in medical jargon. Indeed, modern medical thinking and the emergent discipline of bioethics consider medical suffering a special kind of suffering. But medicine has also been medicalizing an ever greater number of conditions, hitherto not considered pathological at all, childbirth, alcoholism, and aging, for example. The Buddhist and the academic conceptualizations of suffering do not distinguish primary noxious events, such as cancer, from mere frustration of desire. Nor is there any clear attempt to rank suffering by intensity or moral significance. In bioethics, the

Barry Hoffmaster, “Understanding Suffering”, in Suffering and Bioethics, eds. Ronald M. Green and Nathan J. Palpant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 31–53. 11 Nibbedhika Sutta AN 6.63. 12 Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, and Park, “The ‘big three’ of Morality”, 120. 10

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alleviation of suffering is a primary moral goal. Sometimes it appears as the supreme moral goal, and sometimes as the only moral goal. These are no trivial observations. Even though every moral theory considers the alleviation of suffering a praiseworthy goal, rarely is it a primary one. For example, the primary goal of virtue ethics is being virtuous; the primary goal of religious morality is adherence to God’s will. There is always a theoretical framework within which the moral calling of suffering is constructed. But, inspired by secular humanitarianism and the capacity to control acute pain, contemporary medicine addresses suffering directly. Mitigation of suffering monopolizes the moral consensus in bioethics. Suffering has a special role in bioethics owing to three factors. The first is bioethics’ roots in medicine; the second is utilitarianism’s prominent role in contemporary analytic philosophy, the main template of bioethics. The third is bioethics’ avowed pluralism, which is the commitment to independence from specific moral doctrines. Suffering is an excellent common denominator, shared by all theories of ethics. Many people and philosophers would agree with Derek Parfit’s assertion that “all suffering is bad for the sufferer”. Parfit does not even try to justify the claim by means of argumentation. He merely asserts its universality and axiomatic status independently of any theory about human values. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy does not have an entry on suffering, as if it is a self-evident concept. Nor is suffering defined or explicated in philosophies of medicine.13 In Western philosophy, utilitarianism is the doctrine in which suffering plays a foundational role. Utilitarianism proclaims three theorems.

1. Pleasure and pain/satisfaction and suffering are commensurable with each other.



2. It is possible to sum up and to compare different events and different lives by their pleasure/suffering balance.



3. The only moral good is the fair maximization of pleasure/satisfaction overall.

Whereas contenders of utilitarianism reject the third theorem, the first two are widely accepted. Hence, we distinguish between utilitarianism as a moral doctrine and utilitarian reasoning, which operates, albeit diversely, in virtually all moral theories, folk psychologies, and moral intuitions. Philosophers have been debating whether satisfaction and suffering are primary and objective events or merely dependent on one’s wishes and desires. According to the wish fulfillment theories of happiness, we suffer when our wishes are frustrated. Because almost never do people wish to have pain as such, we tend to identify pain and suffering as synonyms. But the only source of suffering is frustration. Indeed, sometimes people desire some pains. The desire fulfillment theory simplifies ethics. There is no need anymore to evaluate the content of desire (e.g., wish to climb Mount Everest, wish to overcome painless paralysis, craving for luxury wristwatch), because what really counts is the desire and its relative ranking among the person’s other desires. The desire fulfillment theory fits well with utilitarianism’s theorems. The medical perspective challenges this mode of reasoning. Judith may suffer a lot when her application to medical school is rejected. It is the frustration of an especially important desire. However, even though we also say that Judith is suffering a lot upon E.g., Broadbent Alex, Philosophy of Medicine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). R. Paul Thomson and Ross E. G. Upshur, Philosophy of Medicine: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2018). 13

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learning that she has breast cancer, the two situations are not similar. In the first case, Judith had cultivated a desire to become a doctor. The more efforts invested in this desire, the more painful the frustration of her desire would be. Evidently, cancer may interfere with one’s career plans. But there is something more significant about cancer-related suffering than its impact on existing life plans. Judith has never cultivated a desire not to have breast cancer. The suffering that stems from illness does not depend on prior wishes. It intrudes one’s life with negative experience that disrupts it. Here enters medicine as a special domain. Medicine aims at the existential threats, malfunctioning, and physical distress that do not stem from the frustration of desires and plans. They develop intrinsically. They may develop consequent to disappointments. Yet, they are not the anguish of the disappointment, but something else, something in the person. According to the biomedical paradigm, it is possible and desirable to treat the suffering, even if the disappointment remains intact. Here lies a great promise and a great temptation. When the disease is incurable and the background causes are non-medical, medicine is under relentless pressure to target the symptoms regardless of other considerations. The promise is control of suffering even if the real problem is irremediable; the temptation is to seek relief of symptoms only. A modicum of control over suffering could be life changing; but some people try to assert self-control in the face of suffering, even by the extreme means of suicide. Judith may walk the street and find racist insults hurled at her. This could be a source of much suffering. Similar to good health, Judith may not have cultivated a desire not to be bullied. Humiliation and racism hurt much and threaten much, often more so than cancer. But medicine confines itself to the threats, malfunctioning, and distress that arise from processes in the body. Cancer is considered a medical problem; racial discrimination is not.

BIOETHICS AND THE MATHEMATICS OF SUFFERING The perception of human life as plottable on two axes – duration in time and “quality” is old (e.g., Gen. 47:9). In the bioethics and human rights discourses, life and freedom from suffering are primary, incommensurable human goods. When in conflict, such as between continuous struggle with severe pain and foregoing life-saving care, the ultimate choice is in the patient’s hands. It is his or her subjective right.14 If this is so, there is no reason to suppose that saving life is more or less important morally than the mitigation of suffering. Moreover, if the sufferer wishes to go on living, it is impossible to tell whose life is more important to save – the life of an otherwise non-sufferer or the life of the suffering person who, nevertheless, wishes to go on living. Every person who cares for his or her life deserves equal treatment, regardless of “quality”, which stands for a hypothetical synthesis of joys and sufferings. This point is borne out by Trude Arnesen and Erik Nord’s criticism of the use of “quality of life” measures in distributive justice of healthcare resources.15 In healthcare

Yechiel M. Barilan, Human Dignity, Human Rights, and Responsibility: The New Language of Global Bioethics and Biolaw (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2012), ch. 4. 15 Trude Arnesen and Erik Nord, “The Value of DALY Life: Problems with Ethics and Validity of Disability Adjusted Life Years”, BMJ 319 (1999): 1423–5. 14

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planning, years of life are multiplied by an index of “quality of life”. In this index, the year of full health is 1.0. A year of suffering and disability qualifies less. Suppose one treatment promises ten years of life with little compromise in its quality, say, 0.9 relative to normal life, we may say that the treatment values 9 QALYs. Which means nine units of “quality-adjusted life years”. Allocating this treatment to ten people will be considered tantamount to allocating fully restorative treatment to nine patients. A treatment that promises a year of life with much misery may be indexed 0.4. Offering this treatment to twenty patients (20*1*0.4) will be considered equal to a treatment that offers a year of full health to five patients (5*1*1). Interestingly, the model does not contain negative values, which means life whose overall agonies surpass their value.16 Because utilitarianism sums up all pleasures and pains in one basket, the very same treatment may value differently to different patients. A blind person’s year of life may value 0.8. If the blind and the non-blind suffer from the same disease and compete over the same treatment, utilitarian distribution will grant priority to the non-blind. To many, this is counter-intuitive and even discriminatory. Arnesen and Nord propose a method to modify the QALY system. Their challenge embodies a few insights bioethics offers in relation to suffering:

1. Suffering is a primary evil; all sufferings are commensurable.



2. Life is a primary good.



3. Interpersonally, suffering and life are incommensurable goods.

The word “interpersonally” is critical here. It means that no person, professional or juridical authority, has the moral power to decide that someone else’s life is not worth living or worth less because of its quality. Doubts regarding the value of life itself are raised in bioethical discourse only in the face of extreme and irremediable suffering or disability and only if we are convinced that the patient disvalues (or would disvalue if he or she were competent to do so) his or her life in such conditions. Very few bioethicists maintain that impaired quality of life in old age, after “completing the life cycle”, justifies lower priority when seeking care.17 The multiplication of suffering’s intensity by its duration fits the analogy of suffering as a quantifiable thing that visits persons and may leave them. But people get habituated to suffering. With time, the person suffers less; but the suffering is no less significant. In contrast to utilitarian teachings, suffering as a morally significant phenomenon is irreducible to the experiential dimensions of suffering. Even the temporal tracking of the experience of suffering is not integral to its representation on a Cartesian matrix of time and intensity.18 If one must contrast bioethics with traditional medical ethics (the norms prevalent in the West until the 1970s), the most striking difference will be found here. Traditional medical ethics would consider life sacred. A few doctors believed that it was sometimes

Yechiel M. Barilan, “Nozick Experience Machine and Palliative Care: Revisiting Hedonism”, Medicine Healthcare and Philosophy 12, no. 4 (2009): 399–407. 17 Daniel Callahan, “Must We Ration Health Care for the Elderly?”, Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 40, no. 1 (2012): 10–16. 18 ​s​ee Wilbert E. Fordyce, “Pain and Suffering: A Reappraisal”, American Psychologist 43, no. 4 (1988): 276–83; see also Donald A. Redelmeier and Daniel Kahneman, “Patients’ Memories of Painful Medical Treatments: RealTime and Retrospective Evaluations of Two Minimally Invasive Procedures”, Pain 66, no. 1 (1996): 3–8. 16

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better to hasten death than to allow the patient to suffer its agonies.19 Doctors would lie and mislead patients to save them from “unnecessary” suffering and out of worry that “bad news” might weaken the body while it is struggling for survival. Bioethics does not tolerate paternalistic decisions, which are fateful choices made by a physician without the proper involvement and full consent of the patient. Mainstream bioethics discourse does not endorse lying to patients and bypassing their autonomy even for the sake of sparing them great suffering. When patients want to relieve their suffering, bioethics has been willing to endorse different transgressions of normative boundaries. Three notable examples are humanitarian aid, end-of-life care, and use of controlled drugs.

BIOETHICS, SUFFERING, AND EXCEPTIONALISM – HUMANITARIAN AID In 1971, a group of French journalists and physicians founded Doctors without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontiers) as a humanitarian organization aimed to tackle two issues that blighted the Red Cross’s humanitarian activities, especially in the Second World War and the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70). The Nazis manipulated Red Cross visits to concentration camps; the Nigerian government blocked humanitarian aid from reaching the seceding region of Biafra. Whereas the Red Cross is bounded to secrecy and full cooperation with the local sovereign, Doctors without Borders announced its intention to deliver humanitarian aid even without permission from the local government. This was an unprecedented defiance of the fundaments of international law. Because the fledgling organization did not suggest that medicine as such was above the law, it had to delineate an inner core of humanitarian relief that was worth delivering even when a violation of the law is necessary. Saving life that is under immediate peril and relief of suffering were taken as the two elements of this inner humanitarian core.20 Even though Doctors without Borders was established independently of the then inchoate bioethics discourse, its promotion of medical care aimed at saving life and relief of suffering as primary, overwhelming moral concerns, not subordinate to a greater religious or ideological paradigm, is in line with bioethics’s mode of reasoning. Until then, religious and humanitarian activists would pick up worthy missions – from feeding the poor to the education of prisoners – never representing their callings as most fundamental, and never investing in them a trumping power over obedience to the law. The idea that international humanitarian law stands above state law (rather than being a voluntary product of international agreements) was a novelty of the twentieth century. The idea that in the face of death and suffering professional ethics has the power to self-proclaim action in defiance of the sovereign state was groundbreaking. It was a paradigm shift for clinical medicine too. By means of the NGO “Partners in Health” (founded in 1987), Paul Farmer, an infectious disease expert and anthropologist, has demonstrated that it was possible to introduce effective medical care to highly impoverished environments. Even though biomedicine is expensive and dependent on elaborate and costly infrastructures, it can relieve much suffering in the poorest places

See Axel Munthe, The Story of San Michele (London: The Book Club, 1941). Renée C. Fox, “Medical Humanitarianism and Human Rights: Reflections on Doctors without Borders and Doctors of the World”, Social Science and Medicine 41, no. 12 (1995): 1607–16.

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in the world without political transformations and economic aid. In the nineteenth century, the Red Cross showed how it was possible to save life and relieve suffering without impacting the course of the war, not even stopping a single battle; Partners in Health brings effective high-tech medicine without any change in the socioeconomic circumstances. Medicine can bypass structural violence without shaking the structure.

BIOETHICS, SUFFERING, AND EXCEPTIONALISM – END-OF-LIFE CARE The advent of modern resuscitation coupled with mechanical ventilation (1950s) created a new class of patients – those whose heart and body survived, but whose brains were irreversibly damaged. These patients were unconscious for months and years on end. Physicians began to wonder whether keeping such patients on life support did them any good. Henry Beecher, a pioneer of intensive care and of bioethics, hinted that such existence tormented the soul (Beecher 1968). The costs were huge. In 1972, a leading medical journal coined the name “vegetative state” to describe this new class of patients.21 Some doctors beheld them as already dead, dead with beating hearts. So, the caring team would disconnect life support to allow the heart to stop.22 In the 1970s and 1980s a series of landmark American litigations brought the problem to the forefront of public attention. Families petitioned the courts to authorize no-treatment of irreversibly comatose patients. In 1976, the parents of a young woman, Karen Ann Quinlan, in a persistent coma requested that the ventilator be removed. Nancy Cruzan and Elizabeth Bouvia are two other comatose patients whose relatives sought to let them die by means of discontinuing care. Soon after, the academic literature and the media were debating “physician-assisted suicide” and even outright euthanasia (= a physician is killing a willing patient). Leading voices in bioethics, applied ethics, and constitutional law expressed support for the right of patients to receive certain kinds of such “treatment”.23 Except for some religious ethicists, bioethics has become a supporter and promoter of such a right, thus transforming traditional attitudes to suffering in two ways. First, incurable medical suffering has become a locus of transgression. Only such suffering may justify the suspension of the old and universal taboo on the taking of human life, explicitly enshrined in the Hippocratic Oath. The Belmont Report, which was issued in 1978 by the US National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, became a formative text of bioethics. The report formulated three principles – respect for persons and their autonomy, beneficence, and justice. These principles were formal, lacking substantive values, such as life, health, and relief of suffering. Although persons may choose to die in a variety of circumstances, in bioethics only extreme an irremediable suffering empowers the value of respect for personal autonomy to compel action against life.

Bryan Jennet and Fred Plum, “Persistent Vegetative State After Brain Damage: A Syndrome in Search of a Name”, The Lancet 299, no. 7753 (1972): 734–7. 22 Gary S. Belkin, “Brain Death and the Historical Understanding of Bioethics”, Journal of the History of Medicine 58, no. 3 (2003): 325–61. 23 Ronald Dworkin et al., “Assisted Suicide: The Philosophers’ Brief ”, New York Review of Books, March 27, 1997, 41–7. 21

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Second, the meaning of “suffering” has been extended significantly. As in the case of persistent vegetative state, whose own name implies lack of sensation, medical suffering has been construed as existence in a condition that is unacceptable to the self. Many people commit suicide and crave death because of unacceptable conditions in their lives. Bankruptcy, defeat, romantic rejections, and public humiliation are a few of the life circumstances that are cited as backgrounds to suicide. In contrast, the bioethics discourse on suffering focuses on the kind of life a person has. Euthanasia is contemplated when the person suffers his or her life. Hence, existence in a vegetative state is a kind of “suffering” because it is an extreme mode of being, which the person does not accept or would not accept if he or she knew about it. In 2013, a forty-four-year-old Belgian citizen was euthanized on the grounds of psychological suffering. Her or his source of suffering was gender dysphoria, unresolved by a few sex-change operations.24 One cannot claim that a significant number of “bioethicists” endorse “psychological suffering” as justifying euthanasia. But only within the context of bioethical discourse is it possible to see gender dysphoria as a kind of medical suffering, to behold extreme irremediable suffering as justification of the active killing of one person by another, and to consider this as a medical treatment.

BIOETHICS AND SUFFERING EXCEPTIONALISM: CONTROLLED DRUGS The power of suffering to exact exceptions from moral norms is also borne out by the recent suspension of the social and legal taboo on controlled drugs. In the 1980s, pain doctors started to promote the use of opioids for the control of cancer pain and other forms of severe pain. The indication of “severe pain” slowly metamorphosed to “refractory” pain. Pain specialists argued that when handled by professionals and for the relief of the physical pain, the risk of addiction was low and that it was immoral to let patients suffer “unnecessarily”. Thirty years later, the disastrous consequences of the “opioid epidemic” are evident. Millions of people became addicted to opioids, which were prescribed for diverse ailments.25 In 2019, over 50,000 people died from the prescription of opioids in the United States, most of whom were young and otherwise healthy. The discipline of pain medicine evolved in parallel to the maturation of bioethics. However, there is no known connection between the discourse on end-of-life care in bioethics and pain medicine. Only in retrospect did the bioethics discourse recognize the opioid epidemic as a crisis of professional ethics too.26 It is the only epidemic that resulted from a pure motivation to alleviate suffering by medical means. Medical cannabis is a reclaimed actor in biomedicine. In 1941, cannabis was banished from the US pharmacopoeia. In 1960, it was classified as a substance of abuse. But in the second millennium, it has been gaining ever greater professional and legal recognition. It is now legally consumed in a wide array of conditions, from cancer pain to Post Traumatic Rachel Aviv, “The Death Treatment: Why Should People with Non-terminal Illness be Helped to Die?”, The New Yorker, June 22, 2015. 25 See Marcia L. Meldrum, “The Ongoing Opioid Prescription Epidemic: Historical Context”, American Journal of Public Health 106, no. 8 (2016): 1365–6; see also S. Scott Graham, “The Opiod Epidemic and the Pursuit of Moral Medicine: A Computational–Rhetorical Analysis”, Written Communication 38, no. 1 (2021): 1–30. 26 Travis N. Rieder, “Solving the Opioid Crisis Isn’t Just a Public Health Challenge – It’s a Bioethics Challenge”, Hastings Center Report 50, no. 4 (2020): 24–32. 24

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Stress Disorder. Even autism has been treated with cannabis. The permit given to sufferers to use an otherwise tabooed drug grants social recognition in their suffering. In contrast to modern pharmaceuticals, medical cannabis is not a single active molecule but a loosely standardized mixture of over 400 chemicals. Hence, it is quite difficult to study its effect by ordinary pharmacological methods, especially when tested on conditions whose scientific validity is obscure and controversial. Even though the world of medical cannabis has not developed within bioethical circles, it reflects the exceptional status of suffering whose recognition as suffering legitimates compromises at the level of scientific epistemology, and social norms. Whereas suffering is the metaphysical common denominator and moral legitimizer, users need medical diagnoses and must pursue them through the bureaucracies of the medical establishment. Suffering has become the gate through which the old and marginalized arts of intoxication (altered state of mind) have been reclaimed by Western culture, which have otherwise repudiated them as vices. The growing focus on “diseases” whose manifestations are only suffering and reduced mental and physical energies, such as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue and depression, led to their medicalization, and then to recognition that hitherto tabooed substances could be no less influential than FDA-approved pharmaceuticals.27 The story of controlled drugs is representative of the era of bioethics. It is not clear whether bioethical discourse has contributed to these developments or merely reflects them. Respect for personal autonomy is the value associated with bioethics most; empowerment of vulnerable and underprivileged people is a key value in contemporary public discourse. Nonetheless, controlled substances are mind-altering and frequently addictive; they pose a profoundly serious threat to autonomy and empowerment. Even those whose suffering is eliminated by these substances find the price of addiction, torpor, and personality quite troubling. Medicine faces a deeper conceptual crisis. Concentration on pain as such, independently of other processes, asks patients, clinicians, and ethicists to talk about pain and suffering without a stable contextual matrix. This insight has led to the conclusion that “pain as the fifth vital sign” campaign was misleading and nudging everybody toward the overuse of opioids and without any significant improvement in the treatment of pain. Today, medicine teaches that the goal of palliation is the restoration of activities that are impaired by suffering, so the goal is human action, not mere elimination of something evil.28 Indeed, a third lesson is that “elimination” campaigns might be misleading too. Whereas it is possible to anesthetize pain and to cut away a tumor, suffering is irreducible to “conditions” that can be “eliminated”. Neither are they blemishes that reduce quality of life as if it were a rotten apple a basket. In the face of grief, people tend to bargain with themselves hypothetical trade-offs (e.g., “Would have I chosen not to have a child had I known she would be disabled?”, “I am willing to accept blindness if I am free from dialysis”).29 This kind of bargaining shows how much people wish suffering were fungible; there is no evidence that suffering can and should be treated as a commodity.

Alan K. Davis et al., “Effects of Psilocybin–Assisted Therapy on Major Depressive Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial”, JAMA Psychiatry 78, no. 5 (2021): 481–9. 28 Nicholas Levy, J. Sturgess and Pam Mills, “‘Pain as the fifth vital sign’ and Dependence on the ‘numerical pain scale’ is being Abandoned in the US: Why?”, British Journal of Anaesthesia 120, no. 3 (2018): 435–8. 29 David Kessler and Elisabeth Kübler–Ross, On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss (New York: Scribner, 2005). 27

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CRITICISM OF MEDICINE AND MEDICALIZATION A significant voice in the sociology of medicine and bioethics is the criticism of medical excesses. A formative insight of bioethics is that much suffering originates in wellintentioned and highly skilled medical care. Iatrogenic suffering (iatrogenic = created by medicine) is divisible into three kinds. The first is unintended side effects. The second is the insult to the person by violations of privacy and autonomy that may occur while the person receives medically valid treatments. The third kind is the overall impact on society and culture by excessive pre-occupation with and the relentless commodification of the biomedical stifling of suffering. Ivan Illich condemned the “war against all suffering”.30 The critics argue that the medical model aggravates the rift between persons and their bodies, generating alienation between a self and the body, which the self uses as a machine.31 The biomedical model weakens the coping capacity of both body and self, lowering the threshold of psycho-social dysfunction. Professional authority, bureaucratization, and commodification of care marginalize self-care and mutual aid. People focus on reified problems (e.g., “post-covid syndrome”) and less on the goals they wish to achieve and experiences they care to have. The critics of medicine portray a trade-off between loss of autonomy (broadly conceived as reduced self-efficacy and alienation from one’s native culture) as a price of medicalization, on the one hand, and easy, less demanding, and less humanly ambitious lifestyle, on the other hand. The war on suffering seems to have infused life with numbness and disengagement. Medicalization’s division between the “problem” and the “solution” makes us forget that the ways we cope with suffering predicate the experience of suffering. Critics of medicine tend to ignore the reasons why so much hope is invested in medicine and technology. Until the end of the nineteenth century, ordinary life had been mired with suffering that is unimaginable to those living in twenty-first-century affluence. People’s backs (mainly women and servants or slaves) were literally broken from fetching water, doing the laundry, and other endless household chores; people lived without sewage and electricity, ever prone to wild outbreaks of epidemics. They worked long hours in dangerous conditions with no health care and social insurance, usually with no access to clean water and safe food. There was no remedy for diarrhea, foot infection, urinary retention, and myriad other ailments and accidents. Mourning was normal. People had to go or run away; they simply disappear without anybody hearing from them ever again.

CONCLUSION Technology and medicine have relieved humanity from much suffering. Medicine works best when its impact on suffering is the product of a therapeutic mission whose goal and structure are neither limited to nor focused on suffering. The bioethics discourse has taught us that the stronger the moral calling to focus on suffering is, the heavier the challenges of poorly understood processes of chronic suffering and the price exacted by granting them moral exceptionalism.

Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (New York: Pantheon, 1976). Irving K. Zola, “Medicine as an Institution of Social Control”, The Sociological Review 20, no. 4 (1972): 487–504. 30 31

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FURTHER READING Bain, David, Michael Brady, and Jennifer Corns, eds. Philosophy of Suffering: Metaphysics, Value, Normativity. New York: Routledge, 2020. Cassell, Eric J. The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Story-Teller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Mayerfeld, Jamie. Suffering and Moral Responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Råholm, Maj-Britt. “Uncovering the Ethics of Suffering Using a Narrative Approach”. Nursing Ethics 15 (2008): 62–72.

Chapter 66

Disability and Suffering HILARY YANCEY AND KEVIN TIMPE

INTRODUCTION This chapter focuses on how disability is and ought to be related to discussions of suffering in contemporary philosophy of religion. One might expect a philosophical discussion of such matters to begin with careful definitions. X is a disability if and only if _____. Y undergoes suffering if and only if _____. Such expectations will not be satisfied. Defining the category of disability is quite complicated. The narrower our concept of disability, the less useful it will be for helping us think about the breadth of human experience, including suffering. If we aim for our concept and its use to be ameliorative (i.e., helping reveal the target concept that we should be using rather than just the descriptive concept that is used), it will be best to not rigidly limit the scope of the content too soon. The Americans with Disabilities Act intentionally defines a disability in a broad manner so as to include those who are “perceived to have a disability”. Given that the ADA’s primary purpose is to protect against discrimination, it casts its concept in a way to include those who may be treated in problematic ways because others think, rightly or wrongly, that they have a disability. We appreciate this approach, since we think it is vital that talking about suffering and the problem of evil includes the practical. That is, we think our discussion of suffering should better prepare us to actually address or minimize suffering. The mere theoretical discussion can become a kind of buck-passing, especially if the harms of suffering are social/contextual. We do not want to use a philosophical definition that could encourage us to engage in the philosophical method of counterexamples rather than motivate us to seek to improve our world and work to alleviate the harms experienced by our neighbors and within our communities. In the first major section, “Avoidance”, we briefly canvas what contemporary philosophy of religion has said about disability and suffering. (There is a reason this treatment can be brief.) We identify a dominant approach to disability in philosophical work on suffering and the problem of evil: what we call “the avoidance approach”. In the next section, “Confronting Avoidance”, we extend arguments against the avoidance approach. In the final section of the chapter, “Disabling Philosophy of Religion”, we then explore some of the positive roles we think disability should play in philosophy of religion. Given the constraints of this volume, this final section must unfortunately be programmatic. But we

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think that there are important issues regarding disability that philosophers of religion and philosophical theologians should be addressing, and hope that this chapter can encourage them to.

AVOIDANCE In this section, we describe what we will refer to as “the avoidance approach” to the relationship between disability and evil. This approach is often, though not universally, adopted in many treatments of the problem of evil. It is what people, especially the laity but also many scholars, often initially think the relationship between disability and the problem of evil is.1 Avoidance comes in two reinforcing forms. The first way of avoiding something is passive; one avoids something by simply not addressing or thinking about it. Issues pertaining to disability are remarkably absent from contemporary philosophical work on the problem of evil, presumably because many philosophers of religion tend to avoid writing on disability at all. On those occasions when it does come up, what is often assumed, without any argument, is that disability inherently involves suffering, and thus that disability is an evil that needs to be explained in order for belief in God’s goodness to remain compatible with the existence of evil. This often leads to the second form of avoidance: stigmatizing avoidance. In this case, because disability is assumed to be a deterrent to flourishing, we assume that disability is something that ought to always be avoided as much as possible. We continue to avoid considering that disability could be neutral or positive precisely because of the way that disability is stigmatized. We begin with the first form of avoidance. Peter van Inwagen’s The Problem of Evil, based on his Gifford lectures, does not contain a single mention of disability,2 nor does Mark Scott’s Pathways in Theodicy: An Introduction to the Problem of Evil.3 The recent Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil mainly avoids in the first way as well, mentioning disability only twice. Given that estimates of the number of disabled individuals alive in the world range widely but have been as high as 2 billion, this seems surprising. But each mention illustrates the second, stigmatizing, form of avoidance. In the first mention of disability, the editors associate disability with evil: “disabilities and diseases that have deleterious effects on humans and other animals, such as AIDS, Zika, deafness, and blindness, are also natural evils.”4 In the other, John Schellenberg suggests that emotional or intellectual disabilities “from which some humans suffer”5 could prevent them from being able to form a personal relationship with God.6 God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views is similar, explicitly mentioning disability twice, both of which are We thank Amy Seymour for this name and helping us have a clearer understanding of the two forms of avoidance. Peter van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 3 Mark S. M. Scott, Pathways in Theodicy: An Introduction to the Problem of Evil (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015). 4 Chad Meister and Paul K. Moser, “Introduction”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil, ed. Chad Meister and Paul K. Moser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 2. 5 John L. Schellenberg, “Evil, Hiddenness, and Atheism”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil, ed. Chad Meister and Paul K. Moser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 112. 6 In contrast, in the single mention of disability in Laura W. Ekstrom, “A Christian Theodicy”, in The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil, ed. Justin B. McBrayer and Daniel Howard-Snyder (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 277, she notes, but only in passing, that “sometimes, quite remarkable abilities are, in fact, accompanied by disorders in other areas. Some savants, for instance, have remarkable mathematical proficiencies while being 1 2

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negatively valanced.7 In the introduction, editors Chad Meister and James K. Dew Jr. list “disabilities such as deafness and blindness”8 as examples of the natural evils that must be explained in a satisfactory response to the problem of evil. Philip Cary, in his response to Craig’s view, describes blindness as an “ontological defect” to illustrate how moral evil is a perversion of free will: Moral evil is related to the free will as blindness is related to the eye’s power of vision. It certainly can happen, but it is an ontological defect, not the exercise of freedom or any other power.9 Richard Swinburne, one of the best-known and most-prolific philosophers of religion, continues this pattern. The central parts of Swinburne’s theodicy10 do not explicitly mention disability, thus illustrating passive avoidance. But specific mentions of disability, as well as his general approach to theodicy, also illustrate stigmatized avoidance. Passive avoidance need not always be problematic, especially in individual texts, as many important issues and groups are often left un-discussed if for no other reason than lack of space. But for something as common for human experience as disability (given that it directly affects over 20 percent of the world’s population), it’s perplexing that it’s so often ignored but then almost always conjoined with stigmaticing avoidance, as we find in Swinburne, that the problem is more profound. Disability is bad and thus is something that we ought to avoid. His claim that “disabilities need to be prevented and cured”11 illustrates that he thinks they are examples of what Elizabeth Barnes calls “bad-difference”.12 If disabilities are negative states of affairs, then they are among the evils that a theodicy must address. We could only find three mentions of disability in Swinburne’s most thorough treatment of the problem of evil, the aptly titled Providence and the Problem of Evil. Each of them is an instance of stigmatizing avoidance. The first comes up in a discussion of suicide: “For some few, the disabled, the only ways of ending life unaided are the processes of starvation which take weeks.”13 The association of disability with suicide is problematic, as has been pointed out by those more familiar with disability tropes.14 But

deficient socially and in other areas, and there is striking disproportionate regularly with which the triad of blindness, mental handicap, and musical genius occurs in savant syndrome”. 7 Chad Meister and James K. Dew Jr., eds, God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2017). There are potentially two other passing references. In his contribution, William Lane Craig mentions leukemia and a child who loses part of a hand in an accident, both of which could disable. But he doesn’t develop either of these examples into a point about disability. 8 Meister and Dew, God and the Problem of Evil, 3. 9 Phillip Cary, “The Classic Response”, in God and the Problem of Evil: Five Views, ed. Chad Meister and James K. Dew Jr. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press Academic 2017), 138. 10 He intends it as a theodicy, not just a defense (on the usual use of this distinction); see Richard Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), x–xi. 11 Richard Swinburne, Revelation: From Metaphor to Analogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 304. We also take it to be problematic, and evidence of the larger pattern of his not paying attention to how disadvantaged groups are treated, that he thinks that homosexuality is a disability, perhaps also a disease, and likely in principle curable medically (303–5). 12 Elizabeth Barnes, The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); see also the discussion in Stephen M. Campbell and Joseph A. Stramondo, “The Complicated Relationship of Disability and Well-Being”, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 27, no. 2 (2017): 151–84. 13 Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil, 147. 14 See Michael Bérubé, “Disability and Narrative”, PMLA 120, no. 2 (2005): 568–76; and Joseph P. Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (New York: Random House, 1993).

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furthermore, it is simply false that “the disabled”, as if this were a uniform class, are only able to successfully end their life in this way.15 The second mention is when Swinburne uses “help[ing] the handicapped” as a way that prisoners can do good for others, and the third is a passing claim to how “autistic children who have no sense of right or wrong are to that extent incompetent”.16 These comments come across as simply condescending. But more problematically, Swinburne seems confident in making such claims without engaging the literature on the issues. His assumption seems to be that his conclusions are so obvious they need no substantive philosophical defense. These comments can be understood as instances of what Marilyn McCord Adams refers to as “the metaphysical devaluation” of human beings in discussions of the problem of evil.17 But Swinburne’s work can also help us get clear on what we think is problematic with this approach to suffering. In general, Swinburne claims that it is “good to be of use”. After claiming that it is good to have the power to accomplish things, he writes: It is a good for us if our experiences are not wasted but are used for the good of others, if they are the means of a benefit which would not have come to others without them, which will at least in part compensate for those experiences. It follows from this insight that it is a blessing for a person if the possibility of his suffering makes possible the good for others of having the free choice of hurting or harming him; and if his actual suffering makes possible the good for others of feeling compassion for him, and of choosing to show or not show sympathy or provide knowledge of others.18 While being of use through one’s own spontaneous agency or character might be better, the good of being of use is not restricted only to intentional, voluntary actions. It also includes involuntary actions and experiences. So it is good to be of use, even without our consent, if our being used brings about good states of affairs. And, even more explicitly, it is good for a person to be of use even if being of use is not good for that person. Swinburne takes this line of argument so seriously that he says it is good for the fawn who dies a painful death in a forest fire in that it provides the opportunity for other deer to avoid such suffering in the future. Now, he does admit that at this point he is not “passing any judgment about whether the good [of being of use] is as great as the bad is bad”.19 But then when he comes back to the good of being of use later in the volume, the caution seems to have fallen away. “It is a great good for the agent if he can help someone who needs help. He is privileged to have the opportunity to be of use and blessed if he takes it”20 and that one person’s suffering can be justified by goods that go to another.21 What

For two useful introductions to the immense literature here, see Robert F. Weir, ed., Physician-assisted Suicide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997) and Joanne Lynn, ed., By No Extraordinary Means: The Choice to Forgo Life-Sustaining Food and Water (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 16 Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil, 225. If the idea is that the agents in question don’t satisfy the relevant epistemic condition on moral agency, it’s hard to see what actual work autism is doing. And given the history of both infantilizing autistics and denying their agency, the pairing of autism and childhood here is problematic. 17 Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 86. 18 Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil, 103. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 167. 21 See ibid., 227. 15

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makes these sufferings good is their good consequences, and they are justified so long as (i) “the goods that they make possible are at least a tiny bit better than the bad states necessary for them are bad”22 and (ii) so long as God does not wrong the person being used. But it can be the good of being of use that benefits the person who God makes (or allows) to suffer. And even that is not needed: “even if the suffering is on balance bad for the sufferer, nevertheless our creator, if he has given us many other good things, has the right to use us to a limited extent for the sake of some good to others.”23 The primary limit to how much a person can themselves suffer is “the safety barrier of death”.24 We have a number of interconnected concerns about Swinburne’s theodicy. Swinburne justifies the good of being of use by appeal to the Christian scriptures25 but is notably silent on its condemnation of those who say, “let us do evil so that good may come”.26 Additionally, it can lead to an instrumentalization of individuals where their suffering is the means to others’ goods. Presumably, he would object to our claim that his approach involves a problematic instrumentalization given that he thinks that “all the ways in which the suffering of A is beneficial to B are also beneficial to A – because A is privileged to be of use”.27 Instrumentalizing individuals in the way that Swinburne’s view does makes it all too easy to justify various forms of oppression and harm where socially disadvantaged individuals or even classes of people must suffer for the good of those who perpetuate their oppression. In fact, this is exactly what we find in Swinburne’s discussion of the good of being of use in chattel slavery.28 History is full of other such examples beyond those already mentioned: the intentional infection of disabled children with gonorrhea by Henry Heiman, the US military and Atomic Energy Commission giving disabled children radioactive food or calcium to measure radiation exposure, the pattern of abuse and death at the Sonoma State Hospital in California, the widespread intentional infection of the disabled residents of the Willowbrook State School with hepatitis, and so on. As parents of disabled children, both of us have been told that the reason God allowed our children to be born disabled is to teach us patience. There is certainly a cultural assumption that disability is bad, and it is an assumption that Swinburne endorses; but it is often thought that God is justified in allowing (or even causing) it so that other individuals, who themselves do not have disabilities, can benefit in some way. Disabled individuals become means to others’ goods in a way that reflects the long history of undervaluing disabled lives. Writing in a different context, one related to suffering rather than disability, Nick Wolterstorff describes this kind of instrumentalization as “repulsive”.29 And we agree. Swinburne might not explicitly endorse the implications we have drawn from his limited discussion of disability, but his account provides a grounding for these claims.

Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil, 223. Ibid. 24 Ibid., 232. 25 See ibid., 247. 26 He could claim that this passage applies only to humans, and not to God, thereby endorsing a different ethic for God than for creation. See Mark Murphy, God’s Own Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) for one such approach. 27 Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil, 241. 28 See ibid., 245–6. 29 Nicholas Wolterstorff, In This World of Wonders: Memoir of a Life of Learning (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2019), 208. 22 23

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Justifying the good of a disability on the basis of the good of being of use for others instrumentalizes disabled individuals, which plausibly is itself an evil. Rather than advancing a successful defense of God’s permitting disability, Swinburne’s view commits a separate injustice against disabled people by suggesting that their existence qua disabled is justified by what they can do for other people. But in many other cases, this justification of instrumentalization does not work. Consider the Tuskegee Syphilis study or the numerous studies of radiation exposure done on disabled individuals.30 Is the suffering these individuals undergo justified by the medical progress made as a result of the experimentation? The general consensus seems to be no; medical progress for others is not a sufficient reason for these individuals to have suffered. And if this kind of justification fails on the human-to-human plane, a fortiori it will fail on the God-to-human plane, because God’s omnipotence will ensure that there is another means by which such progress could be made, absent those individuals suffering. And so, even though Swinburne thinks that God is justified in instrumentalizing humans given that God is their creator, sustainer, and benefactor, we think there is reason to think that God should pursue the good in some other non-instrumentalizing way. Our concern about instrumentalization is connected to others’ criticism of Swinburne’s view for failing to adequately ensure that the good goes to the one who suffers.31 Eleonore Stump, for instance, writes as follows: The doctrine of God’s providence gives us the nature and purpose of God’s rule, and the account of God’s goodness shows us constraints on the way he can achieve his purpose. In particular, the notion of God’s justice requires that undeserved suffering permitted by God be somehow compensated. Undeserved suffering which is uncompensated seems clearly unjust; but so does suffering compensated only by benefits to someone other than the sufferer [at least, not without their endorsement].32 Marilyn Adams suggests a “person-relative” requirement, such that in evaluating suffering we look to how the person who suffers some particular instance of suffering evaluates it: “there is a difference between meanings being recognized and appropriated by others and their being recognized and appropriated by the individual him/herself.”33 Adams advocates for a person-centered restriction, which she describes as a condition on the defense of suffering horrendous evils. She thinks the benefit of having undergone such suffering must go, in some substantive way, to the individual who suffers by means of the evil being integrated into the whole of that person’s life.34 Taking a person-relative approach, such as Adams suggests, would help avoid stigmatizing avoidance.

See, for instance, Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Anchor 2008). 31 See Adams’ discussion of the “person-relative” requirement, discussed later. 32 Eleonore Stump, “Providence and the Problem of Evil”, in Christian Philosophy, ed. Thomas Flint (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 65–6; see Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 221. Stump also addresses disability at considerable length in connection with suffering in Eleonore Stump, Atonement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), ch. 6. 33 Adams, Horrendous Evils, 81–2. 34 See ibid., 28. See also Aaron D. Cobb and Kevin Timpe, “Disability and the Theodicy of Defeat”, Journal of Analytic Theology 5 (2017): 100–20. Swinburne is aware of but doesn’t endorse the person-centered restriction (see Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil, 230, note 5). 30

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CONFRONTING AVOIDANCE Thus far we have outlined the way that contemporary discussions of the problem of evil provide concrete examples of passive and stigmatizing avoidance of disability. Disability is avoided in discussion because, we argue, it is presumed to be bad and that what makes it bad is sufficiently obvious so as not to require any argument.35 In this section we will argue that this view of disability is problematic and harmful in at least two ways: it fails to adequately address the variety of disabled experiences and disabled persons’ testimony, and it distances disability-related suffering from one of its main causes: injustice. First, the evidence we have about the relationship between disabilities and individual lives is diverse and far more varied than the bad-difference (or related) views permit. Consider, for example, how Ron Amundson argues that there is a good amount of variation about the relationship between bodily states and overall well-being.36 In fact, he argues the mode of a function (i.e., the means by which it is performed) is not determinative of overall functional success. For example, a double-leg amputee may not be able to participate in one form of college basketball, but they need not be precluded from play altogether. A blind individual may not experience particular modes of art appreciation, but that does not mean they are wholly precluded from it. Evidence from developmental biology suggests that “the functional potential of an individual human being is not fixed”.37 But a major argument in thinking that disabilities are always bad states of affairs assumes the mere presence of a disability prevents or severely limits one’s ability to function in ways necessary to have a flourishing life. A disability need not preclude forms of successful functioning, even if it alters the mode of that function. And one of the ways we make social systems more just is to create opportunities to recognize and support various forms of functioning conducive to individual flourishing. The testimony we have from disabled individuals suggests that disability is a complex feature of life, without a particular necessary effect on well-being. Studies that seek to measure subjective well-being and disability return a variety of results.38 Some individuals testify that they do not want to alter their disability or even, in some cases, return to a previous state that did not include their disability.39 This kind of testimony suggests two things: first, that not all disabilities cause suffering, and second, that some individuals with disabilities (regardless of the suffering they may experience) do not view their disabilities as an evil, even if they do experience suffering as a result of being disabled. Given that we are concerned with individual suffering, we should give substantial weight to personal testimony. While we do not think that suffering is a wholly subjective condition (something like, S is suffering if and only if S thinks S is suffering), that does not preclude our thinking that personal testimony does provide substantial (even if defeasible) evidence about one’s suffering and/or overall well-being. A well-known case that highlights this is

This avoidance has been noted both in other scholarly work and experienced by many disabled individuals. Ron Amundson, “Against Normal Function”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 31, no. 1 (2000): 33–53; and Ron Amundson, “Quality of Life, Disability, and Hedonic Psychology”, Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 40, no. 4 (2010): 374–92. 37 Ibid., 45. 38 For a discussion of some of the literature here, see Barnes, The Minority Body, especially ch. 4. 39 See Rebecca Atkinson, “Do I Want My Sight Back?” The Guardian, July 17, 2007, https://www​.theguardian​.com​ /lifeandstyle​/2007​/jul​/17​/healthandwellbeing​.health. 35 36

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that of “Deaf-gain”.40 Deaf-gain is a term that captures the numerous benefits that Deaf individuals cite as arising directly from being deaf: “the biological, social, and cultural implications of being deaf are not automatically defined simply by loss but could also be defined by difference, and, in some significant instances, as gain.”41 Whatever evidence we have about the relationship between deafness and well-being or suffering, the testimony about Deaf-gain must be given proper weight. Finally, we cannot ignore the way social context may change the relationship between a bodily condition and an individual’s suffering. Attending to disabled individuals’ testimony reveals a variety of experiences with respect to how the social context affects bodily states and overall well-being. Even an identical condition in two individuals may have widely disparate impacts on well-being, depending on differences in the relevant social and historical contexts. Having a particular form of dyslexia, for example, may cause little to no suffering in a pre-literate social context but have profound challenges for another individual in a literacy-dominated educational setting. What this suggests is not that disability is never associated with suffering but rather that disability’s relationship to suffering is far more complex and contextually mediated than the views described in the section on “Avoidance” permit. Additionally, many disabled individuals consider their disability – including its attendant forms of challenge or suffering – a real part of their overall identity.42 Thus, we do not need to prove that disability is never linked to, or never causes, suffering. Lots of otherwise good – even important – features of life can cause an individual to suffer. Many individuals who experience discrimination for their gender identity, for example, can contend that this identity is a cause of the suffering they experience (in the sense that, counterfactually, had they not had this identity that would not have experienced this suffering). But that does not entail that the condition itself is bad or forms part of that body of evidence that constitutes the problem of evil. Similarly, in cases where there is no moral agent who discriminates, we can see that a feature of personal identity or bodily configuration can cause suffering without thereby being bad in itself. Having female reproductive parts can, if one has children, lead to suffering (including but not limited to post-partum depression, tearing and laceration, pain, and so on). But that does not mean that having female reproductive parts is an evil in need of explanation. Consider, too, how philosopher Scott Williams nuances the relationship between disability and horrendous evils.43 Williams identifies a horrendous-difference disability not by a particular bodily or cognitive configuration alone but rather by the conjunction of a certain intrinsic condition that prohibits the fulfillment of a rational, morally good wish. This kind of disability, for Williams, is a horrendous-difference because one wishes (rationally and licitly) for a certain function(s) that one lacks due to an

The best collection here is H-Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph J. Murray, eds, Deaf Gain: Raising the Stakes for Human Diversity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); see especially Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, “Armchairs and Stares: On the Privation of Deafness”, in Deaf Gain: Raising the Stakes for Human Diversity, ed. H-Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph J. Murray (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 3–22. 41 Bauman and Murray, Deaf Gain, xv. 42 See Barnes, The Minority Body; see also Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), and Shane Clifton, Crippled Grace: Disability, Virtue Ethics, and the Good Life (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2018). 43 See Scott Williams, “Horrendous-Difference Disabilities, Resurrected Saints, and the Beatific Vision: A Theodicy”, Religions 9, no. 52 (2018): 1–13. 40

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impairment that cannot be amended by extrinsic factors.44 For Williams a disability is a “horrendous-difference” in need of theodicy only in the case where one’s wishes are involved and thus the disability exists in a context in which it causes one to doubt whether one’s life is on the whole good for one.45 He goes on to argue persuasively for a variety of ways God might defeat (in Adams’ sense of the term) this kind of rational-wish-fulfillment disability – including cases in which the individual retains their disability and other cases in which they do not. Williams also considers cases of severe cognitive disability in which no rational wishes can be presumed, and argues that in some of these cases (ones that parallel the rational-wish cases) the individuals’ life will be marked by horrendous evils that are eventually defeated. Williams makes clear that these subcategories of disability and/or impairment are not representative of the whole of disability or impairment. As he notes, “Two individuals with the same kind of impairment relative to human function F might experience it differently . . . If an individual with the impairment has sufficient external resources, then he or she might not experience the kind of suffering that the other individual experiences.”46 A disability can fall into the category of a horrendous-difference, depending upon the criteria Williams outlines; but it need not simply in virtue of being a disability. And in this way, the response of theologians and philosophers to the suffering caused by particular disabilities in particular lives will follow, not a reply based on the disability but on the whole of the person’s experience. We noted in the beginning of this chapter that there is perhaps no unified concept of a disability, and certainly no unified experience of disability. Perhaps we should seek, then, not a unified response within the problem of evil, but an array of diverse responses that respect the complex ways disability intersects with human life. The relationship between disability and the problem of evil has often been treated primarily as a problem of natural evil. When philosophers talk about disability, it seems that they are primarily referring to conditions that arise naturally and not out of intentional human action (often but not always, for example, genetic or congenital conditions like blindness and Down’s Syndrome). Disabilities can certainly be acquired and temporary, but discussions of disabilities in the problem of evil literature focus on them as raising a version of a natural, rather than a moral, problem of evil.47 The question is often framed in terms of why God would permit these kinds of bodily conditions to exist, again contributing to stigmatized avoidance. This emphasis, we argue, actually contributes to ongoing injustice against disabled individuals. This occurs in at least two ways.

Williams here relies on the distinction between impairment and disability found in Richard Cross, “Impairment, Normalcy, and a Social Theory of Disability”, Res Philosophica 93, no. 4 (2016): 693–714. 45 See ibid., 2. 46 Ibid., 3. 47 For example, in Richard Cross, “Aquinas on Physical Impairment: Human Nature and Original Sin”, Harvard Theological Review 110, no. 3 (2017): 317–38, in his treatment of Aquinas on physical defects, he notes Aquinas’ care to distance such defects from their being consequences of that person’s sin. It’s certainly the case that disability can be the result of moral evil. This is true not only of acquired disabilities but also of congenital disabilities. Disabling conditions can be caused, for example, by drinking lead-contaminated water, as happened on a wide scale in Flint, Michigan, in the mid-2000s. These cases fall under the moral evil banner not because of the mere fact that they involve a disability (see Elizabeth Barnes, “Valuing Disability, Causing Disability”, Ethics 125, no. 1 (2014): 88–136), but because of their causal history. And the regular responses to the problem of moral evil could be evoked in response to them. 44

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First, treating disability primarily as a variety of natural evil to be justified deemphasizes the role that humans, and the social and political structures humans create and maintain, play in the evils experienced by disabled individuals. As we noted earlier, social and physical contexts can often determine whether one’s functioning – even with an atypical bodily configuration – is successful. Mobility is more limited by the lack of ramps and accessible doorways than by the existence of paralysis. Literacy success is more limited by the lack of resources within school systems than by the mere existence or occurrence of dyslexia. We can imagine numerous other scenarios in which lack of practical resources, as well as persistent forms of ableism and discrimination, contribute substantially to the suffering of a disabled individual. But if the discussion in philosophy of religion centers wholly on the compatibility of disability with God’s existence, the real social harms – the ones that we have power to change – are diminished in importance.48 Terence Tilley argues that one of the problems with theodicies as assertive declarations is they “erase other forms of evil, especially what liberation and political theologians call ‘structural evil’, patterns of practice such as racism and sexism”.49 On Tilley’s argument, when we reduce evil to instances of suffering, we also lose the ability to name these other, structural forces as evil. We think that Tilley’s argument applies to ableism as well as the racism and sexism he explicitly names. Any treatment of the problem of evil as it relates to disability must consider the systems in place that give rise to both concrete individual suffering (individual acts of hatred, individual experiences of discrimination, etc.) and to broader problems, such as the widespread assumption about disability’s relationship to quality of life that prompts our arguments in this chapter. Second, suggesting that disability is itself an evil in need of explanation implies that disability is not a positive contribution to one’s identity, and thus not the kind of identity-conferring quality that would persist into resurrected or beatific life. This might be described as a kind of “identity harm”, in that it takes a feature important to a group of individuals and suggests that a priori this feature cannot be taken to be a meaningful part of one’s identity.50 We are not suggesting that all disabled individuals see their disabilities as contributing positively to their identity, though many do. Indeed, there is diversity within the disabled community about the best way to view the relationship between an individual and their disability: some prefer disability-first or identity-first language (“an autistic person”) because they see their autism as a central part of their identity, others prefer person-first language (“a person with autism”). And we do not want to be inadvertently prescriptive, suggesting that individuals ought to view their disabilities one way or another. But the view of disabled bodies as natural evils does suggest that one of these views is mistaken. That is, it suggests that one ought not to think of one’s

This is one reason that many moral theologians do a better job of addressing disability than do philosophers of religion. 49 Terrence W. Tilley, “A Trajectory of Positions”, in The Problem of Evil: Eight Views in Dialogue, ed. N. N. Trakakis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 181. 50 In saying this, we don’t mean to imply that the presence or absence of a disability alters the agent’s numerical identity, but rather than disability can and often does play a central role in the individual’s self and socially situated understanding. We thus have in mind something like what Hilde Lindemann refers to as the characterization sense of identity: “how the person sees herself and how other people understand her to be” (Hilde Lindemann, Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 4). See her discussion of dismissive forces that can lead to oppressed identities in Hilde Lindemann Nelson, Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). 48

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disability as an identity-forming feature. We think this prescriptive view should not be assumed without argument in philosophical and theological discussions of disability.

DISABLING PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION In the previous sections we have suggested that while disability certainly can (partially or wholly) cause human suffering, it is also irreducible to experiences of suffering. In that sense, disability is not a category that can be taken up wholesale in addressing the problem of evil. Not every disability is an evil that needs to be justified: “Disabilities do not count as evidence of evil . . . They don’t carry any sense of good or bad within them; they just are in the midst of someone’s life, and the fullness of that life lends color and shape and meaning to the differences written in the body and the mind.”51 As Eleonore Stump puts the point: A disability, like a scar, is neutral in itself. It derives its value from its role in contributing to or detracting from a person’s being his true self. And whether it detracts or contributes depends entirely on the way in which a person with a disability weaves the disability into his life. If he does so in such a way that in the end he does not wish that God had done otherwise with respect to him and his disability, then the disability becomes like the scars of the lives of Mary Magdalene and Peter: not something that disfigures the life of the person who has it but rather something which makes that life worthy of celebration.52 As with other aspects of complex human experiences, understanding how disabilities relate to concrete human suffering and well-being requires nuance and detail. This is not to say, however, that disabilities even considered very broadly cannot inform how we do philosophy of religion. In this final section, we suggest some ways that philosophy of disability can shape conversations in philosophy of religion. First, and perhaps most important, philosophy of disability can press philosophy of religion to reckon with the immediate concerns of individuals and communities that are affected by this kind of work. It is irresponsible to assume that when we theorize about the problem of evil, it has no effect on the people about whom we theorize. It is not merely a philosophical puzzle divorced from human experience. Unlike contemporary theology, where liberation theologies require reflection on and engagement with social structures that oppress, conversations in analytic philosophy of religion have tended to ignore the impact of how they are discussed on those they are discussing (e.g., Swinburne). Despite the presence of liberation theologies, James Cone, for instance, describes White supremacy as “theology’s great sin” given that so little contemporary theology engages with issues of race (not to mention class, disability, nationalism).53 But if theology has sinned by being silent in the face of White supremacy, then contemporary analytic philosophy of religion has as well, given that there seems to be even less discussion of race in philosophy of religion than in theology.54

Hilary Yancey, Forgiving God (New York: Faith Words, 2018), 134–5. Eleonore Stump, The Image of God: The Problem of Evil and the Problem of Mourning (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 306. 53 James H. Cone, “Theology’s Great Sin: Silence in the Face of White Supremacy”, Black Theology: An International Journal 2, no. 2 (2004): 139–52. 54 See a number of essays in Blake Hereth and Kevin Timpe, eds, The Lost Sheep in Philosophy of Religion: New Perspectives on Disability, Gender, Race, and Animals (New York: Routledge, 2019). 51 52

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Philosophy of religion should do more to address the social structures that harm, oppress, and hold us in our sin – which involves accurately describing and delineating between irreducibly structural sins and evils, and those that involve human will or natural phenomena.55 We can more effectively address particular instances of structural moral evils only if we have a better account of what structural evil is, rather than reducing the category of moral evils to individual actions, desires, and dispositions. Once we have recognized structural moral evils as something our philosophical reflection needs to address, we will have no excuse for not addressing them. Given that, as feminists and philosophers of disability have noted, “the philosophical is political”,56 philosophy of religion needs to pay more collective attention to political issues and the ways that our philosophical practices themselves contribute to problematic political structures. This will require noting how the patterns and practices of our scholarship can not only reinforce but also hide social realities that skew how we do philosophy of religion. As Michelle Panchuk puts it, in too much philosophy of religion “the myth of the disembodied, dispassionate view from nowhere – which bears a striking resemblance to the view from cisgender, heterosexual, middle-class, white, able-bodied Christian males – reigns”.57 Second, contemporary analytic philosophy of religion has recently begun to incorporate insights from philosophy of science. For example, Meghan Page’s use of psychological modeling in discussing faith58 or Helen de Cruz and Jonathan de Smet’s use of cognitive science and evolutionary theories in ethics and aesthetics.59 Yet we notice that philosophy of biology is less often incorporated into conversations about suffering and the nature of evil, including the biological and psychological data about death and dying. Given that much orthodox Christian theology thinks that death is among the greatest evil we can suffer, understanding the nature of death seems critical to advancing good arguments about the relationship between God and evil. Ted Sider, for instance, suggests that while metaphysics will not answer how we respond to death, being clear on what death is may have an impact on our moral evaluation (as, for example, coming to understand the underlying nature of a piece of fried chicken may make some vegetarians – Sider’s own example).60 We suggest that there is great value in bringing both psychological and biological discussions of disability and illness to bear on discussions about these phenomena in philosophy of religion.

See the social sin section of Kevin Timpe, “Sin in the Christian Thought”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, April 15, 2021, https://plato​.stanford​.wdu​/entries​/sin​-christian/; see also the discussion of social evils in Kevin Timpe, “Public Policy and the Administrative Evil of Special Education”, in The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy, ed. David Boonin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 249–62. 56 Eva Feder Kittay, “The Personal Is Philosophical Is Political: A Philosopher and Mother of a Cognitively Disabled Person Sends Notes from the Battlefield”, in Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, ed. Eva Feder Kittay and Licia Carlson (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 393–413. 57 Michelle Panchuk, “That We May Be Whole: Doing Philosophy of Religion with the Whole Self ”, in The Lost Sheep in Philosophy of Religion: New Perspectives on Disability, Gender, Race, and Animals, ed. Blake Hereth and Kevin Timpe (New York: Routledge, 2019), 56. 58 Meghan Page, “The Posture of Faith”, Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Religion 8 (2017): 227–44. 59 Helen de Cruz and Jonathan de Smet, A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2015). 60 Theodore Sider, “The Evil of Death: What can Metaphysics Contribute”, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death, ed. Ben Bradley, Fred Feldman, and Jens Johansson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1. 55

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Consider, for example, the importance of biological and psychological data about the experience of chronic pain. Pain is usually taken to be a straightforward “bad” by theorists in the problem of evil. While the relationship between chronic pain and experience of psychological conditions such as anxiety and depression is well documented, there are growing investigations into the ways that optimism, hope, or expectations of the future can impact one’s experience of chronic pain. This is not to say that optimism is merely a countervailing good offsetting some of one’s pain; in some cases, studies suggest that optimism (defined as positive expectations of the future) is associated with improvement in at least one symptom of chronic, physical pain. Moreover, numerous studies suggest that the overall experience of pain itself can be changed by a variety of other circumstances: the existence of pain alongside other psychological factors is not inert; rather, these influence each other which results in a more complex picture, one deserving of attention in our treatment of such allegedly “physical” conditions in the problem of evil. To consider the question in broader terms, we can look to controversies over a unified concept of “health” and “disease” – both concepts employed at least tacitly by those who defend a view of the problem of evil on which disabilities and diseases are necessarily bad. But what is it to be “healthy” or “diseased” turns out to be far from straightforward. Elselijn Kingma,61 for example, argues against Christopher Boorse’s well-known “Biostatistical Theory” (BST) of normal function in which health corresponds to a range of states or functions that fall within parameters set by a specified reference class (commonly age and sex). But as Kingma points out, the theory itself lacks justification for why these reference classes are the appropriate ones, nor is it able to account for the dynamic physiological responses that our bodies undergo (consider as she does hormonal shifts, cardiac output, blood pressure, or sweating).62 However, this is far from advocating for a “medical model” of disability or illness. In fact, we think that certain assumptions about the biological and/or psychological nature of these phenomena lie behind the concrete mistreatment of disabled individuals and theoretical misconstruals of disability itself. In arguing for more conversation between psychology, biology, and philosophy of religion in this realm, we want to suggest that disability studies has as much to contribute in the re-formation of these disciplines as it does philosophy of religion. Understanding the nature of functional performance versus functional mode, for example, or questioning the reference classes used to establish the biological (or even psychological) parameters of the “norm” will have a cascading effect on what we think God is “up to” in the creation and redemption of the world. What does this mean for the problem of evil? More investigation is needed, but it points to a broad concern about the basis on which our definitions of vital concepts (e.g., health, disease, normal and abnormal function) for discussing disability are founded. If these concepts need revision in order to better account for biological realities, then we should be cautious before employing those concepts in the moral lens required in the problem of evil. This would bring a welcome change to how disability is currently engaged in philosophy of religion.63 Elselijn Kingma, “Paracetamol, Poison, and Polio: Why Boorse’s Account of Function Fails to Distinguish Health and Disease”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 61, no. 2 (2010): 241–64. 62 Ibid., 250. 63 We would like to thank Eleonore Stump, Amy Seymour, Aaron Cobb, Jason Eberl, David McNaughton, and Yoon Shin for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 61

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FURTHER READING Adams, Marilyn McCord. Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Barnes, Elizabeth. The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Cobb, Aaron D. and Kevin Timpe. “Disability and the Theodicy of Defeat”. Journal of Analytic Theology 5 (2017): 100–20. Cross, Richard. “Impairment, Normalcy, and a Social Theory of Disability”. Res Philosophica 93, no. 4 (2016): 693–714. Panchuk, Michelle and Michael Rea, eds. Voices from the Edge: Centering Marginalized Perspectives in Analytic Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

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PART FIVE

Interreligious and Interdisciplinary Approaches

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Chapter 67

Suffering and the Problem of Evil in Judaism OLIVER LEAMAN

There is no central and unified teaching on evil and suffering in the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible. As one would expect in such a complex collection of writings, there are a variety of approaches to the topic. Right from the beginning, the time that Adam and Eve spent in the Garden of Eden was cut short by their eating from the tree they were forbidden (Gen. 2:17) and it is made clear that this disobedience is the ultimate cause of human suffering (Gen. 3:14-19). This is very much a theme of the Bible, people who do bad things are punished by God and He calls on us to do what we ought to do. Sometimes evil looks like it means going against the divine fiat, as when Abraham is told to sacrifice his son Isaac to God, and he does not question the order but sets out to obey it (Gen. 22:1-19). He is only prevented from carrying out the deed at the last minute by God. A long discussion in Jewish thought has come from this biblical event and it often touches on whether we should do whatever God tells us to do without question, since divine knowledge so exceeds ours and what He says is right establishes the meaning of what is right and wrong. On the other hand, when God proposes to destroy the people in the cities of the plain, Abraham intervenes and challenges God, even going so far as to chide Him with the charge that the God of justice is thinking of doing something unjust (Gen. 18:20-32). That suggests that it is not God who establishes the meaning of evil. We can form an understanding of what it means independently of what God tells us. On the other hand, there is much in the Bible which is presented to the Jews as rules that have no moral dimension at all, apart from their role in encouraging compliance in general with divine authority. The dietary laws, for example, or the ritual rules are in themselves of no significance, what makes them important is that God tells His people to follow them. There is no suggestion, for example, that people in general should follow them. Sometimes in the Bible things happen and we do not know why. For example, the sons of Aaron are killed by God (Lev. 10:1-2) for apparently making an error in how they did it, and since God did it the Bible cannot call it evil, but it does appear to be a puzzling event and one that is difficult to know how to assess. Similarly, Moses is punished for disobeying God on how to provide water for the Israelites in the desert (Num. 20:10-13), but in this case the crime seems to be that he behaved in such a way as to suggest that he was the provider of the water, not God. It was wrong and it led to his being denied participation in entry to the promised land, something which his life had been very much involved with up to then. Toward the end of the Five Books of Moses when the latter addresses the community, he communicates to them God’s warning that if they behave

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well they will be rewarded and if they are evil, punishment will be the result (Deut. 11:13-17; 26-27). In the rest of the Jewish Bible that is very much of a theme, especially in the Prophets. People do evil things and the consequences are serious, and in the end of course death and exile are among those consequences. Some of the actions for which the Jews are punished involve getting rituals wrong, especially becoming idolaters, and some are moral failings, in particular not sustaining the poor and being selfish. The line is very much that human suffering is the fault of the humans themselves and God acts as a moral arbiter punishing and rewarding accordingly. One way of resolving the issue is not really available in the Jewish Bible, and that is the afterlife. One way of explaining apparently undeserved suffering in this life in a world regulated by an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent deity is the existence of an afterlife where those who have endured the suffering patiently can be compensated or rewarded. This is much more of a Christian and Muslim idea than a Jewish concept in the Bible. There are very few references to an afterlife, and Job says quite accurately reflecting the Jewish Bible that we do not know what happens to us after we are dead (Job 7:7-10; 14:1-15; 16:22). It is worth pointing out that Job is never referred to as Jewish in the book of Job.

THE BOOK OF JOB The book of Job is the most focused discussion of evil and suffering in the Bible, and God is represented as very much an agent in this world, not somewhere else. Job’s friends present him with some stereotyped religious responses to his suffering and he rejects them all, and so does God who at the end of the book proposes to punish them for offering such solutions. The text has often been described as enigmatic, it is excellent in outlining the range of views on the issue but not explicit on how to resolve those issues. In the end God talks about His great power and wisdom, and that seems to resolve the matter for Job, although it is not clear why. One aspect of the book worth noting is that Job is never described as Jewish nor as remarkable in any way, except in the sense that he has been fortunate enough to become wealthy and successful. The book shows how any such individual is subject to the vagaries of fate, here represented by Satan. Bad things can happen to anyone, and do. The central question is justifying how and why this happens in the way it does, and this has been a theme of many theological and philosophical debates in Judaism. As one might expect, the book of Job was often the source of discussion in later Judaism on the issues of evil and suffering, but a major development occurred with the development of the oral law and aggadic texts like the Midrash. Judaism went off in a very legalistic direction, and the Mishnah and Talmud exemplified some of the major contributions to this process here, together with all the commentaries linked with them. But it also moved in a very imaginative way into stories and mystical theories connected to the Kabbalah and even magic. What this brought to the religion was for the first time a more elaborate theory of the afterlife, of divine punishment and reward, and stories about spirits and spiritual forces. Perhaps this arose in an attempt at fighting off competing religions which had a more robust notion of the afterlife, since that might have represented a threat to Jewish continuity. This was to have a particular influence on the more traditional versions of Judaism that came to set themselves up in opposition to modernizing forces, as we shall see.

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JEWISH THINKERS One of the chief defenders of what is often called rationalism in Judaism was Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), and his comment on Job was that the Bible says he was good but does not say he was intelligent, and he draws out what he thinks the implication of that is.1 This is a perceptive comment and Maimonides extends the point by criticizing Job’s expectation that God would look after him since he was good and did the sorts of things of which God would approve. Here Job represents everyone who expects a reward for being good and punishment for the opposite course of behavior. It is as though God is like a super accountant who weighs up our deeds and misdeeds, and indeed there is plenty of language in the liturgy to give credence to such an idea, especially during the festivals of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the New Year and the Day of Atonement. None of this language should be taken literally, Maimonides argues, since God is not like a king or a person of any kind, despite the language of religion, he is entirely different from us and the idea that he will look after us as individuals is entirely misplaced. Maimonides makes a big distinction between individual providence and providence covering the whole species. We are entitled to expect the latter kind of providence, not the former, and this is something that Job did not understand. He thought his individual actions would be recognized and rewarded and was surprised when that did not happen. Job represents most of us here, but as Maimonides says this idea of God is crude and does not respect the vast distance that exists between Him and us.2 Another way in which Job represents everyone is that he thinks material issues are significant, something for which Maimonides chides him. Matter is the source of evil, he argues, and although one should not necessarily see this as an argument for asceticism, he does have a point here. Anything material is liable to decay and destruction, and we should both be prepared for that to happen and not seek some external cause when it does happen. This is a point further developed by Spinoza, who despite his differences with the local Jewish community in the Netherlands was not only Jewish but also well acquainted with Jewish thought.3 He also takes the line of emphasizing the distance between us and God and pokes fun at the idea that it is the role of God to look after us as individuals. When bad things happen to us we should not think that we are being persecuted by God or that he has anything against us. We should just accept that this is how nature or God (an expression that Spinoza uses a lot) works, and try to understand what is happening rationally as opposed to reacting emotionally to it all. He suggests that when evil things occur to us, we react particularly badly because we assume that they are aimed at us, by someone who is trying to be mean to us. But we should appreciate that really what is happening is just part of the natural flow of things and nothing could have prevented them from turning out like that. They are part of who we are, and we could not have ended up otherwise. We cannot help these things from having happened, but we can help feeling miserable about them, since they are just how things have to be, according to Spinoza, and there is no more sense in regretting that than in regretting that the English word for regret is spelled as it is. He follows on in the Maimonidean vein of suggesting

See Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1963), 3:22f. 2 See ibid. 3 See Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, and Selected Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992). 1

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that what happens to us is the effect of natural processes. Maimonides argues that the Messianic age will not suspend the laws of nature, so even after the Messiah comes and everything ends up as it should, people still fall ill and die, eat potatoes, and need to use the bathroom. We should not expect God to magically intervene to pull our chestnuts out of the fire for us. Even in the Messianic age they can get burned and will not then be so tasty. Levinas also took a critical line on the idea that there can be such a thing as theodicy, as an explanation for suffering from a religious point of view.4 He argues that Judaism is what he calls a religion for adults and accepts that suffering occurs and is terrible and cannot be justified. When it occurs it immediately calls on us to intervene, and our responsibilities in this area are unlimited. It is not that we should define ourselves separately from others and work out our commitments, in a limited sense, accordingly. Our very being is tied up with others and the point of religion is to reflect this, and Judaism constantly emphasizes the role of the other in anything we do, there is not just us and God but always a third. In a sense this is reflected in the emphasis in the religion on practice, although of course much of that emphasis is about ritual that seems to have little to do with morality. Not for Levinas, this orientation toward practice is all about reminding us that we live with others and must open ourselves to their demands and needs. We cannot leave this sort of task to God. Levinas finds in ritual an indication of the move toward moral practice in religion and away from theorizing about our role in the universe.5

THE VIEWS OF ORDINARY BELIEVERS More popular views went in an entirely different direction. Heaven is a place you get to if you are good, it is full of nice things and God directly intervenes to take you there. The Yiddish story by Peretz, Bontshe Shvayg (Bontshe the Silent) is a good example of this.6 Bontshe has a miserable life but is honorable and nobody on earth notices when he dies, but in heaven his arrival is treated as a major event. He is probably one of the Lamedvavniks, the thirty-eight righteous people who according to Jewish tradition live at every time and whose good deeds keep the world in existence, since otherwise God would destroy it given how horrible its inhabitants often are. These thirty-eight people do not know they play this role, but they are vital in keeping the show on the road, as it were. What does Bontshe want in heaven? He could ask for absolutely anything and it would be granted, but a hot buttered roll every morning for breakfast is his request. Everyone laughs at the simplicity of his request, and the charming story ends there. Of course, for someone who has nothing, a small pleasure is a major event, and if it can be provided on a daily basis, well worth requesting. We are supposed to smile at his simplicity, and one can see how much a thinker like Levinas whom we have just discussed would disapprove of this example. The story suggests that the sufferings of an individual are given a role by God in the universe and accordingly justified. They are not arbitrary and we should not see them as problems for religion but as parts of the divine plan.

See Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 5 Ibid. 6 See Ruth Wisse, trans., The I. L. Peretz Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 4

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THE HOLOCAUST This became part of the debate about the Holocaust and its meaning for Judaism. First of all the question arises as to whether this event is something extraordinary and requires explanation as a break in history, or whether it is just part of the normal history of disasters that have occurred throughout Jewish, or human, life. There have been many such events, and the reaction to them might be compared to our reactions to an ordinary personal disaster. The latter may lead us to lose our faith, or it may strengthen that faith. People react in a range of ways to problems, and sometimes it is obvious that the reaction is inappropriate. For example, people in an abusive relationship may constantly get wrong what the other partner is doing to them. Some people are good at carrying on even in situations where carrying on looks like an unviable option. On the other hand, just because things are not going well we might not want to abandon the ship, as it were, and head off in another vessel. We are familiar with the ways in which different people react to different problems, and to a degree there is no right or wrong reaction, there is just what feels right to a particular individual. Yet some reactions seem to be self-defeating and oblivious to the facts, and those we are entitled to question from a rational point of view. Is there scope for theodicy given the Holocaust? Where was God? This is a question that is frequently asked, and a wide range of responses are available to those who think that theodicy is an option. Some have suggested that the Holocaust means that belief in God is no longer possible, or that belief in an omnipotent God is no longer possible. The Holocaust might be taken to mean that it is even more important for Jewish life to continue despite the odds, or the State of Israel is even more deserving of support. It has been argued that the question about the Holocaust was not “where was God but where was humanity?”. One thing that has changed in modern Judaism is the proliferation of different kinds of Jews, ranging from those who adhere to some sort of reformed religion to those who see themselves as maintaining the traditional ways of behavior. The former tend to look for some novel account of how the Holocaust fits in with their other beliefs, while the latter maintain their principle that whatever happens has a point to it and although we may not understand it, we have to abide by the divine decision. That was made clear in 2021 during the tragedy at Mount Meron in northern Israel, a traditional gathering place for traditional Jews, when a stampede killed forty-five of the participants. The survivors could have wondered why people who are doing their best to live Jewish lives in the demanding ways that orthodox Jews set out for themselves should suffer in this way, when God could easily have prevented the disaster. Yet there were no such speculations in that community, stemming from the prayer that is recited when there is a death or disaster of some kind that praises God and calls him a righteous judge.

ORTHODOXY VERSUS REFORM A neat distinction can be made between reformed and traditional Jews on evil and suffering. The latter see their religion as mainly defined in terms of practice and law, and discussions of deeper theological issues are often discouraged or not regarded as very significant. What they focus on is often the Talmud and other legal texts, and these often warn their readers against plunging too far into theoretical concerns. Other kinds of Jews are more dubious about this commitment to practice and seek to find some way of explaining or justifying what happens, what Levinas labels rather contemptuously as

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theodicy.7 These Jews often do not adhere to much in the way of religious practice in any case, so just concentrating on practice is not going to work for them. They require an answer as to why evil and suffering occur, and not just something to do to help them cope with what happens. This sounds like an argument that traditional Jews are uncritical and their reformed coreligionists are more innovative theoretically, but that is not necessarily the case. On the other hand, if someone is prepared to see basic Jewish texts as not necessarily a complete answer to the issues that arise in their lives, they are more likely to import ideas from elsewhere and expand on those ideas, developing en route more complex theories explaining evil and suffering. So, the discussion of different attitudes to evil and suffering might be seen as a reflection of doctrinal differences. This should not be taken too far since there is more than just one account of evil and suffering among traditional Jews also, and a whole variety of perspectives may be found in the long tradition of commentary on the Bible and other basic texts. There is not, however, the feeling that what is needed is a total reformulation of the Jewish perspective on the topic, which is often the approach taken by those in the various reformed sections of Judaism today.

ELISHA BEN ABUYAH A well-known discussion which indirectly considers theodicy is where Elisha ben Abuyah, one of the major Tannas (teachers of Jewish law during the Roman occupation of Palestine) of his time, is so shocked by the apparent injustice of the world that he ends up a notorious heretic, being labeled acher or the other (Palestinian Talmud – Hagigah 2:1 / Babylonian Talmud – Hagigah 14b-15b). He notices that people who do the wrong thing often end up better off, and the reverse, and there does not seem to be any justice in what takes place, something of a theme in Job as well, of course. How this common observation ended up with his exclusion from the community, mainly a self-exclusion, is indicative of the significance of the issue itself. He took a literal view of what it would be like for God to care for people, and that was the beginning of the end, since as Maimonides puts it, that expectation is part and parcel of seeing God as just like us, albeit a lot more powerful, and that is what in more modern philosophical parlance would be called a category mistake. It is not the sort of way we can see God, if we are to be sophisticated about it, and it is important that we are careful about how we use language here. To take a more prosaic example, when we see a film of someone committing a crime we cannot just say we saw it and so there is no doubt about it. Did we interpret what we saw correctly, could there be other interpretations of the event, and is it possible that the film was itself manipulated to tell a particular story? Despite his great intelligence Elisha is the sort of person who immediately jumps to conclusions when he observes something and sees every situation as cut and dried. His judgments are not balanced, and so he moves over to the other side. This is actually something with which we are very familiar, great thinkers going awry about some issue generally outside their expertise, and yet conferring on their approach a sense of legitimacy based on their previous status, not on the merits of the case before them. What Elisha got wrong was that he became angry, and this is regarded as evil in itself, even in situations where one might think it was reasonable. Moses similarly is

See Levinas, Difficult Freedom.

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punished for apparently getting impatient when procuring water for the Israelites in the desert, whereas he should have waited patiently for God to do it. Anger implies a lack of understanding of the divine organization of the world, and further on down the line perhaps criticism of that organization. The story in the oral law about the four sages who entered Pardes (paradise) included Elisha, and only one came out in the same state as he entered, and that was not Elisha. Entering Pardes is often taken as equivalent to becoming involved with forbidden or secret topics: issues that are to be avoided since they bring along with them the danger of inquiry into things we cannot know. The reason for evil and suffering is one such issue of course, since in a divinely regulated world we just have to assume that God knows and we do not, if we find that how it all works is mysterious to us. Elisha was not happy with this response and hence becomes the Other; he is not prepared to live with the system of rules and rituals that are based on the Jewish idea of how the world works. He then becomes evil in a sense, and we are familiar with the ways in which heroes quickly turn into villains, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas for instance or Ibsen’s The Enemy of the People. They start off trying to find things out and help people and then become so obsessed with the situation in which they find themselves that they are unable to work with others or establish any strategies of compromise. They become the Other. Like Elisha these are formidable people with considerable intellect, and yet they are unable to adopt the appropriate attitude to evil and suffering. They are right to respond by doing things to ameliorate the suffering but wrong to see it as calling for a new attitude to religious authority. This is the same sort of debate that takes place around the Holocaust, nobody disagrees with the idea that the suffering should have been alleviated, but some see its existence as challenging the very idea of a caring God and His relationship to His chosen people. It is worth relating the account of evil and suffering to wider issues in theology since they are never just about evil and suffering. The latter has such a wide dimension, something that Satan points out in the book of Job when he afflicts Job with physical pain, to add to the pain of having his children and business destroyed. Like pleasure, pain has a whole variety of aspects and someone may successfully navigate through some dimensions while being seriously undone by one kind. There is an immediacy to physical pain that Satan was relying on to get Job to turn away from God, but he did not succeed. Perhaps he overdid it, since resignation may be a plausible reaction when everything goes wrong.

CONCLUSION One way of discussing suffering in a religion is to point to something distinctive about the religion and its analysis of the topic. It is difficult to see anything like that in the case of Judaism, and in particular there is no one approach to the topic, but a whole variety of different and often contrasting approaches. One feature of the history of the topic that has not been discussed at all is how far Judaism imported ideas and arguments from the other Abrahamic religions when discussing the issue, and clearly a great deal of this took place. Maimonides and Spinoza were interested in ideas from Islamic thought and Levinas and also of course Spinoza from Christian theorizing on the issue. There is a huge range of other Jewish thinkers who could have been discussed also, since this is something that Jews have extensively debated in the past right up to today. Given Jewish history this is hardly surprising. If there is one theme then it can be found in the constant looking

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back to the Bible and texts like the Talmud and Mishnah and using them to illustrate a variety of perspectives on evil and suffering within the Jewish tradition.

FURTHER READING Anderson, Ingrid. Ethics and Suffering since the Holocaust: Making Ethics “First Philosophy” in Levinas, Wiesel and Rubenstein. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Cohn-Sherbok, Dan, ed. Holocaust Theology: A Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Leaman, Oliver. Evil and Suffering in Jewish Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Nadler, Steven. Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.

Chapter 68

The Kabbalistic Concept of Tsimtsum (“Contraction”) SIMON D. PODMORE

INTRODUCTION: TRACES OF TSIMTSUM Faced with the persisting trauma of evil, to what extent can the Infinite Creator God be construed as present within a finite, suffering creation? Does the very presence of evil elicit an indelible trace of divinity’s “exile” from the world? Kabbalistic notions of divine tsimtsum (tzimtzum; zimzum: “contraction”) have sought to engage such questions through notions of the “withdrawal”, “concentration”, and “concealment” of God’s presence in relation to creation. Recent scholarship indicates progressive interests in tsimtsum, including, among many issues, how such notions might pertain to the mysteries of evil and suffering.1 The latter possibility emerges throughout (post-) holocaust theology, as well as in the work of modern philosophers who have struggled with God’s ostensible hiddenness and silence, “the hidden Face” (hester panim) or “eclipse of God”.2 The most explicit, sustained, and prominent account of tsimtsum in post-holocaust theology remains Hans Jonas’ (1903–93) “frankly speculative theology” (in “The Concept of God After Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice”, 1). According to Jonas’ radical expression of tsimtsum, “God renounced his being” so that “the world might be, and be for itself” (4). While “making itself felt to” humanity, the divine is nonetheless committed to “not intervening in the dynamics of” humanity’s “worldly scene” (5). Jonas’ heuristic myth thereby identifies “a suffering God”, “a becoming God”, “a caring God” (6–7), and “an endangered God” (8) – one who, “After Auschwitz”, is “not an omnipotent God” but a God whose power is given over to creation (8). While the Shoah “raged God remained silent”, not because God “chose” silence “but because he could not intervene” (11). Grounded in this radical notion of “God’s self-limitation through the creation from nothing” (11), Jonas’ “myth” of tsimtsum “means contraction, withdrawal, self-limitation” – a process that must be perpetually sustained (12). In this respect, Jonas clarifies that “My myth goes farther still” than Lurianic kabbalah, insofar as “[t]he contraction is total as far as power is concerned” (12).

See, most recently, Christoph Schulte, Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 2014) and the essays in Tsimtsum and Modernity: Lurianic Heritage in Modern Philosophy and Theology, ed. Agata BielikRobson and Daniel H. Weiss (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021). 2 See, for example, discernible traces of tsimtsum in the works of Martin Buber (1878–1965), Abraham Joshua Heschel (1905–72), Joseph Soloveitchik (1903–93), and Emmanuel Levinas (1905–95). 1

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In the shadows of the Shoah, Jonas drew radically on “The mighty undercurrent of the Kabbalah, which Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) in our days has brought to light anew”, and which “knows about a divine fate bound up with the coming-to-be of a world” (12). In 1966’s After Auschwitz, Richard Rubenstein (1924–2021) had also accredited Lurianic kabbalah with assisting him in re-thinking the complexities of “exile” and “redemption”, construing tsimtsum in accordance with his own vision of “mystical nihilism”.3 In a later edition of this work, Rubenstein captures the prevalent debt of “most” post-holocaust theologians who have “leaned heavily” on Lurianic thought “as mediated by the scholarship of Gershom Scholem”.4 In 1982’s To Mend the World, Emil Fackenheim (1916–2003) confesses to being “greatly indebted to Scholem’s work”,5 invoking tsimtsum (via Scholem) as a dramatic “rupture”: “God Himself is in a state of Tzimtzum – a ‘retreat from the world’6 – without which the very being of the world would be impossible.”7 Around the same time, Arthur A. Cohen’s (1928–86) The Tremendum (1981) drew nascently on tsimtsum in inferring the Shoah as a “caesura of the demonic”8 that elicits a sense of God’s “constriction of utter passivity”.9 While also skeptical of the redemptive power of a “kabbalistic transfiguration” of the Shoah,10 Cohen suggests that “Gershom Scholem’s reading of the kabbalistic counter-history of Judaism” has arisen “to the forefront not least because of Scholem’s superlative advocacy, but surely more because the times require it”.11 Cohen’s comment is borne out in the disparate traces of tsimtsum that are discernible throughout the period, from the remnants of the Shoah itself to the most recent, and perhaps final, expressions of (post-)holocaust theology. If, as has been claimed, the Ḥasidic rebbe Kalonymous Kalman Shapira (1889–1943) “sets the stage” for post-holocaust theology,12 then a diverse genealogy of tsimtsum can be traced from the ashes of the Shoah itself, in Shapira’s Eish Kodesh (Sacred Fire),13 through to the 2007 collection of essays by the Talmudic scholar and holocaust survivor David Weiss Halivni (1927–), Breaking the Tablets.14 Whereas Shapira’s pre-Scholemic theology demonstrates a Ḥasidic reading of tsimtsum that emphasizes the ethical dimensions of “contraction” for the sake of the other, Halivni construes tsimtsum in terms of God’s periodic phases of “presence” and “absence”, “embracing” and “withdrawing”, of “divine intervention” and “divine

Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis: The Bobbs Merrill Company, 1966), 219. See also 230–1. 4 Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 192. 5 Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 253. 6 Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1965), 26, 260ff, 232ff. 7 Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 253. 8 Arthur A. Cohen, The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust (New York: Crossroad, 1988), 21. 9 Ibid., 86–7. See further 86–95. 10 Ibid., 21–2. 11 Ibid., 87. 12 Shaul Magid, “Covenantal Rupture and Broken Faith in R. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira’s Eish Kodesh”, in Piety and Rebellion: Essays in Hasidism (Brighton: Academic Studies Press, 2019), 237–62, at 250. 13 Sacred Fire: Torah from the Years of Fury 1939–1942, trans. J. Hershy Worch, ed. Deborah Miller (Northvale: Jason Aronson, 2000). On tsimtsum, see 298–9. 14 David Weiss Halivni, Breaking the Tablets: Jewish Theology After the Shoah, ed. Peter Ochs (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). 3

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abandonment”.15 Like Shapira, Halivni’s tsimtsum does not entail a total literal absence of God, since “Without Him, there is no existence”.16 Rather, God’s tsimtsum intends to cultivate human freedom and responsibility, offering the only viable way to make sense of the “unparalleled” “tragedy” of the Shoah.17 As Halivni concludes, tikkun (“restoration”) is needed to repair the rupture of the current tsimtsum. Only prayer that “pleads for the curtailment of God’s tsimtsum” can “heal the terrible wound” of the Shoah and “shorten the distance between” God’s revelations at “Sinai and Auschwitz”.18 Notably, neither Shapira nor Halivni is dependent upon Scholem’s scholarship; nor do they espouse his evidently literal reading of tsimtsum as God’s “withdrawal” (Major Trends, 260). However, between these texts, a diverse spectrum of readings flourishes which are more commonly indebted to Scholem. Touching on the presence as well as absence of God in the Shoah, these readings nonetheless reflect enduring kabbalistic disputes concerning whether tsimtsum is to be construed literally as a “withdrawal”, “reduction”, or “removal” (tsimtsum kipshuto), or non-literally as a “concentration” or “concealment” (tsimtsum lo kipshuto).19 Following Scholem, many post-holocaust theologians have veered toward an ostensibly literal sense of God’s “withdrawal”, evocative of forms of “free-will theodicies”.20 An important recent exception occurs in Melissa Raphael (1960–) who, in critiquing patriarchal variations of the “hidden Face of God” (hester panim),21 comes closer to affirming Talmudic and Ḥasidic professions of divine presence. In contrast to prevailing theologies of absence, Raphael’s “Jewish feminist theological revision of the immanent God as Shekinah”22 reimagines an exiled “God-She” as the intimate and discrete “image of God” evoked in feminine acts of care and compassion. Nonetheless, Raphael herself enhances Scholem’s influence while also profoundly extending the presence of tsimtsum in post-holocaust theology to encompass notions of “concealment” and “concentration” as well as “contraction” and “withdrawal”.23 While the confluence of twentieth-century kabbalah studies and post-holocaust theology has remained curiously under-examined, recent scholarship has begun to cast further light on such conceivable influences.24 As twentieth-century kabbalah studies took shape in the emerging shadows of the Shoah, it flourished further in its wake. As post-holocaust theologians attest, much contemporary attention to tsimtsum is indebted to Scholem, who pioneered the modern rehabilitation of kabbalah studies between the 1920s and his death in 1982. In particular, Scholem’s distinctive distillation of Lurianic

Halvini, “Prologue: Between Sinai and Auschwitz”, in Breaking the Tablets, x. See especially “A Kabbalistic Response”, 31–4. 16 Halvini, Breaking the Tablets, 33. 17 Ibid., 31. Also 33, 59. 18 Ibid., 125–6. 19 Perhaps the most prevailing discord arouse between metaphorical Ḥasidic readings and the more literal interpretations of the Mitnagdim (“opponents”). A recent attempt to reconcile this impasse is presented in Avinoam Fraenkel, Nefesh HaTzimtzum, 2 vols (Jerusalem: Urim Publications, 2015). 20 See also the works of Eliezer Berkovits (1908–92) and Irving (Yitzchak) Greenberg’s (1933–). 21 Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust (London: Routledge, 2003), 28. 22 Ibid., 5. 23 Raphael discusses the Lurianic myth in The Female Face of God in Auschwitz, 147ff, 157–9. 24 See, for example, David Osborne Garner, Antitheodicy, Atheodicy and Jewish Mysticism in Holocaust Theology: Atheodic Theologies After Auschwitz (Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2014). 15

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tsimtsum offered a compelling mythical motif for thinkers struggling with the enigma of God’s apparent “hiddenness”, “silence”, or “absence” after the Shoah.25

TSIMTSUM: FROM “CONCENTRATION” TO “WITHDRAWAL” While modern readings of tsimtsum tend to emphasize Scholem’s sense of God’s “withdrawal” and “estrangement”, earlier iterations evoked the “concentration” and even “concealment” of divine presence. Talmudic interpretation of tsimtsum focused on the manner in which the Shekinah (from shachan: “to dwell”), the feminine divine presence, was able to remain present with Israel in exile (galut), even to the point of dwelling between the wings of the keruvim on the Ark in the Holy of Holies (Kodesh HaKodashim). In response to doubts concerning how the infinite can occupy a finite space, midrashic commentary (Pesikta DeRav Kahana, 2:10) records God’s promise that “I will descend and contract [metsamtsem: sharing the same root as tsimtsum] My presence [Shekhinah] among you below”.26 Although affirmations of the “concealment” of an allpervading divine presence are developed in Ḥasidic interpretations of a deeper pan(en) theistic “unity of divine subsistence” (Major Trends, 262),27 much modern discussion of tsimtsum has focused on the mystical re-imaginings of sixteenth-century Lurianic kabbalah, as re-constructed by Scholem in the twentieth century. Among Scholem’s most widely influential, if also contentious, claims is his reading of the Lurianic interpretation of tsimtsum as forged in the protracted wake of the 1492 exile (galut) of Jews from Spain – an event “which so radically altered the outer aspect of the Kabbalah if not its innermost content” (245). Scholem suggests that the venerated Safed kabbalist Isaac Luria (1534–72)28 radically reimagined Talmudic interpretation, inverting its emphasis upon divine presence and immanence and transforming tsimtsum into an expression of God’s radical “withdrawal” (Major Trends, 260f). Such was the potency of Luria’s vision that it became the touchstone for ensuing, if diverse, expositions of tsimtsum. According to Scholem, Luria’s treatment of “the self-contraction of God” sought to address deeper cosmogonic and theogonic issues that Talmudic affirmations of the “concentration” of God’s intimate presence were unable to resolve. While the tsimtsum of the Shekinah

Tsimtsum has also been a potent resource for Christian as well as Jewish thinkers. See further, for example, Simon D. Podmore, “‘Abyss Calls Unto Abyss’: Tzimtzum and Kenosis in the Rupture of God-forsakenness”, in Tsimtsum and Modernity: Lurianic Heritage in Modern Philosophy and Theology, ed. Agata Bielik-Robson and Daniel H. Weis (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 311–38; and “Renunciations of God: Traces of Tsimtsum & Kenōsis in Simone Weil’s Mystical Ethics of Love”, in Routledge Handbook of Comparative Mysticism, ed. Louise Nelstrop and Saeko Yazaki (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2022). 26 Re. Exod. 25:1–27:19. See also Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 29a; Genesis Rabbah 68.9; Exodus Rabbah 34:1; Abraham Joshua Heschel, Heavenly Torah: As Refracted Through the Generations, trans. Gordon Tucker and Leonard Levin (New York: Continuum, 2005), 94–126; Justin David, Longing: Jewish Meditations on a Hidden God (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2018), 66–71; Reuven Leigh, “Hasidic Thought and Tsimtsum’s Linguistic Turn”, in Tsimtsum and Modernity, ed. Agata Bielik-Robson and Daniel H. Weis (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 83–103, 86–92. 27 See further, Daniel M. Horwitz, A Kabbalah and Jewish Mysticism Reader (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2016), 225–39. 28 Isaac Luria (Isaac (ben Solomon) Luria Ashkenazi); revered as Ha’ARI Hakadosh: the holy ARI, or “Lion”. See further: Scholem, Major Trends, 251–66, 269–87; Kabbalah (New York: New American Library, 1978), 131–5, 420–8; Sabbatai Ṣevi: The Mystical Messiah (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 22–44. 25

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spoke to the “dwelling” of divine presence with Israel in exile (galut), Scholem reads Luria’s tsimtsum as an attempt to fathom the mystery of how an infinite God could make space for a finite creation that is essentially other than God. Scholem’s reading is nonetheless moderated by the fact that Isaac Luria himself left little writing that can be confidently attributed to him (253–4). As such, the Lurianic myth has been predominantly mediated, even elaborated, by Luria’s follower Chayyim Vital (1543–1620), particularly in his Etz Chayyim (Tree of Life).29 In “Gate (Heichel) One”, Vital outlines “the first contraction” (tsimtsum ha’rishon) that precedes the creation accounts of Genesis: In the beginning there was simple light called En Sof [without end; infinite]. Neither void nor did emptiness exist. All was the light of En Sof. . . . It cannot be grasped in thought nor principle. It is abstracted and separated from all thought and it existed before all that was ever emanated or created. And then he chose through his divine will to emanate and to create. He did this for compassion [Rachamim] and mercy [Ḥesed], because if there were no one among the worlds who might receive mercy from him, how could he be called compassionate and merciful? Behold, he contracted [tsimtsem] himself in the middle of his light, in his very midpoint, leaving a void [tehiru] within. The contraction [tsimtsum] reveals the root of justice [Din; Gevurah], so that divine justice would exist in the worlds. After the contraction [tsimtsum], there remained an empty space [makom pnui] and open void, poised in the middle of En Sof, so that emanated and created beings could be there. . . . En Sof contracted itself to form Adam Kadmon [Primordial Adam]. Adam Kadmon was made in order to produce the points. This is emanation.30 According to Scholem’s influential reconstruction, Lurianic tsimtsum attempts to fathom the following paradoxes evoked by the doctrine of creation ex nihilo: “How can there be a world if God is everywhere? If God is ‘all in all’, how can there be things which are not God? How can God create the world out of nothing if there is no nothing?” (Major Trends, 260–1). Surely, Scholem surmises, God must first “create” the “nothing”. Luria’s answer envisions the infinite unknowable Godhead (En Sof) contracting its pervasive light (Or En Sof), thereby disclosing a void (chalal; tehiru: “empty” in Aramaic) into which God’s light “emanates”, assuming the anthropomorphic shape of Adam Kadmon (the primordial human being) and the divine sefirot (partsufim: countenances, attributes, characteristics). The creative process ensues through various “contractions”, a continuous cosmic rhythm of inhalation and exhalation, or “hithpashtuth, egression, and histalkuth, See further, Moshe Idel, Primeval Evil in Kabbalah: Totality, Perfection, Perfectibility (Brooklyn: KTAV Publishing House, 2020), 265. 30 Chayyim Vital, Etz Chayyim, Gate One. From a recent translation in Window of the Soul: The Kabbalah of Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534–1572), trans. Nathan Snyder, ed. James David Dunn (San Francisco: Red Wheel, Weiser, 2008), 89–90. 29

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regression” (263), that is dramatically disturbed by a tragic rupture. The “concentrated” light of En Sof is emanated into vessels (kelim) that fail to confine it, shattering (shevirat ha’kelim) and scattering falling “divine sparks” (niẓoẓot) and broken “shards” (kelipot) that descend to form roots of evil in the world (the sitra aḥra: the “other side”). In the wake of this shattering (shevirah), humanity is ultimately appointed the redemptive and theurgic task of “repairing the world” (tikkun ha’olam), locating and “raising up” the “divine sparks” and restoring a fractured theo-cosmogony. While Lurianic kabbalah develops a tripartite myth of “contraction-shattering-repairing” (tsimtsum – shevirah – tikkun), Scholem is evidently captivated by “the first contraction” in which God “withdraws” from creation. Furthermore, Scholem emphasizes that tsimtsum is revealed as an expression of divine Judgment (Din), or de-limitation, “in which God determines, and therefore limits, Himself”, revealing the “roots of divine judgment” in all existence (263). As such, Scholem observes, “One is tempted to interpret this withdrawal of God into his own Being in terms of Exile, of banishing Himself from His totality into profound seclusion. Regarded this way, the idea of Tsimtsum is the deepest symbol of Exile that could be thought of” (261). While acknowledging an exilic “trace” (reshimu) of divine presence in creation that is perhaps commensurate with Talmudic tsimtsum, the galut of Lurianic tsimtsum strikes Scholem at a deeper level. In the “shattering of the vessels”, “something of the Divine Being is exiled out of Himself”; tsimtsum could nonetheless be “considered as an exile into Himself” (261). As such, according to Scholem, whereas Talmudic tsimtsum meant “concentration” or “contraction”, it is translated in “Kabbalistic parlance” as “withdrawal” or “retreat”, emphasizing not just God’s absence but also God’s “estrangement” from creation (260–1).31 Scholem therefore reads Luria as having “inverted” the Talmudic meaning of tsimtsum to the extent of “the precise opposite”: not “the concentration of God at a point, but his retreat away from a point” (260). By virtue of this exilic “retreat”, the very “existence of the universe is made possible by a process of shrinkage in God” (260). This “shrinkage” (tsimtsum) of the Infinite (En Sof) gives rise to a primordial void (tehiru), permitting the creation of something radically other than God (261–4). God therefore undergoes a degree of diminishment and exile by “as it were, abandoning a region within Himself, a kind of mystical primordial space from which He withdrew in order to return to it in the act of creation and revelation” (261).

TSIMTSUM AND EVIL According to Scholem, while Vital himself (unsuccessfully) guarded the secrets of his master, “the spread of Lurianic Kabbalism was almost entirely due to the activity of another Kabbalist, Israel Sarug (1590–1610)”, whose knowledge derived from “stolen copies of Vital’s writings” (257). Sarug re-interpreted Lurianic kabbalah with an eye toward Platonic philosophy, instigating important repercussions for the doctrine of tsimtsum. In Vital’s account, En Sof contracts externally away from its center and toward Scholem refers to tsimtsum as an act of “estrangement” in On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), 84. Nonetheless, Franks disputes Scholem’s “translation” of tsimtsum as “withdrawal” (for which the Hebrew hitrahkut/siluk stand) deeming it a mere “interpretation” that is overshadowed by more prevalent readings of “contraction” as “concentration” and “intensification”. Paul Franks, “The Midrashic Background of the Doctrine of Divine Contraction: Against Gershom Scholem on Tsimtsum”, in Tsimtsum and Modernity, ed. Agata Bielik-Robson and David H. Weis (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 39–60, 54. 31

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a circumference, revealing a void within which creation can come into being. For Sarug, who adopted a more “non-literal” approach to tsimtsum, En Sof contracts internally toward its center, intensified to a purifying point intent on a cathartic, even mechanistic, self-purging and self-realizing. While Scholem evidently follows Vital in affirming a more “literal” reading of tsimtsum as a voluntary “withdrawal” to the circumference, it is conspicuous that he also partially echoes Sarug’s emphasis on the internal catharsis of “evil” in the Godhead that Vital appears to obscure.32 One of the most astonishing aspects of this reading, which we find Scholem “stressing” as “authentic” and “undoubtedly . . . highly important” for Luria himself, is the implication that “the essence of the Divine Being, before the Tsimtsum took place, contained not only the qualities of love and mercy, but also that of Divine Sternness which the Kabbalists call Din or Judgment”. Previously “dissolved” in the compassionate depths of En Sof, tsimtsum causes God’s Din to become “crystallized and became clearly defined, for inasmuch as Tsimtsum signifies an act of negation and limitation it is also an act of judgment”. As an act of judgment, kabbalistic Din “means the imposition of limits and the correct determination of things”, meaning that, as Scholem and Vital affirm, tsimtsum implements a perimeter between En Sof and a creation that is designated as “other”. Creation is consequently conceived as a process of “divine inhalation and exhalation”, a perpetual tsimtsum of “egression” and “regression”. This divine dialectic of Judgment (Din) and Mercy (Ḥesed) cannot, however, conceal the implication that “In the final resort, . . . the root of all evil is already latent in the act of Tsimtsum” (Major Trends, 263). The excess of divine light that exceeds and ruptures the vessels into which it is emanated (shevirat ha’kelim) is thus read by Scholem as resulting from a “cathartic cause”: the necessity of purging the sefirot of the kelipot, or “the forces of evil”, with which they were polluted (267). The implication that evil originates in En Sof therefore “seemed to suggest a dualistic conception of God, i.e. one of the most serious heresies”. The heterodox myth of Lurianic kabbalah thus imagines a theo-cosmogony in which “the good elements of the divine order came to be mixed with the vicious ones”. After the shevirah “the evil and demonic forces assumed real and separate existence in a realm of their own” (267); while reparation of this fractured creation is represented by the third aspect of Lurianic myth, tikkun, which embodies “the restoration of the ideal order”. As agents of tikkun, humanity is therefore appointed the sacred task of fulfilling “the original aim of creation” and “also the secret purpose of existence” (268). This “secret purpose” is realized through acts ranging from esoteric kabbalistic practices to everyday devotional and ethical deeds imbued with theo-cosmogonic significance, restoring the intended harmony of “above and below”, stabilizing the cosmos, and even healing the Godhead itself. Kabbalistic tikkun therefore implies a theurgic process in which humanity emerges as co-redeemers with God – and even, in some iterations, as saviors of God through the tikkun of the ruptured divine sefirot. Given that his reading of Lurianic myth identifies the etymology of evil in the dark stirrings of a fractured Godhead, it is perhaps even more remarkable that Scholem infers this myth as a dramatic response to the problem of evil (244–51).33 According to Scholem’s admittedly speculative and disputed reading, Lurianic kabbalah offered a

Scholem, Kabbalah, 130–1; On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 82–3. See also Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, trans. Allan Arkush, ed. R. Z. J. Werblowsky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 449–50.

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mythical reaction to the historical exile (galut) of Jews from Spain in 1492. In the wake of this exile, Scholem suggests that Luria may have imagined a powerful symbolic resonance between God’s primordial tsimtsum and the contemporary Jewish experience of divine withdrawal. Without actually affirming the certainty that many of his interpreters have inferred from his work, Scholem continues to posit the formidable influence of this resonance in modern Jewish life.34 Construed as a symbol of exile, Scholem reads tsimtsum as an attempt toward mystical theodicy grounded in a speculative exposition of creation ex nihilo – one that seeks meaning for the sufferings of the present in the primordial exile of God that makes a truly free and tragically deficient creation possible. Although the legitimacy of what might be called the Lurianic-Scholemic reading has fallen into question, its own potency and influence surely owe much to a further layer of resonance contemporary with the trauma of Scholem’s own times. Despite being one of the most prominent critics of the viability of Scholem’s reading, Moshe Idel nonetheless proposes that as Scholem interpreted Lurianic tsimtsum “psychoanalytically” via the lens of the 1492 galut, so Scholem’s own myth of tsimtsum may bear traces of his own awareness of the contemporary ascent of the “demonic” – “forged”, as it was, “during the most sordid period of Jewish history, the holocaust”.35

TSIMTSUM AFTER THE SHOAH The implicit influence of the Shoah adds to the existing impression that Scholem was effectively “far more philosophical and non-historical than he himself ever wanted to admit”,36 even appearing “as a radical kabbalist himself”.37 In this respect, Bielik-Robson “complements” Scholem’s reading of tsimtsum as a reflection of the 1492 Spanish exile by suggesting that Lurianic “galuth could also be a reflection on the nascent period of early modernity, this exciting-troubling New Age marked by both high hopes and deep unrest”.38 To this it might be possible to add that Scholem’s own reading reflects the crisis of modernity, the traumatic implosion of Enlightenment optimism that ensues in the wake of the Shoah. Re-constructing Lurianic tsimtsum while a new crisis in European Jewish life was taking shape, Scholem elicited symbolic resonances between primordial, historic, and contemporary moments of suffering and evil, thereby establishing a commensurate trajectory for twentieth-century readings of his own account of Luria’s myth. If, as scholars have suggested, Scholem’s reading of tsimtsum as a radical response to the problem of evil is already being shaped by contemporary events, then the possibility arises that the very account that many thinkers have adapted for the ends of post-Shoah thinking is itself already being conditioned by the holocaust itself. As such, the confluence See also: Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, 82–7; Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 110–17, 129–35; Sabbatai Ṣevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676, trans. R. J. Z. Werblowsky (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016) 22–44. 35 Moshe Idel, Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 94–108, at 105. Idel contests Scholem’s reading of Lurianic tsimtsum (285n78). 36 Agata Bielik-Robson, “God of Luria, Hegel, Schelling: The Divine Contraction and the Modern Metaphysics of Finitude”, in Mystical Theology & Continental Philosophy, ed. David Lewin, Simon D. Podmore, and Duane Williams (London: Routledge, 2017), 39–58, 36. 37 Agata Bielik-Robson, “Introduction. An Unhistorical History of Tsimtsum: A Break with Neoplatonism?” in Tsimtsum and Modernity, ed. Agata Bielik-Robson and David H. Weis (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 3. 38 Bielik-Robson, “The God of Luria, Hegel and Schelling”, 38. 34

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of kabbalah studies and post-Shoah thought suggests an important new speculative moment in the modern reception of tsimtsum – one in which past, present, and future coincide in the aspirations of post-holocaust theology. However, rather than expressing a derivative circularity, many post-holocaust readings of tsimtsum demonstrate ingenuity and profundity in the diverse, even incommensurate ways in which they reimagine Lurianic kabbalah, discovering in Scholem a renewed though ostensibly arcane cipher for decrypting the mystery of God’s apparent withdrawal in the Shoah.39 Nonetheless, the seductions of such mystical free-will theodicies cannot completely conceal the insight, highlighted by Scholem himself, that Lurianic tsimtsum also affirms hidden roots of evil within the Godhead itself. Even the consolations of God’s “contracted” presence, as elicited by Raphael and others, merely veil the darker realization that “the roots of evil” are, in Joseph Dan’s terms, “as ancient and eternal as the Godhead, Ein-Sof, itself”. Effectively, Lurianic myth affirms that while evil’s origin “is completely independent of human action” the “future” of evil will nonetheless “be decided by the behavior of human beings”. However, the human burden of tikkun cannot obscure the melancholy insight that “originally evil is one of the basic potentialities of the eternal Godhead”.40 Inevitably, therefore, appeals to the Lurianic myth of tsimtsum – shevirah – tikkun risk the mystification of an evil that arises before humanity’s own emergence. Noting the gnostic character of the Lurianic response to evil’s origins, Scholem himself observes that “Like all attempts to answer the question, Unde malum? [whence evil?], this effort to find a rational explanation of the existence of evil, or rather of its myth, fails to give complete satisfaction” (Major Trends, 267). In the shadows of the Shoah, appeals to tsimtsum therefore remain susceptible to the temptation of perpetually deferring the mysteries of evil’s source. Unless, that is, they are drawn back toward the abyssal depths of the Godhead itself. At this point, they are confronted with the agonistic question of holding God to account for the decision to create such a catastrophically free world. Here, perhaps, the very wisdom of tsimtsum itself demands interrogation. If, as Shaul Magid suggests, tsimtsum is less a “creation myth” and more “a myth about divine origins”, then “the origin of the God who creates”41 appears to coincide with the origins of evil itself. Such a radical, even heterodox, post-Shoah reading of tsimtsum revives the specter of protest against God – a tormenting yet venerable tradition in Jewish thought, upheld in the writings of Elie Wiesel (1928–2016), but in which David Blumenthal’s (1938–) post-holocaust theology remains a lonely voice. Blumenthal’s Facing the Abusing God (1993) draws deeply on Lurianic kabbalah – albeit in a manner that, like Raphael, refuses unambiguous binaries of absence or presence.42 Yet Blumenthal is more radical in identifying the divine origins of evil and refusing the consolations of “concealment” and “concentration” that tsimtsum appears to promise.43 In doing so, Blumenthal

See further Podmore, “‘Abyss Calls Unto Abyss’”, 311–38. Joseph Dan, “‘No Evil Descends from Heaven’: Sixteenth-Century Jewish Concepts of Evil”, in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Bernard Dov Cooperman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 91. 41 Shaul Magid, “Origin and Overcoming the Beginning: Zimzum as a Trope of Reading in Post-Lurianic Kabbalah”, in Beginning/Again: Toward a Hermeneutics of Jewish Texts, ed. Shaul Magid and Aryeh Cohen (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2002), 163–214, 165. 42 David R. Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), 16, 173–4. 43 E.g., ibid., 27–8, 42, 152, 155–6, 243, 247, 261–5. 39 40

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rejects the solace of theodicy, choosing instead to confront an agonistic and perhaps irresolvable dialectic of tikkun: namely, the struggle to “repair” a relationship with “an abusing God”. Here we arrive at a further impasse, unbreachable by mystical speculation alone. While tsimtsum may offer powerful resources for post-Shoah theodicy, perhaps Scholem’s identification of “the roots of evil” in the Godhead demonstrate that the most profound and enduring contribution of Lurianic-Scholemic tsimtsum resides in its refusal of consolation: a refusal to immunize God against the perennial question of divine responsibility for evil and suffering.

FURTHER READING Bielik-Robson, Agata and Daniel H. Weiss, eds. Tsimtsum and Modernity: Lurianic Heritage in Modern Philosophy and Theology. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021. Jonas, Hans. “The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice”. The Journal of Religion 67, no. 1 (1987): 1–13. Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken, 1965. Schulte, Christoph. Zimzum: Gott und Weltursprung. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 2014.

Chapter 69

The Concept of duḥkha in Hinduism ANKUR BARUA

The interrelated motifs of the pervasiveness of suffering across the finite world and the overcoming of this fragmented finitude through the sustained cultivation of spiritual disciplines recur through Indic worldviews. Across the soteriological spaces of the multiple universes that are labeled as “Hinduism”, a tough-minded acceptance that life is often nasty, brutish, and short goes hand in hand with repeated exhortations to seek an immutable center of gravity that is beyond our fragile fabrics that are suffused with suffering. The fundamental concept here is the richly polyvalent duḥkha – starting from the baseline phenomenological senses of pain and grief, it encompasses connotations such as a deep-seated dissatisfaction with the limitations of worldly existence, the ravages of impermanence, and so on. In this chapter, we will explore some Hindu engagements with duḥkha from within cosmological visions of perpetual plenitude. Since in speaking of “Hinduism” we are ranging across around 3,000 years of civilizational patterns, we need some disciplinary precision as we navigate pathways illuminated by these visions. In approaching “Hinduism” with lenses such as social history, cultural anthropology, and others, we would be addressing questions such as how Hindus grapple with the existential rawness of suffering in the quotidian densities of their lives, develop psychological mechanisms to cope with suffering, and so on. If we study “Hinduism” through the prisms of philosophical theology, philosophy of religion, and others, the central focus would instead be scripture-shaped conceptualizations of the soteriological significance of suffering in a world that is rooted in supreme goodness. Without aspiring toward a comprehensive breadth that would encompass all these scholarly perspectives, we will highlight some Hindu theological attempts to make sense of the why in “Why does suffering exist in God’s good world – at all?” and “Why me – in particular?”, and indicate how these conceptual exercises may be translated into everyday transactions with the recalcitrant realities of suffering. A leitmotif across Hindu soteriological traditions is that the karmic processes of rebirth – riddled with duḥkha – constitute a moral stage along whose pathways individuals are gradually perfected toward their telos of supramundane fulfillment. In this chapter, we will explore some intersections between, on the one hand, these Hindu understandings of duḥkha and, on the other hand, Anglo-American philosophical materials on the “problem of evil” – namely, the question of why there is evil in a world which is said to be created by God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. These philosophical articulations of the “problem” fall into two broad categories – the logical and the

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evidential. In the former, it is claimed that there is a logical chain that leads ineluctably from the premise: “there is evil” to the conclusion: “therefore, there is no God with omni-attributes”. However, it is generally agreed that the conclusion does not, in fact, follow with deductive necessity from the premise, and so much of the philosophical labor in this field is instead centered on assessing the claim that we may conclude that God who is omnipotent and morally perfect does not exist on the inductive bases of instances of seemingly pointless suffering. Unlike the logical variant which, if sound, would yield an irrefutable demonstration of non-theism, the evidential iteration does not necessarily generate such a conclusion, because whether the “dysteleological” forms of suffering that we often encounter are truly gratuitous or are only seemingly so from within our worldly conditions remains an intensely debated point. Another way of mapping these philosophical terrains is with the distinction between two responses to the “problem” – defense and theodicy. The former styles seek to rebut the charge that the pervasiveness of evil demonstrates the non-existence of God by offering arguments as to why evil is not an epistemic defeater for the existence of God. In an important version called “skeptical theism”, it is argued that human epistemic agents are unable to plumb the depths of the divine wisdom in which certain instances of evil are allowed and by which these instances remain encompassed.1 The latter styles are more metaphysically heavyweight in that instead of placing the burden of proof on the critic of theism, they offer some substantive accounts of how suffering is charged with teleological significance in God’s world. In one version called “free-will theodicy”, suffering is said to be the result of the human misuse of their agential capacities which are granted to them by God, while in another called “soul-making theodicy”, suffering is viewed as a concomitant of the difficult environments from within which human beings seek to return to God in the process of cultivating other-regarding virtues. As we will see in this chapter, certain aspects of skeptical theism, free-will theodicy, and soul-making theodicy are reflected across premodern and contemporaneous Hindu theological contexts. In the first section, we offer a conceptual overview of how a key Vedic motif (c. 1200 bce) of symbiotic synergies across human and divine interfaces supplies certain root metaphors for subsequent Hindu conceptualizations of evil, understood in terms of the lack or negation of a proper ordering of beings, goods, and values. We move on to discuss, in the second section, some Vedāntic theological articulations (c. 800 ce) of these metaphors where suffering is domesticated, reoriented, or sublated. The thin red line of suffering weaves crisscrossing patterns – at times in a seemingly gratuitous or pointless manner – through the golden tapestry of indivisible being, and Hindu scriptural commentaries can be read as numerous exercises in grappling with this gnawing absence at the heart of foundational presence. Drawing together these strands, we offer a constructive theology in the third section, by highlighting two interrelated responses to the existential densities of suffering. In the first, certain responses are offered to the inquisitive aspirant to mitigate the sting – epistemic as well as existential – of the “problem of evil”, by using idioms such as karma, reincarnation, cosmological order, spiritual amelioration, and so on. At this preliminary stage of free-will theodicy and soul-making theodicy, the aspirant is pedagogically informed that the universe is structured by moral causation, and so their experiences of suffering are not haphazard occurrences or inexplicable singularities but

Stephen Wykstra, “The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering: On Avoiding the Evils of Appearance”, IJPR 16, no. 2 (1984): 73–93.

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are intricately threaded into reality that is oriented toward liberation. Along the path toward the spiritual summit of a skeptical theism, however, an individual learns to indwell the world without actively demanding responses to the why – it is sufficient that they are able to discern the unfolding of the mysterious divine purpose as much in joyfulness as in suffering. At this summit of a “learned ignorance”, argumentative questing is sublimated into an eloquent silence in which individuals live trustfully in the intensified realization that the divine is with the world and the world is in the divine. In other words, according to this Hindu theological strand, through karmic processes of gradual moral purgation, individuals may become so progressively fine-tuned to the all-environing divinity that they receive even – or perhaps especially – their worldly suffering as a concrete instantiation of the divine presence that is reforming their finite existences.

EVIL AS DHARMIC DISINTEGRATION The fons et origo of Hindu styles of conceptualizing the human self, the divine reality, and the relation between them, is the conceptual-experiential field called the “Veda”. In a strictly historical sense, this term refers to the hymns, invocations, and mantras in compositions such as the Ṛgveda (c. 1500 bce) and in a broader sense, to several subsequent scriptural bodies – such as the Brāhmaṇas (c. 900 bce), the Upaniṣads (c. 600–200 bce), the Manusmṛti (c. 200 ce), the Bhagavad-gītā (c. 300 ce), the multiple Purāṇas (c. 500–1000 ce), and so on – which have alternately reinforced, revised, or reformulated the original Vedic vision. The word “Veda” itself is derived from a root which means “to know” – the knowledge in question is not a mere acquisition of information relating to spatiotemporal entities but the proper understanding of the deep reality of the interlinkages or homologies (bandhu) that dynamically crisscross the world of the humans and the world of the deities. The multiple layers of the Ṛgveda are animated by the theo-poetic vision of the universe as an organically interrelated whole whose diverse segments have emanated from the sacrificial dismemberment of a cosmic person. This primordial sacrifice (yajña) performed by the gods generates dharma – a multivalent concept which encompasses the senses of order, harmony, stability, and coherence at cosmological, social, political, and moral levels. Crucially, in the understanding of the Vedic seer-poets and the later commentators on the Vedic texts, unless this original sacrifice is constructively repeated at key temporal transitions across the day and across the year, the densely-knit fabrics of reality would gradually unravel, and the non-dharma “evil” of degeneration, decay, and dissolution would creep into the world. To put it somewhat aphoristically, worldly dharma is not an always established fact but is a constantly repeated performance. Thus, the Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa narrates that a battle went on for years between Prajāpati, the lord of all finite beings, and Mṛtyu, death personified, since both were equally strong and neither could overcome the other. Finally, Prajāpati had a vision of the symbolic connections between meters, melodies, and verses, and with this knowledge-shaped power, he defeated Mṛtyu.2 In short, the Vedic cosmos is precariously poised on a knife-edge balance between life and death, order and chaos, and good and evil – it is the ritual’s dynamism that injects the rejuvenating power of being into the universe’s structures threatened by dissolution. In some strata of the Upaniṣads,

W. K. Mahony, The Artful Universe: An Introduction to the Vedic Religious Imagination (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 143.

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this cosmos is re-envisioned allegorically so that the sacrifice is understood, through a psycho-cosmic mapping, not as an external ritual performed with physical implements but as an interiorized offering of the individual’s cognitions, breaths, and volitions into the purgative “fires” of self-inquiry. The underlying motif of “evil” as a lack of cosmological alignment is developed across the therapeutic paradigms of Sāṃkhya-Yoga, which repeatedly highlight the pervasiveness of duḥkha in a world marked with mutability and also outline disciplines for its cessation (nirodha). Thus, Patañjali’s Yogasūtra (II. 15) declares that everything indeed is duḥkha to the one who discerns correctly. In this diagnostic approach to the human condition, it is claimed that only after we have realized the true depths of duḥkha shall we seek a remedy. To facilitate this “healing” insight, several techniques are laid down – including steps such as yogic postures, control of the breath, and awareness of oneself as pure witness and as liberated from the cycles of rebirths (saṃsāra) – which are geared toward enabling an individual to become disassociated from ephemeral products and recover the transcendental purity of the deep self (puruṣa). These cosmological visions, mythic narratives, and spiritual techniques become rich exegetical sites for theological patterns of Hindu hermeneutics, which begin to develop from around 800 ce and which are clustered under the exegetical descriptor “Vedānta”. Their Veda-rooted worldviews invoke the liberating power that is invested in the sacred knowledge (vidyā) of the self (ātman) and the self’s location in the divine ground (Brahman). Conversely, because human beings are in a state of ignorance (avidyā) about the embodied self and the divine reality, they remain subject to saṃsāra suffused with suffering. According to an influential strand systematized by Śaṃkara (c. 800 ce) – Advaita Vedānta – the vidyā that overcomes worldly suffering is the realization that one’s true spiritual self is not metaphysically distinct (advaita) from the ineffable divine ground which is beyond all descriptions. Suffering is a concomitant of the deep-seated avidyā that leads us to regard the human self and its divine ground as two ontologically distinct realities. In contrast, according to several variations on theistic metaphysics elaborated by Rāmānuja (c. 1100 ce), Madhva (c. 1300 ce), and others, the liberating vidyā that takes individuals across the turbulent oceans of suffering to the safe haven is the cultivation of unalloyed devotional love (bhakti) through which they become single-mindedly centered in the supremely personal Lord (īśvar). On these theistic landscapes, duḥkha serves as a visceral calibrator of the pilgrim’s progress toward an intensification of the sense of the presence of the Lord. That is, duḥkha is an existential reminder that the “I” has not been fully purged of its acquisitive dispositions and become re-centered in the Lord when it would accept its joys as well as its sorrows as rooted in the Lord.

SUFFERING AS KARMIC TELEOLOGY It is with respect to such articulations of Vedāntic philosophical theology that we may speak of the “problem of evil” as it is conceptualized in post-Leibniz European contexts – the ultimate basis of saṃsāra that is mired in evil is the indivisible plenitude beyond all human imperfections, namely, Brahman, which raises the question as to whether Brahman is unwilling to eliminate this evil or does desire to eradicate it but does not have the power to do so. A leitmotif running through these Vedāntic universes is that a soul-making theodicy can situate instances of seemingly pointless suffering within a moral order such that the suffering undergone by an individual is shaped by a karma-

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guided vector across multiple productions and dissolutions of the world which is without temporal origination (anādi). Max Weber famously declared that the “Karma doctrine . . . represents the most consistent theodicy ever produced by history”,3 and this claim is rearticulated, among many others, by Swami Paramananda, who argues that a world structured by karma and rebirth is an unbroken moral whole: “All reward and punishment are only the natural reactions of our own actions and wholly determined by us. We reward and punish ourselves.”4 In these contexts, however, it is important not to speak of “the Hindu karma theodicy” – there are significant differences across the traditions over the dynamics of the karmic streams, the soteriological significance of duḥkha, the metaphysical reality of impermanent saṃsāra, and so on. Nevertheless, these Vedāntic traditions share the view that each individual can strive, with the conviction that there is no deep randomness in the moral universe, toward their spiritual development that unfolds across many lifetimes. The long-range operation of moral causation is spelled out with quasi-mathematical precision by Bhāgavata-purāṇa VI.1.45 (c. 900 ce): the same person enjoys the fruits of the same meritorious or de-meritorious act in the next world in the same manner and to the same extent according to the manner and the extent to which that act has been performed in this world. On these cosmological vistas of vast worlds without temporal beginning, the Vedāntic exegetical streams outlined earlier expound a set of aphorisms from the Brahmasūtra (2.1.32-36) in engaging with the question of the origin, the purpose, and the telos of duḥkha. These aphorisms grapple with the theme that Brahman cannot be the ultimate cause of the universe in which various types of inequalities, defects, and imperfections are expressed. In his commentary on Brahmasūtra 2.1.34, Śaṃkara responds that this world structured by inequality is generated as the fruits of actions of particular individuals, so that the divine reality, who produces each new world-order by taking into consideration these factors in a previous world-order, is irreproachable. Just as the rain is the common cause for the production of all crops, where the differences between rice and barley are to be attributed to specific potentialities, the divine reality is the common ground of all living beings, and inequalities across them should be attributed to their specific karmic merits and demerits. A similar note is struck in Rāmānuja’s karma-structured free-will theodicy, which begins with the prima facie claim that a merciful God would not produce a world filled with evils of various kinds – rather, moved by pity God would produce one that is completely happy. In his commentary on Brahmasūtra 2.1.33, he argues that the Lord produces the world as a non-necessitated and superabundantly productive sport (līlā). Though the Lord is ever self-satisfied in that the Lord has no desires that are unattained, the Lord may find a certain activity delightful not because the Lord stands to gain something from it but simply because it is inherently delectable. However, while the Lord’s production of the next world-order is thus not constrained by any necessity, it indeed follows the karmic results of the prior actions of individuals, so that the Lord cannot be charged with partiality or cruelty with respect to the differential duḥkha 5. At the anthropological core of these cosmological visions is the conviction that the spiritual self (ātman) is deathless, which remains for many Hindus a silent spring of

3 Max Weber, The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism, trans. Hans Gerth and Don Martindale (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1958), 121. 4 Swami Paramananda, Reincarnation and Immortality (Cohasset, MA: The Vedanta Centre, 1961), 52. 5 George Thibaut, trans., The Vedānta-Sūtras with the Commentary by Rāmānuja (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904), 477–9.

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consolation in their experiences of loss, lamentation, and death. Thus, the following verses from the Bhagavad-gītā 8:5-6 are sometimes recited to dying people: And whoever, at the time of death, gives up the body while remembering Me [Lord Kṛṣṇa] alone, attains My being. Of this there is no doubt. Whatever state one remembers while giving up the body at the time of death, that state one attains without fail.6 In sum, there is no radical evil in the world, and duḥkha should be understood as inwardly charged with teleological directionality toward liberation from the fragile conditions of a shattered finitude. Therefore, the karmic processes should not be viewed merely as a juridical matter of recompense – on these Vedāntic landscapes individuals undergo, in and through the retributive system of karma, a soul-making reformation in the direction of the divine reality. While this karma-centered account is sometimes presented as a (and, by Weber, the most) rationally comprehensive theodicy, its conceptual coherence and moral plausibility have been questioned from various perspectives. Without walking deep into these dialectical terrains, we will focus on three major challenges and also propose certain responses to them. As we will see, while the karmic theodicy offers certain responses to the “problem of evil” in terms of the morally structured processes of reincarnation, regarding the fundamental ontological and epistemological questions: “but why is the world shaped by reincarnation and why accept the truthfulness of this account?”, we are directed toward the idioms of trustful acceptance, scriptural revelation, divine creativity, and ultimate mystery.

KNOWING THE UNKNOWABLE DIVINE First, one of the most significant critiques is the seeming lack of proportionality between the horrifying forms of duḥkha that we often witness in the world and the claim that because there are no ruptures in the webs of moral causation, all duḥkha of an individual is causally related to actions performed by that individual in the past. A mother’s anguished demand for a rational explanation in the face of her only child who is dying in an excruciatingly painful manner, and various other contexts where the existential gravity of duḥkha has crushed an individual rather than ennobling them, cry out defiantly as protests against the theoretical pretensions of a karmic theodicy which seeks to domesticate duḥkha. This is one dialectical juncture where a karmic theodicy could strike an anti-theodicy note of “skeptical theism”, and argue that in the ultimate analysis, not currently accessible to finite human intellects, it will be seen that the proportionalities are always sustained by the Lord who is the overseer of the karmic processes. Given these epistemic gaps, a karmic theodicy should not be read as a rationally transparent account of the occurrence of every instance of duḥkha, or as a predictive calculus where the precise quanta and the differential distribution of duḥkha can be immediately spelled out. This cognitive incompleteness is also reflected in ethnographic accounts such as Ursula Sharma’s fieldwork in a village in Northern India. The process of karmic retribution was regarded by villagers as operating through the instrumentality of human agents or malignant spirits, so that natural causality and karmic causality are not seen as mutually opposed. Thus, Sharma argues that the principle of karma is “logically prior to all other possible explanations in the sense that the latter can be reduced to or made compatible

Shirley Firth, Dying, Death and Bereavement in a British Hindu Community (Leuven: Peeters, 1997), 66–7.

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with the karma doctrine in the final analysis”.7 In other words, a karmic theodicy is to be read not as an empirically verifiable doctrine which can be put to the test right now with respect to a particular instance of duḥkha such as the mother’s heartbroken lament, but as a theocentric exercise in metaphysical cosmology in which one offers the hope that duḥkha will be seen retrospectively to have been charged with soteriological telos – if one is patient enough. In such everyday Hindu contexts, then, a karmic theodicy operates as a Wittgensteinian “hinge proposition”, which remains the conceptual compass for navigating the existential turbulences of duḥkha. Second, it has been argued that the claim that moral regeneration can be sustained by a karmic theodicy is not coherent because individuals do not recall their putative past lives, and therefore they cannot be regarded as morally culpable for wickedness that they cannot remember. In response, it has been argued that while indeed we do not (usually) have such memories from previous lifetimes, this epistemic lack in itself does not falsify the metaphysical claims relating to a reincarnating self.8 Just as we do not conclude that our early infancy did not exist simply because we cannot recall it, we should not claim that our lack of memories relating to previous lifetimes definitively disproves their existence. Conversely, in references to enlightened masters – such as the Buddha and various Hindu spiritual aspirants (Manusmṛti 4.149) – one encounters the claim that along the pathways of soteriological development an individual gains the ability to discern the chains of karmic causality running through the moral tapestries of the universe. In the case of others, a karmic theodicy is to be taken as an article of faith so that an individual would re-envision their temporal existence as an ongoing pilgrimage which may lead through horrendous duḥkha but would always trust that no such duḥkha is ultimately dysteleological. In other words, just as we accept certain accounts of our early years offered by our parents because we regard them as our epistemic authorities, our epistemic confidence in a karmic theodicy should be based on our trusting acceptance that the statements of spiritual masters such as Hindu yogis are veridical. This cosmological optimism is highlighted by Monima Chadha and Nick Trakakis in their claim that “[t]he hope that a just punishment will be meted out to the criminal at some future time is sufficient to sustain our faith in the legal system as a means of moral education, and a similar hope motivates the belief that the law of karma can allow for the moral development of the individual”.9 Third, it has been charged that precisely the claim that a karmic theodicy is a rationally complete account of duḥkha is, from a moral perspective, its weakest link. For if an individual’s duḥkha is simply an unfolding of their karmic demerits, so that there is no unmerited suffering, we seem to be indwelling a fatalistic universe. However, in various presentations of a karmic theodicy – premodern as well as contemporary – the “simply” is not read in terms of strong causal determinism, but they presuppose a libertarian or (at least) a compatibilist account of free will. While certain aspects of one’s current embodiment are inherited through antecedent karmic chains, an individual is said to possess some volitional elbowroom in this lifetime to work against vicious dispositions and cultivate virtuous styles of living (Mahābhārata 12.36.1; Garuḍa Purāṇa 1.230.42). Moreover, because individuals can thus exercise some measure of moral agency, a karmic theodicy should not be read as supporting styles of amoralism, for various scriptural texts Ursula Sharma, “Theodicy and the Doctrine of Karma”, Man 8, no. 3 (1973): 347–64, 358. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, An Idealist View of Life (London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1988), 237. 9 Monima Chadha and Nick Trakakis, “Karma and the Problem of Evil: A Response to Kaufman”, Philosophy East and West 57, no. 4 (2007): 533–56, 537. 7 8

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exhort individuals to cultivate other-regarding virtues such as benevolence, compassion, and others. Arvind Sharma puts the point in this way: The same doctrine of karma and rebirth, which holds us accountable for what happens to us, also urges us to perform good karma rather than bad karma and unattached karma rather than attached karma. Thus, just as doctors go about treating diseases that patients have brought upon themselves, those who subscribe to the doctrine of karma and rebirth are also under an ethical obligation “to help reduce the pain and misery in the world”.10

CRUCIBLES OF DUḤKHA AND LIBERATION IN LĪLĀ As our discussion in the previous sections indicates, while a karma theodicy is often put forward as a perspicuously rational explanation of duḥkha, this explanation itself is embedded in thick clusters of metaphysical and epistemological claims about the nature of reality, the reach of human reason, and so on. Thus, as we have seen, the explanation for why an individual is presently undergoing duḥkha is couched in terms of their karmic deserts, but if we progressively push the explanatory chains backward and ask why there is a karmic order in the first place, one skeptical theist answer is phrased in terms of the Lord’s joyfully creative sport (līlā) which is not cognitively comprehensible. The world is founded on and suffused with the “excess” of līlā, but for reasons that are not transparent to us the lightness of this ontological surplus is shot through with the dark densities of duḥkha. However, as one begins to re-envision the finite world as a gracious outreach of divine līlā and inhabit its duḥkha-ravaged matrices, an individual may become so saturated with a sense of the divine presence that they perceive the divine player as much in suffering as in joy. In this active rewiring of one’s cognitive-experiential subjectivities, a karmic theodicy is to be understood not so much as an explanation for why there is (a particular instance of) suffering as an invitation to become more strongly God-intoxicated when one would trustfully accept that, in the ultimate analysis, there is no pointless suffering. For instance, the Bhāgavata-purāṇa (c. 900 ce) – a pivotal text for many theistic Hindu traditions – is replete with narratives where worldly loss is initially perceived by individuals as duḥkha but is subsequently re-envisioned as God’s gracious action of reorienting them toward God (11.23.28; 10.88.8). This motif reaches its theological culmination at 1.8.25: “O teacher of the universe [Kṛṣṇa], may there always be calamities everywhere and may we have a vision of you [in those calamities], so that we would not have to see worldly existence again.” In other words, the ideal devotee of God (Kṛṣṇa) does not shun duḥkha but actively seeks its purgative fires, which would burn away the empirical dross encrusted over the “I”. In more recent times, this note is struck by the mystical figure Ramakrishna Paramhangsa (1836–86) – in his discourses with disciples, the spiritual pathway is often presented in terms of the devotional practices of becoming morally reoriented to God in and through the crucibles of suffering, so that such individuals would overcome egoistic absorption in themselves and see God in everything. In the following dialogue, we hear Ramakrishna articulating his “panentheistic” vision (vijñāna) of the world as the vital embodiment of līlā, so that it is one unbroken stream of divine life pulsating Arvind Sharma, “Karma, Rebirth, and the Problem of Evil: An Interjection in the Debate between Whitley Kaufman and Monima Chadha and Nick Trakakis”, Philosophy East and West 58, no. 4 (2008): 572–5, 573.

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through the circuits of human joys and sorrows. Crucially, while this līlā – which graciously projects, enfolds, and draws back the world – may be experienced by novices as frivolous or callous cruelty on God’s part, those who are undergoing the discipline of surrendering the overly inquisitive and acquisitive “I” to the divine will are gradually able to affirm, in the light of their conviction of the possibility of universal salvation, “in the end, all is līlā”. Nanda: Is God partial? If things happen through God’s grace (kṛpā), then I must say that God is partial. Ramakrishna: God has become everything – the living beings and the world. You will realise this when you have perfect knowledge . . . Nanda: Why has God assumed all these forms, where some are wise and some are ignorant? Ramakrishna: This is God’s sweet will . . . The Divine Mother is full of bliss and is engaged in the sport (līlā) of creation, preservation, and destruction . . . Nanda: This may be Her sweet will, but it is our death! Ramakrishna: But who are you? The Divine Mother has become all this. As long as you do not know Her you keep on saying, “I”, “I”. All will realise God – and indeed all will be liberated . . .11 The poet-thinker Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) composed several meditative songs which draw on similar motifs from Vedic ritual imaginations of the world as a sacrificial order and Vedāntic spiritual disciplines of indwelling duḥkha through the conscious cultivation of self-surrender to the divine. As this song (in my translation from Bengali) indicates, the soteriological surgery of God’s “fiery mercy” is preparing individuals for the supreme object of human desire – God – by cauterizing their half-baked desires in the blazing kilns of worldly duḥkha.12 Zealously do I pursue my manifold desires – By denying them to me you have saved me! This cruel kindness of yours fills up my life. Even without my asking you these you have given me – The skies, the light, my body, my mind, and my life Every day you are making me worthy of these great gifts By saving me from the perils of unbridled desires. While treading on your pathway Sometimes I linger and sometimes I walk You would cruelly step away from me Alas, I know this too to be your mercy – It is because you wish to draw me to you that you turn me away You will make my life complete and prepare me for our union By saving me from the perils of my half-baked desires.

11 Mahendranath Gupta, Śrīśrīrāmakṛṣṇakathāmṛta: Śrīma-kathita (Kolkata: Udbodhan, 2010 [1897–1932]), 878–9. 12 See https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=jrm​_49YK684.

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CONCLUSION In everyday instances of suffering which threaten to unravel one’s existential fabrics, there is often a phenomenological rawness that no amount of theoretical discourse can dispel or domesticate. To express the point through real-world subjectivities, duḥkha hurts – and often it hurts a lot. On such occasions, the much-vaunted epistemic merits of theodicy could seem to be so many pyrrhic victories. Thus, between a presently fractured humanity and its projected perfection, the Hindu cosmos remains precariously perched on the edge of horrendous evils – even as various motifs are hermeneutically resourced, across Hindu sociocultural life in the here and now, to speak of the divine reality as the power of being that is revitalizing the frayed sinews of the world and transmuting worldly duḥkha. As we have seen, the strands of “theodicy” and “skeptical theism” are densely intertwined in these Hindu theological milieus: duḥkha is not so much an intellectual problem as a theological reminder to remain anchored in the secure harbor of immutable being while traversing the terrifying oceans of the world. Such adepts learn to re-envision their duḥkha as a purgative stigmata of the ongoing perfection of the world in which nothing is irredeemably evil, so that gradually the problem of evil becomes not so much solved as dissolved.

FURTHER READING Doniger O’Flaherty, Wendy, ed. Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Herman, Arthur. The Problem of Evil and Indian Thought. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1976. Krishan, Yuvraj. The Doctrine of Karma. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1997.

Chapter 70

Suffering and Evil in Buddhism DANIEL RUMEL

THE MAIN IDEA OF SUFFERING As is well known, the concept of suffering is one of the core ideas of Buddhist thinking from its early origins on. According to the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutra (The Setting in Motion of the Wheel of the Dharma Sutra), “Life is suffering”. Variants of this teaching appear in many formulations and grammatical forms in different texts,1 but the semantic content can be summed up in modern language as: suffering (skt. duḥkha) is an inherent mode of worldly existence. This means that our way of perceiving the world is always accompanied by a feeling of unsatisfactoriness. This can be best explained by an etymological reference: the word used in the first noble truth is duḥkha. It can be traced back to the Sanskrit prefix du (bad) combined with the root kha (hole). The combination suggests a hole in a wheel that is off-centered. If a wheel is not properly centered (so the whole is not good), the ride (in the carriage) becomes unpleasant. During the history of the translation of Buddhist texts into Western languages, this led to the insight that “suffering” is a term too narrow for the word “duḥkha”, so in recent translations the word “unsatisfactoriness” has become a more common translation, because it includes all kinds of worldly distress like anger, fear, greed, and frustration. But the structure of this teaching becomes much clearer when we consider the second noble truth, which describes the cause of suffering: thirst (skt. tṛ́ṣṇā). This refers to the capacity of the human mind to imagine a better situation. As we know, our life always contains unpleasant elements, like sickness, aging, and general pain, but as human beings we can also imagine those circumstances going away. Thus, the unpleasantness of life is also a comparative problem, which simply refers to the fact that we can always imagine a better situation, which makes all present ones unsatisfactory. Since we are always thirsty for a better situation, we suffer our whole life. Life is suffering.

Still one of the most reliable analyses of its grammatical structure, its sematic variants, and its different appearances can be found in K. R. Norman,“The Four Noble Truths”, in Indological and Buddhist Studies, ed. Jan W. de Jong and Luise A. Hercus (volume in honor of Professor J. W. de Jong on his sixtieth birthday, 1982), 377–91.

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THE IDEA OF EVIL If we define evil broadly as everything that causes suffering, it becomes clear that we are facing a different approach in Buddhism than what we used to in most Western formulations. This can be explained by considering the two other marks of existence, which, together with suffering, complete the conditio existentia: anatman (no self) and anitya (impermanence). The theory of anatman was one of the most important concepts in early Buddhism and prominent in the schism from the other Vedic traditions that have come to be known as Hinduism. Whereas Vedic orthodoxy was concerned with how the eternal soul (skt. ātman) was connected to the unfathomable principle of ultimate reality called Brahman, the Buddhist school denied the existence of an ātman. So, for all Buddhist approaches, the basic starting point is the denial of a distinct entity you can address as a person. Additionally, the idea of anitya claims that our stable perception of a distinct person, or more radically of any distinct object, is also mistaken. There is actually no entity which can be described as distinct and stable. From a Western perspective we may know the notion of Heraclitus that one can never jump into the same river twice. The Buddhist perspective would radicalize this notion: you cannot jump in one and the same river even once. Early Buddhist philosophy tried to elaborate upon this point. The outcome was a great body of literature called the abhidhamma, which today forms a major part of the Buddhist canon. The main view could be summed up as follows: our mind constantly constructs distinct stable objects. In reality no object is to be found. There is only a flowing stream of causes and effects that never stands still. There is no moment in which the perception of the mind sees reality as it is.2 The problem is that we perceive the world and ourselves as stable, even though this perception is falsified every time by the reality of anitya. What results is suffering. Human beings do not see reality as it is. Therefore they cling to things (their imagined self-identity and imagined objects) which do not exist. But if we understand evil as a moral term which accrues to distinct human individuals in the Western sense of the malum morale, we reach a problem. The existence of distinct human individuals has already been denied in the doctrine of anatman. Some Western interpretations of Buddhism, and also some Buddhist interpretations as well, seem to suggest otherwise, but a critically important and also well-known aspect has to be understood here: the idea of karma. Karma simply means action and refers to acts, in the first instance, without any moral judgment. In most Western interpretations, it seems that bad acts lead to unhappy future lives. But it should be noted that the goal of Buddhism is not a better life. Buddhism seeks to end the circle of rebirth itself. This ending of rebirth is called nirvāṇa. This teaching is complicated by the fact that most Buddhist schools deny the existence of an entity that can be reborn through the cycle of death and rebirth. Accordingly, what we might call evil acts – acts that cause suffering – are just outcomes of the same cause that causes suffering: thirst. Because life is always driven by thirst, human beings cause suffering in other human beings, in animals and in plants (Buddhist schools mostly refer to “sentient beings”). The evil act causes new conditions that give rise to more thirst, which then causes new evil acts. This chain of causes is problematic: How can there be a cycle of rebirth (saṃsāra) if The broad context here is of course much more complex. As an introduction and a translation of the second book, see Seṭṭhila, The Book of Analysis (Vibhaṅga): The Second Book of the Abhidhamma Piṭaka (Pali Text Society translation series, 39; London: Luzac, 1969). 2

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there is no self that can be reborn? The solution to this problem has to do with the insight the Buddha had underneath the Bodhi-Tree the insight which made the Buddha a Buddha, one who sees. The solution is the twelvefold chain of conditioned arising (skt. pratītyasamutpāda). It describes the process of rebirth as a simple emergence of conditions and effects, which themselves cause further effects. So if the question is asked, what is evil (or what causes suffering), it is never a particular person, who is evil, but the process itself. It is also hard to distinguish a distinct act and identify it as evil, because every act is just an outcome, a fruit of a planted seed, which underwent the same process.3 But what is described with the term “nirvāṇa”? This is explained in the third noble truth with logical clarity: “If the cause vanishes, the effect also does.”4 So what has to be extinguished is thirst. The question has been debated throughout the history of Buddhism in highly complex ways. This literature centers on a form of insight, in which the mind of a human being breaks through its own limitations, sees the reality of conditioned arising, and attains liberation from suffering. The attainment of nirvāṇa can be related to certain beneficial practices. Consequently, the idea that there is good karma can be justified in a certain way. In general, these practices make up what we think of as Buddhist ethics. These practices are summarized in the fourth noble truth, the Noble Eightfold Path (skt. āryāṣṭāṅgamārga). There are eight categories of righteous acts which stop thirst and therefore lead to nirvāṇa: “Right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right meditation.”5 This is the starting point of a Buddhist ethics. But to understand these practices properly, we must remember that even here a distinct self is not presumed. The acts are not executed by a particular person but can be described as factors.

THE EMANCIPATORY FACTORS If everything that causes suffering is in itself evil, the whole process of the twelvefold chain of conditioned arising is evil in itself. The goal of Buddhism is to discern a way out of this circle. Buddhists look to what are called “factors” (skt. dharmas) which stop the stream of cause and effect by provoking insight. One of these factors is named “absence of greed found in cravings and appetites”.6 This makes perfect sense, because, if the extinction of thirst is the goal of redemption, this goal can be approximated by the absence of greed, cravings, and appetite in the mind. Another factor is “the absence of delusion found in the stupidity of selfish indifference”, which describes the extinction of selfishness as a mental quality. The extinction of delusion

To understand this principle from a Western ontological perspective, see Paul Williams and Anthony Tribe, Buddhist Thought: A Complete Introduction to the Indian Tradition (reprint; London: Routledge, 2006). Online see http://www​.loc​.gov​/catdir​/enhancements​/fy0650​/2003541733​-d​.html, 62. 4 For a precise discussion of the four noble truths, see Eviatar Shulman, Rethinking the Buddha: Early Buddhist Philosophy as Meditative Perception (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Online see http://gbv​.eblib​ .com​/patron​/FullRecord​.aspx​?p​=1642401, 136–88. 5 See for instance Majjhima Nikaya 44. For a proper translation, see Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Culavedalla Sutta: The Shorter Set of Questions-and-Answers, https://www​.accesstoinsight​.org​/tipitaka​/mn​/mn​.044​.than​.html. 6 Peter L. Johnson, trans., On Realizing There Is Only the Virtual Nature of Consciousness: Vijñapti Matratā Siddhi (An Lac Publications, 2018), 55. https://www​.amazon​.com​/Realizing​-There​-Virtual​-Nature​-Consciousness​ /dp​/B0932CX9YZ?. 3

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is a matter of vigilance, which in modern Western culture has come to be known as mindfulness. The practice of these moral values should not be thought of in terms of the agency of a distinct person. They are mental qualities which infuse the undifferentiated stream of consciousness with a quality that causes some mental factors to vanish. Nirvāṇa arises when the illusion of being a separate self stops arising. Nirvāṇa means “extinguishing the flame”. In light of this teaching, the Buddha did not reach nirvāṇa as a distinct entity. Rather he saw the reality of the twelvefold chain of conditioned arising as it is. The precise meaning of “Buddha” is the one who sees (often translated as: the Awakened One). To reach awakening means to open up one’s eyes to the reality as it is, which causes the delusion of being a distinct separate self to vanish.

THE BODDHISATTVA IDEAL The Mahāyāna tradition of Buddhism reformulated the traditional notion of a Bodhisattva into a moral ideal. Properly translated, this term refers to a being (skt. satva) heading for awakening (skt. bodhi), or a Buddha-to-be. The figure of a Bodhisattva was first introduced in the stories of the former lives of Buddha Shakyamuni, which recount his convoluted path to awakening to Buddhahood. During the history of Mahāyāna Buddhism especially, the Bodhisattva became the ideal model of ethics and morality. Stories concerning Bodhisattvas differ according to the sources. The Pali-Canon 547 poems contain Jātakas, but they can only be understood with commentaries and only a few of them add up to a full story. In the Jātaka-Mālā of Arya Śura we find thirty-four full stories.7 The basic pattern of these stories is quite simple. In his former lives, Buddha Shakyamuni lived either as an animal or a human being. In most of these stories, he acts in a self-sacrificing way, giving his life to save the life of other beings or easing their suffering. One of the most prominent examples is the Sasa-Jātaka. Here the Buddha lives as a hare in company with other animals in the forest. As a hungry fasting Brahmin comes to him and asks for something to eat to survive, the hare asks him to set a fire. After the Brahmin has done so, he jumps into the fire to sacrifice himself for the sake of the life of the Brahmin. Before doing so, the hare shakes out his fur to prevent other insects from being burned with him. In the end, the Brahmin reveals himself as the god Sakka, who tested the moral perfection of the hare and engraved his image into the moon as a model for perfection. Buddhist philosophy reflected on these moral narratives. The hare renounces self-attachment in the effort to ease the suffering of another. The hare has extinguished its illusion of being a separate self by means of a practice that puts the hare on the path to emancipation. Although the Jātakas are contained in the Pali-Canon, the Bodhisattva as a moral excellence is most highly developed in Mahāyāna Buddhism. Here it serves as the main ethical and moral ideal,8 but it is always paired with the paradox of selflessness in

See Āryaśūra; Aditya N. D. Haksar, Jatakamala: Stories from the Buddha’s previous births (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2003). 8 For the proper understanding of the development from the Jātakas to the Bodhisattva Ideal see Anālayo, The Genesis of the Bodhisattva Ideal (Hamburg Buddhist Studies 1; Hamburg: Hamburg University Press, 2010). 7

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Buddhist ethics. As a consequence, a Bodhisattva can only be considered a Bodhisattva if he gradually loses the sense of himself as a distinct self. He can only be a Bodhisattva, if he loses the idea of existent sentient beings. But as a Bodhisattva he should care for the sentient beings. The Diamond Sutra formulates this paradox in one of its most prominent chapters: The Buddha told Subhūti, “Bodhisattva-mahāsattvas should pacify their minds thusly: ‘All different types of sentient beings, whether born from eggs, born from wombs, born from moisture, or born from transformation; having form or no form; having thought, no thought, or neither thought nor no thought – I will cause them all to become liberated and enter Remainderless Nirvāṇa.’ Yet when sentient beings have been liberated without measure, without number, and to no end, truly no sentient beings have been liberated. Why? Subhūti, a bodhisattva with a notion of a self, a notion of a person, a notion of a being, or a notion of a life, is not a bodhisattva.”9 It can be clearly seen in this passage that there is a moral ideal present in Buddhist culture. But the structure in which it is primarily described is categorically different to most Western patterns of understanding, because the responsible subject, which is the central reference point for Western ethical approaches, is declared to have not been found.

THE DENIAL OF A CREATOR AND OF A PARTICULAR THEODICY From the beginning, several realms, including multiple heavens and hells, have been an inherent part of Buddhist culture. Buddhists picked up the idea of gods, deities, and divine realms from the Vedic tradition that preceded them. But with all these concepts, they paid close attention to avoid the idea of a personal creator god. The reason for this was surprisingly linked to the question of theodicy. There can be no personal deity who has created the world, its realms and its sentient beings. If such a deity existed, the deity would be of a diminished moral order compared to human beings since the world as we know it is a place of suffering.10 We see immediately that the question of theodicy was more radicalized in the Buddhist context than it was in the Western Christian one. The Christian God is known as a personal being who created a world and afterwards saw, “that it was good” (Genesis 1). But in the Buddhist tradition, “life is suffering”. So the question is not, why does an omnipotent God not prevent suffering in the world, but rather, if life is suffering why did he create this world in the first place. Although the Sutra literature is voluminous and its discourses are complex, we can say that the affirmation of the strict relation between cause and effect (pratītyasamutpāda) replaces the notion of a creator who is responsible for a world taken as the realm of suffering.11 So what replaces theodicy in the West is an analytical concept that is philosophically concise: all mental phenomena are simply the result of conditional fields created by acts which are themselves outcomes of other mental phenomena. The way a Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, trans. from Taishō Tripiṭaka volume 8 by the commite of Lapis-Lazuli- Text, number 235. Online see https://lapislazulitexts​.com​/tripitaka​/T0235​-LL​-vajracchedika/. 10 See Leo M. Pruden, Abhidharmakosabhasyam, trans. from the French translation by Louis de la Vallée Poussin (Berkeley, 1988), 306–7. 11 See Richard P. Hayes, “Principled Atheism in the Buddhist Scholastic Tradition”, Journal of Indian Philosophy 16 (1988): 5–28, 8–9. 9

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human being perceives the world is an outcome of past acts, which themselves are an outcome of a past karmic structure. The whole structure is based on ignorance about causes. What, then, is the relationship between the unenlightened mind of ignorance and the enlightened mind? The image, which is often found in Buddhist literature, to describe the correlation of enlightenment and ignorance is the ocean, the wind, and the waves. The Awakening of Faith, a philosophical treatise of the sixth century ce, describes this analogy as in terms of the mind. The water of the ocean is the calm reality of mind only. The wind of ignorance stirs up the water and forms waves. These waves are the phenomena of the world.12 Besides these phenomena, the theory presupposes an ultimate reality, which is apersonal and has nothing to do with the wind of ignorance. The phenomena that arise are caused by karmic forces in which no distinct personal element can be found. Although it is often claimed that Buddhism does not have a theodicy, much of its early concepts are based upon inquiries related to the question of an omnipotent God and the relation such a God would have to a suffering world. It answers the question by rejecting the existence of a personal creator and by replacing it with a phenomenological theory, in which the appearance of phenomena is just a disturbance of the original unity of ultimate reality. The disturbances themselves are described as moments of ignorance caused by thirst. So we find the same pattern as in the above-described twelvefold chain of conditioned arising.

DEMONS AS IMAGERY OF MIND-DISTURBANCES Demons are well-known creatures in Buddhist stories and art.13 The most well-known demon of Buddhist culture is Māra, the god of death and desire.14 In the myth, Māra has three daughters, Ratī (desire), Aratī (literally un-desire, semantically unsatisfactoriness), and Tanhā (greed). It becomes immediately clear, that all three of these are personifications of thirst (skt. tṛishṇā). The figure of Māra is often mentioned in Buddhist literature either as a single god, a ruler of the realm of all sensual elements, or as many god-like daemons, who cause distress in people on the path of awakening. In the philosophical literature, Māra is an allegory of sensual pleasure. The most well-known story of Māra concerns the awakening of the Buddha. Before his awakening, Siddhartha sits under the Bodhi-Tree and Māra sends armies of daemons to provoke the anger of Shakyamuni. After this does not work, he sends his three daughters to seduce him. Siddhartha resists this as well. Then Māra promises him all the empires of the world. Neither does this succeed. Directly afterwards Siddhartha awakens. In early art, Māra is painted as a daemon often in dragon form, sometimes with flames surrounding him and a halo of sculls.

12 Aśvaghoṣa; Paramārtha, The Awakening of Faith, trans. Yoshito Hakeda. [Repr.] [Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research (BDK English Tripiṭaka, 63-IV), 2005], S. 22. 13 Basically, there are eight classes of them: “nāgas, rākṣasas (or yakṣas), gandharvas, asuras, garuḍas, kiṃnaras, mahoragas and bhūthas (also called pretas)”, as outlined by Michel Strickmann, Chinese Magical Medicine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 63. 14 See Kamitsuka Yoshiko, “The Concept of Māra and the Idea of Expelling Demons”, Taoist Resources 6, no. 2 (1996): 30–50.

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A further devil-like figure is the daemon Siṃhamukhā.15 This female deity is mostly painted in a blue-to-black color with the face of a snow lion. She is naked and has a halo of skulls, three eyes, a skull bowl filled with blood, and a huge knife in her right hand. She dances on a naked human couple. In contrast to Māra, she is not viewed negatively. Her third eye represents profound insight. The knife represents her ability to cut through the stream of illusory thought. The blood she drinks represents the negative passions of sentient beings, which she drinks out of compassion.

CONCLUSION We have seen that in Buddhism the question of suffering and evil refers to different categories than it does in Western philosophical approaches. The most important cause is the lack of a creator and a personal idea of God in general. The philosophical structures, which fill the gap, are completely of a different nature. This provides a so-far neglected opportunity for deeper dialogue between Buddhist and Western philosophies. So the Buddhist approach can help us as theologians and Western philosophers to requestion ideas which seem so obvious that we are often not able to question them.

FURTHER READING Boyd, James W. “Symbols of Evil in Buddhism”. The Journal of Asian Studies 31, no. 1 (1971): 63–75. Shim, Jae-Ryong. “Evil and the Overcoming of Suffering in Buddhism”. In The Origin and the Overcoming of Evil and Suffering in the World Religions. A Discourse of the World Religions, Vol. 2. Edited by Peter Koslowski, 8–23. Dordrecht: Springer, 2001. Silk, Jonathan A. “Good and Evil in Indian Buddhism: The Five Sins of Immediate Retribution”. Journal of Indian Philosophy 35 (2007): 253–86. Peacock, John. “Suffering in Mind: The Aetiology of Suffering in Early Buddhism”. Contemporary Buddhism 9, no. 2 (2008): 209–26.

For the following see Evans-Wentz, Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines: Or Seven Books of Wisdom of the Great Path, According to the Late Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup’s English Rendering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 173–5.

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Chapter 71

Zoroastrian Views on Suffering and Death ALMUT HINTZE

The presence of Evil in the world in the face of a wholly good God constitutes a major theme in Zoroastrianism, as it does in many other religions. The problem of theodicy is here resolved by the view that Evil is eternal and uncreated and exists separately from God, and that it has come into the world created by God from outside as an intruder and destructive enemy. It is the ultimate source of all destructive actions, suffering, and death in the world. At the end of time, however, Evil will be forced out of the world and compelled to retreat powerless to the place where it had initially come from. Evil is thus a major player in the Zoroastrian cosmic drama.

SOURCES The main literary sources for Zoroastrian teachings are the Avesta and the Middle Persian (or: Pahlavi) literature.1 The Avesta comprises the sacred texts of the Zoroastrians, the oldest of which presumably date from around the mid-second millennium bce. Transmitted in the oral tradition, and from c. 600 ce onwards alongside a written one, these texts include seventeen hymns (grouped into five Gathas “songs”) attributed to Zarathushtra, the eponymous instigator of the Mazdā-worshiping religion. These and the “Worship in Seven Sections” (Yasna Haptanghāiti) form the Old Avesta, the oldest linguistic witness of any Iranian language. The cultural setting of the Old Avesta points to the Andronovo pastoralist civilization of present-day Kazakhstan in the Bronze Age period, prior to the southward migration of Iranian tribes into Southern Central Asia.2 Although the Old Avestan texts became fixed in the mid-second millennium bce and were from then on learned by rote from generation to generation to be recited in the rituals verbatim as petrified texts, the priestly practice of oral composition in performance

See also Almut Hintze, “Avestan Literature”, in The Literature of Pre-Islamic Iran. Companion Volume I to A History of Persian Literature, ed. Ronald E. Emmerick, Maria Macuch, and Ehsan Yarshater (London: Tauris, 2008); Maria Macuch, “Pahlavi Literature”, in The Literature of Pre-Islamic Iran. Companion Volume I to A History of Persian Literature, ed. Ronald E. Emmerick, Maria Macuch, and Ehsan Yarshater (London: Tauris, 2008), 116–96. 2 See Frantz Grenet, “Zarathustra’s Time and Homeland: Geographical Perspectives”, in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism, ed. Michael Stausberg and Yuhan S. D. Vevaina with the assistance of Anna Tessmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 22. 1

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also continued in the following centuries up to c. 400 bce, in the more recent forms of the Middle and Young Avestan language.3 The surviving texts produced during that long period of time include praises of Ahura Mazdā’s creations (Yasna, Visperad), purity laws (Vidēvdād), and hymns to individual divine beings (Yašts). The various divine beings, including the god Mithra, are all presented as Ahura Mazdā’s creations, while the purity laws, as well as the entire religion, are prescribed by Ahura Mazdā himself and communicated by him to Zarathushtra. Rooted in the pre-historic Indo-Iranian tradition, a complex system of Avestan language rituals was further developed during the first-half of the first millennium bce. One of them is the Yasna (abbr.: Y), or “worship, sacrifice”. Consisting of seventy-two chapters, the Old Avestan texts form its middle part, and these are embedded in Middle and Young Avestan recitations. The Yasna in turn forms the basis of a festive, and longer version, called Visperad (abbr.: Vr) “all masters”, and the latter is the base text of an even longer ritual, the Vidēvdād ceremony, in which all twenty-two chapters of the Vidēvdād (abbr.: V), “the law to keep away the demons”, are intercalated into the Visperad at specific points. Many of the Pahlavi texts are based on Avestan traditions. These include the Būndahišn “Primal Creation”, a Middle Persian text derived from earlier Avestan traditions and particularly important for Zoroastrian cosmology. Much of the surviving Pahlavi literature was developed into the form in which it has come down to us today in the ninth and tenth centuries ce at a time when Iran was already under Arab Muslim rule.

CREATION The Avestan name of the principal deity of the Zoroastrians is Ahura Mazdā, “Wise Lord”, Ohrmazd in Middle Persian. He is the source of all good, beneficent beings. The Avestan name of Evil is Angra Mainyu, “Destructive Force”, Ahriman in Middle Persian. All suffering and death in the world ultimately come from that Destructive Force. In the Avesta, Evil is not directly opposed to Ahura Mazdā but is the symmetrical opposite of Spenta Mainyu, which is Ahura Mazdā’s creative, life-giving force. In the Younger Avesta, Spenta Mainyu is at times an epithet of Ahura Mazdā, and the conceptual merger of the two names results in a direct opposition between Ohrmazd and Ahriman in the Pahlavi texts.4 But Angra Mainyu/ Ahriman, although uncreated and eternal, is not perceived as a god but as the dark Destructive Force which counteracts the works of the one god, Ahura Mazdā/ Ohrmazd. Ahura Mazdā himself is visible in light, especially in the ritual fire during a ceremony, where light is said to be the most beautiful of his forms.5 Spenta Mainyu represents Ahura Mazdā’s creative ability by which the god brings forth creation in two forms: spiritual (Av. mainiiauua-, Pahl. mēnōy), which is invisible and intangible, and material (Av. gaēϑiia-, Pahl. gētīy), which is visible and tangible. These

See Prods Oktor Skjærvø, “Old Iranian”, in The Iranian Languages, ed. Gernot Windfuhr (London: Routledge, 2009), 44f. 4 See Shaul Shaked, “Some notes on Ahreman, the Evil Spirit, and His Creation”, in Studies in Mysticism and Religion presented to Gershom G. Scholem on His Seventieth Birthday by Pupils, Colleagues and Friends, ed. Ephraim E. Urbach, R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, and Chaim Wirszubski (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1967), 233f. 5 See Almut Hintze, A Zoroastrian Liturgy. The Worship in Seven Chapters (Yasna 35–41) (Iranica 12; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007), 147–54. 3

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two types of existence are referred to in Avestan as uba- ahu- (both existences).6 The Būndahišn states that Ohrmazd brought forth the spiritual creations out of the essence of his own light.7 The beneficent spiritual world descends directly from Ahura Mazdā, and it is wholly good and perfect like himself. Thus, in the Gathas Ahura Mazdā is described as the “father” not only of the “Life-giving Force” (Spenta Mainyu Y 47.3) but also of other spiritual qualities, such as “Order, Truth” (aṣ̌a- Y 44.3, 47.2), “Good Thought” (vohu- manah- Y 31.8, 45.4), and “Right-mindedness” (ārmaiti- Y 45.4). All of them are seen as his spiritual offspring, and the relationship between them is described in kinship terms. Likewise, in Young Avestan texts Ahura Mazdā is the “father” of the “Life-giving Immortals” (amǝṣ̌a- spǝṇta-) in Yašt (abbr.: Yt) 19.16; “Reward” (aṣ̌i-) is the “sister” (xᵛaŋhar-) of the “Mazdā-worshipping Vision” (daēnā- māzdaiiasni-); and “Hearkening” (sraōša-), “Justice” (rašnu-), and “Contract” (miϑra-) are her “brothers” (brātar-, Yt 17.16). Collectively referred to as “Life-giving Immortals” (amǝṣ̌a- spǝṇta-), the spiritual creations carry within them the potential to become manifest in material form.8 It is out of his spiritual creations that Ahura Mazdā brings forth the material world. He does so in two stages. First, he produces the material world in spiritual form, and out of this he then fashions the material world in material form.9 The spiritual creations come first, and they form the root and base of the material ones. As John Hinnells put it, the material creation is not “the opposite of the spiritual, as in many religions, but rather the embodiment of the spiritual”.10 Together the spiritual and the material creations form Ahura Mazdā’s creation. The close link between the two creations emerges, for example, from the following Avestan passage: (The Life-Giving Immortals), who are the creators and formers, the fashioners and guardians, the protectors and watchers of these creatures of Ahura Mazdā. (Yt 19.18)11 The relationship between the spiritual and material creations is so close that in the Pahlavi literature they are systematically allocated to each other, each spiritual creation being closely associated with a material one, a system which is also traceable, although less systematically, in the Avesta.12 For example, “Good Thought” (vohu- manah-) is the guardian of the animal, “Right-mindedness” (ārmaiti-) is associated with the earth, “Truth” (aṣ̌a-) with the fire, and Ahura Mazdā and Spenta Mainyu with the righteous human being.

See also Johanna Narten, Der Yasna Haptaŋhāiti (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1986), 290–5; Hintze, A Zoroastrian Liturgy, 73. 7 See Almut Hintze, “Monotheism the Zoroastrian Way”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Third Series) 24, no. 2 (2014): 225–49, 231f. 8 Ibid., 243f. 9 See also Shaul Shaked, “The Notions of mēnōg and gētīg in the Pahlavi Texts and Their Relation to Eschatology”, Acta Orientalia 33 (1971): 59–107, 65f.; Almut Hintze, “The Cow that Came from the Moon. The Avestan expression māh- gaociϑra-”, in Iranian and Zoroastrian Studies in Honor of Prods Oktor Skjærvø (BAI 19; 2005; 2009), ed. Carol Altman Bromberg, Nicholas Sims-Williams, and Ursula Sims-Williams, 59–61; Hintze, “Monotheism the Zoroastrian Way”, 234–9. 10 See John R. Hinnells, “Health and Suffering in Zoroastrianism”, in Religion, Health and Suffering, ed. John R. Hinnells and Roy Porter (London: Kegan Paul International, 1999), 2. 11 Almut Hintze, Zamyād Yašt. Introduction, Avestan Text, Translation, Glossary (Iranische Texte 7; Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1994), 17. 12 See also Johanna Narten, Die Amǝša Spǝṇtas im Avesta (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1982), 103–47; Mary Boyce, “Amǝša Spǝnta”, Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. I, fasc. 9 (1989): 933–6. 6

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In contrast to Ahura Mazdā, the Destructive Force (Angra Mainyu) has darkness as his own essence, and from this darkness, he produced his Evil spiritual creation.13 This includes symmetrical opposites of Ahura Mazdā’s good spiritual creation, in particular the “lie” (Av. druj-), “bad thought” (Av. aka- manah-), and “arrogance” (Av. tarǝ̄maiti-). In contrast with Ahura Mazdā’s spiritual creations, however, those of Angra Mainyu are incapable of generating a material world because they can only be destructive.14 Thus, Evil per se exists only on the spiritual plane, but not on the material one. There is thus an imbalance in the religious system of Good and Evil of Zoroastrianism both with regard to the concept of God and of Evil and with regard to their respective creations. God, that is Ahura Mazdā, is the supreme deity, and he has no negative counterpart. His creative force, Spenta Mainyu, however, does have one, since it is opposed by the Destructive Force, Angra Mainyu. Ahura Mazdā produces two types of creation, spiritual and material, but Angra Mainyu has only one, which is a spiritual output.15 A distinctive characteristic of the material world created by Ahura Mazdā is that it was made wholly good and perfect, just like the spiritual world. The pro-cosmic view of the world has been rightly described as almost a unique feature of Zoroastrianism, one which sets it apart from many other religious and philosophical traditions. Zoroastrianism is characterized by a pro-cosmic duality of the spiritual and the material, combined with a dualism of Good and Evil and a monotheism which differs from that of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam16 in so far as Evil is not immanent in God’s creation but comes into it from outside.

THE INTRUSION OF EVIL INTO THE MATERIAL WORLD CREATED BY GOD In Zoroastrianism, suffering and death are not seen as natural, integral parts of life because Ahura Mazdā had created the world without them. The existence of suffering and death in the world is the direct result of the presence of Evil in the material world created by Ahura Mazdā. Bodily ailments and diseases, decay and death are products of Evil. They are seen as unnatural and in need of being resisted, fought against, and removed. Zoroastrian cosmology ascribes the presence of Evil in the world to a particular event. This was the “Attack” (Pahl. ēbgat) of Evil on the material world following the creation of the material world by Ahura Mazdā.17 Evil intruded into the cosmos from outside, bringing death and destruction. It polluted the water and the earth, and killed the one exemplar of plant, animal, and human being that Ahura Mazdā had created. However, since Ahura Mazdā had made the material creation first in a spiritual state and then in a material state, he was able to take the immortal blueprint (Pahl. ēwēnag) of each of his material creations which Evil had polluted or killed, purify it in the heavenly spheres

See Domenico Agostini and Samuel Thrope, The Bundahišn. The Zoroastrian Book of Creation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 9. 14 See Antonio Panaino, “The ‘Mental’ Dimension of Evil in the Mazdean Perspective”, Lumina. Rivista di Linguistica storica e di Letteratura comparata 4, no. 1–2 (2020): 45–78, 58–60. 15 See Shaked, “Some notes on Ahreman”, 228. 16 See Alan V. Williams, “The Continuum of ‘Sacred Language’ From High to Low Speech in the Middle Iranian (Pahlavi) Zoroastrian Tradition”, in Religion, Language, and Power, ed. Nile Green and Mary Searle-Chatterjee (New York: Routledge, 2008): 123–42, 132–4, and 141 n. 28. 17 See Agostini and Thrope, The Zoroastrian Book of Creation, 27–31. 13

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inaccessible to Evil, and then reinsert them all into the world as new creations, but this time in multiplicity: 1 human couple, male and female, and 282 species of animals.18 The products of this second round of material creation have been living ever since in a world afflicted by Evil, and all suffering and death in the world are attributed to the presence of Evil in it. In addition, however, Evil also operates on the spiritual plane, and here it is most powerful because it has its own spiritual products at its disposal. One of the major agents of Evil is the lie (Av. druj, Pahl. druž). On the spiritual plane, the one creation most under attack by Evil is the human being. Evil constantly tries to enter a person’s mind with spiritual forces such as the lie, bad thought, arrogance, greed, and debauchery. As soon as a person admits these negative forces into his or her mind, the good forces become eclipsed by the negative ones, and the person becomes an agent of Angra Mainyu. He or she promotes Angra Mainyu’s agenda of destroying Ahura Mazdā’s material world by practicing the lie, bad thought, arrogance, greed, or any other destructive spiritual activity. It is worth noting here that this process applies to both men and women. The Avesta is very explicit about the equality of both men and women as moral agents; members of both genders are equally called to practice the Mazdā-worshiping religion and to reject Evil.19

EVIL AS THE SOURCE OF SUFFERING AND DEATH In Zoroastrianism, suffering is by no means seen as being confined to human beings. The whole of the material world is affected by Evil’s actions whenever the earth, water, and air are polluted, whenever plants dry up and wither, and whenever animals and human beings suffer from old age and diseases and die. The theme of the suffering of the animal creation at the hand of deceitful human beings, who subject it to “violence” (Avestan aēšma-), dominates one of the first hymns of the Gathas, Yasna 29. Here the cow laments to the divine beings, that is, Ahura Mazdā and his spiritual offspring, and appeals for a herdsman to look after her (all translations of texts quoted in this chapter are by the author unless otherwise indicated): To you the soul of the cow lamented: “For whom did you shape me? Who fashioned me? Wrath and force, cruelty, bondage and might hold me fettered. I have no herdsman other than you. Now appear to me with good pasturage!” (Yasna 29.1) She is then joined in her plight by Zarathushtra (most probably the “I” of the Gathas), who lines up with the animal, and both of them implore the deity: With hands outstretched (and) with intensity, my soul and that of the milch cow were endearing ourselves to the Lord, as the two of us expose the Wise One to our questions:

See Hintze, “The Cow that Came from the Moon”, 61. See Leon Goldman, “Women ii. In the Avesta”, Encyclopaedia Iranica, December 14, 2012, https://iranicaonline​ .org​/articles​/women​-ii​-avesta. 18 19

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“Neither for the right-living one nor for the cattle-breeder (is there) any survival among the deceitful ones!” (Yasna 29.5) The reference to the “deceitful ones” entails a life of the righteous among people who have embraced the destructive spiritual forces of Angra Mainyu in their minds. Both the animal and the human being are in need of support. The cow’s request is met when Zarathushtra is appointed as her caretaker. However, being aware that Zarathushtra is just as needy as herself, the cow is unhappy with this appointment: But then the soul of the cow lamented: “I, who end up with a weak one to endure, the voice of an unheroic man, whom I wish were one who could rule through strength!” When will there ever be the one who will give her hands-on help? (Yasna 29.9) But then Zarathushtra has the prospect of being strengthened when he receives the help of the Wise Lord, Ahura Mazdā, and as a result, he will be able to provide “good dwellings and peace” to the animal: To these ones here you, O Lord, give strength through righteousness and, through good thought, (grant) that rule by which he can provide good dwellings and peace! Of this I, indeed, have recognized you, O Wise One, as the first provider. (Yasna 29.10) The theme of providing “peace and pasture” to the animal is the main commitment of the worshipers in the Yasna Haptanghāiti, alongside the worship of Ahura Mazdā.20 It is the direct answer to the crude violence (aēšma-), which destroys the dwellings and homesteads of the Mazdā-worshippers. In the hymn to Mithra, the divine being who personifies “contract” and who punishes those who break it, the plight of truthful people and of the animal is described as follows: The settlements, blood-stained, are ravaged, the dwellings (are) uninhabitable where the contract-breakers and the deceitful ones dwell, who slay the truly truthful ones. The cow, following the lead, is driven on the bloody path of captivity, (she) who is dragged into the fortresses of contract-breaking mortals as their draught-animals. They (i.e. the cows) stand shedding tears, slobbering at their mouths. (Yt 10.38) Wherever deceit prevails, the animals suffer just as much as righteous people. Being aware of the mutual dependence between domestic animals and human beings, the Mazdāworshipers are committed to providing care for them:21 Now we worship our own souls as well as those of the domestic animals which desire to gain our support, (the animals) for which people here indeed (shall be available) and which indeed shall be available for people here. (Yasna 39.1)

See Hintze, A Zoroastrian Liturgy, 87–90. Ibid., 266–7.

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FIGHTING EVIL THROUGH WORDS From a Zoroastrian point of view, the fight against Evil means, on the spiritual plane, the rejection of lying and deceiving, of gluttony and sloth, of ignorance, of excessive mourning, and of any other negative mental activities. On the material level, it entails the fight against suffering, diseases, and poverty; against pollution of the body and of the elements of earth, water, and fire; and against any other activity which impairs the proper functioning of any of Ahura Mazdā’s material creations. While in principle Evil only exists on the spiritual plane, in the material world it acts on both spiritual and material levels. Evil attacks any of Ahura Mazdā’s creatures and undermines their physical wellbeing by pollution, old age, diseases, and death, all of which affect the bodily, material existence. That diseases are the work of Angra Mainyu is explicitly stated, for example, in the following Young Avestan passage: Ahura Mazdā said to Spitama Zarathustra: I, Ahura Mazda, I, the giver of good (things), I who have made this house, the beautiful, light, sightly one, I will go out, I will go across. Then the villain looked at me, then he, the villain, Angra Mainyu full of death, wrought against me 99,999 diseases. Now may you, the most glorious Life-giving Mantra, heal me! (Vidēvdād 22.1-2) Angra Mainyu looks with the “Evil eye” at Ahura Mazdā and produces diseases designed to afflict and destroy the god’s work.22 The many manifestations of Evil in the world, in the form of a mental activity or as it afflicts a material creation, are named individually and recorded in long lists of demons in Avestan and Pahlavi texts. Ailments, diseases, and other unwanted things are addressed by name and asked to “go away” as Ahura Mazdā’s worshipers recite certain Avestan verses, for example: Illnesses go away! Death, go away! Demons, go away! Adversities, go away! Heretics opposed to truth, go away! Human tyrant, go away! (Yt 3.7) Apotropaeic verses like these are very common in Zoroastrian texts, both in Avestan and in later texts. They express resistance against, and disdain of, Angra Mainyu and his minions. Magic exercised through spells, curses, and amulets was one way of keeping the demons at bay.23

See also Hinnells, “Health and Suffering in Zoroastrianism”, 8f.; S. Kori Pekala, “Evil and How to Combat Evil: Magic, Spells, and Curses in the Avesta” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2000), 105; S. K. Mendoza Forrest, Witches, Whores, and Sorcerers: The Concept of Evil in Early Iran (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 83–9. 23 See also Pekala, “Evil and How to Combat Evil: Magic, Spells, and Curses in the Avesta”; Antonio Panaino, “Magic i. Magical elements in the Avesta and Nērang literature”, Encyclopaedia Iranica, July 20, 2008, https:// www​.iranicaonline​.org​/articles​/magic​-i​-magical​-elements​-in​-the​-avesta​-and​-nerang​-literature; Forrest, Witches, Whores, and Sorcerers, 113–36. 22

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The fight against Evil also forms an integral part of Zoroastrian ritual. For example, during the threefold preparation of the sacrificial Haōma drink in the Yasna ceremony, the priest recites the Avestan words: Therefore one is to appoint him, the greatest of all, as lord and judge, (namely) Ahura Mazdā, to smite the deceitful Destructive Force, to smite Wrath of bloody club, to smite the Māzanian demons, to smite all demons and deceitful Varənians. (Yasna 27.1) While reciting these words, the priest takes the pestle from the water container, circles it around the inner rim of the water container, and touches the surface of the ritual table with its upper and lower ends. He then strikes the mortar three times each in all four directions against its outer walls, making a loud ringing sound, in each direction smiting a different type of demon, starting with Angra Mainyu, the “Destructive Force”. The loud, ringing noise that the priest makes with the pestle is meant to scare away Angra Mainyu. This is followed by words in Middle Persian: “Broken (be) the Foul Spirit, a hundred thousand times curses on Ahreman!” (šikašta ganā.mainiiō bar āhrǝ̄man lǝąnat ̰sad.hazār. bār). He speaks these words in a subdued voice because they are not in Avestan.24 The concept of smiting Angra Mainyu is also present in the performance of the Kusti prayers, which Zoroastrians perform in their daily lives. As part of their initiation into the religion, in India usually at the age of seven, in Iran a little later, Zoroastrians are invested with a white cotton shirt (called sudre) and a girdle (called kusti) made of lambswool, which they tie above the shirt three times and close with a reef knot. The shirt and the Kusti are the insignia of the Zoroastrian religion. They symbolize the “armor” of Zoroastrians that protects them against the constant attacks of Evil. At their daily prayer time, Zoroastrians untie and retie the girdle during the recitation of set prayers in Avestan and Middle Persian. While retying the Kusti and reciting the Ahuna Vairya prayer, which is the most sacred prayer of the Zoroastrian religion, Zoroastrians flick one end of the Kusti.25 This action symbolizes the rejection of Angra Mainyu and is meant to chase him away, just like the loud ringing sound of the mortar during the Yasna ceremony. Small pockets in the shirt at the front and back of the neck opening symbolize the idea of collecting good deeds, the ones of the future in the pocket at the back, and the past ones in the front, with the wearer of the shirt between them, symbolizing the present. In the Avesta, the most healing agent, and thus the most powerful weapon against any of the manifestations of Evil, is the “life-giving mantra” (mąϑra- spǝṇta-). One of these is the Ahuna Vairya prayer. Ahura Mazdā was the first to recite it after he had created the spiritual creation and before he made the material one: Zarathushtra asked Ahura Mazdā: “O Ahura Mazdā, most life-giving force, creator of the corporeal living beings, righteous one, what was that utterance, O Ahura Mazdā, which you proclaimed for me,

See Firoze M. Kotwal and James W. Boyd, A Persian Offering. The Yasna: A Zoroastrian High Liturgy (Paris: Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes, 1991), 81f., 107. 25 See Patricia L. Baker, “Clothed in the Faith. The Zoroastrian Sudrah and Kustī”, Studia Iranica 27 (1998): 259–75, 265; Michael Stausberg, “The Significance of the kusti: A History of Its Zoroastrian Interpretations”, East and West 54 (2004): 9–29. 24

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before the sky (existed), before the water, before the earth, before the cow, before the plant, before the fire, the son of Ahura Mazdā, before the righteous man, before (= Y 34.5:) ‘the evil beasts, both false gods and mortals’, before all corporeal life, before all that is good, created by Mazdā, (and which is) of the species of righteousness?” Then spoke Ahura Mazdā: “This was the piece of the Ahura Vairya, O Spitama Zarathushtra, which I proclaimed for you, before the sky (existed), before the water, before the earth, before the cow, before the plant, before the fire, the son of Ahura Mazdā, before the righteous man, before (= Y 34.5:) ‘the evil beasts, both false gods and mortals’, before all corporeal life, before all that is good, created by Mazdā, (and which is) of the species of righteousness.” (Yasna 19.1-4) The twenty-one words of this prayer are believed to encapsulate all the revelation and knowledge of the Avesta, and so, according to the cosmological myth of the Būndahišn 1.28-29, Ahriman fell prostrate back into his endless darkness when he heard Ohrmazd reciting it.26 The Younger Avesta relates that before Zarathushtra was born, human beings had no means of defending themselves against the attacks of Angra Mainyu and all his demons. Zarathushtra brought the Mazdā-worshiping religion to humankind, and he was the first human being to recite the Ahuna Vairya prayer, which immediately caused Angra Mainyu and the demons to run away and hide underground: Before his (i.e. Zarathushtra’s) time the demons used to rush about visibly, their pleasures of lust used to take place visibly, visibly they used to drag away the women from their men, and the demons used to subject to violence those crying and lamenting (women). But a single Ahuna Vairya Prayer which truthful Zarathushtra recited, divided four times into sections, the last (section) with louder recitation, drove underground all demons, which are unworthy of worship, unworthy to be prayed to. (Yt 19.80-81)27 Zarathushtra is the one who takes on Angra Mainyu and slays his demons: Zarathustra threatened Angra Mainyu: “O evil-producing Angra Mainyu, I shall slay your demon-created creation; I shall slay the demon-created corpse-demon; I shall slay the witch Xnąϑaiti, until there will be born the victorious perfector from the Lake Kąsaōiia,

See Agostini and Thrope, The Zoroastrian Book of Creation, 4, 8. Hintze, Zamyād Yašt, 35f.

26 27

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(coming) from the eastern side, (coming) from the eastern sides.” (Vidēvdād 19.5) This passage mentions the end point of the battle against Evil, when the “victorious perfector” (saōšiiaṇt-) will step forth from Lake Kąsaōiia, which is the Avestan name of Lake Hāmūn in the Hilmand basin in present-day Afghanistan, and complete the battle against Evil by defeating it completely and forcing Angra Mainyu to withdraw powerless from the material world.28 Until that expected event in the future, human beings, men and women alike, are called to fight all kinds of Evil and to delimit its presence in the world as much as possible.

FIGHTING EVIL AND HEALING LIFE In addition to mantras like the Ahuna Vairya prayer, the presence of Evil in the world is reduced through “good deeds”, which form the third component of the Zoroastrian motto “good thoughts, good words, good deeds” denoting a fundamental concept of the Zoroastrian religion. The maxim is first attested in one of the earliest texts, the Yasna Haptanghāiti: Of good thoughts, good words, good deeds both here and elsewhere, being done and having been done, we are welcomers, not revilers of such good (things) are we. (Yasna 35.2)29 Being a world-affirming religion, Zoroastrian teachings require that followers involve themselves in the world and contribute to the struggle against Evil by following this maxim. While much emphasis is placed on fighting Evil, just as much is also placed on healing the world afflicted by it. The prayers not only “smite” Evil, but they also heal life. Thus, the prayer of “best righteousness” (aš ̣a- vahišta-) is the most resistance-smashing among the mantras, “the most healing remedy among the mantras” (Yt 3.5). Among the names of Ahura Mazdā are “Healing” and “Most healing” (Yt 1.12),30 and Zarathushtra is described as “a healer of life” (ahūm.biš- Yasna 31.19, 44.2): Listen (to the one) who conceives righteousness, a healer of life, knowing through the Lord, who controls his tongue at will for the right solemn utterance of the words through your flaming fire at (what is) good, at the distribution to the two parties! (Yasna 31.19) In principle, all of Ahura Mazdā’s spiritual and material creations have the capacity to heal existence, including the moon (Yt 7.5), the waters (Yt 8.47), the star Tištrya (Yt 8.2), the plants (Vidēvdād 20.4), and, especially, the sacrificial plant Haōma: See also Almut Hintze, Der Zamyād-Yašt. Edition, Übersetzung, Kommentar (Beiträge zur Iranistik 15; Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1994), 365–99; “Frašō.kǝrǝti”, Encyclopaedia Iranica 10 (2000): 190–2. 29 Hintze, A Zoroastrian Liturgy, 61. 30 Antonio Panaino, The List of Names of Ahura Mazdā (Yašt I) and Vayu (Yašt XV) (Serie Orientale Roma 94; Roma: Instituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, 2002), 45, 52. 28

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O Haōma, give me (those) of the healing remedies through which you are the giver of healing remedies! (Yasna 10.9) Driving away all kinds of diseases and healing the damage they have done to the body is the answer to the afflictions of the material world caused by constant attacks from Angra Mainyu and his minions. The “life-giving mantras” of the Avesta are words by which diseases are driven away, and they are combined with medicinal knowledge and practices of healing with plants and of operating on a person using a knife.31 Of all these healing methods, the healing method which uses the mantra is deemed to be the most effective one: When those who have many healing remedies will come together, O Spitama Zarathustra, (namely) the one who heals with the knife, the one who heals with the plant, and the one who heals with the mantra, they shall here come together to this, which (is) the life-giving, healing mantra. For this is the most healing of the healing remedies, namely the life-giving mantra, the healing one, which will heal the viscera of the righteous man. (Vidēvdād 7.44) Owing to the central role played by the mantra in healing diseases, throughout the ages Zoroastrian priests have traditionally also practiced as medical doctors as they are seen as being in command of the mantra and of the other healing techniques. Zoroastrian medicine is not only attested to in the Avesta but also in Middle Persian texts, in particular in chapters 29–31 of the Selections of Zādspram. This work testifies to the engagement of the Zoroastrian priesthood with analyzing, and speculating about, the composition and functioning of the human body.32 The ancient link between priesthood and medicine is occasionally found even in more recent years and in the context of modern medicine. As John Hinnells33 notes, Dastur Dr. Sohrab H. Kutar, the Zoroastrian High Priest in Britain in the 1980s, was both a highly respected medical doctor and a priest, and so is Jamasp Kaikhusroo Dastur, surgeon and present High Priest of the Anjuman Atesh Behram in Mumbai, where he succeeded his late father Dastur Dr. Kaikhusroo M. JamaspAsa. The Zoroastrian approach to health entails avoidance of anything that weakens the body and makes it susceptible to diseases. For example, when a woman in her menses is required to self-isolate, as she is deemed impure during that period according to Zoroastrian teachings, the family has the duty to provide a sufficient amount of food and drink for her so that her physical health is not compromised: How much food shall one bring? How much barley(-drink)? Two units of dry bread, one unit of liquid, lest the woman becomes weak. (Vidēvdād 16.7)

See Forrest, Witches, Whores, and Sorcerers, 113f.; Paolo Delaini, La medicina nell’Avesta. Widēwdād 7, 20, 21, 22. Studio filologico, traduzione e commento dei testi avestici e medio-persiani. Con un saggio sugli studi sulla medicina zoroastriana dal Settecento ad oggi (Indo-Iranica et Orientalia volume 15; Bologna: Mimesis 2016). 32 See also Peter Sohn, Die Medizin des Zādsparam. Anatomie, Physiologie und Psychologie in den Wizidagiha i Zadsparam, einer zoroastrisch-mittelpersischen Anthologie aus dem frühislamischen Iran des neunten Jahrhunderts (Iranica 3; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996); Philippe Gignoux and Ahmad Tafazzoli, Anthologie de Zādspram (Paris: Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes, 1993), 94–113. 33 See Hinnells, “Health and Suffering in Zoroastrianism”, 8. 31

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Good, healthy food and drink are ways of keeping diseases away from the body, and they should be enjoyed in measure like all other good things of life. Joy is an important part of a healthy life, and material wealth is a good thing as long as it has been acquired with honesty and in an honorable way. It enables a good person to be generous, to dispense it with charitable generosity. This attitude provides the foundation of Zoroastrian charities, as they are a way of promoting good and fighting life-weakening situations such as ignorance, poverty, and ill health. Zoroastrians have a longstanding tradition of charities, which provide housing for the poor, education, and medical institutions.34 Benevolence is seen as a religious duty, and liberality as a virtue. They serve the purpose of alleviating suffering, and thus diminish the power of Evil in the world.

FURTHER READING Forrest, S. K. Mendoza. Witches, Whores, and Sorcerers: The Concept of Evil in Early Iran. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Hintze, Almut. “Monotheism the Zoroastrian Way”. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Third Series) 24, no. 2 (2014): 225–49. Shaked, Shaul. “Some notes on Ahreman, the Evil Spirit, and His Creation”. In Studies in Mysticism and Religion Presented to Gershom G. Scholem on His Seventieth Birthday by Pupils, Colleagues and Friends. Edited by Ephraim E. Urbach, R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, and Chaim Wirszubski, 227–34. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1967. Shaked, Shaul. “The Notions of mēnōg and gētīg in the Pahlavi Texts and Their Relation to Eschatology”. Acta Orientalia 33 (1971): 59–107.

See John R. Hinnells, “The Flowering of Zoroastrian Benevolence: Parsi Charities in the 19th and 20th Centuries”, in Papers in Honour of Professor Mary Boyce, vol.10, ed. Adrian David H. Bivar and John R. Hinnells (Acta Iranica 24; Leiden: Brill, 1985), 261–326.

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Chapter 72

The Problem of Evil in Islamic Thought NASRIN ROUZATI

INTRODUCTION The Islamic theological, philosophical, and mystical literature, notwithstanding divergence in viewpoints, has attempted to resolve one of the most excruciating problems of human history, namely, the “problem of evil” and human suffering. These perspectives, however distinct they may be, strive to justify the existence of evil, particularly unmerited suffering, in a world that has been created, and continues to be created, by an omnipotent God whose benevolence and compassion encompasses the entire universe. That the overall “problem of evil” is conceivably the most debated question in the history of philosophy of religion is evident from the attention that it has received in the theological and philosophical discourses of various traditions of the world. In reviewing these inquires, particularly those in which theodicy is the focal point of the study, the meaning of “evil” seems to be presumed and not debated – illnesses, financial difficulties, loss of loved ones, natural disasters, injustices, violence, and so on. Therefore, although the term “evil” and its assumed meanings appear plentifully in both popular writings and the works of great theologians and philosophers, there appears to be a certain conceptual opacity that exists in the backdrop. As a result, one may ask, what precisely is “evil”, and does our human understanding accord with the divine message? This chapter aims to shed light on the treatment of the “problem of evil” and human suffering as it is presented in Muslim intellectual works.1 I will begin by offering an overview of the term “evil” in the revealed text of Islam, the Qur’an, to explicate its multidimensional meaning and the various contexts in which it is introduced. Next, the notion of evil will be examined from the theological and philosophical perspectives and the debates concerning the overarching concept of “good” and “bad/ evil”, as well as the origination of Muslim theodicean thought. This will be followed by a discussion on the famous doctrine of the “best of all possible worlds” by one of the most distinguished scholars of Islam, Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, and what is called the Ghazālian theodicy. The conclusion of the chapter intends to demonstrate that the so-called problem of evil is not portrayed as a theoretical problem in the religion of Islam, but rather, as a necessary

I have written on the topic of Islamic theodicy elsewhere, specifically, in my book Trial and Tribulation in the Qur’an: A Mystical Theodicy (Berlin: Gerlach, 2015). If any of that content is included here, it is with the permission from the publisher.

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component in the structure of the universe. Although every effort should be made to prevent human suffering, some level of deficiency and imperfectness is embedded in the makeup of the world, and serves to actualize the divine plan and the purpose of man’s creation as “God’s vicegerent on earth”.2

EVIL AND HUMAN SUFFERING IN THE ISLAMIC REVELATION: AN OVERVIEW The revealed text and the foundation stone of the religion of Islam, the Qur’an, is considered the most influential and the highest source of Islamic scholarship, as well as the ultimate inspirational guide for its adherents. The creation of the cosmos and the divine attributes of the Creator appear time and again in the Qur’an; nevertheless, it is humankind’s creation and its relationship to the divine that is presented as the central pillar of the Qur’anic worldview. Consequently, in our analysis of the notion of evil and human suffering from an Islamic perspective, we need to start by exploring the Qur’anic narratives where this concept presents itself, and contemplate on whether or not our human understanding of “evil” is in harmony with the divine message. The main Arabic term that is generally translated to evil is sharr and appears in both Meccan and Medinan phases of the revelation in a variety of settings.3 Contrary to popular belief, where adversities and misfortunes are automatically categorized as evil (sharr), the Qur’an often describes evil as man’s deviation from the divine path. According to this interpretation, evil (sharr) is a condition that man creates for himself when he chooses not to live his life in harmony with the divine purpose. In its explications, the Qur’an utilizes a number of key terms to highlight a variety of humankind’s conducts which fall into the semantic field of evil. Take, for example, conditions and behaviors such as miserliness (bukhl), disbelief (kufr), and going astray (ḍalla), all of which are evil circumstances that a human encounters due to his own volition.4 Moreover, the adherents of the Islamic revelation are repeatedly reminded that the creation of the universe, and more specifically man’s creation, is purposeful and not in vain.5 Humankind, therefore, is encouraged to follow the Qur’anic teachings and the prophetic message, to choose to live his life according to the divine plan, and to fully actualize his potentials. Nonetheless, by disregarding the purpose of his creation, human beings overlook their responsibilities and position themselves in a condition full of evil and suffering, that is, sharr. Although, a major portion of the Qur’anic verses on evil relates to man’s freedom of choice and divergence from the divine path, the notion of evil is also treated in a number of other contexts. On some occasions, the Qur’anic depiction of suffering pertains to divine retaliation of a sinful community who denied the divine message proclaimed by their designated prophet. Appealing to past history, these punishment narratives illustrate that as a result of continuous persistence in disbelief and rejection of the prophetic message, an entire community is eradicated. In these circumstances, suffering and devastation were

The Qur’an, 2:30. For information on the chronology of the Qur’an, see Neal Robinson, Discovering The Qur’an: A Contemporary Approach to a Veiled Text (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003). 4 See The Qur’an, 3:180, 8:55, 25:34. For more on this, see Toshibiko Izutsu, Ethico – Religious Concepts in the Qur’an (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002). 5 See the Qur’an, 38:27. 2 3

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instigated by an earthquake, a windstorm, or a flood.6 Still, on other occasions, the notion of human suffering is illustrated in the Qur’an as a trial and test (balā), which ultimately pertains to the apparent suffering of the innocent. The importance of this concept becomes noticeable from the Qur’anic verses where humankind’s trial is introduced as the purpose of creation, indeed, as the central pillar in the creational structure of the cosmos.7 Furthermore, the Islamic revelation incorporates frequent references to means by which divine trials are manifested, as well as occasions when divine trial is visited on the prophets and their addressee communities – emphasizing that even the prophets are not exempted from trial and tests.8 Time and again, the Qur’an invites its audience to reflect upon various conditions of life to recognize that human person is continuously going through some form of a test, not only in adversities but, in fact, in prosperity as well.9 Therefore, adversities, illnesses, and loss of loved ones, as well as well-being, wealth, and fortunes of life, all play an instrumental role in man’s character building.10 Viewed from the perspective of theodicy, then, one may argue, a soul-making theodicy is articulated where various forms of suffering shape human’s personality and are meant to guide humanity through its spiritual journey. In recapitulating the overall portrayal of the Qur’anic teaching on evil and suffering, one is reminded of the symbolic dialogue between God and the angels concerning the creation of Adam as the prototype for humankind. In response to angels’ bafflement over man’s creation and the possibility of evil and misconduct on earth, He says, “I know things that you don’t know”. What, then, is that which God knew that justified man’s creation notwithstanding the capability of evildoing? The Qur’an seems to suggest that man, through the faculty of freedom of will, is fully capable of becoming the vicegerent of God on earth – which is, indeed, the purpose of his creation.

PHILOSOPHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE ON EVIL AND SUFFERING The problem of evil, as well as the overarching notion of good (khayr) and evil (sharr), seems to make itself known in the context of philosophical debate on existence (wujūd) and nonexistence (ʿadam).11 Viewed from the perspectives of Muslim philosophers (falasifa), “good” is that which sprouts from existence and has a positive entity; conversely, “evil” is that which emerges from nonexistence and is portrayed as a negative entity. It must be mentioned here that while the nature of evil is depicted as a negative entity, it nevertheless has an undeniable reality and, therefore, must be dealt with in the philosophical investigations – the theoretical version of the “problem of evil”.12 The

For example, see the Qur’anic narratives about Noah’s community (11:25-40). See the Quran, 11:7, 18:7. 8 See the Quran, 37:103-107. 9 See the Quran, 89:15-16. 10 For more on the instrumentality of evil in forms of divine trials, see Nasrin Rouzati, Trial and Tribulation in the Qur’an: A Mystical Theodicy (Berlin: Gerlach, 2015). 11 For more about philosophical arguments on existence, see Seyyed Hossein Nasr, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993), 197–8. 12 For more on different versions of the “problem of evil”, see for example, Michael L. Peterson, The Problem of Evil, Selected Readings (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). Also, see Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1974). 6 7

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ontological analysis of the notions of good and evil may be observed from the teachings of Ibn Sīnā and Șadr al-Din Shirāzī, who are considered two of the most influential Muslim philosophers. For Ibn Sīnā, known in the West as Avicenna (d. 1037 ce), the universe comes to being through that which is the only uncaused entity, the Necessary Existence (wājib al wujūd); all other entities are contingent (mumkin al wujūd) and emanate from the Necessary Being – that which is pure good (khayr maḥḍ). Ibn Sīnā further affirms that “good” is that which everything desires, and that which everything desires is existence or the perfection of existence. Consequently, “existence” is absolute good, and the Necessary Existence is in Himself pure good and perfect. All contingent entities, however, bear the possibility of nonexistence and therefore are not devoid of evil and deficiency.13 Furthermore, Ibn Sīnā is of the opinion that the notion of evil and its reality in the world needs to be understood under the umbrella of Divine Providence – and by extension – God’s knowledge of the best possible order of the universe. The foundation of this argument is rooted in his theory of emanation and modalities of being. Establishing on the framework that pure perfection may only be attributed to that which necessarily exists in and of itself, the Necessary Existence, Ibn Sīnā expounds upon the notion of Divine Providence and asserts: Providence consists in the First’s knowing in Himself the mode of existence of the order of the good in His being, in Himself, a cause of goodness and perfection in terms of what is possible, and in His being satisfied with the order of the good in the manner that has been mentioned. He would thus intellectually apprehend the order of the good in the highest possible manner, whereby what He intellectually apprehends in the highest possible way as an order and a good would overflow from Him in the manner, within the realm of possibility, that is most complete in being conducive to order.14 Recapitulating Ibn Sīnā’s philosophy of existence, the Necessary Being is the one and only reason that there is a universe in the first place, and that everything other than Him (mā siwā Allah) is contingent and could, indeed, not exist entirely. Furthermore, existence is good, and pure good can only be attributed to the Necessary Existence, who not only is perfect in His Essence but also has the knowledge of the best order of the universe in Himself – Divine Providence. It is, therefore, within this ontological perspective that Ibn Sīnā’s exposition on the notion of evil makes itself known. As was alluded to previously, in Ibn Sīnā’s cosmological scheme, evil has no essence in and of itself and is “either the nonexistence of a substance or nonexistence of what constitutes rectitude for the state of a substance”.15 In forming his theodicy, Ibn Sīnā makes it clear that while evil is mostly defined as privation of good, a distinction must be made between the “essential” evil (sharr bidh-dhāt), which is non-being or privation, and “accidental” evil (sharr bil-ʿaraḍ), which can be either being or privation. In Ibn Sīnā’s worldview it is the non-essential/accidental evil that is the leading cause of human suffering, and the total amount of good in the universe compensates the amount of evil.16

Avicenna, The Metaphysics of the Healing, trans. Michael E. Marmura (Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2005), 283–4. 14 Ibid., 339. 15 Ibid., 284. 16 For more on Ibn Sīnā’s theodicy, see Shams C. Inati, The Problem of Evil: Ibn Sina’s Theodicy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). 13

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The overarching question of essence, existence, and nonexistence, as well as the ontology of what constitutes good and evil, remained at the core of Islamic philosophical discourse for the later generations. The most widespread discussion, however, seems to appear in the works of Șadr al-Din Shirāzī (d. 1636 ce), known as Mulla Sadrā or simply Sadrā. It would be useful to mention here that a distinct element in Sadrā’s philosophy is the integration of rational propositions with theological reflections and mystical insight – personal religious experience – which introduced a different approach to Islamic metaphysics.17 In his major work, al-Asfār al-Arba֙֙a, Sadrā emphasizes that “existence” (wujūd) is the one and only reality in the universe – the primordial reality that is the ultimate cause of everything. Nevertheless, since the human mind, due to its limitations, is not capable of perceiving this “existence”, it resorts to the essence of things that arises in the mind and is conceptually understandable.18 According to Sadrā’s ontological perspective, good and evil need to be understood in relation to and in the backdrop of existence. Pure good, therefore, may just be attributed to the one and only true Reality who is “pure light” (nūr maḥḍ). “Evil”, on the other hand, is that which is ascribed to the absence of a thing when a being comes to exist in the physical world.19 Furthermore, since contingency is ingrained in the making of the universe, all created beings lack certain level of perfection, and hence evil is unavoidable, and yet, evil is partial and insignificant to the abundance of goodness that is being manifested in the world.20 In Sadrā’s worldview, misunderstanding the meaning of evil, and that which is generally referred to as the cause of human suffering, has contributed to a widespread, and at times, confusing debates. Moreover, the notion that humankind is at the center of the universe, that the entire cosmos has been created for the sole purpose of man’s life and his satisfaction, has caused a superficial and unrealistic expectation for human beings.21 Criticizing the Western philosophy of humanism, wherein individuals are considered the most important aspect of cosmic creation, Sadrā explains that it is based on this wrong assumption that any disturbance to life’s enjoyment – illness, loss of a loved one, natural disaster, and so on – is identified as evil, which, in turn, provides the context in questioning God’s attributes.22 Additionally, Sadrā’s philosophy partakes in the elucidation of more tangible and concrete aspects of evil, namely, moral evil, which will be discussed in conjunction with the opinions of Muslim theologians (mutakallimun). The history of Islamic theological literature (kalam) demonstrates that the reconciliation of human free will with the divine attribute of omnipotence was recognized as the top priority for Muslim theologians. The debate began with the Qur’an, however, due to various interpretations of the Qur’anic teachings on divine names and attributes (asmāʾ al-ḥusnā), divergence of opinion soon appeared.23 The emphasis on God’s power seems Fazlur Rahman, The Philosophy of Mulla Sadra (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975), 3–7. Șadr al-Din Mulla Sadrā Shirāzī, al-Asfār, al-Arbʾa, trans. Mohammad Khajawii (Tehran: Mola, 1388 AH), 364–5. 19 Ibid., 367. 20 Șadr al-Din Mulla Sadrā Shirāzī, Mafatih al-Ghayb, trans. Mohammad Khajawii (Tehran: Mola, 1387 AH), 387. 21 Mulla Sadrā Shirazi, al-Asfār, al-Arbʾa., 87. 22 Einollah Khademi and Kobra Abbasi Kia, “Mulla Sadra and Plantinga on the Problem of Evil”, Cosmologial Investigations (Spring & Summer 1391 AH): 17–44. 23 For more on the diversity of Qur’anic interpretations and its impact on Islamic theology, see Abdol Rahman Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldūn, trans. Mohammad P. Ghonabadi, 2 vols (Tehran: Sherkat Elmi Farhangi, 1375 AH). 17 18

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to have been at the core of discussions and initiated the first attempt in formulation of an Islamic theodicy. The Muʿtazilite school of theology aimed to counterbalance God’s power with divine justice and asserted that God has a permanent responsibility to act in just ways. The notion that God is subject to the same law of justice as humans, however, resulted in sharp disagreements within its members and ultimately brought about the formation of Ashʾarite school of theology.24 The Ashʾarite theologians argued that while humans are compelled to perform in accordance with God’s law of justice, the same law, nonetheless, does not apply to God, indeed, God is just in all that He does. The consequence of this understanding is that evil and suffering inflicted on people are good because it has been allowed by God who is just in what He does. Ibn Rushd (Averroes, d. 1198), the Andalusian Muslim philosopher-theologian, strongly challenged both schools for applying the attribute of justice to humans and God in the same fashion. Viewed from Averroes’ perspective, “man is just because he gains something good by being so which he cannot gain otherwise. God is just, not that He may become more perfect by His justice, but because His perfection requires him to be just”.25 The doctrine of purposefulness of Divine acts also attracted attention within the Muslim theological discourse and deeply influenced the theologians’ interpretation of the notion of evil. According to the Muʿtazilite, since creation of the cosmos in general and of humankind in particular is purposeful, the Creator must do what is best for all of His creation. The idea of ascribing purpose to God’s acts, however, was considered problematic by the Ashʾarite school of thought on the ground that it compromised God’s supremacy and His ultimate otherness to creation.26 The notion of Divine purposiveness, nevertheless, was reintroduced by Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), and its significance in understanding the problem of evil was highlighted.27 In Ibn Taymiyya’s theological philosophy, “what makes all God’s deeds good is wise purpose while what makes human evil deeds evil is a lack of wise purpose”.28 As Hoover points out, even though Ibn Taymiyya does not provide much elucidation on God’s purpose concerning certain forms of evil, he nevertheless emphasizes that the existence of evil in the world is partial and is good by virtue of God’s wise purpose.29 The Sunnite Islam embraced Ashʾarite theology, and due to their persistence on God’s omnipotence rejected human free will, which significantly influenced their interpretation of problem of evil and the notion of theodicy.30 In an attempt to reconcile individual responsibility with the fact that God creates all acts, the doctrine of acquisition (kasb) was introduced by the Ashʾarite theologians; God is the only agent who creates all acts, humans, however, choose acts according to their own volition and therefore are held

Tilman Nagel, The History of Islamic Theology From Muhammad to the Present, trans. Thomas Thornton (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2006). 25 Ibn Rushd, The Philosophy and Theology of Averroes, trans. Mohammad Jamil Rehman (Lexington: Forgotten Books, 1921), 287. 26 Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of Kalam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). 27 Fazlur Rahman, Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 113f. 28 Jon Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism (London: Brill, 2007), 184f. 29 Ibid. 30 For more on this, see Tim Winter, ed., Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 24

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accountable for their conducts.31 The theologians who belonged to the Shi’ite Islam, on the other hand, remained in divergent with the Ashʾarites.32 According to the contemporary Shi’ite philosopher, Morteza Muṭahharī (d. 1979), although the Ashʾarite theologians, by denying human free will and ascribing all acts to God, aimed to vindicate God of any injustice, their extreme and overstated view resulted in the exoneration of human persecutors of any wrongdoing.33 In summary, the scrutiny of Muslim philosophical and theological thought on the problem of evil indicates that, while the actuality of various forms of evil is recognized, the nature of evil, however, is explained through negative theory and primarily as privation of good. Furthermore, the world exists due to the creative act of a God who is the only necessary existent, absolute good and omnipotent; contingency of all that is other than God necessitates some level of imperfections and insufficiency on their part. This overarching positive attitude as it pertains to the creation of the cosmos greatly influenced the formulation of the doctrine of the optimum (al-aṣlaḥ) – that this world is the most excellent creation of its Creator.

THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS: GHAZĀLIAN THEODICY The creation of the universe and the attributes of the One who brought it to existence appear at the core of the Qur’anic teachings and constitute a major portion of Muslim philosophical, theological, and mystical literature. The cornerstone of this debate is the following question: Has the cosmos always coexisted with God or did it come into existence at a particular time? This inquiry raised serious disagreements between the philosophers and the theologians as they attempted to explicate on the notion of the eternity (qidam) of the world, and the theory of creation-in-time (ḥudūth). The cosmos, from the perspective of the philosophers such as Ibn Sīnā, is eternal and has always coexisted with God – cosmos is the necessitated effect of God who is its essential cause.34 Furthermore, the world exists in the perfect manner because God acts out of necessity to establish the best order – He is pure good (khayr maḥḍ), therefore, only the best originates from Him. In other words, the perfect arrangement of the world is not because God had a particular desire to create the best of all possible worlds; rather, it is due to His preceding knowledge that is embedded in His essence.35 The philosophers’ declaration that the universe has eternally coexisted with God, as well as the assertion that God creates out of necessity, was seriously challenged by the orthodoxy and appeared at the core of widely debated topics within the theological deliberations. Perhaps the most comprehensive representation of the theologians’

For more detailed discussion on the doctrine of acquisition, see Richard Frank, “Moral Obligation in Classical Muslim Theology”, Journal of Religious Ethics 1, no. 2 (2001): 204–23. 32 For an extensive discussion on Shi’ite theological outlook, see Linda Clarke, ed., Shi’ite Heritage: Essays on Classical and Modern Traditions (New York: Global Publications, 2001). 33 Morteza Mutahhari, ‘Adl-e elahi (Divine Justice) (Tehran: Sadra, 1385 AH), 50f. 34 David Burrell, “Creation or Emanation”, in God and Creation: An Ecumenical Symposium, ed. David Burrell and Bernard McGinn (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 27–37. 35 Avicenna, The Metaphysics of the Healing, 291f. 31

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contested position on this argument is observed in the teachings of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (1058–1111), who is regarded as one of the most influential intellectuals of Islam.36 According to the Ashʾarite, and by extension Ghazālian theology, the divine attributes – will, power, knowledge – are coeternal with God’s essence but not identical with it. This concept is of high magnitude, especially in understanding al-Ghazālī’s refutation of the eternal world doctrine argued by the philosophers. Viewed from this perspective, the creation of the cosmos is the excellent work of an all-powerful and all-knowing God whose creation is not out of caprice and due to necessity but, indeed, out of His goodness, will, and wisdom.37 In other words, for al-Ghazālī, that which is determined by the divine attribute of will and is commanded to come to being must come to exist; in this sense its existence is necessary. However, this is not necessitated by divine essence – since divine will is not identical with divine essence it does not have to decree the creation of the world; indeed, it does so by an eternal free and deliberate act. Consequently, the existence of the universe is the result of divine knowledge, will, and power coming together at a finite moment in time.38 To recapitulate, according to al-Ghazālī, the universe is the realization of one possibility among many possibilities. The creation-in-time principle promoted by the Muslim theologians and crystalized in Al-Ghazālī’s writings was further developed, and it provided the context for what is called the theory of optimum (al aṣlaḥ), that is, the universe with all of its apparent imperfections is the perfect creation of the Creator. The significance of this theory is manifested in al-Ghazālī’s later writings and during a new period in his life where he encountered a major physical and mental crisis. Following a widespread and rigorous education in all areas of Islamic sciences such as theology, jurisprudence, Qur’anic, and Hadith studies, al-Ghazālī was appointed to the full professorship position in one of the most celebrated academic institutions of his time, namely, Niẓāmīyah College in Baghdad. At the height of his career, however, al-Ghazālī became skeptical of the truthfulness of his theoretical religious knowledge as it had not brought him into a direct personal experience of God.39 As he described in his spiritual autobiography Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min aḍl-ḍalāl), this higher knowledge, which is grounded in an intimate relationship with God, required major sacrifices and breaking away from worldly attachments. Following months of inner struggle, al-Ghazālī faced a major physical and spiritual illness that resulted in an inner conversion. Throughout months of hardship and suffering al-Ghazālī transformed internally, left his academic position and family, and departed to Damascus where he spent two years in contemplation and seclusion to practice the mystic/Sufi way. His efforts and dedication bore fruit in providing him with certitude and personal experience of God that was free from doubtfulness.40 The Revival of the Religious Sciences (Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm ald-ḍīn) is al-Ghazālī’s magnum opus which he composed during the last decades of his life. This voluminous work is the W. Mongomery Watt, “Ghazali, Abu Hamid”, in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., 15 vols, ed. Lindsay Jones (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2004), 5:3469–72. 37 Abū Ḥāmid Al-Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, trans. Mohammad Khajawii (Tehran: Shirkat Intisharat Elmi va Farhangi, 1377 AH), 1:208f. 38 Michael E. Marmura, “Al-Ghazālī”, in The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Richard Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 137–54, 140–3. 39 For more on this, see John Bowker, The Religious Imagination and the Sense of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 195. 40 Abū Ḥāmid Al-Ghazālī, al-Munqidh min al-Dalal, Deliverance from Error, trans. R. J. Mccarthy (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2006), 52–5. 36

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synthesis of his philosophical theology in permutation with mystical insight and personal religious experiences. It is during this period of his life that al-Ghazālī appears to have gained an in-depth realization of the most excellent order in creation. This internalized perception of the “perfect rightness of the actual” makes itself known in various contexts of his teachings.41 Al-Ghazālī’s deep awareness about the flawless nature of the universe is encapsulated in his famous dictum of “the best of all possible worlds”. Appearing in book 35 of the Iḥyāʾ on Divine Unity and Trust in God (Kitāb at-tawhīd wa’ t-tawakkul), the statement is the main pillar of what may be called Ghazālian theodicy. Viewed from his perspective, not only is this world indeed the most excellent created work of God, even more significantly, “there is not in possibility anything more wonderful that what is” (laysa fị’l-imkān abdaʿ mimmā kān). Everything that God distributes among men such as sustenance, lifespan “ajal”, happiness and sadness, weakness and power, faith and unbelief, obedience and apostasy – all of it is unqualifiedly just with no injustice in it, true with no wrong infecting it. Indeed, all this happens according to a necessary and true order, according to what is appropriate as it is appropriate and in the measure that is proper to it; nor is anything more fitting, more perfect, and more attractive within the realm of possibility. For if something were to exist and remind one of the sheer omnipotence of God and not of the good things accomplished by His action, it would be miserliness which utterly contradict God’s generosity, and injustice contrary to divine justice. And if God were not omnipotent, He would be impotent, thereby contradicting the nature of divinity.42 The foregoing statement – that God is not able to create a better world – raised much controversy among the Ashʾarite theologians as it seemed to question the divine attribute of omnipotence which was in direct conflict with the orthodoxy and must be denounced. Moreover, al-Ghazālī was criticized for being influenced by Mutazilite theory of al-aṣlaḥ, as well as the teachings of the philosophers. The dispute continued for several years, albeit al-Ghazālī’s counter-arguments to clarify and justify his position.43 Al-Ghazālī’s “best of all possible worlds” statement, in the context of the problem of evil, appears to include several components of a classical theodicy, namely, reconciliation of certain divine attributes with the existence of evil. Nevertheless, it should be mentioned that this proclamation is presented in the wider context of trust in God (tawakkul) which is a notion that is comprehensively expounded upon in the Muslim mystical literature. To be sure, for al-Ghazālī the belief in divine unity – that God is the only true agent in the universe and everything else are His instruments – becomes meaningful in relation to having an elevated level of trust in God. Therefore, the test for human’s understanding of that which may be called evil, in the context of divine unity, will come through a strong and genuine level of trust, tawakkul, in the Creator who is pure good and pure light.44

41 Eric L. Ormsby, “Creation in Time in Islamic Thought with Special Reference to al-Ghazali”, in God and Creation: An Ecumenical Symposium, ed. David Burrell and Bernard McGinn (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 246–64, 256. 42 Abū Ḥāmid Al-Ghazālī, Kitāb al-tawhīd wa’ l-tawakkul, Faith in Divine Unity & Trust in Divine Providence, trans. David Burrell (Louisville: Fons Vitae, 2001), 45f. 43 For a detailed discussion over this dispute, see Eric L. Ormsby, Theodicy in Islamic Thought: Dispute Over AlGhazali’s “Best of All Possible Worlds” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). It should be mentioned that this statement was raised by Leibnitz in the context of a more consistent theodicy several centuries later. 44 See al-Ghazālī, Faith in Divine Unity, 53–66.

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Applied in the context of evil and human suffering, then, this elevated level of trust in God is attainable if one upholds a genuine conviction that this world is indeed the most excellent of all possible worlds.

CONCLUSION The overall representation of the problem of evil in Islamic tradition indicates that the topic is multidimensional and may be approached from a variety of angles. According to the Qur’anic teachings, on some occasions, evil and suffering is the consequence of man’s conducts that are not in accord with God’s purpose for his creation. On other occasions, suffering might be due to trial, which will be instrumental in character building and man’s spiritual development. Since the Qur’an aims to provide practical guidelines for living a moral life which is established on a strong faith in God, it does not entertain the formulation of a classical theodicy. While the philosophers engage with the ontological aspects of evil, the theologians, on the other hand, seek to reconcile certain divine attributes with the existence of evil. Finally, by establishing on the best of all possible world dictum, Ghazālian theodicy provides a comprehensive scheme for a Muslim to attain a highly elevated level of trust in God. As a result, man will fully realize that this world, despite the seeming imperfections, is in fact, the most wonderful universe that is meant to provide an excellent opportunity for man to grow and become God’s vicegerent on earth.

FURTHER READING Aslan, Adnan. “The Fall and the Overcoming of Evil and Suffering in Islam”. In The Origin and The Overcoming of Evil and Suffering in The World Religions. Edited by Peter Koslowski, 24–47. Dordrecht: Springer, 2001. Heemskerk, Margaretha T. Suffering in The Muʿtazilite Theology: `Abd al-Jabbar’s Teachings on Pain and Divine Justice. London: Brill, 2000. Kermani, Navid. The Terror of God. Translated from German by Wieland Hoban. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.

Chapter 73

Muslim Perspectives on Evil and Suffering MEHRUNISHA SULEMAN

This chapter briefly introduces theological, ethical, mystical, and historical accounts within the Islamic tradition pertaining to the “problems” of evil and suffering, including references to the Qur’an, traditions of the Prophet Muhammad (hadith), and relevant theological, jurisprudential, and individual Islamic scholarly accounts. This normative and historical account is accompanied by a complementary empirical ethical analysis of contemporary experiences of palliative and end-of-life care and how Islamic theologies of theodicy are manifest among Muslims through their expressions of how to suffer well.

INTRODUCTION Since the time of the Ancients, philosophers, theologians, ethicists, and jurists alike have deliberated the problems of evil and suffering – one of the most intractable questions of human history. For theistic religions such as Islam the problems of evil and suffering have been contended with by scholars and lay believers alike who have considered, “why does an oft merciful and compassionate God allow evil and suffering?” Before we consider this and other related questions, it is important to consider briefly what is meant by evil. Evil has been characterized as “moral” or “natural” where moral evil is that which is committed by moral agents such as lying, cheating, murder, and natural evil is a result of naturally occurring events such as earthquakes and tsunamis.1 This classification coheres with that of Islamic theological and philosophical discourses that will be employed here. It is also important to consider the scope of this chapter. Centuries of Islamic scholarship have been dedicated to the aforementioned question and so the aim is to not comprehensively summarize or repeat such contributions. Rather the focus will be on salient mention of key texts and scholarly influences that not only provide a survey of views but also enable engagement with contemporaneous experiences and understandings about the problems of evil and suffering. A key delineation needs to be made in terms of how existing works have understood and addressed the question and how it will be dealt with here. Islamic scholarship pertaining to

1 Chad Meister and Paul K. Moser, eds, The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

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the problem of evil and suffering expectedly begins with the challenge posed by Epicurus (342–270 bce)2 and was later posited by Hume, which points to inquiries about God, His attributes and purposes as a Being worthy of worship. A notable contribution is that of Eric Ormsby, who examines Islamic theodicy and the problem of optimism through an analysis of the renowned medieval scholar, Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī’s statement that “the actual world is the best possible one”. Ormsby provides a comprehensive analysis of the statement and how it relates to understandings of God’s attributes such as Divine Justice and Power.3 Another relevant contribution is that of Shams Inati who provides an exposition of the nature and types of evil through an analysis of another Islam’s renowned theologian and philosopher, Ibn Sina. Her analysis offers a novel interpretation of how Ibn Sina’s account, which suggests no discordancy between God’s attributes and the existence of evil and defines evil as privation of being, “dissolves rather than solves” the problem of evil. Inati also demonstrates how Ibn Sina’s thought influenced later Muslim theologians and philosophers.4 Building on Ghazali and Ibn Sina’s contributions was the celebrated Muslim jurist Ibn Taymiyyah, whose “Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism” is expertly interpreted by Jon Hoover. Hoover presents a compelling account of how Ibn Taymiyyah’s contributions to Islamic scholarship and thought, although commonly identified as influencing contemporary Islamic resurgence and in particular in the social and political, also extends to theodicy. Echoing Ibn Sina’s views, Ibn Taymiyyah holds that evil is a necessary attendant of God’s perfectly created order.5 If we look beyond medieval Islamic scholarship, to contemporary Islamic theological and philosophical works, a prominent contribution is that of Sherman Jackson, whose book Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering offers a comprehensive analysis of the schools of classical Islamic theology on the question of whether “God is racist”. Jackson concludes that despite their overwhelming emphasis on Divine omnipotence none of the schools denies human agency and free will. Jackson not only grapples with traditional Islamic theology but illustrates how it retains the tools to contend with contemporaneous questions and challenges.6 Finally, although not a comprehensive work, the chapter by Timothy Winter on “Islam and the Problem of Evil” in the Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil necessitates a particular mention here due to its departure from traditional formats of tackling theodicy. Winter’s exposition not only deals with God, His attributes and purposes, but more significantly focuses on questions about the nature and purpose of humankind. His

As quoted by Lactantius (ad 260–340): “God either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is neither willing nor able; or He is both willing and able. If He is willing and unable, He is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God; if He is able and unwilling He is malicious which is equally at variance with God; if He is neither willing nor able, He is both malicious and feeble and therefore not God; if He is both willing and able, which is alone suitable to God, from what source then are evils? or why does He not remove them?” From: M. B. Ahern, The Problem of Evil (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 2. 3 See Eric L. Ormsby, Theodicy in Islamic Thought: The Dispute over al-Ghazālī‘s “Best of All Possible Worlds” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 4 See Shams Inati, The Problem of Evil: Ibn Sina’s Theodicy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). 5 See Jon Hoover, Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 6 See Sherman A. Jackson, Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 2

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account re-centers the debate around what is central to Islam’s message and the Prophet Muhammad’s example – surrender and submission.7 This entry is a contribution that reflects the approaches of Jackson and Winter. It will draw on relevant verses of the Qur’an, traditions of the Prophet Muhammad (hadith) as well as pertinent theological, jurisprudential, and individual Islamic scholarly accounts to first build a narrative of Islamic understandings of the nature and purpose of humankind. This is in order to then draw a nexus between this normative account with an empirical analysis of Muslim perspectives on death and dying. Islamic eschatological teachings are recognized as being important not only for beliefs around death, resurrection, and judgment, but also for how these influence understandings of pre-earthly and earthly life and purpose. As the subsequent analysis will reveal Muslim perspectives on eschatology, and how these influence meaning-making around death and dying, offer an invaluable way of understanding how classical Islamic theological accounts of theodicy are manifest in believers, through their interpretations of evil and suffering and more importantly their commitments and quintessence on how to suffer well.

ISLAMIC THEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE ORIGINS AND PROBLEMS OF EVIL Muslims, who are adherents of the second largest religion in the world, believe that Muhammad, an illiterate man, received revelation from God over 1,400 years ago, and this revelation (Qur’an) and example of Muhammad (Sunnah) transmitted through authentic narrations (hadith) are their ultimate source of guidance. These sources have been interpreted and understood by religious scholars and lay communities since the advent of Islam, and lacking a central authority or institution, the Islamic tradition is thus replete with diverse approaches to its normative sources. The emergence of this diversity occurred early in Islam’s history where the death of Muhammad and the contentious selection of his successor marked not only political but also theological bifurcation. This primary branching led to the establishment of what is recognized as Shi’i and Sunni Islam. A key theological question, emerging in the early decades of Islam, was around the knowing of what is good and evil and whether this could be achieved through reason alone or required revelation. Shi’i theology is heavily influenced by Mu‘tazilite theology and if applied to Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma (Plato, 1914) would hold the view that “God commands because He knows a thing to be good”. In contrast Sunni theology finds its roots in Ash’ari theology and Maturidi theology, the former’s response to Plato would be that “a thing is good because God commands it”.8 This “theistic subjectivism” is a feature of the Sunni school.9 For the Mu’tazilis, following from the earlier discussion, good and evil can be discerned through reason, yet for Asharis this evaluation requires revelation. The Maturidi position is a nuance of the two, where reason and revelation are relied upon to recognize and

See Timothy Winter, “Islam and the Problem of Evil”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil, ed. Chad Meister and Paul K. Moser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 230–48. 8 See Umar F. Abdullah, “Theological Dimensions of Islamic Law”, in The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology, ed. Tim Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 237–57, 249. 9 See Winter, “Islam and the Problem of Evil”. 7

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discriminate between what is good and not. Extrapolating the Asha’ri position to purpose and accountability (taklif) one can surmise that if a person lives remotely and does not encounter revelation then she is not obliged to know God, do good or forgo evil.10 There are considerable differences between the differing schools and even within schools of Islamic theology and philosophy, in relation to the knowing of God, good, and evil and subsequently taklif. Beliefs about humanity’s primordial nature (fitra) and Qur’anic teachings pertaining to God’s primordial covenant with humanity (7:172–3) emphasize humankind’s innate proclivity toward Godliness and goodness. The fitra, according to scholars such as Ibn Taymiyyah and Ghazali, knows God, His attributes and Majesty without reasoning. It has been instilled by God and can discern good and evil. Yet, Ibn Taymiyyah and Ghazali both warn that the fitra is weak and prone to going astray and so requires faithful nurturing through the inextricable interweaving and reliance on reason and revelation.11 What is unanimous within the differing theological, ethical, and legal schools in Islam is the predominant message of the Qur’an, that of Tawhid (oneness of God) and understandings of humankind’s ultimate purpose of worshiping God (Ibadah) (51:56). The central message is important in allowing us to identify the source of moral goodness and evil, according to the Qur’an. God describes how He “perfected everything which He created” (32:7; 27:88). Perfection and goodness in creation are also synonymous with truth, whereby the Qur’an states that God has “not created the heavens and earth and that between them except in truth” (15:85). God also described the creation of humankind as being “in the best of moulds” (95:4). Thus, the Qur’anic message is that of God being the originator of all that is good, perfect, and true. Evil in the Qur’an originates when Satan (Iblis) defies God’s command. The Qur’an describes how God creates Adam from clay and breathes into him a portion of His spirit. God orders those in heaven to kneel to Adam. The Angels obey and Iblis refuses, arguing that his fiery quintessence makes him superior to a being of clay. Although the Angels also question God as to why He brought into existence a creature who will cause “corruption” and “bloodshed”, while they “praise and sanctify” God, they nevertheless obey (2:30). Iblis’ disobedience makes him the subject of God’s wrath and he is dismissed from heaven. Before departing he requests God, that he may be protected from further punishment and is able to lead humans, who succumb to his wiles, astray. God accepts Iblis’ request and warns that whoever follows Iblis will follow him to hell (15:28-40; 7:1118). Disobedience to God or evil, committed by Iblis or humankind, thus occurs through God’s will but not with his pleasure (ridda). Islam’s central message is that of surrender and submission to God and His worship such that every act conducted for God’s pleasure is considered worship. Evil or sharr in the Qur’an is equivalent to disobedience to God, His guidance and His will. Iblis’ testing of humankind’s will, belief, and commitment in God’s command begins imminently where God warns Adam and his wife Hawa to not eat of the forbidden tree, Iblis deceives them and they are subsequently banished from heaven to earth. The wrongdoing or evil committed by Adam is accepted by him with humility as his own doing. In repentance, he seeks forgiveness of God and describes the action in which they

10 See Ayman Shihadeh, “The Existence of God”, in The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology, ed. Tim Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 197–217. 11 See Abdullah, “Theological Dimensions of Islamic Law”.

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have “wronged” themselves (7:19-25). Similarly, the Qur’an is replete with references to humankind’s free will and accountability before God delineating God’s overall majesty over the universe to that of the actions of humankind on Earth. Furthermore, the Qur’an defines as “successful” those who “enjoin the doing of good and forbidding what is evil” emphasizing individual but also collective accountability and reward (3:104). The cultivation of one’s nature through remembrance of God and commitment to virtuous action is echoed throughout the Qur’an, teachings, and example of the Prophet and is considered a means of ensuring protection against the deception of Iblis. Islam’s rendering of Aristotelian phronesis or practical wisdom is one that interlinks virtuous actions with God consciousness (taqwa). In combination, they offer reinforcement against vulnerabilities in committing moral evil. Those who forsake the cultivation of one’s nature toward good by committing evil, not seeking forgiveness and repeating evil, are those who God mentions are astray and forsaken (45:23).

LIFE AS A TEST MANIFEST THROUGH SUFFERING One of Islam’s answers to the question “why does an oft merciful and compassionate God allow evil and suffering?” is linked to its cosmological framework where this earthly life is one of hardship (90:4) and a test (ibtila) for believers. The Qur’an pronounces how natural evil such as “fear and hunger and a loss of wealth and lives and fruits” will befall humankind. Such evil must be borne with patience and those who surrender to God’s will and persevere are those who will receive “good tidings” as well as “blessings”, and they are those who are “guided” toward God and protected from Iblis (2:155-157). The Qur’an is replete with messages about God promising suffering as a means of testing believers. This promise is not only borne out by ordinary people; the Qur’an and life of the Prophet Muhammad outline that those chosen by God are subject to immense suffering and hardship. Muhammad was orphaned in childhood and lost his uncle and grandfather in quick succession. He endured immeasurable loss in adulthood with the death of his beloved wife Khadija and all but one of his seven children. He was poisoned, exiled, and persecuted for a significant proportion of the twenty-three years over which the Qur’an was revealed to him and in which he enacted his mission of spreading God’s word. Stories of suffering are plentiful in the Qur’an with the tribulations of Abraham, Hajar, Noah, Joseph, Job, Mary, and Jesus all presenting an account of earthly injustice, loss, pain, and grief. Their unifying example is of reliance in God and with that deliverance. For Muhammad, God says in the Qur’an: By the morning brightness; and by the night when it grows still; your Lord has not forsaken you [Prophet], nor does He hate you; and the future will be better for you than the past; your Lord is sure to give you so much that you will be well satisfied. Did He not find you an orphan and shelter you? Did He not find you lost and guide you? Did He not find you in need and make you self-sufficient? So do not be harsh with the orphan; and do not chide the one who asks for help; talk about the blessings of your Lord.12

The Qur’an 93:1-11. Translation: Abdel Haleem, The Qur’an – A New Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 425 (Sura 93 “The Morning Brightness”, Al-Duha).

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The verses speak of not only the hardship endured by God’s prophet but also the perpetual deliverance and guidance from God. Although the previous translation cites “the future” as being better than that of “the past”, other translations are less ambiguous in highlighting akhira not just as “the future” but the hereafter. Through the Prophet’s life and example, believers are guided by an eschatological paradigm that emphasizes the afterlife over this life. It is in the hereafter that believers who patiently endure natural evil and the injustices of moral evil will receive God’s reward. That earthly life is temporal and the one to follow is eternal means that the khayr (goodness) that awaits believers outweighs any and all suffering endured presently. The outweighing of khayr over shayr is encapsulated in God’s attributes, as Rahman (the Lord of mercy) and Raheem (the Giver of mercy). The abundance of His mercy for His creation is summarized in the teaching of the Prophet Muhammad through a Hadith Qudsi or a narration that is directly from God. The Hadith outlines that God’s offering through forgiveness, reward, and propinquity surpasses that of believers and even the slightest effort is rewarded plentifully: God says: “I am just as My slave thinks I am, and I am with him if He remembers Me. If he remembers Me in himself, I too, remember him in Myself; and if he remembers Me in a group of people, I remember him in a group that is better than they; and if he comes one span nearer to Me, I go one cubit nearer to him; and if he comes one cubit nearer to Me, I go a distance of two outstretched arms nearer to him; and if he comes to Me walking, I go to him running.”13 Islamic eschatology is central to its message and beliefs about theodicy and humankind’s ultimate purpose.14 The prominence of the hereafter provides numerous reasons for suffering within Islam’s cosmological framework. The first being that of fulfilling humankind’s purpose of being tested and overcoming the wiles of Iblis. The second of being afforded a chance to atone for any wrongdoings committed, and finally an opportunity to gain nearness to God and be elevated in the hereafter. This triad is central to believers’ meaning-making around suffering and also represents God’s awareness of human nature where life’s purpose is encapsulated in a broad offering: avoiding punishment or hell; seeking reward or heaven and finally attaining God’s pleasure. The last of the triad requires careful exposition as it links to the question of why the innocent suffer. The Qur’an stresses that though innocent of committing any evil, Muhammad suffered and through his suffering received concomitant relief through God’s mercy: Did We not relieve your heart for you; and remove the burden; that weighed so heavily on your back; and raise your reputation high? So truly where there is hardship there is also ease; truly where there is hardship there is also ease. The moment you are freed [of one task] work on, and turn to your Lord for everything.15 The message of “where there is hardship there is also ease” points to a pietistic tension for believers who recognize and accept adversity as a means of receiving God’s mercy, guidance, and deliverance. It is a submission that is represented in the example of Islam’s mystical or Sufi tradition that promotes an ascetic piety emphasizing not the attainment Sahih al-Bukhari: Book 97, Hadith 34, accessed December 26, 2021, https://sunnah​.com​/bukhari​:7405. See Marcia Hermansen, “Eschatology”, in The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology, ed. Tim Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 308–24. 15 The Qur’an 94:1-8. Translation: Haleem, The Qur’an – A New Translation, 426 (Sura “Relief ”, Al-Sharh). 13 14

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of heaven and avoidance of hell, but rather the doing of good, avoiding of evil, and bearing suffering patiently for the singular purpose of devotion to God. Rabiya Basri, a saint and mystic, introduced the concept of Divine Love, by which she spoke of, wrote, and exemplified earthly purpose as that of doing and worshiping for the purpose of God and God alone: O Lord, if I worship you; Because of fear of hell; Then burn me in hell; If I worship You; Because I desire Paradise; Then exclude me from Paradise; But if I worship You; For Yourself alone; then deny me not; Your eternal beauty.16 The suffering of the innocent is also understood through an acceptance of God’s divine wisdom. The Sunni doctrine of theistic subjectivism, for example, includes the belief that suffering experienced by those who are innocent is not intrinsically evil, rather that such tests and experiences fall within the purview of God’s overall wisdom and majesty over the universe, despite our not being able to comprehend them.17 Humankind’s inability to comprehend the overall cosmic order and purpose as well as God’s overall wisdom is allegorical in the story of Moses and Al-Khadir.18 God cautions Moses for claiming that there is no one more knowledgeable than himself. He is directed to follow Al-Khadir who commits what seems to Moses injustices or evils. Al-Khadir, guided by God, undertakes these actions to prevent potentially greater injustices, such as damaging a boat of innocent seafarers to prevent it from being seized by the king. This tradition of the Prophet and other similar lessons in the Qur’an and Hadith emphasize God’s divine decree for humankind, where suffering in this earthly realm may not be or cannot be fully understood, yet it ought to be accepted and borne with patience. Such teachings are accompanied by the Qur’anic message of Divine justice, where believers are reassured that their trials are carefully measured: God does not burden any soul with more than it can bear: each gains whatever good it has done, and suffers its bad – “Lord, do not take us to task if we forget or make mistakes. Lord, do not burden us as You burdened those before us. Lord, do not burden us with more than we have strength to bear. Pardon us, forgive us, and have mercy on us. You are our Protector, so help us against the disbelievers.”19

MUSLIM UNDERSTANDINGS OF SUFFERING THROUGH THEIR END-OF-LIFE EXPERIENCES Muslims reside within a theocentric moral universe where theodicy is intricately linked with eschatology and ascetic piety. The Qur’anic message, Prophetic teachings, and generations of Islamic scholarship and interpretation find their present-day embodiment in the lived reality and virtuous expression of Muslims. Empirical research analyzing the perspectives of service users and providers: Through the study of decision-making and understandings at the end of life and in particular their

Jamal Mahmood, Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi (London: Penguin, 2009), 8. 17 See Winter, “Islam and the Problem of Evil”. 18 Sahih al-Bukhari: Book 65, Hadith 248, accessed December 26, 2021, https://sunnah​.com​/bukhari​:4726. 19 The Qur’an, 2:286. Translation: Haleem, The Qur’an – A New Translation. 16

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views on death and dying, we are able to discern their embodied theologies of theodicy. A précis of the empirical research methodology is presented here.20 Participants: Seventy-six semi-structured interviews were carried out with Muslim patients and family members; healthcare professionals; other service providers, for example, bereavement officers, funeral service providers, mortuary staff, and coroners; chaplains and Imams; and/ or Islamic scholars involved in End-of-Life Care decision-making. Sampling was carried out in London and Birmingham to maximize the opportunity to study Muslim values in End-ofLife Care decision-making, as these two cities have the highest population of Muslims in the UK.21 Sampling was also carried out in Cambridge, despite the small population of Muslims, to include narratives of stakeholders in a varied socio-demographic profile. Ethical review: As the study involves direct participation involving human subjects, it has undergone review by the University of Cambridge School of Humanities and Social Sciences Ethics Committee as well as the NHS Health Research Authority (IRAS number: 220682). Data analysis and the process of developing the main themes for this chapter: Semistructured interviews were audio recorded and transcribed. Using data from notes taken at the interviews and transcriptions of the audio recordings, a framework analysis approach was employed.22 The method I used reflects the framework analysis requirements described first by Ritchie and Lewis, who suggest that the framework should ensure the investigator:

1. Remains grounded in the data.



2. Permits captured synthesis – this is reflected in the charting process where verbatim text is reduced from its raw form.



3. Facilitates and displays ordering – again this is reflected in the charting process.



4. Permits within and between case searches – the charting process allows for searching and comparisons to be made within and between data sets.23

Having analyzed the literature and studied the transcripts using a framework analysis, I identified two main themes and associated subthemes that helped me organize the insights emerging from the data pertinent to Muslim values and end-of-life care decisionmaking.24 Although the data could have been presented in multiple ways, and I drafted

For a detailed outline of the methodology, see Mehrunisha Suleman, “Muslim Values and End of Life Healthcare Decision-Making: Values, Norms and Ontologies in Conflict?” in Biomedicine and Islam, ed. Aasim Padela and Afifi Al-Akiti (Philosophy and Medicine 137; Cham, Switzerland: Springer 2022). 21 See Muslim Council of Britain, British Muslims in Numbers: A Demographic, Socio-Economic ad Health Profile of Muslims in Britain Drawing on the 2011 Census (London: The Muslim Council of Britain, 2015), 26. 22 See also Judith Green and Nicki Thorogood, Qualitative Methods for Health Research (Introducing Qualitative Methods Series), 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2013), 209–17; Catherine Pope, Sue Ziebland, and Nicholas Mays, “Analysing Qualitative Data”, BMJ Clinical Research 320, no. 7227 (2000): 114–16. 23 Jane Ritchie and Jane Lewis, Qualitative Research Practice: A Guide for Social Science Students and Researchers (London: Sage Publications, 2003), 56. 24 See also Suleman, “Muslim Values and End of Life Healthcare Decision-Making”; Mehrunisha Suleman, “Muslim Perspectives on End of Life Care”, in British Muslims and Health, ed. Sufyan Abid Dogra (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020); for additional discussion of this data set. 20

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several versions of the data tables, the following themes outlined ultimately functioned best as organizing concepts for the data I gathered from the participants I interviewed. The themes are as follows:

(a) End-of-life care decision-making in modern healthcare systems: values, norms, and ontologies:



(b) Muslim values, beliefs, and practice in end-of-life care decision-making: sources, languages, and authorities:

− Understandings of death and dying

− Beliefs about suffering and understandings of what is a “good death” While these themes emerged as being important from my analysis of participant accounts, they also provided a framework through which the data and discussion from this chapter could be related back to the aims of the research in addressing how faith commitments are encountered within the palliative and end-of-life care context.25 End-of-life care decision-making in modern health-care systems: values, norms, and ontologies: An analysis of seventy-six interview transcripts shows the importance of theological perspectives and practices for Muslims. Many spent a significant amount of time detailing their religious commitments and how these impact their meaning-making around death and dying.

UNDERSTANDINGS OF DEATH AND DYING Many of the participants spoke about their understandings of death and dying being rooted in their commitments to the meaning and purpose of life. One Muslim physician who herself was recently bereaved explained that This life is just to test us. This physical stuff is just nothing, it’s just a shell. It’s just a shell that we are traversing through, and that we came from nothing, and we’ll go back to Allah, and that this is just collecting good, hopefully not too many bad deeds. Let’s do as much good as we can. Let’s uplift as many people as we can. Let’s empower as many people as we can. In that short time that is now, because this is nothing in comparison to the eternity that we are.26 For her this life is a temporary reality, one in which good ought to be done and suffering endured for goodness in an eternal afterlife. She also explained that she knows not about her own death and instead relies on God: I think it’s important to remember death and maybe not fear it. Well, we fear it for different reasons. We fear it because of our relationship with our Maker, but the actual preparing for it by doing the best you can in your life, therefore, it’s not as painful at the end, then we can work on that now.

See also Ronald Chenail, “Presenting Qualitative Data”, The Qualitative Report, 2, no. 3 (1995): 1–9; Margarete Sandelowski, “Writing a Good Read: Strategies for Re-presenting Qualitative Data”, Research in Nursing & Health, 21, no. 4 (1998): 375–82. 26 Interview 36, Muslim physician, Birmingham. 25

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I think about my own death. I wonder what it will be like? I wonder when it will be? I wonder if I’ll be remembered for anything? I wonder where I’ll have 20 spectators watching me have a ghusl, because I don’t want that. But then I think, just trust in Allah. Just trust in Allah.27 Her views and experiences resonate with the aforementioned Qur’anic, Prophetic, and Islamic scholarly teachings on the meaning and purpose of life and how it is a forum for trials and tribulations for believers so they can attain God consciousness (taqwa) and that death ought to be remembered as a reminder of life’s purpose and one’s ultimate destination. Her views also represent the inherent trust in God that is central to Muslim theodicy (65:2-3).

BELIEFS ABOUT SUFFERING AND UNDERSTANDINGS OF WHAT IS A “GOOD DEATH” Given such theological commitments around death and dying, the role of spiritual care, including Muslim chaplaincy, is increasingly being recognized as crucial for ensuring patient-centered care. Chaplains involved in the study explained how they encountered patients’ and families’ faith at the bedside and how they administered to them using an Islamic theological and ethico-legal framework: I think whenever death happens, especially when it’s someone close to you, you start thinking about the purpose of life, because you then recalibrate your being, and you remember that I’m also mortal. I am also a being and I am going to go one day as well. Then people start to ask questions about life and death, and what’s the purpose of life? What am I doing here? Where’s my father gone? All those questions which majority of the people they have faith, it’s this strength of Iman (faith) that I’m talking about, everybody has faith in Allah, but it’s rekindling that Iman. They start remembering some of the stuff that they learnt when they were young. It’s just trying to remind them that God has said that this life is temporary, God has that eternal life is the hereafter. God has said that this world is a test. God has said that this test does not mean that you have done something wrong to get in this, it’s just God wants to raise your status. All these different elements are then a reminder for that individual. “Oh, okay.” And that helps them cope. There’s lots of reward for helping people, especially coping in those difficult times.28 The chaplain explained how loss and grief are recognized by patients and families as a means of increasing their faith (Iman) in God, that life is a test and the trials they endure are not necessarily because of them having committed a wrong, rather it was an opportunity to be elevated and to gain nearness to God. His perspective and that of others in the study exemplify contemporary embodiment of what it means to suffer well. Furthermore, the chaplain explained that from within the Islamic ethico-legal paradigm, seeking treatment or healthcare intervention at the end of life is not an obligation due to the uncertainty of its success.29

Interview 36, Muslim physician, Birmingham. Interview 1, Muslim Chaplain, London. 29 See Afshan Mohiuddin, Mehrunisha Suleman, Shoaib Rasheed, and Aasim I. Padela, “When can Muslims withdraw or withhold life support? A narrative review of Islamic juridical rulings”, Global Bioethics, 31, no. 1 (2020): 29–46. 27 28

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Life is always a test, but that’s with that individual who feels his Iman is strong, or her Iman is strong, and is able to bring those thoughts to the fore. Then you have somebody who is alone, doesn’t have that network, doesn’t have that support, doesn’t have that strong Iman, and then they’re faced with a decision of end-of-life, or quality of life. It’s not necessary for someone to take medicine, or treatment when it’s not guaranteed or compulsory. Are they then allowed to make that decision I’d rather have end-of-life, by not taking treatment? For example, somebody’s been diagnosed with cancer. They’ve been told that you can have chemotherapy, or radio therapy. They’ve heard that radiotherapy, chemotherapy is very harsh. It is difficult, but it’s not guaranteed. They would rather say no, I’ll rely on Allah, and I’ll eat well, and I’ll drink well, and I’ll have quality of life, and if Allah wills, I’ll die. If Allah wills, I don’t. Is that allowed? I would say yes it is, because radio therapy, chemotherapy is not 100% guaranteed. It’s a choice for that individual. If that person makes that choice, we as a community need to support it. We’d rather that person dies well, rather than dying in a miserable state.30 He provides a survey of the differing experiences and views among Muslim patients that he encounters. For those of strong faith, they recognize life is a test and are willing to endure. For others who would find severe medical intervention unbearable, they can opt for a more immediate palliative route. Both are acceptable and ought to be supported. What is important to highlight is his stratification of suffering and meaning-making around what is a “good death” as well as what it means to suffer well. The taxonomy of suffering alluded to by the chaplain mirrors that of the levels of faith mentioned earlier (life’s purpose being interpreted as avoidance of hell and seeking heaven or God consciousness/God’s pleasure Ridda). For those who lose or deny faith in God, for them encountering suffering leads to rebellion resembling that of Iblis’ questioning and subsequently rejecting submitting to God’s will. For those embodying lower levels of faith, suffering is endured as a recompense and may or may not be accompanied by silent resentment alongside a recognition of the inevitability of the suffering and therefore a disgruntled acceptance. Those who accept suffering as a means of elevation or paradise may silently accept and bear what befalls them with fortitude. They embody virtues such as trust in God (taqwa) and patience (sabr). Finally, those who exemplify the uppermost levels of faith not only accept the suffering but recognize its source and are thankful (shukr) that God has offered them a means of gaining nearness to Him. The latter personify the ascetic piety of the Prophets and saints submitting entirely to God’s will and welcoming the khayr and sharr as part of God’s masterplan.31

FURTHER READING Ghaly, Mohammed. Islam and Disability: Perspectives in Theology and Jurisprudence. Routledge Islamic Studies Series. London: Routledge, 2009.

Interview 1, Muslim Chaplain, London. I am grateful to Professor Gurch Randhawa, University of Bedfordshire, for reviewing transcripts and the data analysis for external validation. I am also indebted to my family, in particular my mum Hazra Suleman and also Anisah, Umar, and Aisha Suleman for their guidance and support in the authoring of this chapter. 30 31

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Hoover, Jon. Ibn Taymiyya’s Theodicy of Perpetual Optimism. Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science: Texts and Studies, Vol. 73. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Inati, Shams C. The Problem of Evil: Ibn Sina’s Theodicy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Jackson, Sherman A. Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Ormsby, Eric. Theodicy in Islamic thought: The Dispute over al- Ghazālī‘s ‘Best of All Possible Worlds’. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Winter, Timothy. “Islam and the Problem of Evil.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil. Edited by Chad Meister and Paul K. Moser, 230–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Chapter 74

The Holocaust SARAH K. PINNOCK

INTRODUCTION The Holocaust has generated distinctive responses to suffering and the problem of evil. Under Hitler’s National Socialist Party (1933–45), genocide occurred against groups categorized as inferior to Aryan-Germans, including Jews, gypsies, the disabled, homosexuals, and Slavic populations. In particular, the systematic murder of six million Jews in Christian Europe raises serious questions about the biblical covenant with the descendants of Abraham, God’s plan in history, and the sources of antisemitism in Christianity. In significant ways, the Holocaust provokes a crisis and a turning point for reflection on suffering and the problem of evil. Primary sources and first-hand accounts of those who suffered are crucial elements for Holocaust reflection. Such testimonies are accounts of trauma, impossible to fully articulate for victims or to fully comprehend for readers. They offer a basis for parsing the complexity of suffering, difficulties of representation, and ethical implications. Texts by Holocaust survivors, such as Night by Elie Wiesel, Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi, or Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land by Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, have become essential resources for religious reflection. Holocaust thinkers agree that listening to survivors and those directly involved and encountering the magnitude of what happened are necessary prerequisites to any intellectual responses to suffering and evil. Major contributions to Holocaust thought began to emerge in the 1960s among Jewish and Christian authors. Moreover, since the 1990s, a new generation of Holocaust responses has offered constructive criticisms of earlier Holocaust theology and pursued new avenues of reflection, including examination of public memorials and gatherings, bringing other religions into dialogue with Jews and Christians, and extending discussion to other cases of massive suffering or genocide.

JEWISH HOLOCAUST RESPONSES Orthodox Jewish rabbi Irving Greenberg sets a standard for Holocaust thought with his oft-quoted rule: no statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children.1 He argues that one should not say “obscene” things intended to make the situation seem less bad or to offer posthumous

Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire: Judaism, Christianity, and Modernity after the Holocaust”, in Auschwitz: Beginning of a New Era, ed. Eva Fleishner (New York: KTAV, 1977), 23.

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comfort. The impetus behind Greenberg’s warning has been taken seriously in the development of major Jewish and Christian Holocaust responses, leading to critiques of traditional approaches to suffering and evil and toward anti-theodicy. One pioneering Jewish Holocaust response occurs in the midst of the “death of God” movement in 1966 with Richard Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism. In this work, he proclaims the death of the God of history. The vehemence of his reaction represents Rubenstein’s encounter in Berlin with Protestant German pastor Heinrich Gruber, who had been imprisoned in Dachau for political opposition to National Socialism during the war. In conversation with Rubenstein, Gruber explains to him that theologically the Holocaust was God’s will and Hitler was God’s henchman, and that the Jews have a special role in God’s design for salvation.2 Utterly shocked to hear that traditional theology applied made the Holocaust an act of God’s will, Rubenstein subsequently rejects any understanding of God that makes the Holocaust part of a divine plan. He observes that this Christian understanding of the covenant people burdens Jews alternately with high expectations and collective guilt. Although he eschews the omnipotent God of theodicy, he reconceives God as a source of life, an immanent presence, and ultimate being.3 With his appeal to a Jewish God of nature, drawing from Jewish mysticism and continental philosophy, Rubenstein rejects the imposition of meaning on Jewish suffering and theodicy attempts to explain history as God’s plan. Theodicy critique accompanies reinterpretation of the concept of God and exile in the work of Eliezer Berkovitz, an Orthodox rabbi trained in pre-war Germany. In a similar vein to Greenberg, Berkovitz confers authority on testimonies of Jewish faith in the concentration camps in Faith after the Holocaust. He writes: “It is not our intention to justify God’s ways with Israel. Our concern is with the question of whether the affirmations of faith may be made notwithstanding God’s terrible silence during the Holocaust.”4 He formulates a dialectic between rebellion and protest against God, who appears to permit the Holocaust, and faith and confidence in God’s love shown in the biblical covenant with Israel. He employs the concept of God’s self-hiding, the self-restraint of divine power, and the reappearance of God in the growth of the Jewish community. Jewish continuity that overcomes suffering is of major concern for Emil Fackenheim, a Reform rabbi from Germany, who was imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp during the war. In God’s Presence in History, he draws on midrashic tradition to explore the saving presence of God in the Exodus from Egypt and at Mount Sinai, which he contrasts with the rupture of the Holocaust in the Nazi assault on the Jews. Together, positive and negative, these are considered epoch-making events. Adding to the traditional 613 rabbinic mitzvot, Fackenheim proposes that the “Commanding Voice of Auschwitz” produces a 614th commandment: “it is forbidden to hand Hitler yet another, posthumous victory.”5 In his view, this command applies equally to religious and secular Jews, as it is revealed in the midst of catastrophe. He considers this imperative for Jewish survival to be symbolized by the modern state of Israel. God and Torah are ruptured and

Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 15. 3 Ibid., 297. 4 Eliezer Berkovits, Faith after the Holocaust (New York: KTAV, 1973), 68. 5 Emil L. Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations of Philosophical Reflections (New York: Harper Touch, 1970), 83. 2

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fragmented after Auschwitz, yet the biblical command has transferred from God to the Jewish people: to live. Rather than rethink God, Marc H. Ellis considers the Holocaust as an impetus to reflect on suffering as it leads people to seek liberation and end conditions of oppression. Influenced by Richard Rubenstein, Ellis agrees that traditional Jewish belief in redemption history becomes untenable after Auschwitz. On his first trip to Israel in 1973, Ellis took the opportunity to meet Israeli Jews as well as Palestinians and refugees, which galvanized his activism for social justice. In Ending Auschwitz, Ellis widens the perspective on suffering from the Holocaust to include other victimized groups. He objects to the political implications of connecting the modern state of Israel to the 614th commandment appealing to victory against Hitler. He criticizes militarism and forced displacement of Palestinians, which he sees as related to other liberation struggles in Latin America and postcolonial lands.6 Ellis argues that the response to Holocaust evil entails the necessity of solidarity and resistance. The phenomenology of Holocaust suffering leads other authors to reject theodicy. In his essay entitled “Torture”, written in 1965, Jewish survivor Jean Améry analyzes his own imprisonment by the Nazis in 1943 in a Belgian prison. He describes how the victim of torture becomes numb, helpless, dehumanized, and broken with no expectation of help. Trust in the world ceases and vulnerability radicalized. Améry concludes that “torture was not an accidental quality of this Third Reich but its essence”.7 For the perpetrator, the infliction of torture establishes an identity of superiority, apart from its purported utility. Améry’s experience illustrates Emmanuel Levinas’ argument in his essay “Useless Suffering”. Levinas asserts that “The disproportion between suffering and every theodicy was shown at Auschwitz with a glaring, obvious clarity. Its possibility puts into question the multi-millennial traditional faith.”8 Holocaust suffering should never be explained as a means to an end or justified by God. Levinas writes, “For an ethical sensibility – confirming itself, in the inhumanity of our time, against this inhumanity – the justification of the neighbor’s pain is certainly the source of all immorality.”9 Theodicy justifies the other’s suffering in religious terms as part of God’s design, or in secular terms as a means to an end. The proper religious and ethical response to the other should be compassion and assistance. Under the extremes of suffering, God may be accused and held to account as analogous to an abusive parent. In Facing the Abusing God, David Blumenthal employs a discourse of brokenness where biblical passages from Psalms are juxtaposed with commentaries and counter-verses offering fragmentary reflections. In this inter-textual mode of protest, Blumenthal considers God’s position as inconsistent and at times cruel and unjust. God’s children must confront helplessness, hurt, and disappointment with God in attempting to recover from suffering.10 Faith consists in persistent attempts to seek reconciliation with

Marc H. Ellis, Ending Auschwitz: The Future of Jewish and Christian Life (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994), 9. 7 Jean Améry, “Torture”, in At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 30. 8 Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering”, in The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1988), 162. 9 Ibid., 163. 10 David R. Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 183. 6

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the abuser, involving protest and questioning, but Blumenthal also appeals to faith that God is loving. Rather than view God as abusing, affirmation of God may be found in the concentration camps on an everyday level among the prisoners. Taking God as immanent, rather than almighty, God’s presence amidst suffering may be conceived as vulnerable. In a feminist response to Auschwitz, Melissa Raphael draws on women’s testimonies in Auschwitz-Birkenau to show the realization of God’s presence conceived of as a bodily reality embedded in everyday acts, and she rejects suggestions that God was “hidden, absent or eclipsed” in the camps.11 Raphael shows that women’s narratives reveal God in mutual caring, nurturing, and kindness as sacred acts that wash the profanation of Auschwitz. Raphael finds redemption in human relationships and the presence of God as Shekinah, the female emanation of God in the Jewish mysticism of the Kabbalah. She develops a concept of God embodied in relationships and found in suffering. But consistent with other Holocaust thinkers, she finds traditional Jewish thought about suffering and evil inadequate.

CHRISTIAN HOLOCAUST RESPONSES Christian responses to the Holocaust attend to victim testimonies and Jewish witnesses as a departure point and often focus on Christology and the doctrine of Israel. Moreover, Holocaust reflection considers the status of Christian perpetrators and bystanders during National Socialism. Particular attention falls on Christian teachings that have negative connotations toward Jews such as theological supersessionism, where the new covenant in Christ replaces the Old Testament covenant, and soteriological triumphalism, which proclaims victory over evil through Jesus Christ. Christology is a focal point for German Christian responses to the Holocaust, emerging with thinkers who grew up as teenagers under National Socialism in the 1940s. One example is Protestant theologian Jürgen Moltmann, who develops a theology of the cross that encompasses the Holocaust. He holds that the great abyss of the world’s godforsakenness is taken up within the Trinitarian love between Father and Son, such that God’s suffering encompasses human suffering. Moltmann remarks that as in Night where Elie Wiesel envisions God hanging on the gallows “even Auschwitz is taken up into the grief of the Father, the surrender of the Son, and the power of the Spirit”.12 It seems the suffering of the burning children, referred to by Greenberg, becomes included in God’s Trinitarian life somehow. Although this view might seem too sanitized, Moltmann denies that his theology is triumphalist since Israel’s redemption is based on the covenant, and the messianic hope of the resurrection is postponed. Redemption is treated more cautiously by Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz, who proposes a political theology. Metz observes that the Holocaust displays the moral failure of bourgeois Christianity and modern technology and requires an overarching critique of Western civilization. He attends to Jewish Holocaust narratives and their impact on Christian discourse. Metz holds that both Holocaust testimonies and biblical narratives are dangerous memories, which interrupt attitudes of indifference to suffering Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust (London: Routledge, 2003), 85. 12 Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1974), 278. 11

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and generate protest. Redemption functions as a critical idea that functions to measure the shortcomings of human failures of justice and to heighten awareness of how urgently redemption is needed.13 He insists that Christian meaning should never be imposed on the victims of Auschwitz. Alongside protest, Metz formulates a mysticism of suffering that prays to God without answers, a “mysticism of open eyes” that increases the perception of others’ suffering.14 For a Christian to take this approach to Jewish suffering means to refuse to offer theological ideas that make suffering justified, to remain appalled, and yet continue to search. Mystical and political strands of theology unite in the work of Protestant German theologian Dorothee Soelle. In her early work, Suffering, she reflects on Holocaust narratives alongside examples of suffering during wartime and instances of economic and social oppression. The only legitimate meaning arising from suffering is self-designated by persons who suffer, and only suffering that is in imitation of Jesus Christ by intention of the subject counts as meaningful.15 She holds that the cross is a paradoxical symbol of suffering and redemption, and gives Christology a non-triumphalist interpretation that fuels protest against injustice and solidarity. She argues that the theodicy question “why does a good God permit suffering?” should be superseded by the practical question: How can my suffering be transformed into something which serves God?16 Divine pain becomes visible in human pain when suffering is linked with mystical solidarity and liberation for all who are oppressed. Like Metz, Soelle brings together political and mystical approaches. While addressing suffering theologically, North American Christian Holocaust responses seem to place more emphasis on the biblical people of Israel. One early contribution to reflection on the Holocaust is Faith and Fratricide by Rosemary Radford Ruether. As a Catholic feminist, Ruether carefully examines early Christianity and seeks to retrieve non-prejudiced teachings and outlooks toward Jews, women, and marginalized groups. Her examination of the Jewish roots of Christianity and the Christian roots of antisemitism leads toward a constructive conclusion. She argues for an authentic core of Christian faith found in the teaching of Jesus, free of anti-Judaism. In coming to terms with eschatology after the Holocaust, Ruether objects to the idea that the cross completes the work of redemption, which would appear to make Holocaust suffering part of God’s plan or theodicy. In her view, the gospels teach unrealized eschatology and unfulfilled messianism, analogous to the Hebrew Bible’s teaching about the messianic era promised to the people of Israel.17 Christianity does not supersede Judaism, and Christian negative teachings leading to the Holocaust can be revised. Jewish–Christian relations are also key for Franklin Littell, a Methodist pastor who spent ten years in Germany working with the de-Nazification process before returning to the United States. His major work entitled The Crucifixion of the Jews: The Failure of Christians to Understand the Jewish Experience appears more critical of Christianity than Ruether’s. He considers all Christians in Europe as responsible for the Holocaust, not only Germans. His book traces antisemitism from the inception of Christianity

Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society, trans. David Smith (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 195. Johann Baptist Metz, “Theology as Theodicy?” in A Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimension of Christianity, trans. J. Matthew Ashley (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 178. 15 Dorothee Soelle, Suffering, trans. Everett R. Kalin (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1975), 167. 16 Sarah K. Pinnock, Beyond Theodicy: Jewish and Christian Continental Thinkers Respond to the Holocaust (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 133. 17 Rosemary Ruether, Faith and Fratricide (Minneapolis: Seabury, 1974), 240. 13 14

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through the early church with attention to pejorative teachings about Jews during the Protestant Reformation. After Auschwitz, he argues that there is a credibility crisis for Christian churches that requires repentance and alliance with Jewish communities. He views the state of Israel as symbolic of the resurrection of the Jewish people and criticizes anti-Zionism as aligned with antisemitism. He advises Christians to learn from Jews and not spiritualize the meaning of the cross.18 Littell is pragmatic in his approach, organizing Jewish-Christian dialogue, developing warning signs for genocide prevention, and encouraging defense of the Jewish people in response to threats. Paul van Buren goes so far as to make the Holocaust revelatory in his three-volume systematic theology, A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality. He proposes that the Holocaust is a reorienting event which makes it another step in divine revelation which has repercussions for eschatology and Christology. He locates a positive understanding of Judaism in New Testament writings and emphasizes common hopes of Jews and Christians for redemption.19 He affirms that salvation can occur apart from Jesus Christ and proposes that the Jewish “No” reminds the church that salvation is unfinished. He refuses to spiritualize Israel; thus, he endorses Christian Zionism. Van Buren considers the state of Israel necessary to allow the Jewish people to define themselves. Church teaching must become more Hebraic and emphasize the importance of human responsibility to overcome Holocaust failings. Rather than focus on Israel, John K. Roth weaves together Jewish and Christian questioning of God and anti-theodicy to build common themes in his 1981 essay “A Theodicy of Protest”. He foregrounds Christian responsibility for evil, and at the same time, Christian affinity with Jews. He views Jesus Christ as in the line of succession of the Hebrew prophets. Jesus is not triumphal; he hopes in God’s promises and ends up on the cross. Roth considers the gospels a source of protest faith, including Jesus’ outcry on the cross that he is forsaken by God. His objections to theodicy arise from the sense that evil is far worse than can be made comprehensible theologically.20 Rather than resolve the tension between God’s goodness and omnipotence, Roth adheres to Christian beliefs and protests faith that he finds incongruous with the Holocaust.

RECENT HOLOCAUST RESPONSES Major established Jewish and Christian responses to the Holocaust show an unmistakable urgency, determined to build proposals from the raw material of religious traditions found wanting. They are confident in authentic voices of the Holocaust represented by Jewish survivors and in the potential to learn lessons and forge a new religious outlook. Their work becomes a reference point for a new generation that calls assumptions into question about both religion and the Holocaust. These recent responses are chronologically parallel to the Holocaust “third generation” that includes the grandchildren of those adults who lived through the Second World War. This generation becomes active as intellectuals

Franklin Littell, The Crucifixion of the Jews: The Failure of Christians to Understand the Jewish Experience (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1975), 130. 19 Paul van Buren, A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality, Volume Two, A Christian Theology of the People of Israel (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), 114. 20 John K. Roth, “A Theodicy of Protest”, in Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, A New Edition, ed. Stephen T. Davis (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 17. 18

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and authors from the 1990s onward.21 They concentrate self-reflexively on subject positioning and the transmission of Holocaust memory through cultural, religious, and national lenses. The theme of anti-theodicy runs through major Jewish responses to the Holocaust which reflects the shock of learning what happened shortly after the war. In his thematic study, Zachary Braiterman looks back at the “reckless courage” of thinkers such as Rubenstein, Berkovits, and Fackenheim, who reject traditional forms of faith in God after Auschwitz.22 Looking forward, he considers whether their apparent rejection of theodicy might be more subtle than it appears, and leave an opening for Jewish orthodoxy to remain. He suggests that the darkness of Auschwitz lies in tension with Jewish messianic hope and confidence in the future. He also notes that alongside critique of theodicy, Holocaust thinkers appear to sanctify the state of Israel theologically. Yet while emblematic of Jewish survival after Auschwitz, the state of Israel can become idealized in religious terms, lacking closer political examination. Major Christian responses come under scrutiny for the treatment of suffering and the doctrine of Israel. In Reluctant Witnesses: Jews and the Christian Imagination, Stephen Haynes studies how Christians appropriate the Jewishness of Christianity and the role of the Jews during and after the Holocaust. He notes that Christian Holocaust thinkers approach suffering and evil with close attention to the Jewish people, conferring a sense of Jewish exceptionalism which may be positive or negative. Notably, Jewish suffering and survival becomes a turning point for these theologians who see the Jews as emblematic of God’s providence, and the state of Israel as a sign of God’s promises.23 Christians seek an authentic faith in early Christian texts which are closer to Judaism, and they see the state of Israel as theologically destined, assumptions which new generation thinkers query. Concerned that attention to victims may indicate avoidance of Christian evildoing, some contemporary Christian responses begin with perpetrator perspectives involving the author’s subject positioning and national belonging. An impetus for German-born scholar Katharina von Kellenbach was learning that the best man at her father’s wedding, uncle Alfred, belonged to the SS and was responsible for 30,000 Jewish deaths in Pinsk Belarus, however, no one in the family would talk openly about it. This silence about perpetrators leads her to research the post-war records of German chaplains working with perpetrator families, and reflect on forgiveness and reconciliation. She concludes that German churches’ teachings about God’s mercy did not help perpetrators face their evil deeds, rather the opposite.24 For Christians, reflection on the Holocaust must deal with guilt and responsibility, even in countries outside Europe where there may be no family legacy or denominational connections. Evil and suffering gain religious meaning not only in writings but also in public Holocaust spaces. Museum displays, monuments, artifacts, and architectural symbolism offer versions of theodicy both at wartime Holocaust locations and newly built museums

Sarah K. Pinnock, “Atrocity and Ambiguity: Recent Developments in Christian Holocaust Responses”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75, no. 3 (2007): 499–523, 515. 22 Zachary Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 168. 23 Stephen R. Haynes, Reluctant Witnesses: Jews and the Christian Imagination (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), 127. 24 Katharina von Kellenbach, The Mark of Cain: Guilt and Denial in the Post-War Lives of Nazi Perpetrators (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 5. 21

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in major cities. In her study of Holocaust sacred space, Avril Alba argues that a careful observer can detect redemptive narratives in museum displays in the United States, Israel, and Australia consisting of Jewish religious references and national celebrations of the camps’ liberation and victory. The imperative to remember and to honor the victims often includes verses and symbols from Jewish tradition. With the use of scripture, quotations from survivors, and the incorporation of spaces for reflection for museum visitors, memorials offer ways to express grief as well as endurance after liberation. In the sacred aspects of these purportedly secular memorials, there are depictions of suffering and metanarratives leading toward hope. Memorials and museums reassure visitors of the survival of the descendants of the Holocaust and the defeat of evil. Ritual activities performed in Holocaust spaces also produce theodicy responses to evil and suffering. One notable example is the interfaith retreat held annually in Poland at Auschwitz-Birkenau founded in 1996 by Buddhist Jewish-born teacher Bernie Glassman. The purpose of the retreat is to reflect on differences and conflict in a location where diversity was condemned, and to find healing in a place of suffering. Participants include descendants of Holocaust victims and perpetrators; and they have included Bosnians, Rwandans, Palestinians, and Native Americans with the intent to widen the scope of diversity and connect to other situations of genocide.25 Rituals from Buddhist, Jewish, and Christian traditions converge on the ground of Auschwitz. Meditation on victims’ suffering extends outward toward all suffering, including one’s own, and the response to perpetrators entails recognizing evil in oneself and in society. Encountering suffering leads to peacemaking. Another on-site Holocaust gathering is the March of the Living, a Holocaust program for Jewish high school students founded in 1988 involving group travel in Poland and Israel. After visiting former Jewish sites in Poland, thousands of participants march from Auschwitz to Birkenau on Holocaust Remembrance Day in April and participate in ceremonies with speeches by Holocaust survivors and their descendants. The second half of the trip occurs in Israel, including celebration of Israel’s Independence Day and a visit to the Jerusalem Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem.26 As ritual and tourism, the March of the Living symbolizes the reversal of the Holocaust, life not death. Trip goals include awareness of prejudice, racism, and antisemitism and understanding Holocaust suffering and survival. For the Bearing Witness retreat, theodicy is internalized in contemplation with the goal of healing suffering; for the March of the Living, theodicy is externalized in Jewish history with the overcoming of suffering. Jewish-Christian dialogue has recently expanded to trialogue between Jews, Christians, and Muslims to address the responses of Abrahamic religions to the Holocaust. One gathering, sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, involved Jews, Christians, and Muslims in equal numbers touring the permanent exhibition together and establishing relationships of mutual learning. Such trialogue seeks to challenge forms of religious exclusivism, foster peace, and remedy misunderstanding and conflict.27 This workshop resulted in a published book with each participant considering faith responses.

Bernie Glassman, Bearing Witness: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Making Peace (New York: Random House, 1998), 5. 26 Oren Stier, Committed to Memory: Cultural Mediations of the Holocaust (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 152. 27 Leonard Grob and John K. Roth, Encountering the Stranger: A Jewish Christian Muslim Trialogue (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012). 25

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In the first book-length Muslim response to the Holocaust, Shoah Through Muslim Eyes, Mehnaz Afridi examines the roles of Muslims during the Holocaust, both as rescuers and sometime exponents of antisemitism. She interviews Jewish concentration camp survivors and reflects on her identity as an American Muslim engaging in Holocaust studies.28 As more religions are included, it remains to be seen whether the Holocaust will remain a central topic for dialogue or share attention with other examples of prejudice and killing.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS Holocaust reflection on evil and suffering has centered on the shared history of Jews and Christians. Looking back at formative Jewish and Christian approaches, it appears that the two sides of the dialogue have expressed different needs. Jewish Holocaust thought appears to involve more internal dialogue within branches of the Jewish tradition to grapple with Holocaust suffering and persecution by Christian institutions and other cultures. Christians seem to clearly need Jewish partners to understand the Holocaust and address evil and suffering in ways that offer correctives to traditional ideas of theodicy, Christology, and the doctrine of Israel. In recent responses, the construction of Holocaust memory is analyzed as changing over time with different emphasis that varies culturally and nationally. More attention to political issues in Holocaust dialogue adds another layer of discussion concerning international affairs, the state of Israel, and its religious significance. As interfaith dialogue continues, participants’ attention to suffering and evil turns to issues comparable to the Holocaust worldwide. Theologies of genocide are beginning to emerge, dealing with Bosnia, Rwanda, indigenous peoples, and other cases of mass death.29 As historical distance increases, the memory of the Holocaust cannot be held in isolation.

FURTHER READING Braiterman, Zachary. (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Haynes, Stephen R. Reluctant Witnesses: Jews and the Christian Imagination. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995. Littell, Franklin. The Crucifixion of the Jews: The Failure of Christians to Understand the Jewish Experience. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1975. Rubenstein, Richard. After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism, 2nd edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Soelle, Dorothee. Suffering. Translated by Everett R. Kalin. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1975.

Mehnaz M. Afridi, Shoah through Muslim Eyes (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2016), 47. Peter Admirand, Amidst Mass Atrocity and the Rubble of Theology: Searching for a Viable Theodicy (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2012).

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Chapter 75

Psychology and Theodicy The Meaning-Making Model and Growth M. ELIZABETH LEWIS HALL

What can the field of psychology contribute to our understanding of the problem of evil and theodicy? As a descriptive discipline, psychology is unable to offer proposals regarding the implications of suffering for various theological topics nor comment on reasons that might justify the continued existence of suffering if God is just, knowing, loving, and powerful. These are tasks best left to theologians and philosophers. However, as a social science psychology can document the prevalence of theodical concerns and struggles, the use of various kinds of cognitive theodical appraisals of suffering and the psychological consequences of embracing diverse appraisals, as well as the kinds of positive outcomes that may emerge from suffering. In sum, psychology can tell us how the sufferer makes sense of his or her suffering. These contributions can inform theology and philosophy in a variety of ways. For example, prevalent academic theodicies can be compared and contrasted with lay theodicies, constructed by people who are undergoing suffering.1 The experiences of those who suffer can also heuristically suggest new avenues for theodical reflection, such as suggesting that the good of a meaningful life could potentially justify the presence of suffering.2 Theoretical claims regarding the benefits of suffering that might justify its existence can be compared with the actual outcomes of suffering. An extensive body of literature has accumulated on growth following suffering, allowing for such a comparison. This body of literature is the focus of this chapter.

THEODICY, MEANING-MAKING, AND GROWTH THROUGH SUFFERING Arguably, the most important contribution psychology has made to our understanding of theodicy and the problem of evil has been to empirically investigate what theologians, philosophers, and great works of art and literature have claimed for centuries: that

E.g., Eric J. Silverman, M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall, Jamie Aten, Laura Shannonhouse, and Jason McMartin, “Christian Lay Theodicy and the Cancer Experience”, Journal of Analytic Theology 8 (2020): 1–27. 2 Eric J. Silverman, M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall, Crystal L. Park, Jason McMartin, Kelly Kapic, Laura Shannonhouse, Jamie Aten, and Alexis Abernethy, “The Value of a Meaningful Life as a Response to the Problem of Evil”, Faith and Philosophy (in press). 1

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suffering can be a vehicle for growth and transformation – the theodical claim that good can come out of suffering. Furthermore, psychology has contributed to an understanding of the psychological processes leading to these changes, including the role that different views of suffering, including those reflecting theodical claims, have in those processes. Finally, psychological research has documented the areas in which change tends to occur. Crystal Park’s meaning-making model provides a clear structure for understanding how suffering can lead to growth.3 People who suffer often feel that the world no longer makes sense; there is a loss of sense of control, meaning, and predictability. Park’s model outlines a process in which individuals engage when encountering difficult life events that challenge their sense of meaning. According to this model, this disruption in meaning causes people to engage in a form of coping known as meaning-making, in an attempt to regain a sense of the world as orderly. In her model, Park distinguishes between global and situational meaning. Global meaning consists of one’s core beliefs about the world and one’s place in it, important life goals, and feeling that life has meaning and purpose. These provide people with frameworks for interpreting their experiences and guiding their actions. When people encounter a stressful life event, a set of cognitive appraisal processes are engaged that yield meaning specific to the life stressor, otherwise known as situational meaning. People evaluate the meaning of the life stressor, including how threatening and controllable the event is, why the event occurred, and what the implications of the event are for one’s future.4 The degree to which the appraised meaning of the event is discrepant from global meaning determines one’s level of distress, which can trigger further meaning-making processes aimed at reducing the global-situational meaning discrepancy. Resolving this discrepancy can restore a view of the world as meaningful and life as worthwhile. It can also lead to growth. Using this model as a framework, the mechanism that allows suffering to result in growth becomes clearer. The discrepancy between the global and situational meanings causes a meaning-making process to occur, which can result in changes in global meaning, situational meaning, or both. Under the right conditions, meaning-making can lead to the discarding of unhelpful or untrue beliefs and misguided goals and values, and the adoption of a new, better way of understanding the world and one’s place in it. For example, the naïve belief that God won’t allow any suffering to come to those who trust God may give way to the belief that suffering will come, but that God can redeem suffering. Even when the global beliefs and goals are fairly solid, the meaning-making process can cause these to become more complex, nuanced, and internalized. When meaning-making results in the successful resolution of the discrepancy between global and situational meaning, this enables the suffering to be incorporated into one’s life narrative in meaningful ways. All of these changes reflect potential growth. It should be clear that the meaning-making process can also lead to poor outcomes. In the attempt to reconcile global and situational beliefs, helpful and true beliefs may be discarded, and harmful ones adopted, leading to worse mental health outcomes. For example, people may jettison previously held beliefs about God’s goodness, power, or Crystal L. Park, “Making Sense of the Meaning Literature: An Integrative Review of Meaning Making and its Effects on Adjustment to Stressful Life Events”, Psychological Bulletin 136, no. 2 (2010): 257–301. See also Crystal L. Park and Susan Folkman, “Meaning in the Context of Stress and Coping”, Review of General Psychology 1, no. 2 (1997), 115–44. 4 Park, “Making Sense of the Meaning Literature”, 259. 3

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existence. Important life goals may be discarded without adopting any goals to replace them, leading to purposelessness. Individuals may get stuck in the meaning-making process and be unable to resolve the discrepancy, resulting in ongoing distress. In other words, suffering itself does not cause growth, as is sometimes simplistically assumed. Suffering may provide the opportunity for growth, but the quality and kind of meaning-making is what facilitates or hinders growth.

THE PREVALENCE OF THEODICAL STRUGGLES Does the distress resulting from the discrepancy between global and situational meaning typically take the form of theodical struggles? In other words, does it result in people doubting or struggling to understand their suffering in light of God’s love, power, omnipotence, or justice? Psychological research challenges the assumption that most people who suffer struggle to reconcile their suffering with the existence or character of God. The social science literature (as well as the theological and philosophical literature) frequently assumes that theodical struggles are pervasive in those who suffer.5 This assumption is problematic, in that it has not been tested empirically; no studies are available documenting how widespread theodical concerns are in those who suffer. In fact, indirect evidence challenging the view of universal theodical struggles in the face of suffering is provided in a handful of qualitative studies. These studies, conducted in samples of cancer patients and elders, have found that less than one-third of participants in each sample expressed theodical concerns.6 While non-representative qualitative studies should not be used to generalize to percentages in the general population, the numbers in these studies suggest at a minimum that theodical struggles do not always or even usually occur as a result of suffering. These findings highlight the importance of the distinction between the two classes of the “problem of evil”: the logical and evidential problems that primarily concern theologians and philosophers and that result in the construction of formal theodicies, and the existential problem of evil of those who suffer. In general, it would appear that only a minority of those who suffer need a response to the “why” question of their suffering (such as those provided by free-will or soul-building theodicies). It is much more important for them to know that God is present in their suffering and that they can take their suffering to God and be confident that God cares – answers that are more typically provided by pastoral versions of theodicy (such as those that suggest that God suffers alongside those who suffer).

For example, in a theoretical article written to healthcare professionals, Dein, Swinton, and Abbas (2013) state, “It appears that theodical questions are commonplace at the end of life in those with life-threatening illness” (206). S. Dein, J. Swinton, and S. Q. Abbas, “Theodicy and End-of-Life Care”, Journal of Social Work in End-ofLife & Palliative Care 9, no. 2–3 (2013): 191–208. Similarly, Sharp states, “experiences of suffering trigger the need for those who hold religious beliefs to undertake theodicy”. S. Sharp, “Monotheistic Theodicy as Imaginary Face-Work”, Sociological Forum 29, no. 4 (2014): 873–92, 873. 6 Elizabeth J. Taylor, Frieda H. Outlaw, Therese R. Bernardo and Angeli Roy, “Spiritual Conflicts Associated with Praying about Cancer”, Psycho-Oncology 8, no. 5 (1999): 386–94. Barbara J. Lowery, Barbara S. Jacobsen, and Joseph DuCette, “Causal Attribution, Control, and Adjustment to Breast Cancer”, Psychosocial Oncology 10, no. 4 (1993): 37–53. M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall, Laura Shannonhouse, Jamie Aten, Jason McMartin, and Eric Silverman, “Theodicy or Not? Spiritual Struggles of Evangelical Cancer Survivors”, Journal of Psychology and Theology 47, no. 4 (2019): 259–77. 5

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SITUATIONAL MEANING AND THEODICY Although meaning-making is a complex process, encompassing various elements, one of the central components is the actual appraisal of the suffering, the interpretation of the suffering event which forms part of situational meaning in Park’s model. How does the person who suffers conceptualize the suffering itself? Is it a threat? An opportunity? Why did it happen? Was God involved, and if so, how? What are the implications of the suffering for one’s goals? Research has demonstrated that the appraisal of the suffering is one of the most significant elements of the meaning-making process with respect to growth.7 Given the centrality of religion to people’s meaning-making systems, their appraisals of their suffering often draw on religious resources. Religions provide comprehensive meaning systems, and have the advantage over non-religious meaning systems of offering hope and significance even in very difficult circumstances and beyond death.8 Religions provide ways of understanding the source of suffering, provide coping resources, and help people identify areas of personal growth.9 While all religions provide guidance during times of suffering, the views of suffering represented are actually quite diverse across religions.10 It should be noted that some of these religious appraisals of suffering reflect theodical concerns or even draw on theodicies, bringing theodicy and the problem of evil front and center in the meaning-making experiences of those who suffer. A small body of research on religious views of suffering does exist, studying religious appraisals of suffering. It should be noted that most of these study appraisals of suffering in relationship to mental health and well-being outcomes, rather than growth outcomes. These kinds of findings must be differentiated, as evidence suggests that recovery from the consequences of the suffering does not necessarily correlate with growth resulting from the suffering.11 In other words, people may continue to express emotional distress while also endorsing suffering-related growth. The religious attributions studied include, broadly, whether God has a plan or purpose for the suffering, whether suffering is the result of God’s apathy, anger, or punishment, or whether the suffering is consistent with God’s will or justice.12 A smaller number of P. Alex Linley and Stephen Joseph, “Positive Change Following Trauma and Adversity: A Review”, Journal of Traumatic Stress 17, no. 1 (2004): 11–21. 8 Ralph W. Hood, Jr., Peter C. Hill, and W. Paul Williamson, The Psychology of Religious Fundamentalism (New York: Guilford Press, 2005); T. Newton and D. N. McIntosh, “Unique Contributions of Religion to Meaning”, in The Experience of Meaning in Life: Classical Perspectives, Emerging Themes, and Controversies, ed. J. A. Hicks and C. Routledge (New York: Springer, 2013), 257–70. Israela Silberman, “Religion as a Meaning System: Implications for the New Millennium”, Journal of Social Issues 61, no. 4 (2005): 641–63. 9 Crystal L. Park, “Religion as a Meaning-Making Framework in Coping with Life Stress”, Journal of Social Issues 61 (2005): 707–29. See also M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall, Laura Shannonhouse, Jamie Aten, Jason McMartin, and Eric J. Silverman, “Religion-Specific Resources for Meaning-Making from Suffering: Defining the Territory”, Mental Health, Religion and Culture 21, no. 1 (2018): 77–92. 10 M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall and Peter Hill, “Meaning-Making, Suffering, and Religion: A Worldview Conception”, Mental Health, Religion & Culture 22, no. 5 (2019): 467–79. 11 Richard G. Tedeschi, Jane Shakespeare-Finch, Kanako Taku, and Lawrence G. Calhoun, Posttraumatic Growth: Theory, Research, and Applications (New York: Routledge, 2018), 30, 68–9. 12 Terry L. Gall and Cynthia Bilodeau, “‘Why Me?’ – Women’s Use of Spiritual Causal Attributions in Making Sense of Breast Cancer”, Psychology and Health 32, no. 6 (2017): 709–27. Dirk Hutsebaut, “Theodicy Models, Religious Coping Strategies, Self-image and Post Critical Belief ”, Archive for the Psychology of Religion 24, no. 1 (2003): 75–84. Vincent D. Moschella, Kristin R. Pressman, Peter Pressman, and David E. 7

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studies, using the Views of Suffering Scale, also document ten more specific views, some of which represent specific theodicies (e.g., soul-building, suffering as an opportunity to encounter God).13 Overall, these studies document that positive spiritual appraisals are associated with positive indicators of mental health (e.g., purpose in life, flourishing, satisfaction with life) and, conversely, negative spiritual appraisals are associated with negative mental health indicators (e.g., depression and anxiety). While most of these studies are correlational, which limits the ability to make causal statements, one study of women with breast cancer did find that an attribution to God’s anger or punishment was related to greater emotional distress from pre-diagnosis to two years post-surgery, suggesting that this kind of appraisal may have a causal role in a downward emotional spiral.14 They further suggest that views of suffering accentuate preexisting tendencies when people experience religious or spiritual struggle.15 However, these studies have generally focused on well-being outcomes, rather than on growth related to suffering. A few studies using less specific measures of religious views of suffering have directly measured their relationship to suffering-related growth. Pargament, in his comprehensive measure of twenty-one forms of religious coping (RCOPE), identified three kinds of coping that consist of cognitive reappraisals of suffering related to theodical concerns, in which the stressor was seen as benevolent, punishing, or as an indication that there are limits on God’s power.16 In a series of studies using the RCOPE in various suffering populations, seeing the event as having a divine purpose was robustly and positively related to growth, while seeing the event as due to limitations in God’s power had small inconsistent relationships (both positive and negative) to growth, and small or no significant correlations were found with seeing the event as punishment.17

Weissman, “The Problem of Theodicy and Religious Response to Cancer”, Journal of Religion and Health 36, no. 1 (1997): 17–20. Jacqueline R. Mickley, Kenneth I. Pargament, Curtis R. Brant, and Kathleen M. Hipp, “God and the Search for Meaning among Hospice Caregivers”, The Hospice Journal 13, no. 4 (1998): 1–17. 13 Amy Hale-Smith, Crystal L. Park, and Donald Edmondson, “Measuring Beliefs about Suffering: Development of the Views of Suffering Scale”, Psychological Assessment 24, no. 4 (2012): 855–66. Joshua A. Wilt, Julie J. Exline, Matthew J. Lindberg, Crystal L. Park, and Kenneth I. Pargament, “Theological Beliefs about Suffering and Interactions with the Divine”, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 9, no. 2 (2017): 137–47. J. Irene Harris, Timothy Usset, and Zhen H. Cheng, “Theodicy and Spiritual Distress Among Veterans Managing Posttraumatic Stress”, Spirituality in Clinical Practice 5, no. 4 (2018): 240–50. Stacey E. McElroy-Heltzel, Edward B. Davis, Don E. Davis, Jamie D. Aten, Joshua N. Hook, Daryl R. Van Tongeren, and Jenny Hwang, “Benevolent Theodicies Protect Against PTSD Following a Natural Disaster”, Journal of Psychology and Christianity 37, no. 1 (2018): 6–16. 14 Gall and Bilodeau, “Why Me?” 709–27. 15 Wilt, Exline, Lindberg, Park, and Pargament, “Theological beliefs”, 137–47. 16 Kenneth I. Pargament, Harold G. Koenig, and Lisa M. Perez, “The Many Methods of Religious Coping: Development and Initial Validation of the RCOPE”, Journal of Clinical Psychology 56, no. 4 (2000): 519–43. One further reappraisal, demonic reappraisal, did not seem as relevant to theodical concerns. 17 Harold G. Koenig, Kenneth I. Pargament, and Julie Nielsen, “Religious Coping and Health Status in Medically Ill Hospitalized Older Adults”, The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 186, no. 9 (1998): 513–21. Curtis Lehmann and Emma Steele, “Going Beyond Positive and Negative: Clarifying Relationships of Specific Religious Coping Styles with Posttraumatic Outcomes”, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 12, no. 3 (2020): 345–55. Pargament, Koenig, and Perez, “The Many Methods”, 519–43. Gina Magyar-Russell, Kenneth I. Pargament, Kelly M. Trevino, and Jack E. Sherman, “Religious and Spiritual Appraisals and Coping Strategies among Patients in Medical Rehabilitation”, Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion 24 (2013): 93–135. Kenneth I. Pargament, Harold G. Koenig, Nalini Tarakeshwar, and June Hahn, “Religious Coping Methods as Predictors of Psychological, Physical and Spiritual Outcomes among Medically Ill Elderly Patients: A Two-year Longitudinal Study”, Journal of Health Psychology 9, no. 6 (2004): 713–30. Russell E. Phillips III and Gene G. Ano, “A

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GROWTH RELATED TO SUFFERING With respect to the positive outcomes of suffering which often figure in theodicies, a substantial body of literature spanning several decades documents self-reported growth as a result of enduring suffering. This kind of growth is referred to in the psychological literature by a variety of names, including posttraumatic growth, stress-related growth, or adversarial growth. It has been documented across diverse cultures, and in a variety of types of suffering, with self-reported ranges from 3 percent to 98 percent of people in each study.18 It is important to note that these self-reported gains often coexist with ongoing negative outcomes; evidence of growth does not invalidate negative consequences of suffering that are often also present.19 Over the long term, however, it does appear that suffering-related growth has a causal role in ameliorating distress.20 Reported growth tends to occur in five interrelated domains.21 First, people often report that their relationships are enhanced in some way, for example, that they now value their friends and family more and feel increased compassion and altruism toward others. Suffering often brings about a greater sense of connection and closeness to other people and a greater willingness to accept help from others.22 This is often reflected in changed priorities in which more time is spent with loved ones. Suffering also seems to serve a winnowing function in relationships, in that some relationships that are perceived as unsupportive or harmful are left behind. Second, people view themselves as having developed new strengths. The most common changes in the view of self have to do with seeing the self as stronger, wiser, and more resilient as an outcome of the suffering.23 People may also report greater acceptance of their vulnerabilities and limitations.24 Character changes are also often reported, as suffering produced ample opportunity to practice the virtues.25

Re-Examination of Religious Fundamentalism: Positive Implications for Coping”, Mental Health, Religion and Culture 18, no. 4 (2015): 299–311. 18 Linley and Joseph, “Positive Changes”, 11–21. 19 This kind of growth has come under recent attack as being illusory; however, the critiques are primarily based on definitional issues and/or outdated positivistic epistemology which requires external verification of the growth. See Tedeschi, Shakespeare-Finch, Taku, and Calhoun, “Posttraumatic Growth”, 36–40, 76–7, 99–100 for a rebuttal. 20 Patricia Frazier, Amy Conlon, and Theresa Glaser, “Positive and Negative Life Changes Following Sexual Assault”, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 69, no. 6 (2001): 1048–55. P. Alex Linley, Stephen Joseph, and Barbara Goodfellow, “Positive Changes in Outlook Following Trauma and their Relationship to Subsequent Post-traumatic Stress, Depression, and Anxiety”, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 27, no. 8 (2008): 877–91. Howard Tennen and Glenn Affleck, “Benefit-Finding and Benefit-Reminding”, in Handbook of Positive Psychology, eds C. R. Snyder and S. Lopez (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 584–96. 21 Tedeschi, Shakespeare-Finch, Taku, and Calhoun, “Posttraumatic Growth”, 26. 22 Lawrence G. Calhoun and Richard G. Tedeschi, “The Foundations of Posttraumatic Growth: An Expanded Framework”, in Handbook of Posttraumatic Growth: Research and Practice, ed. Lawrence G. Calhoun and Richard G. Tedeschi (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 2006), 3–23. Stephen Joseph and P. Alex Linley, “Growth Following Adversity: Theoretical Perspectives and Implications for Clinical Practice”, Clinical Psychology Review 26, no. 8 (2006): 1041–53. Tedeschi, Shakespeare-Finch, Taku, and Calhoun, “Posttraumatic Growth”, 27–37. 23 Calhoun and Tedeschi, “The Foundations of Posttraumatic Growth”, 3–23; Joseph and Linley, “Growth Following Adversity”, 1041–53. 24 Joseph and Linley, “Growth Following Adversity”, 1041–53. 25 Christopher Petersen, N. Park, N. Pole, W. D’Andrea, and Martin E. P. Seligman, “Strengths of Character and Posttraumatic Growth”, Journal of Traumatic Stress 21, no. 2 (2008): 214–17.

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Third, suffering often results in the identification of new possibilities in one’s life.26 In terms of Park’s model, this reflects new global goals (part of global meaning) that are chosen as a result of the suffering. This may involve radical changes, such as entering a new career, or smaller changes such as adopting healthier lifestyle choices, becoming more involved in the community, taking the long-dreamed-of vacation, and so on. Often people draw on their own experiences of suffering in order to address the needs of people in similar circumstances, interpreting their trauma as a valued learning opportunity and giving back to others through the benefit of their experience. Fourth, there are often reports of changes in appreciation for life.27 For example, people report feeling gratitude for each new day and renegotiating what really matters to them in the full realization that their life is finite. They are more aware of the things that they previously took for granted. People report that their awareness guides them to live their lives in an authentic way, in the moment, and savoring what life has to offer, including important relationships. Finally, people report changes in the spiritual and existential realms.28 They often report a greater sense of purpose and meaning in life and increased clarity regarding the existential questions addressed in religions.29 A long-standing body of research on religious conversion also suggests that periods of extreme stress often precede conversions, further confirming the possibility of spiritual growth as a result of suffering.30 Research has also demonstrated that meaning-making involving religion is more strongly linked to growth than is secular meaning-making.31 Specifically, positive religious coping, religious openness, readiness to face existential questions, religious participation, intrinsic religiousness, and faith maturity have been positively associated with posttraumatic growth; negative religious coping and spiritual struggles have been negatively associated with growth.32 In considering the five areas in which growth as a result of suffering has been documented, a general conclusion that could be drawn is that suffering has the potential to lead people into greater eudaimonic well-being. The distinction between eudaimonic and hedonic versions of well-being, long established in philosophy, has more recently been adopted by psychologists. A hedonic view of well-being is generally measured psychologically as involving high levels of positive affect and satisfaction with life.33 In contrast to hedonic well-being, eudaimonic well-being is conceptualized in terms of

Tedeschi, Shakespeare-Finch, Taku, and Calhoun, “Posttraumatic Growth”, 27–37. Ibid. 28 Annick Shaw, Stephen Joseph, and P. Alex Linley, “Religion, Spirituality, and Posttraumatic Growth: A Systematic Review”, Mental Health, Religion and Culture 8, no. 1 (2005): 1–11. 29 Ryan M. Denney, Jamie D. Aten, and Kari Leavell, “Posttraumatic Spiritual Growth: A Phenomenological Study of Cancer Survivors”, Mental Health, Religion and Culture 14, no. 4 (2011): 371–91. 30 B. Spilka, Ralph W. Hood, B. Hunsberger, and Richard Gorsuch, The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach, 3rd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2013). 31 Crystal L. Park, Donald Edmondson, and Thomas O. Blank, “Religious and Non-Religious Pathways to StressRelated Growth in Cancer Survivors”, Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being 1, no. 3 (2009): 321–35. 32 Shaw, Joseph, and Linley, “Religion, Spirituality, and Posttraumatic Growth”, 1–11; Mary Beth Werdel, Gabriel S. Dy-Liacco, J. W. Ciarrocchi, Robert J. Wicks, and Gina M. Brelsford, “The Unique Role of Spirituality in the Process of Growth Following Stress and Trauma”, Pastoral Psychology 63 (2014): 57–71. 33 Ed Diener, John Helliwell, and Daniel Kahneman, International Differences in Well-being (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, “On Happiness and Human Potentials: A Review of Research on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well-being”, Annual Review of Psychology 52 (2001): 141–66. Joar Vittersø, and Tove I. Dahl, “What’s In a Face? Perhaps Some Elements of Both Eudaimonic and Hedonic Wellbeing”, The Journal of Positive Psychology 8, no. 4 (2013): 337–45. 26 27

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feeling that life has meaning and purpose and high levels of autonomy, mastery of the environment, interest in personal growth, and self-acceptance.34 The changes documented earlier often reflect a movement toward more authentic living, congruent with important personally held values, and in ways that are generative and that weave people more firmly into their communities. Findings of changes in character also fit well with the increases in eudaimonic well-being documented earlier, as classical philosophers understand virtues as skills of human living that are conducive to eudaimonic well-being. These character strengths might be considered the mediators or bridges between suffering and eudaimonic well-being. Research on hedonic and eudaimonic well-being suggest that these usually travel fairly closely together; they are highly correlated.35 People who live meaningful lives also seem to be satisfied with their lives and experience more positive emotions. However, suffering sharply differentiates between these types of well-being, correlating positively with eudaimonic well-being but negatively with hedonic well-being.36 Suffering-related growth itself, while correlating with both hedonic and eudaimonic forms of well-being, is more strongly associated with the latter.37

EMERGING AREAS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS One promising area relevant to theodicy that has emerged recently in the psychological literature is that of the centrality of intimacy with the triune God as the most important outcome of suffering and meaning-making. While intimacy with God as an outcome of suffering is central to some versions of theodicy,38 and indeed the pursuit of intimacy with God is central to the entire Christian life, it has generally been ignored in psychological research. There are (at least) two reasons for this omission. First, research on sufferingrelated growth has typically been informed by positive psychology, which, in its turn, has largely focused on character strengths rather than overtly religious variables. Second, even psychologists of religion have tended to focus on etic religious variables – that is, variables that can be studied across religions. Intimacy with God, which in its emic Christian conceptualization includes concepts such as the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and being “in Christ”, including in his suffering, is typically not the focus of study. The exception to the absence of intimacy with God in psychological research is in qualitative research, where the concept of identification with Christ has emerged spontaneously and

Carol D. Ryff and Corey L. M. Keyes, “The Structure of Psychological Well-being Revisited”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69, no. 4 (1995): 719–27. 35 Roy F. Baumeister, Kathleen D. Vohs, Jennifer L. Aaker, and Emily N. Garbinsky, “Some Key Differences Between a Happy Life and a Meaningful Life”, The Journal of Positive Psychology 8, no. 6 (2013): 505–16. Mohsen Joshanloo, “Revisiting the Empirical Distinction Between Hedonic and Eudaimonic Aspects of Wellbeing Using Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling”, Journal of Happiness Studies 17 (2016): 2023–36. Daniel B. Turban and Wan Yan, “Relationship of Eudaimonia and Hedonia with Work Outcomes”, Journal of Managerial Psychology 31, no. 6 (2016): 1006–20. Alan S. Waterman, “Two Conceptions of Happiness: Contrasts of Personal Expressiveness (Eudaimonia) and Hedonic Enjoyment”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64, no. 4 (1993): 678–91. 36 Baumeister, Vohs, Aaker, and Garbinsky, “Some Key Differences”. 37 John Durkin and Stephen Joseph, “Growth Following Adversity and Its Relation with Subjective Well-Being and Psychological Well-Being”, Journal of Loss and Trauma 14, no. 3 (2009): 228–34. 38 E.g., Eleonore Stump, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 34

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repeatedly. If one of, or the most important good to come out of suffering is the possibility of intimacy with Christ, then the spontaneous emergence of this theme in the accounts of people who suffer is empirical evidence of this important connection. A second potential area of interest in psychology is the possibility that suffering, rather than raising theodical concerns, can actually buffer against their emergence. The psychological literature on the prevalence of theodical concerns, noted above, makes clear that the primarily philosophical and apologetic purposes for which most theodicies are constructed are largely irrelevant to those who suffer. It also seems to be the case that, far from causing doubts about God’s goodness, power, or justice, suffering often provides opportunities for people to directly experience God’s goodness, power, and justice. In this way, some people emerge from times of suffering with greater confidence in God’s existence and character. In a qualitative study examining theodical concerns in a sample of Evangelical cancer survivors, we found that in about two-thirds of our sample, a strengthening rather than a diminishing of the beliefs that typically give rise to theodical attempts seemed to occur.39 Rather than doubting God’s love, suffering led these participants to experience increased confidence in God’s goodness. Rather than doubting God’s power, their suffering led them to greater understanding of God’s control. Rather than doubting God’s omniscience, their suffering caused them to express intellectual humility in the face of God’s knowing. Rather than doubting God’s existence, their suffering reinforced for them God’s intimate involvement in the details of their cancer journey. Given prevalent and mistaken assumptions that most people who suffer will have theodical concerns, this contradictory consequence of suffering has not been well documented, emerging in only one qualitative study. This warrants further study, with accompanying theological and philosophical reflection to further understand the reasons for this surprising outcome. A third area of potential research has to do with the role of specific theodicies or views of suffering in producing growth. As noted above, with the exception of research investigating views of suffering and indicators of spiritual growth, or using very general kinds of religious views of suffering (using the RCOPE reappraisal subscales), no research to date has investigated the role of specific views of suffering in stress-related growth. Must suffering events be viewed in certain ways in order to facilitate growth? Do different kinds of religious appraisals of suffering produce different kinds of growth? For example, do religious appraisals focusing on character development facilitate the development of character growth, while views focused on encountering God facilitate intimacy with God? It has already been established that there are distinct mental health and well-being outcomes for different views of suffering; is the same true for growth as the result of suffering? In conclusion, it would appear that psychology is a promising interdisciplinary partner for advancing our understanding of theodicy and the problem of evil. As a field that deals regularly and deeply with those who suffer, psychology is well-positioned to offer insights that might validate or challenge existing perspectives in other fields, or provide heuristic value in suggesting directions for future research.40

Hall, Shannonhouse, McMartin, Aten, and Silverman, “Theodicy or Not?” 259–77. This publication was made possible through the support of grant #6147, Christian Meaning-Making, Suffering and the Flourishing Life, from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation. This work reflects

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FURTHER READING Park, Crystal L., Joseph M. Currier, J. Irene Harris, and Jeanne M. Slattery. Trauma, Meaning, and Spirituality: Translating Research into Clinical Practice. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2016. Tedeschi, Richard G., Jane Shakespeare-Finch, Kanako Taku, and Lawrence G. Calhoun. Posttraumatic Growth: Theory, Research, and Applications. New York: Routledge, 2018. Werdel, Mary Beth and Robert J. Wicks. Primer on Posttraumatic Growth. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2012.

the contributions of my research collaborators: Crystal Park, Jason McMartin, Kelly Kapic, Jamie Aten, Laura Shannonhouse, and Eric Silverman.

Chapter 76

Unmasking the Systemic Problem of Evil in Theology A Feminist Critique ESTHER MCINTOSH

INTRODUCTION Philosophical and theological approaches to suffering and the problem of evil in the Global North are primarily constructed along analytic and systematic lines; indeed, the analytic and systematic nature of academic responses to suffering and the problem of evil are prized as the serious and complex work of philosophical theologians and philosophers of religion. In essence, such approaches are concerned with claims regarding the existence of the Christian God – held to be omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibenevolent – and the existence of evil. Arguments countering the existence or definition of the Christian God rest either on the unlikely probability that such a God exists given the extent of evil evident in the world, or on the logical impossibility of such a God co-existing with evil. Christian philosophers of religion and systematic theologians seek, therefore, to counter the negative conclusions aimed at in both of these two approaches by mounting either theodicy intended to explain the existence of evil without compromising the conception of God or defenses that render the existence of both God and evil logically compatible. Regardless of the success or otherwise of such theodicies and defenses when considered from a purely intellectual perspective, feminist and womanist scholars find them wanting: an argument may be intellectually coherent or follow a logical pattern without necessarily being useful or adequate when considered from an alternative perspective. Theodicies are, on the whole, written from a perspective of privilege, and their analysis of evil is abstract; these are serious limitations when considered from the perspectives of the marginalized. Certainly, both hypothetical and real-life cases of pain and suffering are drawn upon in theodicies and defenses, from Bambi dying in the forest to the most extreme and horrific suffering meted out by dictators and torturers in situations of genocide and war. Conceptually, then, “evil” has a broad remit encompassing all harms, including premature death, caused to sentient beings, whether these occur as a result of so-called natural evil – earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, debilitating, or terminal illness – or whether the cause is another human being whose acts are referred to as moral evil. Consequently, both pain and suffering are equated with evil, with the former referring to a physical state and the latter often referring to a mental state, such as despair. Contrastingly,

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“good” indicates the opposite of evil for sentient beings: flourishing, improvement, and so on. Attempts to reconcile the existence of evil with the existence of God assert that divine goodness (a concept that transcends human goodness and is, ultimately, beyond human understanding) is certain and, at some future point, will defeat evil: in the here and now it may seem as if the wicked prosper while the good suffer, but in the end, they will all receive their due. In order for this assertion to be at all plausible, theodicies draw upon two contrasting metaphysical notions of evil: first, privation theory, as found in Augustine and Aquinas, whereby evil does not have an independent existence but is the absence of good; second, a dualist theory in which evil is spoken about as if it is an entity with a force of its own. For privation theory, then, natural evil occurs where there is, for example, an absence of health, or some other good is lacking; moral evil occurs as a result of human flaw (introduced into the world via “original sin”, or the Fall as portrayed in the biblical story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis and developed by Augustine).1 Even if evil can be understood as a lack or absence, it is frequently contrasted with good in a dualistic sense, and this has been problematic for women, and for any other groups perceived as “other” by the dominant ruling class. Despite theoretically claiming that all humans are sinful or evil, the history of Christian theology is replete with examples of scholarly interpretations of biblical texts and philosophical and theological treatises arguing that women are more evil than men: Tertullian claims that women are the Devil’s gateway; Augustine asserts that women only reflect the image of God when joined with their husbands; Aquinas argues that women are defective men; biblical passages are cited to support the notion that women are inferior to men and should be silenced and controlled by them (for instance, Gen. 3:16; Prov. 31; 1 Cor. 11:3; Eph. 5:22; 1 Tim. 2:12, and so on).2 By failing to grapple with the dualisms underlying conceptions of good and evil, and, moreover, the extent to which these dualisms have been employed by those in positions of power, much of contemporary philosophical and theological thought on suffering and the problem of evil continues to support the status quo. Notwithstanding claims to the contrary, the academy and the church, along with the wider culture, is patriarchal: the dominance of White male privilege is built upon racist, sexist, classist, cisgendered, heteronormative, and able-bodied theories that make universalizing claims while destroying the lives of those labeled as “other”, including humans, non-human animals, and the environment. In this chapter, drawing on the work of feminist and womanist scholars, I argue that suffering and the problem of evil must be understood differently when considered from the perspective of the subjugated rather than the dominant class, and, further, that contemporary analytic theology, by willfully and deliberately ignoring or dismissing feminist and womanist theologies, continues to construct theology from the perspective of the dominant class, thereby perpetuating a moral evil.

See Saint Augustine (354–430), On the Merits and Remission of Sins, and of the Baptism of Infants, I, trans. Peter Holmes, Logos Virtual Library, available online at: https://www​.logoslibrary​.org​/augustine​/merits​/index​.html. 2 See Tertullian, De Cultu Feminarum, I.1 (c. 189–220), trans. S. Thelwall (1869), The Tertullian Project, available online at: https://www​.tertullian​.org​/anf​/anf04​/anf04​-06​.htm; Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 92 (c. 1265–74), trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Logos Virtual Library, available online at: https:// www​.logoslibrary​.org​/aquinas​/summa​/1092​.html; Saint Augustine, On the Trinity, XII.5 and XII.7 (c. 399–426), trans. Arthur West Haddan, Logos Virtual Library, available online at: http://www​.logoslibrary​.org​/augustine​/ trinity​/index​.html; Augustine, Confessions, 5.10; 7.11 and De Trinitate, 7.7.10. 1

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THE PROBLEM WITH DUALISM: WOMEN AS EVIL As we have identified earlier, theodicies and defenses relating to suffering and the problem of evil consider moral evil in the abstract despite drawing on real examples: that is, the arguments move from the real example to the question of God’s goodness and explanations as to how a good God permits evil, but, in so doing, they fail to grapple with the systemic evil of patriarchy. Patriarchy, as a system in which men (usually White, middle-class, cisgender, heterosexual men) hold a disproportionate amount of power, sustains inequalities and injustices that result in manifold suffering; theodicies fail to challenge theologies that legitimize those inequalities, from sexism and homophobia to classism, racism, colonialism, and the destruction of the environment. During the last two years, we have witnessed the global pandemic caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 pose a greater threat to the lives of the global majority and those living in the Global South than to those in the Global North; we have seen racialized police violence lead to the death of George Floyd and to renewed Black Lives Matter protests, while the then president of the United States, Donald Trump, courted White supremacists and evangelicals; in the UK we witnessed the differential police and media coverage of the murders – femicide – of Bibaa Henry, Nicole Smallman, and Sarah Everard, as well as the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in religious organizations. Around the world resistance and backlash are evident as hate crime and homophobic attacks rise, while trans rights and access to abortion are restricted. Condemnation of these evils among theological and church circles lacks teeth if the underlying systems of power and their theological justification remains intact. Yet, as we have noted earlier, the inequality between men and women is commonly found in the works of the Church Fathers; this inequality is bound up with a series of dualisms that pervade Christian theology. In her analysis of the book of Proverbs, Pamela J. Milne explores the image of a good woman as Woman Wisdom, alongside the image of a bad woman depicted as Strange Woman.3 She finds that the descriptions of these two types of women are significant for their impact upon men: good women are valuable wives “more precious than rubies” (Prov. 31:10), enriching their husbands’ lives; whereas, by contrast, bad women are of no such value, they seduce men and destroy their lives (Prov. 5:3-5). Significantly, however, Proverbs makes it clear that the two types of women are not easily distinguishable by their words; hence, “what is a duality in the abstract becomes one in experience”.4 In consequence, therefore, Proverbs can be read as a warning against all women – the trope of the femme fatale in popular culture – thus, in Milne’s words, “it is hardly surprising that . . . men would be fearful and distrustful of women as women”.5 Such fear may beget violence, violence directed at and endangering women more than men. Against this biblical backdrop, a theology of women as evil and in need of control by men is formed and cemented over centuries in ways that favor those in positions of power. In addition, this dualism of good and evil is intertwined with binary conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality presented as immutable and divinely ordained. Summarizing this development, Rosemary Radford Ruether states:

Pamela J. Milne, “Voicing Embodied Evil: Gynophobic Images of Women in Post-Exilic Biblical and Intertestamental Text”, Feminist Theology 10, no. 30 (2002): 61–9. 4 Ibid., 65. 5 Ibid., 69. 3

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Western religious and philosophical thought, with its various syntheses of Hebrew, Greek and Christian themes, exhibits a tendency to identify ontological dualism, spirit and matter, mind and body, with a good/evil dichotomy. This, in turn, becomes identified with gender and class hierarchy. Ruling class males come to be seen as closer to mind and reason, women and lower class people as closer to the bodily.6 For Ruether, this erroneous subject/object hierarchical structure provides the ideological basis from which the ruling class define themselves as superior and in a rightful position of authority over all those they deem to be inferior: “men over women, whites over blacks, masters over slaves.”7 Furthermore, as less rational beings than men, women’s salvific potential is called into question. As we have mentioned, for Augustine women do not fully possess the imago Dei and for Aquinas women are defective males, which leads easily into the claim that the incarnation is necessarily in male form because only maleness is sufficient; consequently, the foundation from which to build an exclusively male priesthood is established and women (in Roman Catholicism at least) are denied this role. Moreover, since the ontological dualism of mind and body is simultaneously a moral dualism between good and evil, the ruling male elite seeks to institute the good by controlling all that is evil, which, in this case, is all other humans and non-humans. Drawing on the biblical story of Adam and Eve, Eve is singled out as the bringer of evil and the usurper of male control, providing the grounds from which to demonize all women and enforce their re-submission. The characteristics assigned to women are extended to slaves and servants, other races and other religions resulting in that which Ruether identifies as “exploitation”, “demonization”, and idealization”.8 On the one hand, the perception of others as less rational warrants for their exploitation; on the other hand, embedded in forceful subjugation is a fear of being overthrown that leads to demonization in an effort to suppress the threat of the other even further: women are burned or drowned as witches, and slaves are hanged as rapists. Somewhat ironically, idealized versions of good women and slaves exist alongside their exploitation and demonization: virgins are idealized for their sexual innocence, and dutiful slaves are idealized for their servile demeanor. In response, Ruether argues for “two kinds of revolution”.9 First, equality for human beings requires that relations of domination and subordination are eradicated; social, political, and economic power needs to be shared equitably. Second, she avoids characterizing the oppressor as evil or idealizing the oppressed as good, instead recognizing the capacity for good and evil in all, while, fundamentally, paying attention to the radically different positions of power and privilege that have been held by some and not by others. In other words, simply rethinking the dualisms of mind/body, good/evil and their ideological connections with race and gender will not be sufficient to achieve equality if the power structures that accompany them are not dismantled. Responding to Ruether, Iain Torrance admits that dualist ideologies in Christian theology have resulted in hierarchies, and he acknowledges that fear begets violence; nevertheless, he argues in favor of maintaining the subject/object dualism and suggests that

Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Dualism and the Nature of Evil in Feminist Theology”, Studies in Christian Ethics 5, no. 1 (1992): 26–39, 26. 7 Ibid., 27. 8 Ibid., 32. 9 Ibid., 33. 6

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rather than justifying human goodness we place our hope in eschatology.10 It is staggering that Torrance makes no mention of the fact that subject/object dualism is intertwined with demarcation along the lines of race and gender, or that Ruether is critiquing the equation of ruling class men as rational and good and everyone else as irrational and evil. Torrance’s invoking of eschatology does nothing to challenge systemic injustices or rebalance power relations that have made it possible for some to be oppressors; hence, he side-steps the crux of Ruether’s argument, reverting to a level of abstraction that avoids engaging with the substance of her analysis, namely, the suffering of the oppressed legitimized by theology. By contrast, Kathleen M. Sands calls the narrative of the Fall “a theology of victim-blaming”.11 She contends that, while the theory of original sin is intended to apply to all human beings, the notion of inborn flaw will be absorbed most deeply by the oppressed: “Indeed, the internalization of evils whose origins are external is a hallmark of abuse.”12 Furthermore, the theological “solution” for humans who are deemed to be at fault as a result of the Fall is that of vicarious atonement. Drawing on the notion of the “suffering servant” in the Hebrew Bible (see Isa. 53:4-6), echoed in several New Testament passages (such as Matt. 8:17; Acts 8:32; John 3:16; 1 Pet. 2:22), only the perfectly innocent incarnate Son of God can take on himself the punishment that humans deserve, thus satisfying the concept of divine justice: a theory found in the works of, among others, Luther and Calvin.13 In effect, the retelling of the narrative of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ idealizes the notion of suffering, but this idealization is imbued more fully by those with the least power.14

INTERSECTIONALITY: THE EVILS WE SUFFER Conversely, Emilie M. Townes asserts that “womanist ethical reflection rejects suffering as God’s will and understands suffering as outrage”.15 Against the history of slavery, she contends that, while the Black church finds much with which to identify in the biblical story of the exodus and the suffering of Israel, “the inevitability and desirability of suffering needs to be challenged”.16 For African American women, subjected to “intersectional” oppressions on the grounds of sex, race, and class, the Christian concepts of self-sacrifice and evil are forced upon them “as tools of repression”.17 Alternatively, by centering the Iain Torrance, “A Response to Professor Rosemary Radford Ruether’s ‘Dualism and the Nature of Evil in Feminist Ethics’”, Studies in Christian Ethics 5, no. 1 (1992): 40–3. 11 Kathleen M. Sands, “Tragedy, Theology and Feminism in the Time After Time”, New Literary History 35, no. 1 (2004): 41–61, 53. 12 Ibid. 13 See Martin Luther, “Second Sermon on Luke 24:36-47”, The Sermons of Martin Luther, vol. 2 and John Calvin, Institutes, II​.​xv–xvii. 14 For a more detailed discussion of the motif of sacrifice and how this works against women in patriarchal Christianity, see Esther McIntosh, “The Concept of Sacrifice: A Reconsideration of the Feminist Critique”, International Journal of Public Theology 1, no. 2 (2007): 210–29. 15 Emilie M. Townes, “Living in the New Jerusalem: The Rhetoric and Movement of Liberation in the House of Evil”, in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Emilie M. Townes (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1993), 78–91, 78. The term “womanist” comes from Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt, 1983). 16 Townes, “Living in the New Jerusalem”, 84. 17 Ibid., 87. For exploration of the “intersectional” oppression of Black women, see Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, 10

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empty cross rather than the crucifixion, Townes shifts the focus from obedience and submission to liberation and justice: “The resurrection moves the oppressed past suffering to pain and struggle and from pain and struggle to new life and wholeness.”18 Similarly, reflecting on the ways in which Jesus’ suffering is understood as a motif for Christianity, Jacquelyn Grant highlights the distinction between the “servanthood” of White women and the “servitude” of Black women.19 She explains: As I examined the words and work of nineteenth-century feminists, I found that white women were challenging the fact that they were relegated to the level of “servants of men”. They were incensed because they were being treated as second-class citizens in the larger society, and second-class Christians in the church. Certainly, any perusal of history in general, and women’s history in particular, validates their claim.20 In spite of the evident servanthood of White women, their subjugation does not capture the multidimensional oppression of Black women. She continues: “an examination of Black women’s reality reveals that they are further removed from the topside of history. In fact, African-American women have been the ‘servants of the servants’.”21 For African American women, therefore, servanthood is, in fact, a form of “servitude” that shifts the question of theodicy from one in which the characteristics of God are challenged by the generalized existence of pain and suffering to one that reflects the lived experience of African American women as economically poor, victimized and abused, under the power and control of the dominant (White) class. Thus, the central question, in Grant’s words, becomes “why does God permit the suffering of Black women? Or even more pointedly, does God condone the fact that Black women are systematically relegated to being ‘servants of servants’?”22 From this perspective, the motif of servanthood is highly problematic: it keeps Black women in positions of subordination, pain, and suffering. The logic of enslavement portrayed Black women as more physically capable than their White counterparts, expecting them to work in the fields and care for their master’s children, in contrast with the portrayal of White women as delicate and in need of protection. Hence, the understanding of Black women as women is undermined by the priority given to a definition of White femininity that excludes Black women and prevents solidarity among women. Furthermore, African American women are dominated by White women who employ and exploit them as domestic workers. Feminist theologies claim to start from the experience of women, but, Grant asks: “Is it the experience of the daughters of slaveholders or the experience of the daughters of slaves?”23 An overly spiritualized theology of servanthood has radically different connotations for White and Black women, but it is empowering for neither. Barriers to liberation from misogynoir are multiplied by the complicity of White women in racism and Black men in sexism. White women have sought their own liberation at the expense of Black women, aligning themselves with White male power and the privilege afforded

Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”, University of Chicago Legal Forum 1, no. 8 (1989): 139–67. 18 Townes, “Living in the New Jerusalem”, 85. 19 Jacquelyn Grant, “The Sin of Servanthood: And the Deliverance of Discipleship”, in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Emilie M. Townes (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1993), 199–218. 20 Ibid., 200. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 209.

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to their racialized group. Additionally, as Frances E. Wood remarks: “Absent from the Black church is any substantive discussion of gender justice as it pertains to women.”24 She observes that African American women, even within the Christian community, are disregarded as “permissible victims”.25 Black churches have absorbed a sexist hierarchy of male leadership from White Christianity that is enmeshed with a romanticization of suffering that prevents Black women from obtaining equality. Moreover, women who speak out against domestic violence in Black households risk accusations of “maligning African-American manhood”.26 Systems of racism and sexism that perpetuate moral evil – the pain and suffering of Black women – will never be eradicated if the theologies we espouse sustain the patriarchal status quo under the pretense that “malestream” theology consists of non-negotiable truths. Indeed, the narratives of freed, previously enslaved, people reveal that slavery itself was understood as evil.27 The Christian theology that developed among African Americans is far from identical with the version handed down by White slave owners. On the contrary, enslaved people, Delores S. Williams discovers, resist accepting that the ordering of society in which they are controlled and degraded by slave owners is natural or divinely ordained, nor do they accept that Black people are inherently more sinful than White ones: “Rather, certain patterns of human relations that yield cruelty and enslavement are thought to be sinful and evil.”28 Williams, drawing on the biblical notion of defilement as a punishable sin (see Matt. 15:17-20), relates the abuse of Black women’s bodies, including their exclusion from notions of womanhood as promulgated by White supremacists, to a devaluation of their worth that is coterminous with social sin.29 Similarly, reflecting on the lived experiences of Brazilian women, Ivone Gebara understands evil as that which prevents equality in human relationships and justifies the destruction of the environment: “the kind of evil present in institutions and social structures.”30 In common with the feminist and womanist scholars we have encountered earlier, she finds that theological debate concerning the nature of evil “has always given preference to evil as men perceive it, with no reference to the evil actually borne by women. Evil as women know it has been reduced to silence”.31 Theology presents the experiences of men in positions of power as if they are universal human experiences; hence, the realities of the lives of impoverished women in Brazil, for example, are rendered invisible. Women who lack public power and status are subjected to intersectional oppressions that lead to desperation in the search for food and clean water and a lack of choice and bodily autonomy in sex work; hence, Gebara writes of evil in the plural: the evils that the poorest women suffer.32 Considered in light of the structures present in the lives of women who

Frances E. Wood, “‘Take My Yoke Upon You’: The Role of the Church in the Oppression of African-American Women”, in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Emilie M. Townes (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1993), 37–47, 41. 25 Ibid., 40. 26 Ibid., 42. 27 See Delores S. Williams, “A Womanist Perspective on Sin”, in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Emilie M. Townes (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1993), 130–49, 137–8. 28 Ibid., 138. 29 Ibid., 143–5. 30 Ivone Gebara, Out of the Depths: Women’s Experience of Evil and Salvation, trans. Ann Patrick Ware (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002; originally published as Le mal au féminin, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999), 1. 31 Ibid., 7. 32 Ibid., 14. 24

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are kept in positions of subordination, she opposes the promotion of sacrifice as the means by which to escape evil; instead, expanding on the preferential option for the poor, as found in liberation theology, Gebara states: “I am persuaded that this unjust situation demands not only economic, social, and cultural reform but also a theological revision radically transforming the image of God as one who demands suffering.”33 Adding nuance to her exploration of women’s narratives through her definition of evil as that which “destroys or harms human relations”, Gebara is careful to point out that women can be both victims and perpetrators.34 Women who advocate patriarchal models of gendered hierarchies in their home or in their church, who criticize other women for not conforming to a submissive stereotype of Christian womanhood, are complicit in perpetuating evil, while suffering from it themselves. Women who experience some measure of privilege – whether on the grounds of race, class, sexuality, or marital status – and remain silent regarding social injustices perpetrated against victims of racism, classism, and heteropatriarchy, in order to maintain that privilege, function as accomplices sustaining the status quo. Freedom from evil for marginalized women is bound up with self-determination: in Williams’ words, the transition from unworthiness to “somebodiness”.35 In this respect, the image of Jesus on the cross has resonance with the evils that women suffer in as much as it represents “concrete suffering . . . physical, psychological, and social”.36 Moreover, unlike mainstream theology, which glorifies the crucifixion as the ultimate sacrifice, Gebara claims that The suffering of the crucified, of a man upon the cross . . . is certainly no greater than that of prostitutes stoned to death, of a mother whose child is wrenched from her, of revolutionaries struggling for liberty, of so many nameless men and women who have fought for the good of their brothers and sisters . . . [It] is not greater than the mass murder of indigenous peoples . . . It is not greater than that of women who see their children die of hunger because of the greed of those who hold economic power.37 By shining a light on the crosses of women, Gebara makes it possible to see and condemn the evils that women suffer. Likewise, she brings salvation out of the shadow of an eschatology that reinforces systemic oppressions and finds moments of salvation in the midst of suffering: a shared meal that assuages hunger, vegetation that sprouts after a drought, “tenderness in the midst of daily violence”.38 Salvation need not be abstract and universal, but, rather, “mini-salvations”39 occur in relation to specific evils of oppression affecting specific people.

Gebara, Out of the Depths, 90. Ibid., 96. 35 Williams, “A Womanist Perspective on Sin”, 145. 36 Gebara, Out of the Depths, 110. 37 Ibid., 116. 38 Ibid., 124. 39 Ibid., 125. 33 34

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CONCLUDING REMARKS: EVIL AND THE PERSISTENCE OF ANDROCENTRISM IN ANALYTIC THEOLOGY At the theological level, Gebara asserts that “[e]vil is making people believe that one knows the will of God, that one can teach it or even impose it”.40 Her words are a stark reminder of theological projects that reduce evil to the level of abstraction, that fail to critique a canon that is male dominated, that render the evils that women suffer invisible, that portray women as more evil than men, or that fail to dismantle the power imbalances inherent in heteropatriarchy so as to unmask the moral evils that their abstraction conceals. She states: “While there is always a level of abstraction in human thought and language, when the abstraction becomes an ideology that promotes the dominance of the knowledge of some over others, this abstraction is no longer knowledge but the politics of domination.”41 I argue that contemporary analytic theology falls under the spell of abstraction, ignoring the privilege it sustains and, thus, propagates the moral evil of inequality in human relations. In Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology consideration of Black, womanist, or queer theologies is in short supply.42 Undeniably, Oliver D. Crisp notes (literally, in a footnote) that analytic theology could face criticism on the grounds of androcentrism, but his response reveals a misunderstanding of that criticism.43 He assumes that the problem is that analytic theology “fails to take into account . . . the role of feelings”; he refers to this as “the feminist objection” and responds that “this seems rather beside the point”.44 Crisp’s response is reductive and dismissive; it suggests a lack of serious engagement with feminist scholarship, as if such engagement is unnecessary because any claims to the contrary can be easily waved away. In essence, this dismissal serves to prove the point of the feminist objection: it is only from the position of privilege that the concerns of those less privileged seem insignificant and unworthy of time and attention. Crisp continues: “What is at issue is whether an analytic method can get at the truth of the matter . . . the gender of those in quest of it is irrelevant.”45 Thus, by conflating feminism with “the role of feelings” and the gender of the theologian, Crisp completely disregards the systemic injustices and power relations that underlie feminist critique. In this way, contemporary analytic theology has a tendency to evade querying the limited range of voices on which it is constructed and discounts the fact that claims of truth are based on limited and partial perspectives. In fact, the few women who might refer to themselves as analytic theologians call for greater “disruption”46 and interaction with feminist scholarship to reveal to analytic theology that which “it failed to confront

Gebara, Out of the Depths, 140. Ibid., 163. 42 Oliver D. Crisp and Michael C. Rea, Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 43 Oliver D. Crisp, “On Analytic Theology”, in Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Michael C. Rea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 33–53, 51 fn 29. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Michelle Panchuk, “Gender and Justice: Human and Divine Gender in Analytic Theological Discourse”, in The T&T Clark Handbook of Analytic Theology, ed. James M. Arcadi and James T. Turner, Jr. (London: T&T Clark, 2021), 381–94, 381. 40 41

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in the first place”.47 Analytic theology (as with other, admittedly pre-feminist, fields of systematic theology) is still predominately reliant upon the scholarship of racist and sexist historical figures – Anselm, Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Jonathan Edwards, to name a few – as if their God-talk is entirely separable from their views on gender, race, class, and so on; yet, as Grant reminds us: “The language that we use to talk about God more often than not says more about the speaker than God.”48 Similarly, Amber L. Griffioen notes that “values commonly on display in analytic theology have simultaneously served both to marginalize certain voices . . . and to reinforce a particular conception of the divine”.49 She concludes that “there can hardly be any doubt that the traditional God of [analytic theology] has been used – and still is used – in ways oppressive of women and minorities”.50 Analysis is not value-neutral, and theological status is not entirely meritocratic; it is high time theologians stopped pretending that it is. Randal Rauser’s contribution to the aforementioned edited collection, Analytic Theology, promises a more substantial conversation with feminist scholarship, but it is a damning one. In combative style, he compares Sallie McFague’s approach with that of a deceptive “used car salesperson”, assessing her metaphor of God as mother, lover, and friend to be no more than “intentional bullshit”.51 At best, this is a deliberate attempt to be controversial; at worst, it is an arrogant appraisal that eludes the damaging effects of male God-language that McFague is seeking to address. The methods and arguments that are listened to and respected, the voices and lives that are deemed worthy of consideration, have been defined by a predominantly White male academia, as if “the truth” is impervious to the lives of actual people. If analytic theology reproduces injustice – structural evil – for the marginalized and oppressed, its only value is that of maintaining the status quo; it is of no use to those who exist outside of its privileged circles. Feminist criticism is not resolved by changing the pronouns of hypothetical examples in written scholarship; only ivory tower theology, separated from the facts and practical realities of the lived experiences of the less privileged would think so. A democratic theology that no longer replicates the moral evils of social, economic, and political inequalities, Sands contends, will “explicate how power over norms is exerted and contested, how norms change in time and space, how normative decision-makers are challenged or displaced”.52 To properly address the problem of evil(s), those with privilege are required to step aside, to cede space and authority, and to center the voices of the marginalized.

FURTHER READING Grant, Jacquelyn. White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989.

Sarah Coakley, “On Why ‘Analytic Theology’ Is Not a Club”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 81, no. 3 (2013): 601–8, 604. 48 Grant, “The Sin of Servanthood”, 210. 49 Amber L. Griffioen, “Nowhere Men and Divine I’s: Feminist Epistemology, Perfect Being Theism, and the God’s-Eye View”, Journal of Analytic Theology 9 (2021): 1–25, 2. 50 Ibid., 21. Griffioen is referring specifically to Perfect Being Theology (PBT), and while this is not exactly synonymous with analytic theology, the majority of analytic theologians are committed to PBT. 51 Randal Rauser, “Theology as Bull Session”, in Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Michael C. Rea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 70–86, 79. 52 Sands, “Tragedy, Theology and Feminism in the Time after Time”, 57. 47

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Isherwood, Lisa and Hugo Córdova Quero, eds. The Indecent Theologies of Marcella AlthausReid: Voices from Asia and Latin America. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. Radford Ruether, Rosemary. Sexism and God-Talk: Towards a Feminist Theology. Boston: Beacon Press, 1983; London: Student Christian Movement Press, 2002. Williams, Delores S. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2013 [1993].

Chapter 77

Suffering and Problems of Evil in Black Theology A Narrative Approach ANTHONY G. REDDIE

MY POINT OF DEPARTURE Right from the outset, the academic dimension of Black theology has always had a dialectical identity within the theological academy. In the first instance, Black theology, since the epoch of the Black Power Movement and the stellar work of its grand patriarch, James H. Cone, has been largely designated as a branch of systematic or constructive theology. And yet, alongside this designation, Black theology has also been a form of experiential, practical theology that has responded to the very visceral, existential challenges that have faced Black people, especially the descendants of “enslaved Africans”. I attempt to unpick this dialectic because understanding it, I believe, is an important factor in appreciating the ways in which the questions of suffering and evil have been approached in Black theology. Both of these identities – systematic and constructive – in their academic framing on the one hand and existential and practical on the other hand, can be seen in the first two recognized Black theology texts. In Black Theology and Black Power1 written by James H. Cone in 1969, we see the first intimations of the latter perspective. Cone’s initial foray into building the definitive canon of generative texts outlining the definitional dimensions of Black theology was a response to the intellectual challenge to the church and the wider nation of the US of the Black Power Movement. Cone argued that the Black Power Movement should be seen as a revelatory expression of God’s liberatory presence in history.2 In this landmark text, Cone is not outlining a systematic treatise for Black theology. Rather, he is offering a theological polemic, speaking to the zeitgeist of the 1960s and the need to recalibrate the meaning of Christian orthopraxis in light of the seeming failures of the more emollient civil rights work of Dr. Martin Luther King. And yet, the following year, in 1970, Cone unleashed his brilliant A Black Theology of Liberation,3 in which he offered a systematic and sequentially ordered model of theological reflection that sought

James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2003). Ibid., 47–61. 3 James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1990). 1 2

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to outline the definitional parameters for this newly emerging academic discipline. In outlining the sources and norms of Black theology,4 Cone sets the template from which later scholars will develop or reject his foundational ideas (but rarely ignore them outright). In this work, I will be seeking to explore the question of suffering and the problems of evil in Black theology from the perspective of the Black British context, writing and reflecting as a Diasporan African, of Caribbean roots, who is the descendant of enslaved Africans who suffered under chattel slavery in the British empire. This work draws on the twin dimensions of Black theology as outlined by James Cone. In adopting a narrative approach, I will earth my reflections in terms of the existential challenges and lived experiences of faith, within the so-called Motherland of the British empire. The narrative approach is born from my formative academic training as a Practical theologian as opposed to a systematician, as is the norm for the majority of Black theologians, especially in the United States.

DEFINING THE NATURE OF SUFFERING AND EVIL In some traditional approaches to the question of “Theodicy” there is a temptation to explore this topic in somewhat abstract terms. Scholars will articulate the nature of evil and suffering beneath layers of obfuscation and intellectual discourse as if the phenomena is one that is opaque and wreathed in complex metaphysics. In saying this I am not refuting either of these approaches or seeking to dismiss the intellectual complexities of the subject. In taking a narrative approach, reflective of the first of the two identities of Black theology outlined by James Cone, I am seeking to offer an embodied, historical, existential point of departure in responding to this most vexed of questions within academic theology. In using the term “Black theology”, we mean a radical rethinking of how we conceive of God and Jesus in light of the ongoing suffering and oppression of Black people in a world run and governed by White people. Black theology identifies the God revealed in Jesus as committed to liberation and freeing Black people from racism and oppression.5

Black Suffering The starting point for me must be a brief exploration of chattel slavery and the machinations of British imperialism. The basis for exploring evil and suffering in the context of Black theology arises from the Transatlantic slave trade in which millions of African peoples were trafficked across the Atlantic across a 400-year period.6 Alongside this development of human depravity and greed lay the expansionist concerns of Christian Missionary agencies whose relationship with slave plantations and the incarceration of Black bodies remains a complicated one.7 A central feature of Mission Christianity that arose from its white supremacist entanglement with the machinery of slavery was the construction of the Black body as “other”. The magisterial work of Anthony Pinn (to which we shall return in terms

See Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 21–39. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 1–20. 6 See James Walvin, Slavery in the British Empire (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001). 7 See Noel Leo Erskine, Plantation Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 97–119. 4 5

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of his theological articulation of the nature of Black suffering and theodicy) explores material realities of Black bodies and the phenomenon that is Christianity.8 In Terror and Triumph, Pinn outlines the contested and troubled relationship between White slaves holding Christianity and Black bodies, explicating the levels of demonization and virulent denigration that provided the essential backdrop to Transatlantic chattel slavery.9 Black suffering under the aegis of British-run slavery and colonialism remains an under-explored phenomenon in academic, British theological life.10 The sense of a deep prevailing anti-Black sentiment replete with notions of Greek antiquity11 and practiced within Western (particularly English), Missionary Christianity was given added piquancy in the deliberate attempt to use the developments of early Christian theology as a means of reinforcing the essentially depraved and base status of the Black body.12 Kelly Brown Douglas demonstrates how a particular outworking of Pauline, platonized theology (one that downplays the concrete materiality of the body in favor of the abstract and the spirit) was used as a means of demonizing Black bodies.13 While the solidified boundaries and binaries between Whiteness and Blackness were being played out in the Mission field across the broad contours of the British Empire, there was also a more subtle form of dichotomous discourse in evidence within the borders of the British nation-state. Essentially, suffering and evil for many Black people of Diaspora, African roots has been and remains an embodied and existential experience. Black British Pastoral theologian Delroy Hall has written movingly and persuasively on the Windrush generation in Britain, describing our existence as one of “Existential Crucifixion”.14 Hall argues that Diasporan African peoples have endured the horrors of “Good Friday” and our existential crucifixions at the hands of White hegemony, through the privations of slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism, but the exulting freedom of “Easter Sunday” has yet to materialize. In effect, Diasporan African peoples are still wrestling with an acute sense of being mired in “Low Saturday” or “Holy Saturday”, stuck in a socio-religious and political form of liminality that speaks to the transformative nature of redemptive suffering that has thus far proved to be anything but redemptive.15 The continued marginalization and suffering of Black people has raised an important, if not seemingly insoluble theological problem of trying to correlate the agency of an omnipotent God with the ongoing negation of faithful

See Anthony B. Pinn, Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003). See also Anthony B. Pinn and Dwight N. Hopkins, eds, Loving The Body: Black Religious Studies and the Erotic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Anthony B. Pin, ed., Black Religion and Aesthetics: Religious Thought and Life in Africa and The African Diaspora (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 9 Pinn, Terror and Triumph, 1–80. 10 Elsewhere I have stressed the paucity of theological texts written by White British theologians that have explored the complicity of British churches in the epoch of slavery and the oppression and marginalization of Black bodies. See Anthony G. Reddie, Theologising Brexit: A Liberationist and Postcolonial Critique (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 14–17. 11 This phenomenon and theme has been explored by Robert E. Hood, Begrimed and Black: Christian Traditions on Blacks and Blackness (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994). 12 This idea is taken from Kelly Brown Douglas’ excellent study on Black bodies and how they have been policed and controlled within the religious framework of Christianity. See Kelly Brown Douglas, What’s Faith Got To Do With It? Black Bodies/Christian Souls (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2005). 13 Kelly Brown Douglas, What’s Faith Got To Do With It?, 3–38. 14 See Delroy Hall, “The Middle Passage as Existential Crucifixion”, Black Theology: An International Journal 7, no. 1 (2009): 45–63. 15 Ibid., 46–54. 8

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peoples who have called repeatedly on God to end their existential travails, but seemingly to no avail! The Transatlantic slave trade remains the critical point in history in which Black theology in Britain has sought to make sense of God’s sovereignty and the impact of notions of human freedom and self-determination.

BLACK BRITISH CHRISTIANS REFLECTING ON SUFFERING AND EVIL The challenge for Black Christians has always been trying to make sense of the experiences of our enslaved ancestors. Namely, “what do we think God was doing when African peoples were being butchered and maimed in their millions”? In responding to this theological challenge I want to offer two religio-cultural vignettes from recent British history as a means of exploring this topic from a narrative perspective. In 2007, Britain marked the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade (as opposed to the ending of slavery itself, which did not occur until 1833). I want to offer two incidents from that year as a way of framing the critical theological question pertaining to suffering and the problems of evil as they pertain to Black theology. The first incident was related to an important “Commemoration Service” to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. In one of the many “abolition services” in 2007, a leading Black Pentecostal minister was invited to preach at a special service. The potential preacher, a conservative evangelical, was asked what would be his theme for the ecumenical service that was to take place in several months’ time. He responded, stating that his theme would be one of “Thankfulness for Slavery”. That is, his theme would be, “thanks to God for allowing chattel slavery to occur”. His rationale was that slavery had been an unexpected blessing for Black people, for through the evils of the slave trade Black people had found Jesus, become Christians, and many of them were now “saved”. Further conversations for clarification resulted in the invitation being rescinded as the organizers of the service realized the potential uproar that would ensue if this speaker were allowed to share such sentiments within the sensitivities of a public, ecumenical event. In the second incident, another high-profile Black Pentecostal Christian, while speaking at a major ecumenical theological event to mark the abolition of the slave trade, was asked for his theological interpretation on the evils of the slave trade and its relationship to Black people, during a subsequent Q&A session. This individual opined that, as difficult as it might be to accept, perhaps there was a sense in which this epoch could be understood in terms of God’s “providence”. Namely, that such evils were all part of some grand cosmic plan of God, in which the senseless deaths of millions of Africans were somehow caught up in the Divine action of God. The reaction of the audience to this second example of theological myopia was no less striking than the first. What was notable in this second incident was the extent to which a very prominent speaker,16 with a respected track record as an academic and scholar, was nonetheless trapped within a form of theological construction that countenance a view of God that many would find deeply problematic.

As his address was never written up and published, meaning there is no objective record or account of this incident, I feel it prudent not to mention the name of the speaker.

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In both cases, the material reality of Black suffering was not used to re-configure and rearticulate one’s understanding of the nature of God and the meaning of the Christian faith. Rather, Black experience was sublimated beneath the faith and not placed as equal importance alongside it. As we will see, Black theology’s method has always been one of utilizing existential experience as the point of departure in talking about the veracity of God’s action in the world. A God who is willing to sanction the death and suffering of millions of Black people in order to execute God’s providential action is a God that is no friend to enslaved Africans. In both incidents, we have Black Pentecostal speakers17 whose theological perspectives are informed by a “High view” of biblical authority. In the case of the second speaker, he sought to place the realities of Black suffering within a theological framework of “providence”, by invoking the “Joseph Paradigm”. The “Joseph Paradigm” takes its name from the narrative of Joseph, the favored son of Jacob, who is sold into slavery in Egypt and later prospers, as depicted in Genesis 37–50. In the narrative, what appears as a deleterious event in Joseph’s life turns out to be a propitious chapter, as at later point in the narrative he has the power to save his brothers from complete economic ruin. The providential act of an omnipotent and omniscient God is one that enables a concrete reversal of events to occur within the life experiences of a family following a seemingly vengeful and sinful act at the outset of the narrative. In this case, the ends clearly justify the means. If the biblical narrative is correct (which of course for an inerrant holy text, it must be) and is to be taken literally (same logic of faith applies once again), then the theological meaning of enslavement, exile, and finally redemption is axiomatic. If God is all-powerful and all-knowing and is the “Lord of History”, then that same God somehow could accommodate the evils inflicted on Black people as a means of enabling something “good” or “better” to emerge at a later point. The initial point of departure for exploring suffering and the problems of evil is to acknowledge that for some Black Christians, especially those from more conservative evangelical perspectives, the notion of God’s providence and freedom to act within history is one that can countenance God as the architect of seemingly evil acts. The fact that there is a redemptive turn, so to speak, at a later juncture is “proof” or at the very least “justification” that God’s deeds are always faithful, loving, and for the greater good. In my work as a Participative Black theologian18 living and working in the UK, as a descendant of enslaved Africans, I have witnessed at first hand many Black Christians who possess a predilection for such theological perspectives and views, vis-à-vis Black suffering and the evils of chattel slavery. In these conservative perspectives, there is no primacy of human experience as a means of interpreting God’s activity in the world. Rather, religious mythology, in this case, the Joseph narrative from the Hebrew scriptures, becomes the point of departure in interpreting the nature of Black suffering and evil, arguing that the latter can be seen as redemptive when read through the lens of a literalist, non-contextual reading of the Bible.

It should be noted in the interests of balance that Black Pentecostals are not alone in holding to such conservative and problematic theological views and perspectives. 18 Participative Black theology is a form of activity-based approach to theological thinking and action that is based on the notion of Christian believers engaging in what I call “perfomative action”. Elsewhere, I have described Performative action as one that requires that we creatively engage with the “other” in a specified space (what one might term “ecclesia” or “Communities of Faithful Practice”. See Anthony G. Reddie, Is God Colour Blind? Insights from Black Theology for Christian Faith and Ministry (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2020), xiv. 17

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In many respects, the complete antithesis to this view can be seen from the two main critics of Black theology and it’s more critical, but nonetheless, deeply theistic framing of Black suffering and the problems of evil.19 Going back to the issues of the theological perspectives of the two Black Pentecostal speakers I highlighted previously, one of the problems with their theological reflection is the absence of any critical engagement with notions of lament, sorrow, or anger. These are replete with Hebrew sacred texts. Any cursory glance at the Psalms will alert us to the sense in which writers who share their reflections while struggling with the raw emotions of anger, confusion, and doubt give vent to these feelings through the searing poetic writing, which expresses their sense of lament. In Psalm 10, for example, we see the writer bemoaning God for God’s silence as they are besieged by their enemies. The writer cries out, “Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” (v. 1).20 I have no doubt that many of my enslaved African forbears uttered such cries of anguish in the midst of their despair. Black and womanist theologians, such as James Cone and Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, have explored the varied ways in which Black (African American) spirituality sought to give voice to their existential condition and seek answers to profound questions of suffering and evil through their varied musical traditions, perhaps best exemplified in the spirituals. Cone, commenting on the role of the spirituals as a means of giving voice and agency to the reality of Black suffering, states: The Spirituals are historical songs which speak about the rupture of black lives; they tell us about a people in the land of bondage, and what they did to hold themselves together and to fight back. We are told that the people of Israel could not sing the Lord’s song in a strange land. But for blacks, their being depended upon a song. Through song they built new structures for existence in an alien land. The spirituals enabled blacks to retain a measure of African identity while living in the midst of American slavery, providing both the substance and the rhythm to cope with human servitude.21 In a later work, womanist theologian Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, in a penetrating and exhaustive study, outlines the functional strength of the spirituals as a means of encompassing the depth of sorrow and lament of Black people.22 The late womanist religious educator Yolanda Smith assesses the pedagogical potential of the spirituals for shaping their faith formation and cultural consciousness of Black people in the modern or post-modern epoch.23 Smith, commenting on the historic function and contemporary potential of the spirituals to foster critical, honest reflections on the nature of Black struggle, says: Spirituals were also important educational tools that taught worshippers about the Bible, God, Jesus, sin, Satan, and communal ethics as well as personal and collective empowerment . . . The Spirituals also provided a means of expressing the hope and despair that arose out of the living conditions under the brutal system of chattel slavery.24 The two scholars in question are William R. Jones and Anthony B. Pinn. Holy – New Revised Standard Version (London: Harper Collins, 1989). 21 James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1992), 30. 22 See Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Exorcizing Evil: A Womanist Perspective on the Spirituals (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1997). 23 See Yolanda Y. Smith, Reclaiming The Spirituals: New Possibilities for African American Christian Education (Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2004). 24 Ibid., 71–2. 19 20

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What emerges clearly from these authors is that the eschatological hope that resides deep within the lyrical content of the spirituals is one that is dialectical in its engagement with the existential context and condition in which the Black self resides. Namely, that the spirituals speak to the often prevalent sense of despair, confusion, and hope “against” hope of Black suffering during the tumult and existential misery of Black bodies during the epoch of slavery. This struggle for meaning is located in the context and conditions in which the Black self exists, in which the ones daring to hope are fused in dialectical tension with the realities of one’s existence that seems to point to the futility of that hope. This existential, dialectical tension sits right at the heart of the Diasporan African slavery and post-chattel slavery existence. As I have pointed out in Job’s quest to seek a measure of understanding of the catalogue of suffering that befalls him, in a previous piece of work, there can be no easy “quick fix” theological formulas for the colossal reality of Black suffering, in both historic and contemporary terms.25 The sense of hope that emerges from the spirituals is not a declamatory and exuberant spirituality. It does not celebrate in the midst of evil nor does it give God thanks for the providence of acquired insight and revelation as a consequence of that evil. The tone is down-beat, reflective, circumspect, and yet hopeful. My sense of the reaction of these two significant Black Pentecostal leaders was that their theological and spiritual armory contained little or even no resources that drew upon the notion of lament and critical hopefulness as the most honest response to the presence of evil in the life experiences of Black people who have suffered and, indeed, are still suffering. It is interesting to note that for the first of the two individuals the theological approach to the bicentenary services was one of “celebration” and “thanksgiving”. The sense of “celebration” and “thanksgiving” arose from his belief that the epoch of slavery had been providential. The providence of God had enabled Black people to find salvation in Christ through the whip and the lash of the enslaver. The fact that countless millions had died meaningless and pitiful deaths in order that this so-called act of “providence” could be achieved did not seem to merit any undue consideration from this particular Black church leader. The inability to move beyond a prevailing sense of “manufactured joy” in the face of colossal evil represents one of the major theological challenges for more conservative Black Christian people in Britain. It is the challenge to face the horrors and brutalities of the slave epoch and its continued legacies and to ask the sharp, pertinent question, such as “And where was God in all this?”

TYPOLOGIES FOR UNDERSTANDING BLACK SUFFERING AND EVIL It can be argued that in terms of a narrative approach to understanding Black suffering and the questions of evil, one can broadly outline four perspectives. These perspectives are drawn from my ongoing educational work with Black Christians and churches across the theological spectrum in Britain.

See Anthony G. Reddie, “A Run of Bad Luck”, in Acting in Solidarity: Reflections in Critical Christianity (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1995), 22–30.

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These theological typologies are not derived from empirical work but rather have emerged from the countless workshops I have led in churches, working with ordinary Black Christians as they reflected on their faith in light of the challenges presented by Black theology. The four typologies are as follows: 1) It is God’s will and can be redemptive – This view states that God may have even made the evil or injustice happen or, at the very least, allowed it to happen. As God is an all-powerful and ever-present force in Creation, nothing can happen without God’s agreement. So historic slavery and the modern forms of this institution, while not necessarily of God’s making, they can be understood as being within the orbit of God’s will. The important thing to realize, however, is that slavery, like other forms of evil and oppression can be redemptive. And that, basically, transformative change can emerge from such events in history. Something “good” can come out of such suffering. This position was the one derived, primarily from these Black Pentecostal leaders, but echoed in the perspectives of other Black, conservative evangelical Christians in Britain. 2) Brings God into question and can never be redemptive – This view states that if God is an all-powerful and ever-present force in history, then by definition the presence of evils, such as slavery (historic and contemporary), calls God’s existence and alleged “goodness” into question. Is God to blame? Does God care? Is God completely absent? Does God even exist? Whatever one might say of God, this position asserts that the suffering that is a part of such evils as slavery is never redemptive or transformative. It is simply evil and has nothing but bad consequences for those caught up within it. William R. Jones’ classic text, Is God a White Racist?,26 was a withering critique on the presumptions of Black Christian theism, forming the non-foundational underpinning of Christian Black theology. Jones posed a number of challenging questions for the basic presupposition of Black Christian faith that lies at the heart of Black theology, particularly in light of Black suffering. Starting from the basic premise of Christian theism, that God is all-powerful; then what are we to make of evil and suffering of people, particularly innocent Black suffering? If God is all-powerful, then why cannot God intervene and banish suffering and the oppression of Black people? Maybe God chooses to do nothing? In doing nothing, God, then, appears to sanction Black suffering. Given that Black people suffer disproportionately more than White people, God, therefore, can be seen to be on the side of White people. Ergo, God is a White racist. If this is the case, then perhaps this God should be opposed and denounced. The alternative view is that God is not all-powerful. That due to the need to preserve human agency and free will, God will not impose God’s will on us. In this scenario, it is the duty and responsibility of human beings to solve their own problems as God cannot and perhaps will not intervene. In which case, why worship God at all, if God can be seen to be impotent? A third view might hold that God is to be best understood from within the framework of “humanocentric theism”.27 This theological frame accomplishes its particular understanding of Black suffering by “removing God’s overruling sovereignty

See William R. Jones, Is God A White Racist? (Boston: Beacon Books, 1998). This term comes from ibid., 185–202.

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from human history”.28 Responsibility for the start, the perpetuation and the ultimate eradication of evil and slavery are ultimately the responsibilities of human beings and not God’s. This form of explanation for the evil and suffering of Black people during the epoch of slavery, essentially, “takes God out of the equation” and leaves the moral responsibility for effecting change down to human beings. This view seems to gesture toward that of No. 4 (as we will see in a short while), but whereas for No. 4, one will still argue that God is love and is on the side of those struggling for systemic change, No. 2 negates such notions. Jones emphasizes the point when he writes: The consequence of humanocentric theism is to remove God from anyone’s side. History becomes open-ended and multi-valued, capable of supporting either oppression or liberation, racism or brotherhood.29 In effect, No. 2 asserts that all people, Black or White, are charged with the responsibility of effecting systemic change and that there is “no get clause” in which God will ultimately intervene to put right that which humankind is singularly unable to accomplish. The starkness of this theological position often arose from within the thinking of younger Black people who may have experienced a strong sense of Christian formation during their years of maturation, but upon becoming adults, they have left the church and become more critical conversation partners with their former ecclesial homes. It was from such individuals that the “logics” of William R. Jones began to emerge, and for some, the greater radicalism of Anthony B. Pinn. Many will argue that Pinn’s influential Why Lord?30 goes further than Jones’ thesis that rests on a form of “Humanocentric theism”, in which the latter adopts a “Deist” position regarding: the Divine. For Pinn, full-blown humanism is the logical position for a radical, human centered position that prioritizes human agency as the primary hermeneutical perspective on understanding Black suffering and evil in the world. Anthony Pinn’s work seeks to move beyond the formal category of theodicy, arguing that to work within this framework is to continue to center God and God’s attributes as the critical point of departure.31 Conversely, moving beyond traditional theological sources and their concomitant sense of “authority” such as the Bible, Pinn creates a mode of religio-cultural reflection which he terms “nitty-gritty hermeneutics”. Pinn describes “nitty-gritty hermeneutics” thus: Defined by its nitty-gritty character, nitty-gritty hermeneutics exhibits a sense of nonconformity. It ridicules interpretations and interpreters who seek to inhibit or restrict liberative movement and hard inquiries into the problems of life.32 Anthony Pinn’s solution to the vexed question of Black suffering and evil is to move beyond the parameters of conventional theistic-informed theologizing and to mine the resources of Black expressive culture, in order to find human meaning-making in the production of music and art as means of addressing the deepest of existential challenges.

Jones, Is God A White Racist? 195. Ibid., 196. 30 See Anthony B. Pinn, Why Lord: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology (New York: Continuum, 1999). 31 See ibid., 113–16. 32 Ibid., 117. 28 29

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Recent theological work by young Black British womanist and Black theologians are showing the extent to which the traditional and often restrictive theism of the church vis-àvis Black suffering and evil (oftentimes to which ecclesial bodies have colluded) presents a critical missiological challenge for those on the margins of religious institutions.33 And while their work in no way endorses the radical deconstructionist mode of traditional theism as exhibited by Anthony Pinn and before him by William R. Jones, it does, nonetheless, ask critical questions on the assumptions found in the first typology. 3) We cannot know where and what God is doing, but we know that God is love – This view states that trying to “know” the reason for something happening is almost impossible. The one irrefutable “fact” we do have is that God is love, and that love, as displayed by Jesus on the Cross, suggests that God is with us in our suffering. So, God was and continues to be with those who are suffering and are wrestling with realities of evil in the world. In this context of the various groups and the number of people with whom I have worked, a good number would adhere to this theological position. Many ordinary Black people will assert that in their lived experience they would declare that the God they worshiped was one of love and hope, and these twin dimensions in God’s nature were facets that encouraged those struggling with the reality of “social death”,34 to believe that death itself would not be the end. This sense of hope that was encapsulated in the thinking of the individuals who held onto this view was one that finds echoes in the work of African American womanist theologian Elaine Crawford.35 Crawford argues that ordinary Black women have always declared a defiant “hope and against hope” ethic in their daily operations. Crawford argues that many Black women were able to hold in dialectical tension the struggles of holding together family, life, and the church; much the same way as that found in the seemingly more popular and well-known formulations of Jürgen Moltmann.36 Moltmann and his development of a “theology hope”, which is grounded in an “end before the beginning” teleological framework that places the notion of eschatological at the foreground of systematic theology,37 is one that echoes the experiential struggles of ordinary Black women. The theology of hope,38 as outline by Moltmann, is given historical and contextual agency by the embodied life stories and experiences of Black women. The sense that the hope of those who are suffering is informed by their association with and identification with God’s suffering, as exemplified in the experiences of Jesus on the cross; this is one that has been explored by a number of Black and womanist theologians. Within Black theology-based thought a number of writers have located within the suffering of Jesus a sense of divine solidarity with their own historical and contemporary

See Jarel Robinson-Brown, Black, Gay, British, Christian and Queer: The Church and the Famine of Grace (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 2021). See also Selina Rachel Stone, “Holy Spirit, Holy Bodies? Pentecostal Spirituality, Pneumatology and the Politics of Embodiment”, University of Birmingham, Unpublished PhD Thesis, 2021. 34 This term is derived from the work of Orlando Patterson. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 35 A. Elaine Brown Crawford, Hope in the Holler: A Womanist Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002). 36 Ibid., 4–5. 37 See Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1967). 38 See Brown Crawford, Hope in the Holler, ix–xvii. 33

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experiences of unjustified and unmerited suffering. Scholars such as Douglas,39 Cone,40 and Terrell,41 to name but a few, have all explored the theological significance of Jesus’ suffering on the cross for Black people. Writing with reference to this theme, Terrell states, Yet the tendency among Black people has been to identify wholly with the suffering of Jesus because the story made available to them – Jesus’ story – tells of his profound affinity with their plight. Like the martyrs, they are committed to him because his story is their story. Jesus’ death by crucifixion is a prototype of African Americans’ death by circumscription.42 This radical identification with the undeserved suffering of an innocent individual has exerted a powerful hold on the imagination of many Black people and other marginalized and oppressed groups in the world.43 While there are inevitable dangers in a kind of religious quietism at play in those who seek to wrap themselves in a comforting blanket of God’s love and suffering presence alongside them; nonetheless, such protestations gave rise to greater resources of radicalism and resistance than those found in group one. 4) Looking to God is to look in the wrong place, as countering evil is our (human) responsibility – This view states that as human beings have free will, it is both unrealistic and unhelpful to be looking to God for answers to questions such as why there is Black suffering and its concomitant relationship with evil. Rather, taking our human freedom seriously, we should spend our energies and efforts trying to counter evil in all its forms, including that of systemic racism, be it in the guise that murdered George Floyd or in the existence of a Covid pandemic in which poorer peoples of color have died in disproportionate numbers than wealthier White people.44 The existence of such evils as slavery tells us more about the human capacity toward horrid acts of selfishness than it does about the nature of God. This perspective falls short of Jones’ open-ended view of history, in that those who adhered to this perspective would still want to argue for a notion of “Eschatological hope” in which God will decisively enter into human history and ensure the completion of God’s purposes for righteousness and justice. Those who advocated this typology would argue that humans being are charged with the responsibility for campaigning and fighting for justice within history. This is active campaigning for justice is accomplished, as a forward-oriented journey through the continuum of human experience, in the confident belief that the “God of History” will meet them at the “other end of History”. This view might be challenged by those in No. 2 as the “so-called radicals who want to have their cake and eat it”. That is, such proponents want to preserve human free will and autonomy

See Kelly Brown Douglas, The Black Christ (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1993). James H. Cone, God of The Oppressed (San Francisco: Harper, 1975), 108–95. 41 JoAnne Marie Terrell, Power in the Blood? The Cross in the African American Experience (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1998). 42 Ibid., 34. 43 See Robert Beckford, Jesus is Dread (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1998), 130–52, and Riggins R. Earl Jr., Dark Salutations (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2001), 1–16. 44 See Jione Havea, ed., Doing Theology in the New Normal (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 2021). 39 40

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but still want the comfort of an interventionist and activist God who will enter history to complete the task that human beings cannot accomplish through their own efforts.45 The lack of any historical data, by which one can attribute any notion of a God who is actively working in partnership with humankind to banish evil and suffering, has to be acknowledged. The notion that God is “with us” in the struggle to overturn evil and suffering is based on the presupposition of Christian faith, which, when examined in the light of historical experiences, can be shown to be speculative at best and delusional at worst. For those who adhered to typology No. 4, such exhortations of faith cannot be sustained in empirical terms. The challenges of those in No. 2 to the inherent weaknesses of those who hold to No. 4, can only be countered by the latter by appealing to notions of faith.46

CONCLUSION In my work as a Participative Black theologian, whose work emerges from a Practical theology-led engagement with people in terms of their lived experiences of faith, I would argue that not all four typologies are consistent with the basic tenets of Black theology. Certainly, I would rule out the first typology as having anything to do with the radical intent of Black theology. Its inclusion, here, speaks to the necessity of acknowledging those theological perspectives, which although deeply inimical to the liberative project at the heart of Black theology, nonetheless remain operative in the lives of more conservative, evangelical Black Christians living in Britain. Conversely, the second typology, I would see as the radical riposte to the theistic hinterland that has dominated the hermeneutical approach to Black theology, remains the most visible expression of the discipline; we are talking of predominantly Christian theologians operating from within the parameters of Christianity, in working with the Bible.47 At the outset of this chapter, I outlined the twin differing identities of Black theology arising from the first two pivotal works of James Cone, namely a practical model of theologizing arising from existential experience, juxtaposed with an identity that coheres to systematic, scholarly discourse within the academy. It can be argued that the third and fourth typologies best encapsulate these twin identities of Black theology and theological intent in which it engages with issues of Black suffering and problems of evil. Any exploration of Black theology and the subject of suffering and evil will quickly deduce that for the most part Black and womanist theologians often adopt a practical and experiential approach to the subject. Our work (as one who identifies with the movement) is often less an exploration of metaphysical arguments than it is an existential and pragmatic rendering of the means by which Black people have survived and continue to battle against insuperable odds as it relates to suffering and evil.

This issue is addressed in Carol Troupe, “Human Suffering in Black Theology”, Black Theology: An International Journal 9, no. 2 (2011): 199–222. 46 An excellent example of this can be found in Jamall A. Calloway, “‘To Struggle Up a Never-Ending Stair’: Theodicy and the Failure It Gifts to Black Liberation Theology”, Black Theology: An International Journal 18, no. 3 (2020): 223–45. 47 Frederick Ware offers brilliant dissection of the differing methodological approaches to Black theology, in which the “Hermeneutical school” is by far the most visible and influential. See Frederick L. Ware, Methodologies of Black Theology (Cleveland: Pilgrim’s Press, 2002), 28–65. 45

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I cannot pretend that this is an exhaustive exploration of Black theology and its relationship to suffering and evil. Given that I am by nature more of a Practical theologian than a Systematic one, I have approached this topic by means of a narrative approach that has sought to locate this theme from within the context of lived experience and religious practice. Given the existential, experiential, and pragmatic nature of Black theology, I believe that my approach reflects aspects of the nature of the discipline itself: that is, Black suffering is not a philosophical treatise but an existential reality, and evil is not a metaphysical entity but is often an expression of White supremacy.

FURTHER READING Cone, James H. Black Theology and Black Power. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1969/89. Cone, James H. A Black Theology of Liberation. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1970/90. Cone, James H. The Spirituals and the Blues. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1972/92. Jones, William R. Is God A White Racist? Boston: Beacon Books, 1998. Pinn, Anthony B. Why Lord: Suffering and Evil in Black Theology. New York: Continuum, 1999. Smith, Yolanda Y. Reclaiming The Spirituals: New Possibilities for African American Christian Education. Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2004.

Chapter 78

Music, Sacred Sound, and Suffering JONATHAN ARNOLD

“Music is something that should happen whenever people feel a need to speak through sounds, to thank God they are on the earth or to curse him for what they are suffering.”1 Since the beginning of human evolution, where there has been suffering there has been music. From the socially cohesive and defensive powers of vocalization among early homo sapiens, to the pain of Bach, Beethoven, Bartok, and countless composers throughout history, music has been the sound of those who suffer and has formed an essential expressive element of the human condition. Music is born out of, and speaks to, our suffering humanity. Just as music can be used to rouse people to acts of terror, violence, and war, it can also be used to express the sorrow of living with distress or agony, whether from natural causes or human evil. Music can creatively express the human consequences of social injustice and oppression, illness, conflict, or depression. Or it can inspire joy and the hope of liberation from those evils. It can bind up the broken and the divided and become the means by which suffering can be relieved, healing individuals and the larger society. In times of sorrow and grief, music can enable a body of people to externalize grief publicly as well as allow the individual to internalize and process grief by creating private space for contemplation or recovery or to rejoice in new-found freedom from persecution or from ill health. In this chapter2 I will begin by outlining some recent research into the earliest development of human music and its use as a means of promoting social cohesion. Thereafter, I will explore music’s transformative power to promote mental and physical well-being, as well as its ability to enable [or empower] individuals and groups to articulate their suffering, especially after trauma. I will also consider the power of music to both manifest and alleviate the consequences of war and oppression. Because music seems to have always been at the heart of religious conflict, suffering, and pain, I will in the final section of this chapter briefly examine some musical themes related to this within the history of Western Christianity. As a case in point I will briefly focus on the use of music in the liberation of the Baltic States from Soviet occupation, and specifically on the work of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935), examining the influence of persecution, exile,

Wilfrid Mellers, Music and Society: England and the European Tradition (London: Dennis Dobson, 1946), 18. I would like to thank Dr. Jan Spurlock for her kind wisdom, comments, and corrections, which have significantly improved the presentation of this chapter. Any remaining faults are entirely my own.

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and censure on his work, especially in the context of his conversion to the Orthodox faith. I will then consider his music alongside that of other contemporary composers whose work reflects and embodies the suffering consequent on lives lived under oppressive regimes. These examples will, I hope, argue persuasively for the conclusion that music and suffering have been allies throughout human history: as an expression of, or therapy for, mental and physical anguish, not only as a prelude to conflict, violence, and war but also as a source of non-violent power to free people from the shackles of oppression. I will now turn to a brief overview of music in some pre-history evolutionary theory.

MUSIC, EVOLUTION, AND SOCIAL COHESION Music developed early in human evolution as a means of promoting social cohesion in tribal groups. As Iain McGilchrist has shown, this development probably predates language: “the control of voice and respiration needed for singing came into being long before they would ever have been required by language.” Indeed, “intonation, phrasing and rhythm develop first; syntax and vocabulary come only later”. Therefore “our love of music reflects the ancestral ability of our mammalian brain to transmit and receive basic emotional sounds”, which improved communication, social cohesion, and harmony and helped bond people together in community.3 Evolutionary psychologists Weinstein, Launay, Pearce, Dunbar, and Stewart have attempted to demonstrate how humans create and maintain social bonds in large groups and have argued that “evidence from historical and anthropological records suggests that group music-making might act as a mechanism by which this large-scale social bonding could occur”.4 Indeed, evidence from our own day confirms that when individuals from community choirs sing together their communal music-making fosters social closeness, even in large group contexts where individuals are not known to each other, a finding “consistent with evolutionary accounts that emphasize the role of music in social bonding, particularly in the context of creating larger cohesive groups than other primates are able to manage”.5 Anecdotal evidence from community choirs formed in the mid- to late twentieth century affirms the power of flourishing community singing and amateur choirs to promote social cohesion. Joan Taylor’s “Can’t Sing Choir” at Morley College in London, Polly Barton’s “Singing for the Terrified”, and Frankie Armstrong’s 1988 Natural Voice Network sought to foster “accepting, non-judgmental communities that sing together”. These choirs have all played an important part in introducing non-musical, untrained people to the aural/ oral learning process of being in a choir, through which they gain a sense of joy, inclusivity, and nourishment.6 The Birmingham “Wellbeing Choir” declares, for instance: “Attending a choir rehearsal is an uplifting and friendly experience.”7 Such experiences of communal music-making benefit social and individual well-being, but music has also been shown

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 102f. Daniel Weinstein, Jacques Launay, Eiluned Pearce, Robin I. M. Dunbar, and Lauren Stewart, “Singing and Social Bonding: Changes in Connectivity and Pain Threshold as a Function of Group Size”, Evolution and Human Behavior 37, no. 2 (2016): 152–8, 152. 5 Ibid. 6 Sarah Morgan and June Boyce-Tillman, A River Rather Than A Road: The Community Choir as Spiritual Experience (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2016), 24, 26. 7 Ibid., 28. 3 4

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to play a very significant role in the therapeutic healing process, following physical or mental illness, trauma, or violence.

MUSIC AS THERAPY FOR PHYSICAL AND MENTAL SUFFERING Music therapy has a long and noble history. We learn from the Old Testament that King Saul was disturbed by an evil spirit: “David would take the harp and begin to play; Saul became calm, felt better and the evil spirit departed from him” (1 Sam. 16:15-16, NIV). Furthermore, evidence from ancient Greece, China, India, Africa, and the Andes, from Aesculapius, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, indicates that all advocated music as an agent for the healing of mental illness.8 Countless composers throughout history have battled with bodily and psychological anguish. Beethoven (1770–1827), for example, suffered in both mind and body. His great Heiliger Dankgesang (op. 132 III) of 1825 emerged from his sense of thanksgiving for the alleviation of suffering, praising God for recovery from a serious illness. But in a letter to his brother, hidden among his papers and dated 1802 was found Beethoven’s Heiligenstadt Testament. The letter reveals the depths of his near suicidal suffering as a consequence of his increasing deafness: Such experiences almost made me despair, and I was on the point of putting an end to my life – the only thing that held me back was my art. For indeed it seemed to me impossible to leave this world before I had produced all the works that I felt the urge to compose; and thus, I have dragged on this miserable existence – a truly miserable existence.9 While Robert Schumann (1810–56) suffered from mental illness, attempting suicide in the Rhine, his music, as well as the compositions of many other composers, gives evidence that music had often saved others from ending their own lives. For instance, Wittgenstein “recorded that, more than once, the slow movement in Brahms’s third Quartet pulled him back from the brink of suicide”.10 But the nineteenth century provides evidence of more formalized and scientific experimentation with the therapeutic properties of music. Experiments in music therapy took place in the women’s asylum of San Clemente, founded in 1873 in the Venetian lagoon.11 Its director Cesare Vigna, friend of Verdi, built a room where patients could listen to music, reasoning that “the moral and physiological influence of music on the nervous system” could be “properly used in curing psychopathy”.12 San Clemente finally closed its doors to patients in 1984, but more recent research confirms that music therapy benefits patients not only by enabling them to live with pain but also because it can assist in the transcendence of suffering: “We are encouraged to see the benefit of suffering in bringing us beyond our present understandings, which is

Silvia Bencivelli, Why We Like Music: Ear, Emotion, Evolution, trans. Stephen Thomson Moore (Hudson: Music Word Media, 2011), 133. 9 Emily Anderson, The Letters of Beethoven, vol. 3 (New York: Norton, 1961), 1352 quoted in Albert L. Blackwell, The Sacred in Music (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999), 168. Beethoven’s emphasis. 10 George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), 84. 11 Bencivelli, Why We Like Music, 131. 12 Cesare Vigna, Intorno all Diverse Influenze deal Musica sul Fiscio e sul Morale (Milan: Ricordi, 1878) quoted in Bencivelli, Why We Like Music, 132–3. 8

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also an understanding of the transcendental.”13 This is particularly true regarding pain management: “The ability to rise above suffering, to go beyond the present situation to a realm where life takes on another, perhaps deeper, significance is an important factor in palliative care.”14 There is in-depth and broad evidence that music can engender marked benefits for human mental and physical well-being and healing with, for instance, regard to mood, stress, and pain management. Music also has proven benefits to our immune and neurologic functions: it has been shown to reduce pain and stress during childbirth and can help patients suffering from depression, coronary heart disease, and cancer.15 There are innumerable scientific studies and articles chronicling the beneficial effects of music in the alleviation of physical and mental affliction, such as the effect on the physiological and psychological parameters of disease in patients with primary open-angle glaucoma.16 There is good evidence that music can improve the quality of life in older people17 and be beneficial to those living with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease by helping in decreasing neuropsychiatric symptoms.18 Oliver Sacks has demonstrated, over many years of research, that music can have a remarkable effect on brain activity. For instance, not only can it ease the symptoms of neurological diseases, it can also alleviate the frequency of epileptic seizures (“musicogenic epilepsy”).19 Sacks has worked for decades analyzing how music effects patients with various neurological problems, from Parkinson’s disease, aphasia, dementia, epilepsy, and melancholia. He writes that “our auditory systems, our nervous systems, are indeed exquisitely tuned for music”. However, Sacks also notes that discerning how this might be so, physiologically and neurologically, is not clear.20 Nevertheless, individual and corporate psychological healing through music are scientifically observable, including treatment for trauma. Recent studies have demonstrated that “women who have been exposed to physical, psychological and/or sexual abuse often with a history of childhood

David Aldridge, “Music, Consciousness and Altered States”, in Music and Altered States: Consciousness, Transcendence, ed. David Aldridge and Jörg Fachner (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2006), 167. 14 Ibid., 168. 15 See Suzanne B. Hanser, “Music, Health and Wellbeing”, in Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications, ed. P. N. Juslin and J. A. Sloboda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 833, 855–73; see also Suzanne Hanser, The New Music Therapist’s Handbook (Boston: Berklee Press, 1999); Daniel J. Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of Human Obsession (New York: Dutton, 2006); Oliver W. Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008); William Davis, Kate Gfeller and Michael Thaut, An Introduction to Music Therapy: Theory and Practice, 3rd ed. (Silver Spring, MD: American Music Therapy Association, 1992); Susan Hallam, Ian Cross and Michael Thaut, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), chs. 46–9; Barbara L. Wheeler, ed., Music Therapy Research, 2nd ed. (Gilsum: Barcelona Publishers, 2005). 16 Thomas Bertelmann and Ilse Strempel, “Short-term Effects of Relaxation Music on Patients Suffering from Primary Open-Angle Glaucoma”, Clinical Ophthalmology 9 (2015): 1981–8. 17 C. Victor Fung and Lisa J. Lehmberg, Music for Life: Music Participation and Quality of Life for Senior Citizens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 18 Anneli Pitkänen et al., “Implementing Physical Exercise and Music Interventions for Patients Suffering from Dementia on an Acute Psychogeriatric Inpatient Ward”, Nordic Journal of Psychiatry 73, no. 7 (2019): 401–8. 19 Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind (London: Harper Collins, 1992), 34–7; Oliver W. Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (London: Duckworth, 1985), 7–21; Oliver W. Sacks, Awakening (London: Duckworth, 1973), passim; Sacks, Musicophilia, passim. 20 Sacks, Musicophilia, xii. 13

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abuse and neglect”21 and who suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder individually responded positively to group music, which led to “decreased PTSD symptoms”. It also resulted in favorable changes in “symptoms of dissociation, anxiety and depression, and an improvement in quality of life”.22 Music therapy can also be effectively applied communally, as witnessed by the Manchester Survivors’ Choir, who began to meet after the Manchester Arena terrorist bombing on May 22, 2017. On the first anniversary of the attack, they performed and recorded the song “I Will Rise”, which gained national and international attention.23 The Manchester Evening News reported: “It was a love of music that took them to the Arena on May 22 last year. And that same love has helped them through the dark days, weeks and months that followed.”24 One survivor explained the benefits of being in the choir: “Singing together is really cathartic. It feels like a release.”25 The research of Suzanne Hanser confirms that music has a close association with physical and mental health, because its therapeutic qualities are so powerful that they attend to the whole person: Psychoneuroimmunology has built a foundation for explaining the impact of music and emotion on health, and positive approaches to psychology have helped describe how music facilitates well-being. Engaging with music becomes a form of integrative medicine that benefits the whole person.26 Music can effect our minds, bodies, emotions, and senses. This wholistic influence is not just felt by individuals and communities but can also whole nations as they live through, or emerge from, international conflict or religious oppression, from biblical times to our own day.

MUSIC IN PERIODS OF WAR, OPPRESSION, AND LIBERATION Music has been a feature of war throughout history – in the lead up to battle, during conflict, and in the posttraumatic aftermath. In the Old Testament, for instance, the music of the trumpets becomes an integral part of the destruction of Jericho: So, the people shouted, and the trumpets were blown. As soon as the people heard the sound of the trumpets, they raised a great shout, and the wall fell down flat; so the people charged straight ahead into the city and captured it. Then they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city. (Josh. 6:20-21, NRSV)

Gabriella Rudstam et al., “Trauma-Focused Group Music and Imagery with Women Suffering from PTSD/ Complex PTSD: A Feasibility Study”, Approaches: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Music Therapy 9, no. 2 (2017): 202. 22 Ibid., 215. 23 Damon Wilkinson, “The Choir That Brought Hope to the Survivors of the Manchester Arena Bombing”, Manchester Evening News, May 22, 2018, https://www​.man​ches​tere​veni​ngnews​.co​.uk​/news​/greater​-manchester​ -news​/choir​-brought​-hope​-survivors​-manchester​-14672046. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Hanser, “Music, Health and Wellbeing”, 873. 21

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In the book of Exodus, Miriam the Prophet rejoices with tambourine and song at the destruction of the Egyptians in the Red Sea: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea” (Exod. 15:21, NRSV). But the suffering of war has also stimulated creativity. In more recent times, for instance, in the First World War, the English composer Ivor Gurney “returned after 15 months at the Front, having been shot and gassed, but with five of his most enduring songs, some written practically in the front line”.27 Gurney’s generation of composers “poured their experiences [of war] into works”.28 During the war itself, music flourished under oppression: Composers such as Edgar Bainton, Benjamin Dale and the young composer / conductor Ernest Macmillan were rounded up and interned in cramped horse stalls on Ruhleben racecourse, in the suburbs of Berlin. There they quickly founded orchestras, choirs and a whole education programme for the benefit of the 5,000 other prisoners, who found themselves treated to all-male performances of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, with improvised costumes, and lectures on the history of music.29 Indeed, music has always been found wherever violence and persecution take place because songs and hymns – from the Old Testament Psalms to civil rights freedom songs – allow people to express their deepest beliefs and values. From the cry of the Jews carried into captivity in Babylon “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” recorded in Psalm 137, to the words of the gospel song “We Shall Overcome” made famous by Pete Seeger in the twentieth century, liberation has given suffering people an enduring and galvanizing musical theme. It is powerfully and persistently expressed in the JudeoChristian narrative. The songs or canticles of St. Luke’s Gospel – Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:46), Zechariah’s Benedictus (Luke 1:67), Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis (Luke 2:28) and the Angels singing Glory to God (Luke 2:13) – are all radical in their theology of liberation. Mary, for instance, sings of a world where the mighty are brought low and the humble and meek are exalted, and in so doing connects the divine act of the incarnation and her prophetic witness to social justice. As Don Saliers puts it, “to sing with Mary is to sing God’s Justice”.30 Perhaps there is a very relevant point here for modern society in that a great deal of the music-making surrounding the theme of liberation from oppression in the Bible is sung by women. As Walter Brueggemann writes, Mary’s hymn of praise is revolutionary in its world-making . . . raw in its power . . . the nations are invited to a new world with a public ethic rooted in and normed by the tales of nameless peasants, widows and orphans. It is enough to make trees sing and fields clap and floods rejoice and barren women laugh and liberated slaves dance and angels sing.31 Mary’s song echoes the Old Testament themes of justice too, such as Hannah’s song in 1 Samuel: My heart exults in the Lord; Kate Kennedy, “Music and the First World War”, British Library, https://www​.bl​.uk​/20th​-century​-music​/articles​ /music​-and​-the​-first​-world​-war. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Don E. Saliers, Music and Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007), 44. 31 Walter Brueggemann, Israel’s Praise: Doxology against Idolatry and Ideology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 85–6. 27

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my strength is exalted in my God.* My mouth derides my enemies, because I rejoice in thy victory. (1 Sam. 2:1) And in Psalm 33 where the Psalmist proclaims: The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples. (Ps. 33:10) In Mary’s song, she highlights the gap between what is and what ought to be and thus continues the tradition of singing as the proclamation of justice and freedom. This is a tradition which has continued through the classical Christian music of the church, from J. S. Bach to the liberation songs of African American slaves and spirituals: What [Bach’s] Jesu meine Freude and [the spiritual] Deep River have in common is an attitude to this mortal life which renders the loss of it desirable. Hope for another, better, life, beyond the grave, is common to the oppressed and deprived, to slaves, be they on a sugar plantation or in early Christian Rome. Suffering begets music, and since the human condition is unlikely to improve, the source is unlikely to run dry. Music will flourish as long as suffering itself, because it expresses something deep within the human psyche, and it will remain in the hands and mouths of the chorus – the congregation, unmediated by any authority other than popular belief.32 This connection between affliction, music, and the deep desire for liberation “unmediated by any authority” is evident whenever a political power or nation seeks to impose its regime upon another. One example of music’s enduring role within religious persecution and liberation comes from the Soviet Union and the occupied states it dominated. The uprising of 1917 and the communist era that followed gave birth to a political ideology that sought to crush all faith practices. But the Christian faith and the musical and artistic culture that went with it nevertheless continued to flourish underground. When the priest and scholar Michael Bourdeaux (1934–2021) was in Russia over Easter in 1960, he attended an Orthodox service in a church which still celebrated the resurrection despite the persecution of religious liturgy and music. That Easter Bordeaux records what remained for him a lifelong and unforgettable experience of subversive and communal worship and singing: They were all old people. Young people didn’t dare go to church in those days, but those old people had suffered. They had been through the Stalin period, who had only been dead for seven years. Almost all of them, if they hadn’t been in prison themselves, had relatives that had been in prison, or they’d lost loved ones in the war . . . You could see the suffering on the faces of these people, illuminated by their single candle, and you could see the suffering turning into joy – the certainty of the resurrection. Even so, Bordeaux was later to witness “much worse persecution of the Church than I had ever imagined”.33

Jonathan Arnold, Sacred Music in Secular Society (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 133–4. Jonathan Arnold, Music and Faith: Conversations in a Post-Secular Age (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2019), 138–9; see also Michael Bourdeaux, Risen Indeed: Lessons in faith from the USSR (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1983), 41–2.

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Such persecution also persisted more widely in Eastern Europe. During the Second World War the Soviet Union twice occupied the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), first from 1940 to 1941, and then again from 1944 onwards. These countries continued under occupation until 1990, when the Soviet Union collapsed. Many people were executed, imprisoned, or sent to Gulag camps. The main deportations took place in 1941 and 1949.34 Music played a significant role in the liberation of the Baltic States from occupation and oppression, especially in the remarkable events of the “Singing Revolution”, a term coined by the Estonian activist and artist Heinz Valk in 1988. The term refers to mass singing demonstrations, the first of which took place at the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds. But the phenomenon lasted four years. For instance, on August 23, 1989, a staggering two million people formed a line on the Vilnius-Tallinn road stretching through Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. And they sang mostly nationalist traditional songs. The line formed a human chain over 675 kilometers long. Other peaceful protests ensued, such as in 1991, when people in Estonia acted as human shields to protect radio and TV stations from Soviet tanks. Ethnomusicologist Jeffers Engelhardt has noted that alongside this peaceful singing protest, and independence, came a return to religious Orthodoxy: Conversion to Orthodoxy was one of the more unexpected and revealing phenomena of religious and social transformation after the Singing Revolution . . . Singing pervaded these processes and was one of the principal ways converts encountered, experienced, and assimilated Orthodox doctrine and tradition.35 The oppression of composers and performers of sacred music spread to other communist countries, including Estonia, the home of composer Arvo Pärt.

ARVO PÄRT Born in Tallinn in 1935, Pärt has lived under a succession of repressive regimes, first of the Soviets, then the fascist Germans, and then after the war of the Soviets again. All these regimes attempted to eradicate Estonia’s cultural traditions and its Christian heritage. While still a student Pärt was conscripted in 1954 into the Soviet Army for two years until he could return before returning to Tallinn to resume his musical studies while also working for nearly a decade as a sound engineer for Estonian state radio. He continued to compose, and in 1960 completed his first orchestral piece, Nekrolog. This piece explicitly demonstrated Pärt’s conviction that there is a connection between music and adversity, for he dedicated the piece to victims of fascism. But it was Pärt’s nascent passion for Orthodox spirituality which would lead to his being ultimately silenced by the Soviet authorities. His first overtly Christian composition, his Credo of 1968 for piano solo, chorus, and orchestra mixed tonal and atonal music, setting a biblical text

Violeta Davoliute and Tomas Balkelis, eds, Narratives of Exile and Identity: Soviet Deportation Memoirs from the Baltic States (Budapest: Central European Press, 2018); Alain Blum and Emilia Koustova, “A Soviet Story: Mass Deportation, Isolation, Return”, in Narratives of Exile and Identity: Soviet Deportation Memoirs from the Baltic States, ed. Violeta Davoliute and Thomas Balkelis (Budapest: Central European Press, 2018), 19–40; Romuald J. Misiunas and Rein Taagepera, The Baltic States: Years of Dependence 1940–1990 (Berkely: University of California Press, 1993). 35 Jeffers Engelhardt, Singing the Right Way; Orthodox Christians and Secular Enchantment in Estonia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 180. 34

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which was interpreted as defiance by the Soviet regime. Demonstrating an affinity with the overtly Christian J. S. Bach by employing Bach’s first prelude from the Well-Tempered Clavier as a compositional theme, Pärt also began and ended his piece with the words “Credo in Jesum Christum”, asserting faith in Jesus Christ, as well as citing Christ’s injunction from the Sermon on the Mount that we are to love our enemies. The piece was banned by the Politburo. “It was my deep conviction”, said Pärt, “that the words of Christ [were] a theological musical form . . . The hate collapsed itself when it met love”.36 When questioned in a radio interview about what his influences were, Pärt responded that it was Jesus Christ who was his greatest inspiration. The interview was banned from being broadcast. Pärt said he could no longer compose in a Soviet-acceptable way, which for him signified “conflict with people, with the world, with God”. He said, “art has to deal with eternal questions, not just sorting out the issues of today”.37 Pärt described the official reaction to Credo as “my musical death sentence”. According to his biographer Paul Hillier, the opposition to, and censure of, his work brought the composer to “a position of complete despair in which the composition of music appeared to be the most futile of gestures in which he lacked the musical faith and will power to write even a single note”.38 From 1968 until 1976 he was unable to compose. He later said that “I had lost my inner compass”. And yet, writes Hillier, “it was from this creative death that there gradually arose in him a search for an entirely new way to proceed”.39 In these years of silence, Pärt slowly formed a theological musical form which allowed him to take “small steps of tolerance to the world”.40 He entered the Russian Orthodox Church in 1972 and studied Gregorian chant and polyphony, even though sources for this religious musical material were difficult to find: “After Credo the composer had to rediscover the inner workings of tonality for himself, and consequently pared down and reconstructed both his musical ideas and his technique.”41 Thus, by 1976 he had developed a new compositional style which he called “tintinnabulation”, referring to the slow modulations of sound made by bells, and involving a technique centered on the musical “line” of the triad and its relation to melody. A famous example of this style is his 1978 Spiegel im Spiegel reveals a “relationship between the stability of the triad and that touching insecurity with which the melodic voice moves; just like a child who learns to walk and returns into the arms of his mother”.42 The space between notes evokes a silent dialogue of prayer or, as Pärt himself described it: “One line is who we are, and the other line is who is holding and takes care of us. Sometimes I say . . . that the melodic line is our reality, our sins. But the other line is forgiving sins.”43 Suffering, oppression, justice, and liberation are all key factors in Pärt’s life and music, as is sacrifice:

Arthur Lubow, “The Sound of Spirit”, The New York Times, October 15, 2010, https://archive​.nytimes​.com​/ www​.nytimes​.com​/2010​/10​/17​/magazine​/17part​-t​.html. 37 Paul Hillier, Arvo Pärt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 65. 38 Ibid., 64. 39 Ibid. 40 Lubow, “The Sound of Spirit”. 41 Peter Quinn, “Out with the Old and in with the New: Arvo Part’s Credo”, Tempo 211 (2000): 16–20, 20. 42 Diego Malquori, “Arvo Part’s ‘Credo’”, The Musical Times 157, no. 1936 (2016): 37–48, 48. 43 Quoted in J. Spurlock, Programme Notes for Oxford Lent Concerts: Chapel of Queen’s College (Oxford: Unpublished Booklets, 2011–19). 36

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Naturally, I understand under “sacrifice” more than a fight for justice with a sword in your hand. There are enough examples in music history, where the best music was written secretively, where composers remained unknown or even suffered from persecution. This was often the best music.44 Indeed, for Pärt, suffering is an essential part of the compositional process: A composition comes in a single gesture which is already, in essence, music. The path to this is hard; you descend to the lowest spiritual place, the bottom of the world, not knowing what will be found. The only thing you know is that you don’t know anything. If this gesture, like a seed, takes root, it must be cultivated with extreme care so that it may grow; meanwhile you are oscillating between heaven and earth. The compositional task is to find the appropriate system for the gesture. It is one’s capacity for suffering that gives the energy to create.45 The cost of the compositional process is sacrifice and suffering in response to the affliction of the world, such as Pärt’s Da Pacem, Domine, composed in 2004 in solidarity with those who died in Madrid bombings and with those who seek peace “in the midst of suffering and violence”.46 But one consequence of this sacrificial compositional process is the consolation Pärt’s music has brought to many who suffer pain or who are dying. This is partly because Pärt has an instinctive empathy for others who suffer: The first-felt effect of Pärt’s work upon those who suffer, even before consolation or hope, is empathy . . . they feel heard and accompanied in their suffering; the music meets them in their affliction. People in their darkest hours do not, in the first instance, want to be “cheered up”. They want to be understood for their suffering.47 Through this empathy there is hope, which is sometimes alluded to in the Orthodox tradition as “bright sadness”, for “the arts and the sacred traditions alike, where they are true to life as we know it, will often reflect this interweaving of sorrow and consolation, brokenness and wholeness”.48 This “bright sadness” manifests itself in the soul of the composer, and the compositional process, as much as in the ear of the listener. For Pärt, music is both a consoling friend and a thorn in the flesh: Music is my friend: ever-understanding, compassionate, forgiving. It’s a comforter, the handkerchief for drying my tears of sadness, the source of my tears of joy, my liberation and flight. But also a painful thorn in my flesh and soul, that which makes me sober and teaches humility.49 Like Arvo Pärt, many other composers today are part of an unbroken tradition through the centuries which leads back to the great sacred music contrapuntalists of the Renaissance – music centered on the suffering and death of Christ and the ultimate redemption of humanity: Quoted in Geoff Smith, “An Interview with Arvo Pärt: Sources of Invention”, The Musical Times 140:1868 (1999): 19–22, 24–5. 45 Pärt speaking in 1994 before a performance of Litany, quoted in Hillier, Arvo Pärt, 201. 46 Spurlock, Programme Notes. 47 Peter C. Bouteneff, Arvo Pärt: Out of Silence (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2015), 41–2. 48 Ibid., 141. 49 Pärt speaking at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminar, May 31, 2014, quoted in Bouteneff, Arvo Pärt, 24. 44

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Through music, words, and art we think about his Cross and Passion and reflect on the physical, social, and spiritual suffering: the nails, the abuse, and the sense of total abandonment . . . If we allow ourselves to be drawn into the suffering of the man on the cross, we may glimpse behind him the images of human tragedy which we ourselves have witnessed . . . In the faces of the despairing poor and the vulnerable, the sick, the outcast, and the exiled of our world, we see those who two thousand years ago were the focus of Jesus’ ministry and mission.50 Like Pärt, John Tavener (1944–2013) converted to the Orthodox Church in 1977, composing deeply spiritual music based on personal faith. As Tavener suffered ill health throughout his life, he too “discovered in reflecting on suffering and death a source of creativity”. Pain, he once remarked, produced in him “a kind of ecstatic music”.51 In the case of Tavener, this creative suffering opened up the possibility that others might find consolation and healing from their own pain. As Tavener suggested: The fact that I’ve been given this universalist vision of the world makes it a possibility that I might be able to contribute, just fractionally, toward the healing of a planet that’s torn to pieces at the moment, by strife, by war, by different religions warring with each other.52 In some cases, however, the distress, desolation, oppression, and violence that inform the musical creative process of so-called minimalist composers, like Pärt, Tavener, and Henryk Górecki (1933–2010), can elude the listener if the musical text and context are not fully understood. For instance, when the celebrated actor Simon Russell Beale first heard Górecki’s Third Symphony in 1992, he confessed that he considered it simply to be a relaxing piece of background music: I was guilty when I first heard it of using it as a miraculous piece of meditative wallpaper. But the piece sets words written on the wall of a Nazi prison camp, so it is really a cry for help. And I didn’t know that. This is emotionally complex music. And all of them – Pärt, Górecki, Tavener – are writing works that use the vocabulary of calm and stasis, but actually they’re about dynamism and movement, and ultimately, about redemption and death. That’s the confusion in my head: I was using it as a kind of spiritual wash, and it’s not.53 This is music that, on the surface, seems to be an aid to calm serenity, but which can become quite a different piece once the hearer learns more about the composer, the setting, the words, and the intention of the work. This multidimensional engagement with music born out of suffering can bring a sense of hope: The “New Spiritual Music” of Arvo Pärt, John Tavener and Henryk Górecki has also been helpful to people looking for “hopeful time”. Partly this is perhaps due to the explicit religiosity of the style, but also because of how its compositional structure somehow refuses to be entirely goal directed. In what Pärt calls his tintinnabuli style (“like bells”), he creates a ritual effect through the way static musical motifs both circle Spurlock, Programme Notes. Ibid. 52 David McCleery, John Tavener: A Portrait (London: Naxos, 2004). 53 Tom Service, “On the trail of Sacred Music”, The Guardian, March 11, 2010, http://www​.guardian​.co​.uk​/music​ /2010​/mar​/11​/sacred​-music​-simon​-russell​-beale. 50 51

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and progress in time. Tavener similarly describes his pieces as “sounding icons” that are both static and moving, hinting at how this music provides a non-verbal parable of the mysteries of end-time.54 Music created from suffering speaks to a secular Western world of violence where hope is still needed, where “secular minds are only now beginning to perceive that all is not as it should be”,55 and where being a Christian can be just as countercultural as it was in Pärt’s 1968 Estonia. Writing of his friend and collaborator, the poet Michael Symmons Roberts has suggested that, in the music of James MacMillan (b. 1959): the whole [Christian] story is there, the whole drama. Christ could not have risen if he had not been crucified first. The battle is ultimately won, but it continues all around us. Truly religious art, truly Christian art – whether music or poetry – must surely live and draw creative breath from that tension, that struggle, that completeness in the midst of incompleteness.56

CONCLUSION From what evidence we have of the earliest human music, developed as a means of avoiding social conflict, to that composed in today’s conflicted post-secular Western world, music and suffering seem to have coexisted symbiotically from within the imperfections of fragmented and broken societies. Whether music is employed as a tonic for physical and mental health or as a therapy for illness or trauma, or whether it serves to manifest the pain of political oppression or promote a transcendent liberation from it, music will continue to embody and emerge out of individual and collective affliction. While the anguish and sacrifice at the heart of many musical compositions may accurately reflect the depth of human suffering, it may also paradoxically bring sympathy, solace, consolation, empathy, and healing to those in distress. Until the eschaton and the silencing of all worldly endeavors, music will endure, occupying the same time and space as the fragile, complex, and suffering humanity who create it.

FURTHER READING Arnold, Jonathan. Sacred Music in Secular Society. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Arnold, Jonathan. Music and Faith: Conversations in a Post-Secular Age. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2019. Bouteneff, Peter C. Arvo Pärt: Out of Silence. New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2015. Engelhardt, Jeffers. Singing the Right Way: Orthodox Christians and Secular Enchantment in Estonia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Engelhardt, Jeffers. “Arvo Pärt and the Idea of a Christian Europe”. In Resounding Transcendence: Transitions in Music, Religion, and Ritual, edited by Jeffers Engelhardt and Philip V. Bohlman, 214–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Gary Andsell, How Music Helps in Music Therapy and Everyday Life (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 288–9. Philip Blond, ed., Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology (Abingdon: Routledge, 1998), 9. 56 Michael Symmons Roberts, “Contemporary Poetry and Belief ”, in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, ed. Peter Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 694–706, 702. 54 55

Chapter 79

Richard Wagner RICHARD BELL

WAGNER AS THEOLOGIAN Richard Wagner (1813–83) made a significant contribution to theology. One way of accounting for this is that he read the great dramatists and poets such as Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Schiller; he read philosophers such as Plato, Hegel, and Schopenhauer; he read the great works of medieval literature (e.g., Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan; Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival); he knew his New Testament and he took a keen interest in theologians such as Luther and in recent theological developments. All this he internalized and then metamorphized to create his own stage works, employing his artistic sensibilities. Creating them involved working on preexisting material, forging his own version of the story (e.g., Tristan, Parsifal), composing his own libretti, some of which can stand alone as works of great poetry, working out the stage direction and sets, and of course composing the music whose relation to the poetry is thoroughly thought through.1 One aspect of his creative genius is addressing and reflecting on suffering and the problem of evil. But this is no conventional way of addressing the issues. As we shall see he can relate the deepest understanding of suffering to kissing a beautiful woman as in Parsifal Act II; indeed suffering, the quest for knowledge, coming to maturity, and the “erotic” are all inextricably intertwined for Wagner. He presents a complex and nuanced picture of suffering and evil. Although there are a few characters who are completely evil (one could name Ortrud, Hunding, and Hagen, all of whom call on the “pagan” gods), Wagner usually presents “evil” characters with some sympathy (e.g., Alberich, Klingsor). One of his finest presentations of evil entering the world is in Rhinegold Scene 1, where “fall” does not occur by some outside agency but by an imminent process; so the Rhinemaidens have a certain “innocence” but also a certain seductiveness to which Alberich succumbs.2 Wagner held no consistent understanding on this but two examples are worth mentioning. In his “Opera and Drama” (1851) music is related to the poetry as a sexual union. Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, Volume II: Opera and Drama, trans. William Ashton Ellis (New York: Broude Brothers, 1966), 235–6; see original: Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen von Richard Wagner, 10 vols (Leipzig: E.W. Fritzsch, 1897), 4:102–3. In a later work, “On the Name Musikdrama” (1872), music is seen as the fundamental driving force such that his dramas were “deeds of music that have become visible”. Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, Volume V: Actors and Singers, trans. William Ashton Ellis (New York: Broude Brothers, 1966), 303 (translation modified); see original: Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen 9:306. 2 The process at work corresponds to Hegel’s “diremption” or “bifurcation” (“Entzweiung”). See Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 36–7. 1

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Suffering and the problem of evil is a theme found to a greater or lesser extent in every stage work of the so-called Wagnerian canon of ten works (i.e., the works from The Flying Dutchman through to Parsifal). I will discuss all these stage works (in roughly chronological order), but I will focus on the later artworks which, I think, portray suffering in its most profound form: first, The Valkyrie and Twilight of the Gods, these being the second and fourth operas of the Ring of the Nibelung; second, two works that are very much related, Tristan and Isolde and Parsifal.

The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin The first three operas of the Wagnerian canon were products of the 1840s. Suffering in The Flying Dutchman (1841) is evident in the tormented figure of the Dutchman, doomed to sail the seas but who has the opportunity to land every seven years in search of a woman who, if faithful, will redeem him. The Dutchman is like “Ahasuerus”, a “wandering Jew”, a figure with whom Wagner himself identified;3 strange though this may appear for an antisemite, it makes sense of the composer who was certainly a “wanderer” for a significant part of his life, frequently having to flee his creditors, and living in exile for thirteen years, having been banned from Germany because of his part in the Dresden revolution of 1849. The major source of suffering in Flying Dutchman is Satan, and it is significant that of the fifteen occurrences of the word “Satan” and derivatives I have located in Wagner’s extant works and writings, six are in Flying Dutchman.4 The redeeming woman, Senta, although having some resemblances to Gretchen of Goethe’s Faust,5 certainly does not share her innocence or naïvety, and it is ironic that she could be considered to have what one could call “diabolical” characteristics.6 The work ends in a dramatic but also beautiful resolution: the Dutchman departs in his ship, believing himself to be eternally damned; but Senta jumps from a cliff into the sea whereby the Dutchman’s ship sinks; then the stage direction tells us, “[i]n the glow of the rising sun, the transfigured forms of the Dutchman and Senta, clasped in each other’s arms, are seen rising over the wreck and soaring into the sky”. His next stage work, Tannhäuser (1845), also concerns the redemption of a sinful man by a woman, but this time it is the simple saintly figure of Elizabeth (based on Elizabeth of Thuringia) rather than the complex Senta of the previous opera. The work lacks the sense of existential anxiety we find in the Dutchman and was revised for performances in Paris (1861) and Vienna (1875) and just three weeks before Wagner died he expressed his dissatisfaction, telling his wife Cosima that “he still owes the world Tannhäuser”.7 But whatever problems one finds with the work it nevertheless expresses fresh aspects of suffering. Two sources of suffering come from two polar opposite figures: Venus and the Pope. Although it may be questioned whether the sensuous and “pornographic” pleasures of the Venusberg count as “suffering”, Tannhäuser clearly finds the whole place oppressive, disorienting, and without any sense of time or the seasons. He longs to feel the sunshine, to glimpse the stars, and hear the nightingale (Act I, Scene 2). Act III, Martin Dürrer, ed., Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Briefe, Band 11 (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1999), 137. Wagner’s preferred term for the adversary is “Teufel” (“devil”); I have found over 600 occurrences of “Teufel” and derivatives in Wagner’s extant works and writings. 5 John Deathridge, “Pale Senta”, Opera Quarterly 21, no. 3 (2005): 452–64. 6 Daniel Albright, “The Diabolical Senta”, Opera Quarterly 21, no. 3 (2005): 465–85. 7 Cosima Wagner’s Diaries, Volume II, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, trans. Geoffrey Skelton (New York: Harcourt Brace Jonanovich, 1977), entry for January 23, 1883. 3 4

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Scene 2 expresses another type of “hell”: despite begging for forgiveness the unmerciful Pope declares that just as his staff will never blossom, so Tannhäuser will never find forgiveness. However, the power of Elizabeth’s prayer is such that “the staff has put forth leaves of freshest green”.8 Of all the stage works it is the next, Lohengrin (1848), that presents the most devastating ending. Whereas in other stage works redemption is achieved, Lohengrin is a story of failed redemption. Although the work superficially suggests that the knight from the realm of the Holy Grail, Lohengrin, is sent to redeem a woman in distress, Elsa, the whole point is rather the reverse: she is meant to redeem Lohengrin, who is seeking to become fully human through marriage. Evil is represented by the figure of Ortrud, a worshiper of the pagan Germanic gods Wodan and Freia. Through her work she destroys not only what could have been a happy marriage but also Lohengrin’s hopes of “incarnation”. This points to a key theological theme in Wagner that the divine has to find human form.

Jesus of Nazareth and the Ring This theme of the divine finding human form was a central point in Wagner’s projected opera Jesus of Nazareth (1849). This was never completed, and had it been it may well have been in the style of Lohengrin, including great choruses (the one musical sketch happens to be found on the reverse side of a sheet from the score of Lohengrin). Although it was never completed the material did not go to waste for much of it ended up on the stage of the Ring cycle, a work that occupied him on and off for twenty-six years (1848–74). The most significant theological aspect of the Jesus of Nazareth sketches and the Ring is the “death of God”. Jesus’ death comes about because of his love for humankind. The death of the Valkyrie Brünnhilde in the Ring comes about in a similar way. The second opera of the Ring is called The Valkyrie because the opera revolves around the fact that this young woman for the first time in her life observes and is overcome by the sacrificial nature of true erotic love. This is the love between the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde, children of the god Wotan and a mortal woman. They have been separated after birth, Sieglinde is forced into a loveless marriage with Hunding, but Wotan has seen to it that the twins meet and he blesses their union. Wotan himself is trapped in a loveless marriage with Fricka and in fact Wagner sees their “mutual torment of a loveless union” as “the germ of . . . evil”.9 Fricka forces Wotan to see to it that in the combat between Siegmund and Hunding that the wronged husband prevails. Brünnhilde reluctantly sets out to call Siegmund to Valhalla, knowing that this contradicts Wotan’s own wishes but nevertheless thinking that he will relish the joys of everlasting bliss. She is dumbfounded that he refuses to follow her to Valhalla simply because he does not wish to be separated from Sieglinde. But soon after Brünnhilde comes to a realization of the power of their love. She decides to disobey her father and is intent that Siegmund should live. But the battle does not go according to her plan for Wotan intervenes and arranges that “his only son”

Translation of Rodney Blumer, in Tannhäuser: Richard Wagner (London: John Calder), 93. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington, eds, Selected Letters of Richard Wagner (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987), 307; Hans-Joachim Bauer and Johannes Forner, eds, Richard Wagner: Sämtliche Briefe, Band 6 (Leipzig: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1986), 67 (letter to August Röckel, January 25/26, 1854).

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(cf. John 3:16),10 Siegmund, falls. Wotan’s suffering is essentially of his own making and it only intensifies when in the final scene he punishes his daughter. He tells Brünnhilde that she will lose her Valkyrie status, and will never ride again with her father; she will now become “incarnate”, deprived of her divinity, and is to be put to sleep and be vulnerable to the hero who will eventually awaken her. In this scene one feels it is Wotan who is the one who suffers most as he prophesies: “On a happier man / [the stars of her eyes] shall shine: / on the hapless immortal [Wotan] / they must close in parting!”11 The irony of this scene is that it precipitates the end of the gods: power is going to move from the gods to Brünnhilde and her awakener, Siegfried. But by time we reach the final opera of the Ring, Twilight of the Gods (Götterdämmerung), matters do not go well for the two lovers and Brünnhilde is betrayed and comes to be “god-forsaken”.12 Toward the end of Twilight of the Gods Brünnhilde comes to understand all that has happened, including her betrayal by Siegfried, and the work ends on a “theodicy”. Brünnhilde recovers her divinity and offers her life as a redemptive sacrifice. Her death is the “death of God”. Such a death can be said to be modeled on the death of Christ in the proposed opera Jesus of Nazareth. Just as Jesus’ spirit is given to the community at the end of the Jesus sketches, so Brünnhilde’s spirit fills the cosmos. The close of Twilight of the Gods is ambiguous and deliberately so, but one way to understand what happens after the curtain goes down is that a new heaven and a new earth come into being (cf. Rev. 21:1). Wagner’s theodicy, despite his unconventional Christian views, corresponds to much found in the Christian tradition.

Tristan and Isolde and Parsifal The close of Twilight of the Gods is dramatically powerful, but one wonders whether it has satisfactorily dealt with the problem of suffering. The world is redeemed and reborn but one could say there is something unrealistic about the way Brünnhilde courageously goes to her death. The answer to the existential anguish of suffering is, I suggest, to be found in two other operas, Tristan (1859) and Parsifal (1882). To some extent Wagner’s more profound depiction of suffering can be attributed to the deeper understanding of Schopenhauer he gained in 1852–4 and after.13 Schopenhauer has colored certain scenes of the Ring that were revised after Wagner read his work, one of which is Siegfried Act III, Scene 1, where we find Wotan as the Wanderer, looking to “the end of the gods” (“der götter ende”) “in gladness and joy”,14 reflecting Schopenhauer’s idea of renunciation. But both Tristan and Parsifal have a far stronger Schopenhauerian coloring, the vast amount of work being done on these works after 1852. But I think there were also other factors informing

Whereas in the Norse sources Odin has many sons, Wagner presents Wotan (Odin’s equivalent) as having just one son. 11 Translation of Stewart Spencer in Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington, eds, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010), 191. 12 Spencer and Millington, Selected Letters, 310; Bauer and Forner, Sämtliche Briefe 6, 71. 13 Many argue for a “discovery” of Schopenhauer in the Autumn of 1854. I date his reading of Schopenhauer for the first time in 1852 (Richard H. Bell, Theology of Wagner’s Ring I (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2020), 238–45) and in fact he most likely knew something of Schopenhauer’s ideas back in the early 1840s evidenced by his 1841 novella A Happy Evening (Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, Volume VII: In Paris and Dresden, trans. William Ashton Ellis (New York: Broude Brothers, 1966), 81; Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 1:148. 14 The re-worked libretto of 1852 (quoted in Bell, Ring I, 247). 10

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his understanding of suffering: his growing sense of despair during the years of exile (1849–63), his disappointments in love (especially regarding the unattainable Mathilde Wesendonck), his deteriorating health, and the growing appreciation of the suffering God. One of the most devastating experiences in the theater is Tristan Act III. Wagner wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck: “Child! This Tristan is turning into something terrible! This final act!!! – – – – – – – I fear the opera will be banned – unless the whole thing is parodied in a bad performance: only a mediocre performance can save me!”15 It is in Act III that Wagner presents what I consider to be his most powerful portrayal of suffering such that one needs a fairly strong constitution to cope with the agony of Tristan. “Against the fearful torture / of my agonies / what balm / could bring me relief?”16 Nietzsche claimed that it was not so much the words or images that were devastating but rather the music. Indeed he argued myth “shields us from music”. Alluding to Schopenhauer he wrote: “How could anyone fail to be shattered immediately, having once put their ear to the heart of the universal Will, so to speak, and felt the raging desire for existence pour forth into all the arteries of the world as a thundering torrent or as the finest spray of a stream?”17 It is in experiencing true musical tragedy that one is elevated to a kind of omniscience, as if the visual power of his eyes were not merely a power to attend to surfaces, but as if it were capable of penetrating to the interior, as if, with the help of music, he were now able to see before him, in sensuously visible form, so to speak, the undulations of the Will, the conflict of motives, the swelling current of passions, and as if he could dive down into the most delicate secrets of unconscious stirrings.18 Nietzsche’s analysis of Tristan, based on Apolline and Dionysiac imagery (which Wagner had actually introduced earlier),19 brings us to the essence of what he called “the actual opus metaphysicum of all art”,20 a work that can be unbearably painful to experience but which at the same time enables one to plumb the depth of the world, even down to the “noumenon”, which Wagner and the Nietzsche of the Birth of Tragedy, following Schopenhauer, identified with the world as “will”. Wagner’s answer to the problem of evil in this drama (he calls it not an “Oper” but a “Handlung”, literally an “action”) was that with death the lovers are reunited as they enter the world of the noumenon, where space, time, and causality do not apply. As Isolde hints at the close of Act II: “Now you lead the way to your own land / to show me your

Spencer and Millington, Selected Letters, 452; Wolfgang Golther, ed., Richard Wagner and Mathilde Wesendonk: Tagebuchblätter und Briefe 1853–1871 (Berlin: Duncker, 1908), 123 (letter of mid-April 1859). 16 “Libretto for Tristan and Isolde”, trans. Lionel Salter, in Booklet accompanying the Compact Disc recording, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, Philips, 1993, 141. 17 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (CTHP; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 100–1; Friedrich Nietzsche: Die Geburt der Tragödie; Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I–IV; Nachgelassene Schriften 1870–1873, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 135 (§21). 18 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 104; Geburt der Tragödie; Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I–IV, 140 (§22). 19 See “The Destiny of Opera” (1871) (Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, Volume V, 138–9; Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 9:137–8). 20 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale (CTHP; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 232 (“Richard Wagner in Bayreuth”, §8); Friedrich Nietzsche: Die Geburt der Tragödie; Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen I–IV, 479. 15

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heritage: / how could I flee from the land / that spans the whole world? / Isolde will dwell / where Tristan’s house and home is: / now show Isolde the way that, / loyal and gracious, / she must follow”.21 But it is important to stress that Wagner deals with the problem of suffering by transcending Schopenhauer. The lovers are not enveloped in some world of non-individuation as a Schopenhaurian analysis would suggest; rather they are reunited as individuals in the world beyond. The opera that presents the most profound insight into suffering is his final stage work, Parsifal. Wagner even went to the point of saying this concerning the suffering of Amfortas (Anfortas) in Parsifal: “It suddenly became dreadfully clear to me: it is my third-act Tristan inconceivably intensified. With the spear wound and perhaps another wound, too – in his heart – the wretched man knows of no other longing in his terrible pain than the longing to die.”22 Whether this is what the one experiencing the work perceives is open to debate (as mentioned earlier I find Tristan’s suffering the most unbearable). But the work can be said to portray suffering from the very beginning, namely the Prelude to Act I.23 Whereas in Tristan the suffering comes about because of an exalted and sacrificial sense of erotic love, in Parsifal suffering, at least for Klingsor and Amfortas, comes about because of some form of sexual misadventure. Klingsor tells of his “hell-inspired impulse” (sexual urge), which he “throttled to deathly silence” (i.e., he castrated himself).24 Kundry suffers because she laughed at the crucified Christ and although I think there is no sexual element here, she is named “Herodias” and “rose of hell” both of which could imply a perverted sexual attitude. She tells Parsifal: “If you knew the curse / which afflicts me, asleep and awake, / in death and life, / pain and laughter, / newly steeled to new affliction, / endlessly through this existence!”25 Amfortas falls and suffers because he was seduced by Kundry. He, like Tristan, longs to die but cannot. In his final despair in Act III he cries: “Already I feel the darkness of death enshroud me, / and must I yet again return to life? / Madmen! / Who would force me to live? / Could you but grant me death!”26 But the key figure of suffering is the one who never appears on stage: the suffering figure of Jesus Christ. He is never named as such but is referred to as the “redeemer”, “savior”, “He on the cross”, or simply “Him”. One of the most profound commentaries on Parsifal is Wagner’s 1880 essay “Religion and Art”. He writes that Christ’s body “stretched out upon the cross of pain and suffering” was an “image (Bild), a real copy (wirkliches Abbild) of the divine”.27 Christ being such an “Abbild” of the divine parallels Schopenhauer’s idea that music is an “Abbild” of the world-will.28 Hence Christ crucified is not a symbol Salter, “Tristan and Isolde”, 130. Spencer and Millington, Selected Letters, 457; Dürrer, Sämtliche Briefe 11, 104 (letter to Mathilde Wesendonck, May 30, 1859). 23 The opening slow motif contains elements related to suffering; see Richard Bell, Wagner’s Parsifal. An Appreciation in the Light of His Theological Journey (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2013), 96. It could be said that pain is especially evident in bars 28–33, where the main opening theme occurs in a minor key, being played by violins, trumpet, and three oboes. For a guide to the musical themes of Parsifal, see Lionel Friend, “Thematic Guide”, in Parsifal: Overture Opera Guides (London: Oneworld Classis, 2001), 95–104. 24 “Parsifal Libretto”, in Parsifal: Overture Opera Guides, trans. Lionel Salter (London: Oneworld Classis, 2001), 163. 25 Ibid., 199. 26 Ibid., 233. 27 Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, Volume VI: Religion and Art, trans. William Ashton Ellis (New York: Broude Brothers, 1966), 217 (translation modified); Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 10:215. 28 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), 257; Wolfgang von Löhneysen, ed., Arthur Schopenhauer Sämtliche Werke I: Die Welt als Wille und 21 22

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depicting reality but rather is reality itself. And in Parsifal the “Schopenhauerian night” of Tristan and Isolde whereby the lovers enter the world of the “noumenon” becomes the “Christian night” of holy communion.29 Parsifal is in fact linked to Tristan in a number of ways. In an early sketch Parsifal was to visit the suffering Tristan in Act III, an idea Wagner later abandoned. The two works are linked by a variety of means and one way is through the “cup of suffering”. Tristan’s agony is the love potion which in Act III he calls “[t]he terrible draught!” He tells Kurwenal: “How madly it surged / from heart to brain! / No healing, / no sweet death, / can ever free me / from the pain of yearning.”30 For Amfortas, though, the cup is the Grail, which functions to give him solace but at the same time prolongs and indeed intensifies his unbearable suffering. As Wagner explains to Mathilde Wesendonck: “in order to retain this supreme solace, [Anfortas] demands repeatedly to be allowed a glimpse of the Grail in the hope that it might at least close his wounds, for everything else is useless, nothing – nothing can help him: – but the Grail can give him one thing only, which is precisely that he cannot die; its very sight increases his torments by conferring immortality upon him.”31 The Grail in Wagner’s sources was a dish (Chrétien de Troyes) or a magic stone (Wolfram von Eschenbach), which the composer christianizes and elaborates its significance as follows: The Grail, according to my own interpretation, is the goblet used at the Last Supper, in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the saviour’s blood on the cross. What terrible significance the connection between Anfortas and this miraculous chalice now acquires; he, infected by the same wound as was dealt him by a rival’s spear in a passionate love intrigue, – his only solace lies in the benediction of the blood that once flowed from the Saviour’s own, similar, spear-wound as He languished upon the Cross, worldrenouncing, world-redeeming, and world-suffering!32 I suggest that this language of the cup in both Parsifal and Tristan alludes to the “cup of suffering” of which Christ speaks in the Gethsemane scene of the synoptic gospels.33 Examining this we can perceive a shift in Wagner’s view of the Gethsemane scene. In his Jesus of Nazareth sketches Wagner tends to follow John’s Gospel, which presents a Jesus largely in control of events.34 Likewise at the end of Twilight of the Gods Brünnhilde

Vorstellung I (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2004), 359. 29 The stage direction for Act I bars 1445–1446 is: “While Amfortas bows devoutly in silent prayer before the chalice, an increasingly dark twilight extends over the hall”. Then at bars 1456–1457: “Beginning of complete darkness”. 30 “Tristan and Isolde”, 141. On this passage, see Eric Chafe, The Tragic and the Ecstatic: The Musical Revolution of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 258. 31 Spencer and Millington, Selected Letters, 457; Dürrer, Sämtliche Briefe 11, 104 (letter to Mathilde Wesendonck, May 30, 1859). 32 Spencer and Millington, Selected Letters, 457 (translation modified); Dürrer, Sämtliche Briefe 11, 104–5. 33 Luther’s translation has “Kelch” for “cup”; Isolde refers to the cup as “Schale” (Salter, “Tristan and Isolde”, 89) and in Parsifal the terms for the grail are “Gral”, “Kelch”, “Krystalschale” (“crystal vessel”), and “Heilsgefäß” (“sacred vessel”) (Salter, “Parsifal”, 148–9, 194–5). 34 Martin Hengel, The Johannine Question (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1989), 71, notes how John 12:27 directly contradicts the Gethsemane account in Mark. So in Mark 14:34 Jesus says “I am deeply grieved, even to death” and in 14:36 asks “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet not what I want, but what you want”. But in John 12:27-28a Jesus says “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say – ‘Father, save me from this hour?’ No it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. Father glorify your name”.

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faces her death with similar unrealistic courage. However, the references to the cup of suffering in Tristan and Parsifal reflect the suffering Christ whom we know from the synoptic gospels.35 If Parsifal is to be seen as Wagner’s “third-act Tristan inconceivably intensified”, then I suggest it is best seen in the way Wagner presents the whole of the created order participating in the sufferings of Christ. According to notes made by Heinrich Porges during rehearsals for Parsifal, Wagner said that with Parsifal’s words “O torment of love” (“Oh! Qual der Liebe”), uttered after Kundry kisses him: “Now all at once Parsifal sees how the whole world is a sacrificial slaughter.”36 Wagner therefore brings together knowledge of suffering with the sexual urge that accompanies kissing a beautiful woman. Very much at the center of his view of suffering was that of animals, and Parsifal’s shooting of the swan in Parsifal Act I and Gurnemanz’ extended rebuke is a powerful reminder of Wagner’s care for animals. He attempted vegetarianism in his later life and one reason he despised Judaism was his understanding of how the tradition viewed and treated animals.37 He writes about the suffering of animals in his open letter against vivisection, and it is significant that this is his most systematic writing about the atoning death of Christ. “The monstrous guilt of all this life a divine and sinless being took upon himself, and expiated with his agony and death. Through this atonement (Sühnungstod) all that breathes and lives should know itself redeemed, so soon as it was grasped as pattern and example to be followed.”38

AN ANSWER TO EVIL AND SUFFERING? Wagner is certainly extremely skilled in presenting the problem of suffering in his stage works. The question is though whether he is able to address the problem of suffering and evil. I have already hinted that in some ways he does this, but I now deal with this more systematically. One key theological point in Wagner’s stage works, articles, letters, and diaries is the focus on the God who suffers, namely the figure of the crucified Christ. Here he is influenced by Luther and by Hegel’s idea of the death of God. One of the clearest instances of this in his prose is a letter to Ludwig II on April 14, 1865, which deserves to be quoted at length. Today is Good Friday again! – O, blessèd day! Most deeply portentous day in the world! Day of redemption! God’s suffering!! Who can grasp the enormity of it? And yet, this same ineffable mystery – is it not the most familiar of humankind’s secrets? God, the Creator, – he must remain totally unintelligible to the world: – God, the loving teacher, is dearly belovèd, but not understood: – but the God who suffers (Gott der Leidende), His name is inscribed in our hearts in letters of fire; all the obstinacy of existence is washed away by our immense pain at seeing God suffering (Gott im Leiden zu sehen)! The teaching which we could not take in (Die Lehre, die wir nicht begriffen), it now takes hold of us (sie ergreift jetzt uns): God within us, – the world has Although a later addition to the Gospel, Wagner would know a text such as Luke 22:44 from his Luther bible: “In [Jesus’] anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling on the ground”. 36 See Martin Geck and Egos Voss, eds, Dokumente zur Entstehung und ersten Aufführung des Bühnenweihfestspiels Parsifal (Mainz: B. Schott, 1970), 203. 37 Wagner went as far as attributing the negative treatment of animals in Germany largely to the Pentateuch. See Richard Wagner’s Prose Works VI, 199, 203; Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 10:198, 202. 38 Richard Wagner’s Prose Works VI, 203; Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 10:202. 35

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been overcome (überwunden)! Who created it? An idle question! Who overcame it? God within our hearts, – God whom we comprehend in the deepest anguish of fellowsuffering (der im tiefsten Schmerz des Mitgefühles begriffene Gott)!39 In this passage two fundamental theological elements can be discerned. The first is the Hegelian idea of the death of God, which was a development of Luther’s idea of the suffering God. Wagner may be alluding to a passage in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, a work he read (most likely in 1846). In the third part of chapter 7, Hegel writes of “manifest religion” and in §784 there is a wordplay on Begreiffen/Ergreiffen which, as in Wagner’s letter to Ludwig, occurs in the context of the death of Christ. This section and the next one (§785) may well have informed Wagner’s understanding of the death of Christ and the parallel death of Brünnhilde. So first in § 784 Hegel writes: Comprehension (Begreiffen) is, therefore, for that self-consciousness not a grasping of this [concept] which knows superseded natural existence to be universal and therefore reconciled with itself; but rather a grasping (Ergreiffen) of the imaginative idea, that by bringing to pass its own externalization, in its historical incarnation and death, the divine Being has been reconciled with its [natural] existence. The grasping (Ergreiffen) of this idea now expresses more definitely what was previously called the spiritual resurrection in this same context, i.e. the coming into existence of God’s individual self-consciousness as a universal self-consciousness, or as the religious community. The death of the divine [Human], as death, is abstract negativity, the immediate result of the movement which ends only in natural universality. Death loses its natural meaning in spiritual self-consciousness, i.e. it comes to be its just stated [concept]; death becomes transfigured from its immediate meaning, viz. the non-being of this particular individual, into the universality of the Spirit who dwells in His community, dies in it every day, and is daily resurrected.40 In the next section (§785) Hegel then takes up an idea he had earlier introduced of the death of God (§§753, 763) and quotes a line from Johann Rist’s passion hymn “O Traurigkeit, O Herzeleid” (“O Great Woe, O Heart’s Pain”):41 “Gott selbst liegt tot” (“God Himself lies dead”).42 Hegel’s logic is taken up by Wagner in that with the death of God as the death of Christ (or Brünnhilde) we have a “resurrection as Spirit”,43 such Spirit being at work within our hearts and within the community. The second theological element that can be discerned in this letter to Ludwig is Wagner’s own idea of suffering with Christ and union with Christ in his suffering. This is a key theme in Parsifal and Wagner provides another link to Tristan and Isolde. The very first chord in the work, the so-called “Tristan chord” (F B D sharp G sharp), evokes the union of the two lovers and recurs throughout the whole opera. In Parsifal exactly the same chord occurs when Kundry kisses Parsifal in Act II; but, perhaps rather surprisingly, it is also used in relation to union with Christ. In Act II Kundry relates how she laughed at Spencer and Millington, Selected Letters, 641–2 (translation modified); Otto Strobel, ed., König Ludwig II. und Richard Wagner: Briefwechsel, Band I (Karlsruhe: G. Braun, 1936), 82. 40 A. V. Miller, ed., Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 475 (§784) (translation modified); G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Reinhard Heede (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1999), 418. 41 The first verse was composed by Friedrich von Spee (1628) and vv. 2–8 added by Johann Rist (1641). 42 Miller, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 476 (§785); Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 419. 43 Miller, Hegel’s Phenomenology, 471 (§779); Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 415. 39

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Christ. After the words “I saw Him . . . Him . . . / and laughed . . . / His gaze fell upon me!” (“Ich sah Ihn . . . Ihn . . . / und lachte . . . / Da traf mich sein Blick!”) the three trombones and the bass tuba play almost imperceptibly the Tristan chord. The word “Blick” (“look”) also provides a link to Tristan where such a “Blick” is central for the union of the lovers; indeed in Parsifal Act II as Kundry sings “sein Blick” the cellos play precisely the two same notes used in the Tristan prelude (A sharp to B) to represent the lovers’ “Blick”.44 Another significant use of the chord is in the Good Friday music of Act III when immediately before Gurnemanz sings “Him Himself on the cross can she [nature] not see” the timpani and double basses play the chord of F and B (note also the sustained chord of F and B on the clarinets together with the B on the Cor Anglais) and flutes and oboes play the chord of D sharp and G sharp (with a D sharp added on the muted horns). In the Good Friday music Gurnemanz makes clear that the death of Christ issues in the redemption of the whole created order, to some extent reflecting Rom. 8:21-22. But Wagner can be said to make a more organic connection between the redemption of human beings and the subsequent redemption of creation. The Good Friday music follows directly from Kundry’s baptism and faith in Christ. Since, according to Schopenhauer, “The world is my representation (Vorstellung)”,45 Kundry’s renewed mind can be seen as forming a renewed creation.

WAGNER AS SUFFERING MAN Wagner certainly enjoyed undoubted joys and successes although what are often considered successes (such as the first Bayreuth festival of 1876 with the three performances of the entire Ring cycle) were also unbearably painful for him. But much of his life was plagued by money worries, anguish in matters of love, and despair concerning his public career. Then he was dogged by ill health such as erysipelas (a skin problem visible in some photographs) and especially later by angina pectoris where in these attacks “his face suddenly turned blue, he fell with heart spasms on the sofa, and made violent movements with his hands as though wrestling with an invisible enemy”.46 But despite these problems and despite his love of Schopenhauer, the so-called “philosopher of pessimism”,47 he had a remarkably positive outlook on life, and many witness to what good company he was! The close of his operas, all of which end on a major chord, point to a future hope. Even Lohengrin, despite the desperate ending with Elsa falling “lifeless” (“entseelt”) to the ground and Lohengrin leaving unredeemed, does offer a future hope for the people of Brabant in the figure of Gottfried; and it is worth emphasizing that although this work and others can be called “tragedies”, the ending is not necessarily “tragic”.48 Indeed the Ring can be understood as an “optimistic tragedy”.49 Bell, Parsifal, 95, presents the annotated music. Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation I, 1; Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I, 31. 46 C. F. Glasenapp, Das Leben Richard Wagners, Sechster Band (Liechtenstein: Sändig, 1977), 647, referring to the witness of Emil Scaria (who sang Gurnemanz in Parsifal). 47 See Frederick Copelston, Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosopher of Pessimism, 2nd ed. (London: Search; New York: Harper & Row, 1975). 48 See, e.g., Hegel’s comments that the Eumenides, the final play of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, “does not end with the death of Orestes or the discomforture of the Eumenides” (Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox, vol. II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2019), 1218; G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2018), 550). 49 See Wolfgang Perschmann, Richard Wagner: “Der Ring des Nibelungen”. Die optimistische Tragödie (Graz: Österreichische Richard-Wagner-Gesellschaft, 1986). 44 45

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Wagner not only suffered a great deal; he was also responsible for the suffering of others.50 One example is the set of circumstances in which he entered his second marriage to Cosima von Bülow. There is also the difficult matter of his antisemitism, something that is integrally incorporated into the one mature work I have not yet mentioned, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. This was originally conceived as a “comic opera”51 and in its final form can still be experienced as such. But laughter not only restores and heals; it can also function to “ostracize and wound”.52 The figure of Beckmesser, modeled on Eduard Hanslick, the Viennese music critic who had turned against Wagner, is a figure of ridicule: he is a failed singer, a failed lover, and a social outcast.53 Although Hanslick considered himself Catholic, Wagner played on the fact that his mother was Jewish. Although Wagner’s attack on Hanslick could be understandable in view of Hanslick’s series of explicit negative reviews of Wagner from 1858, the ridicule of the “Jewish” figure of Beckmesser is cruel and casts a shadow over what is otherwise a work full of love, human warmth, and joy. But Wagner’s antisemitism should not, in my view, disqualify him as one of the greatest artists of all time who engages with theology through his artworks and thereby addresses the deepest matters of suffering and the problem of evil.54

FURTHER READING Bell, Richard H. Wagner’s Parsifal. An Appreciation in the Light of His Theological Journey. Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2013. Bell, Richard H. Theology of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, 2 vols. Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2020. Chafe, Eric. The Tragic and the Ecstatic: The Musical Revolution of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, Volume VI: Religion and Art. Translated by William Ashton Ellis. New York: Broude Brothers, 1966. Spencer, Stewart and Barry Millington, eds. Selected Letters of Richard Wagner. New York: W.W. Norton, 1987.

It is worth adding that I consider the popular image of Wagner as a particularly wicked person to be unfair. The degree to which he was responsible for the suffering of others can no doubt be matched and indeed overtaken by the lives of some Christian theologians and church leaders; and at least Wagner made no pretense of personal piety. 51 Originally it was to be a “comic opera” (“Komische Oper”) then a “Great Comic Opera” (“Große komische Oper”). 52 Klaus van den Berg, “Die Meistersinger as Comedy: The Performative and Social Signification of Genre”, in Wagner’s Meistersinger: Performance, History, Representation, ed. Nicolas Vazsonyi (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004), 163. 53 Ibid., 161. 54 I am grateful to Roger Allen and Lionel Friend for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. The research for this paper was carried out while holding a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship and I thank the Leverhulme Trust for their support. 50

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Christianity, over its two-thousand-year history, has offered many resources for the cure of souls (Latin: cura animarum), acknowledging suffering as real and attending to its pernicious manifestations. Coming to recognize Christ’s suffering with us and for us is the foundation for what has traditionally been called the art of living and the art of dying. In the lexicon of religious visual images, meditation on Christ’s suffering on the cross has been central, especially since the eleventh century. Images of the suffering of Jesus Christ were not common in the early centuries of the church. Early Christians would have been vividly aware of the reality of suffering, not just from witnessing crucifixions that were regularly carried out in public (crucifixions were not banned until the third century) but also from their own experience of persecution (according to tradition, St. Peter and St. Paul were martyred in Rome) and the detailed account of the suffering of Christ in the Gospels. The early Christian visual images that we find stress the overcoming of suffering: Christ is depicted as a shepherd carrying a sheep on his shoulders, a philosopher teaching disciples, and a host presiding over a heavenly banquet. Early Christians also represented Christ symbolically as the Chi-Rho, anchor, ship, fish, dove, and bread. When we do find Christ on the cross in the early church, he is not suffering or injured but reigning as Lord. The triumphant Christ is sometimes pictured in contrast to an image of Judas who is defeated by his wickedness. Judas is depicted as committing suicide by hanging himself from a tree, whereas Christ, the redeemer, is shown overcoming death while giving his life on a tree that has been made into a cross. We find the first crucifix appearing in the early fifth century, and not until the twelfth century was it becoming widespread.

CRUCIFIXION Consider this fourteenth-century crucifix: Crucifix (Figure 80.1) is carved from oakwood. Christ’s suffering is expressed in a body that has been left exposed and unable to move or support itself. Christ’s head is falling, cast to one side, beginning a curve through the spine that continues down to his feet, nailed one on top of the other at the bottom of the cross. This frontal depiction includes a naturalistic articulation of muscle and bone, making this confrontation with his suffering more life-like. The naturalism depicted in his body calls and awakens our own lived experience of strain, weakness, and helplessness. The eyes of Christ are closed; his mouth is slightly open, and his abdomen is distended. Stains of blood surround the nails at his hands and feet and appear on his forehead beneath the crown of thorns. There is a refined sensitivity in the carving of details in the

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FIGURE 80.1:  Crucifix, c. 1300. French, oak, polychromy, 59 ¾ by 45 ⅝ by 13 ⅛ inches (159.76 by 117 by 33 centimeters). Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1922.

folds of flesh around the toes, shinbones, calf muscles, and arch of the eyebrows. There is restrained dignity portrayed in the loincloth of loosely gathered fabric carved into a rhythm of falling waves. The outstretched arms of Christ form a funnel-shape above his head, heightening a sense of willing openness to the suffering flowing through him, and perhaps an identification with suffering that is timeless or continuous with our suffering.

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The very humane, vulnerable nature of Jesus depicted here is in keeping with the spirituality developed in the twelfth century. It stressed the intimate love of God and the importance of inward longing and desire. Mere external following of liturgy was not enough; the relationship between God and the devotee was also understood to be internal. Theologically, the suffering of Christ has historically played an important role in affirming the full humanity of Jesus as well as in challenging an aloof understanding of God as impassable (not subject to passion). Augustine, in the fourth century, articulates a profound vision of Jesus as the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity; the Triune Godhead is simultaneously in heaven and on earth. In a sermon on the Ascension of Christ, Augustine depicts the Lord as simultaneously exalted in heaven while also suffering on earth, as he lovingly suffers with and for us. “Christ is now exalted above the heavens, but he still suffers on earth all the pain that we, the members of his body, have to bear.”1 We are invited to see in Jesus a union of earth and heaven: Why do we on earth not strive to find rest with him in heaven even now, through the faith, hope and love that unites us to him? While in heaven he is also with us; and we while on earth are with him. He is here with us by his divinity, his power and his love. We cannot be in heaven, as he is on earth, by divinity, but in him, we can be there by love.2 This Augustinian stress on our having a loving union with God through union with Jesus was richly developed in the medieval era, reaching a new depth in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in works by Anselm of Canterbury, Aelred of Rievaulx, Peter Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux, William of Saint Thierry, and others. Here is a representational passage from Bernard: I think that this was the main cause why the invisible God wished to be seen in the flesh, and as man to converse with men: so as to draw all the affections of fleshly men, who could only love in a fleshly way, to the saving love of his flesh, and thus by stages to lead them to a spiritual love.3 The entire life of Christ – his birth, presentation at the temple, teaching, healing miracles, the Last Supper, the passion, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension – is the subject of multiple visual arts (drawing, painting sculpture, prints, film). Arguably, the visual depiction of Christ crucified speaks directly to the very foundation of Christianity. As Paul the Apostle writes: “We preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23). Many Christians have interpreted the piercing of Christ’s body causing an outflow of blood and water as symbols of baptism and the Eucharist. Here is a representative passage from Bishop John Chrysostom: If you desire further proof of the power of this blood, remember where it came from, how it ran down from the cross, flowing from the Master’s side. The gospel records that when Christ was dead, but still hung on the cross, a soldier came and pierced his side with a lance and immediately there poured out water and blood. Now the water

St. Augustine of Hippo, Sermo de Ascensione Domini, reproduced in The Prayer Book Office, comp. and ed. Howard Galley (New York: The Seabury Press, 1980), 738. 2 Ibid. 3 Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual 1050–1200 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 153. 1

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was a symbol of baptism and the blood of the holy eucharist. The soldier pierced the Lord’s side, he breached the wall of the sacred temple, and I have found the treasure and made it my own . . . As a woman nourishes her child with her own blood and milk, so does Christ unceasingly nourish with his own blood those to whom he himself has given life.4 Returning to the reproduction of Crucifix, one may well see how meditation on such an image resonates with the devotion to Christ’s wounded body that emerged in the late medieval period. Here is the Anima Christi Prayer (in Latin, the soul of Christ), dating back to the fourteenth century: Soul of Christ, sanctify me. Body of Christ, save me. Blood of Christ, inebriate me. Water from the side of Christ, wash me. Passion of Christ, strengthen me. O Good Jesus, hear me. Within your wounds hide me. Permit me not to be separated from you. From the wicked foe, defend me. At the hour of my death, call me and bid me come to you That with your saints I may praise you For ever and ever. Amen. In this prayer, Christ’s outflowing blood and water are acclaimed as saving, and the very wounds of Christ are a kind of healing, safe, holy abode. This is a shocking inversion of the secular Roman use of crucifixion. Rather than the body of the crucified being an object of disgrace, horror, and disgust, it becomes a saving, curing sacrament that can heal and even provoke ecstasy (inebriation). Meditation on the five wounds of Christ (his sacred hands, feet, and side) was important in Franciscan tradition as its founder, St. Francis, is believed to have been given the stigmata in 1224. A stigmata is the bearing of wounds that resemble the wounds of the crucified Christ. The devotion to Christ crucified reached a zenith with establishing the Feast of Corpus Christi (also known as the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ). We now turn to another artistic visual image of the suffering of Christ.

THE FLAGELLATION OF JESUS Visual art depicting the Flagellation of Christ, also known as the Scourging at the Pillar, or Christ at the Column, first appears in the ninth century. Flagellation was the customary prelude to crucifixion; it is referenced in three of the Gospels (John 19:1, Mark 15:15, and Matt. 27:26). John Chrysostom, The Catechesis, reproduced in The Prayer Book Office, comp. and ed. Howard Galley (New York: The Seabury Press, 1980), 734–5.

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The small panel The Flagellation of Christ (Figure 80.2), painted by the Italian artist Cenni di Pepo, known as Cimabue (c. 1240–1302), is understood to be part of a larger, possibly portable, devotional diptych, triptych, or dossal. Whether owned and used by an individual or by a small group, it would have been used to aid the devoted in participatory prayer, a form of prayer that encouraged the reimagining of Christ’s passion through empathetic concentration on the human suffering of Christ. Cimabue, considered an early master of a bourgeoning naturalism in Western painting, was closely linked with the Franciscan order that commissioned many of his large panel paintings and frescos, such as those found at the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi. In

FIGURE 80.2:  Cimabue, The Flagellation of Christ, c. 1280. Tempera on panel, 9 ¾ by 7 ⅞ inches (24.76 by 20 centimeters). Copyright The Frick Collection.

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this small painting, Cimabue combines vestiges of the established Byzantium influence in medieval art with a gold-leaf background, while simultaneously creating a new sense of three-dimensional space. It is not the three-dimensional space that would be developed later through perspectival systems leading the viewer’s eye back to a fixed point in space. Rather, Cimabue angles the towers at both sides of the panel toward Christ in the center to create a three-dimensional space that protrudes into the viewer’s space. Christ is standing tied to a marble column or pillar. His hands and wrists hang limp, while his right foot is lifted slightly as if to brace himself from the blows of the whips. He looks straight out with eyes open and tense, his mouth drawn down in sorrow and pain. His vulnerability is heightened by his near nakedness and the cold of the stone. The colors in the fabrics of the two men whipping create movement back and forth with electricity. To the left of Christ, the arrow-shaped right arm of the man points directly to Christ. The man’s salmon-pink, shell-like tunic is mirrored on Christ’s shoulder where the whip is aimed. The bright red stockings of the man on the right are an arrestingly bold visual echo of the sound of the whip – CRACK! – every time the viewer’s eyes pass from left to right. The painting’s drawing – that is, the way Cimabue begins and ends shapes and articulates the edges and boundaries of things – is delicate, in a great contrast to the content of the scene. But there is yet more to bring the viewer to feel Christ’s suffering as we look at the postures of the two men. Cimabue is not depicting the whips on Christ’s flesh, but rather in preparation to strike. Looking at the arms and hands raised above each man’s head, angled to throw his body weight forward toward Christ, we remember what it feels like in our own body to get ready to throw something, to hit something. A kinesthetic response, something painting can excel in prompting, is incited through this identification of muscle memory, and we remember our own violence toward others. We become the torturer. Rather than looking at Cimabue’s formal inventions in naturalism as purely an interest in creating new ideas about space and figuration, scholars now invest in his close ties to the Franciscan order and the development in this era of a prayer life that would actively seek to embrace the life of Christ as fully human.5 While there were extreme forms of devotion to Christ’s suffering, such as the groups of men and boys known as disciplinati or battuti who engaged in public flagellation as displays of penance, there is evidence of less violent, more reverent devotion to Christ as a victim of flagellation. Many faithful participated in pilgrimages and used devotional objects and texts in the growing number of religious movements and orders that saw Christ’s suffering as a stage in the passing from suffering to joy (Jesus is described as enduring the cross “for the joy that was set before him” in Heb.12:2). In terms of suffering and the problem of evil, this artwork displays Christ’s loving endurance of the painful injuries inflicted by our violence. The image of Christ’s flagellation may well provoke viewers to remorse, confession, and repentance.

SUFFERING IN COMMUNITY The Isenheim Altarpiece created by German sculptor Nikolaus of Haguenau (c. 1445– before 1538) and German painter Mattias Grünewald (c. 1470–1528) was built for the main chapel of the Monastery of St. Antony, located in Isenheim in northeastern France. The order was dedicated to serving the crippled and infirm. The hospital connected to

See Holly Flora, Cimabue and Early Italian Devotional Painting (New York: The Frick Collection, 2006).

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the monastery was designed so that patients could be rolled on their beds to the doors of the chapel to participate in daily devotions. During the time Grünewald was part of the monastery, the monks were caring for patients suffering from what they called St. Anthony’s fire, a very painful skin disorder causing open wounds. In an extraordinarily personal and intimate gesture of care for the life of the community of suffering patients, Grünewald’s altarpiece brings Christ’s suffering together and in communion with the suffering of the patients. The placement of saints and witnesses in the composition (Figure 80.3) is already established in Christian religious art. At the foot of the cross, a lamb, symbolizing the sacrifice of Jesus, carries a cross and bleeds into a chalice underneath its raised leg. St. Sebastian in the left panel and St. Antony in the right panel are patron saints present to protect and heal the sick. But it is Grünewald’s depiction of Christ’s suffering on the cross that is unprecedented – in his rendering of the flesh of Christ, his skin covered with the very wounds suffered by the patients at Isenheim. The altarpiece is a multilayered polyptych. The hinged front panels unfold to reveal the second layer, which opens onto the third layer. The altarpiece was displayed in different states of exposure according to the liturgical calendar. When opened to its second state with outer wings unfolded, Grünewald’s work offers the worshipers the risen Christ, surrounded by an aura with a palette of color that recalls the psychedelic art of the 1960s: Light is emanating from Christ in bright, warm yellows and glowing orange circles framed by violet and turquoise blue. Research into the disease they called St. Anthony’s fire has

FIGURE 80.3:  Nikolaus of Haguenau and Matthias Grünewald, The Isenheim Altarpiece, c. 1512–16. Oil on wood, 9 feet 9 ½ inches by 10 feet 9 inches (298.45 centimeters by 327.66 centimeters). Musee Unterlinden, Colmar, France. Courtesy WikiArt.

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revealed poison rye as a cause, inducing high fevers and hallucinations. Interestingly, a component of the fungus that caused the illness is chemically close to the hallucinogenic drug LSD. In the open second state, Grünewald creates four different zones of light. Two panels, the first (the annunciation) and third (the birth of Christ), are pictured as illuminated by a natural source of light. The other two panels, the great choir of angels and the risen Christ, emit their own light. Through his depiction of light, Grünewald establishes a whole universe made up of this earthly world and the transcendent. By comparing the closed and open states of the panels, one can see how Grünewald used clear and vibrant color to indicate goodness and, by contrast, darker and lower-key colors to indicate evil. In the third state, the inner wings are opened, and the sculptures by Nikolaus of Haguenau are revealed. The sculpted figures include St. Augustine, Guy Guers, St. Anthony, Two Bearers of Offerings, St. Jerome, and Christ and the Twelve Apostles. Two painted panels by Grünewald frame the central panel of sculptures. Grünewald creates two narratives for St. Anthony in worlds filled with fantastic vegetation and creatures. In one panel St. Anthony visits St. Paul in a world teaming with healing herbs and medicines; in the other he is tormented by a demon. These panels have been compared to the visionary work of Hieronymus Bosch. In the closed state (Figure 80.3), which features the Crucifixion of Christ, there are three panels and a predella along the bottom. In the left panel is St. Sebastian, pierced with arrows, looking inward to the central panel. In the central panel, the disciple John is holding Mary, the mother of Christ, as she sways away from the cross. Mary Magdalene is kneeling before Christ with her hands raised together in a plea, echoing the supplication of Mary, mother of Jesus, behind her. St. John the Baptist appears to the right of Christ, holding an open book of Scripture and pointing to Christ, a visual depiction of his words in the Gospels that he who he baptized is the true Son of God. The scroll he is holding reads: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” The patron saint of the monastery, St. Anthony, is shown in the right column holding his Tau cross, a stick with a T-shaped handle, representing an execution cross. The predella, the long horizontal panel along the bottom, is the same shape as the tomb pictured next to Christ. Christ’s body, lifeless and pale, is supported by three who tend him. This is a Lamentation bringing Christ closer to the worshipers for contemplation. In this closed state, Grünewald depicts Christ covered with the skin disorder of the patients, but many also suffered the loss of extremities, both hands and feet. Grünewald’s use of hand gestures brings this loss to the fore. The hands of Mary, Mary Magdalene, and John are in extreme positions with fingers flayed and tensed. Christ’s feet and fingers are intensely curled and knotted. Images of flaying and shredding are repeated in Mary Magdalene’s hair and the folds of her robe. The weight of physical pain and suffering is expressed through everything in the composition, all unfolding under a dark, starless sky. This is a world bringing the suffering of a community together with the suffering of Christ, offering a vision of his shared humanity as a balm of empathy, present alongside them in their suffering. In terms of suffering and the problem of evil, this artwork and the role it played in the monastery speaks to the way in which Christians seek to heal and console through community (see Matt. 18:20; Rom. 12:4-5; 15:5-7; 1 Pet. 3:8; and 1 John 4:11 on the importance of community). During times of disease, the second-century plague that ravaged the Roman Empire and the fourteenth-century Black Death, many Christians

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sought to care for those who were ill.6 Such caring may not shed light on theodicy (why are there plagues of any kind?), but it is evidence of the importance of Christian loving care in response to the devastations.

THE MYSTERY In Christian spiritual life, the mystical journey to God is often thought to have three main stages: illumination, purgation, and union.7 Illumination may take different forms: the realization of the objective reality of God through reason or experience, an astounding awareness of living in the presence of God (Coram Deo), and the recognition of revelation through the work of the Holy Spirit (testimonium Spiritus Sancti). Purgation may involve the purging of vices and distorted beliefs. Union with God (theosis, or making divine) is a transformative state in which the soul forms an affective and connotative union with God’s will and nature. This has sometimes been depicted in terms of a great, beatific vision (as we see at the end of Dante’s Divine Comedy). Between illumination and union, somewhere in the stages of purgation, some saints speak of a dark night of the soul. This has been variously described in terms of aridity, fatigue, lassitude, dullness of feeling, or privation. St. John of the Cross went so far as to experience this stage as an abandonment by God. The author of The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous medieval text, counseled repeating the word “Love” when in this sense of disquiet and apparent absence of God. Many Christian spiritual guides speak of passing through this night only to wake – in the very presence of God. While the dark night of the soul is not the very same thing as negative theology (the via negativa, or apophatic theology), it is similar insofar as it addresses the mystery of God in the absence of positive images and noetic clarity. The first three visual artworks we have covered reflect positive theology (the via positiva, or cataphatic theology). Positive theology may be exhibited in artwork depicting the vivid reality of Christ (whether crucified or undergoing the passion, or in depictions of the birth of Jesus, miracles, the transfiguration, or the appearance of the Risen Christ), whereas negative theology may involve artwork with no images at all such as a black canvas. The installation Dark Adaptation (Figure 80.4) by American artist Amanda Hamilton (b. 1977) engages in a conversation with religious contemplation and twentieth-century modernist artists who, indeed, made black paintings. Russian painter Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) was an important figure in the development of nonobjective abstraction; he was invested in creating a vocabulary in abstraction that would evoke pure feeling and spirituality. American painter Ad Reinhardt (1913–67) wanted to banish any associations of the world or everyday life from his black canvases; their surfaces contained barely perceptible geometrical shapes within the overall composition. He was, however, interested in mysticism. He made a small black painting for his friend Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk. Merton kept the painting in his cell at Gethsemane as a visual aid to his contemplative prayer life. The dark paintings in the installation Dark Adaptation are small (12 by 11 inches, 30.5 by 28 centimeters) and each is unique. The walls are painted dark gray, and

See William H. McNeill, Plagues and People (New York: Anchor Books, 1976). See Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness (1911; Mineola: Dover Publications, 2002), Part II, chs. 3, 4, and 10.

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FIGURE 80.4:  Amanda Hamilton, Dark Adaptation, 2018. Mixed media installation, SooVAC, Minneapolis, Minn. Photo by Rik Sferra, courtesy SooVAC.

the lighting is dim. Two low benches are placed in the center of the long, narrow gallery for viewers to sit if they so choose. The relationship of the walls, lighting, and measurements of the objects installed were all designed to create a quiet and calm place for contemplation. Dark Adaptation, the installation’s title, is a term for the optical process of our eyes adjusting to low light levels to perceive the environment. In viewing the paintings in the faintly lit space, that is precisely what happens: Over time one sees each painting grow more complex, more nuanced, and richer in associations (there is no representational imagery). The paintings have three-dimensional surfaces that share a quality with relief sculpture. While the object and the viewer are in the same physical space, the viewer cannot get “behind” the object because it is installed on a wall. This creates an unusual and even tense psychological space, being suggestive of existing as a three-dimensional object in the same space as the viewer, but ultimately unknowable as such. Hamilton employs a wide range of tactility in the paintings, evoking such things as rough geological formations, a night sky, or scarred flesh – each one registering a pressure on the viewer as a catalyst of embodied experience of what is close, what is far, or what is interior. An idea about time is inherent in each surface. The surfaces emit, having sustained a slow accumulation of their structures and compositions before arriving at their present state. In one panel, raised textures create tiny edges of reflected light and adjacent shadow, hooking the eye along that edge to create a path through figure-like shapes and forms that begin to assemble like crowds in a fog. In another panel a tree-bark-like surface is interrupted by ripped and finely jagged openings revealing irregular shapes of burnished gold, like precious bone exposed here and there at some indeterminate time in the past and not healed over. One panel’s surface gathers itself into the center as if by a sudden

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implosive force, the kind of altered state that happens in an instant and leaves the former state forever changed or gone. All these associations may have a role in the viewer’s life, whether this is understood as religious or not. Hamilton does not prescribe the viewer’s interpretation of Dark Adaptation, but the paintings possess the potential for the affective response of touch and sight through the handling of the material. Building each panel with acrylic paint and adding various other materials – such as wood shavings, sand, stone, sawdust, geode particles, copper dust, charcoal, flake mica, and gold leaf – she does not begin with an idea of what the final painting will look like. She waits for the painting to “arrive”, an intuitive and responsive practice of waiting for her own recognition that some composition and accumulation of materials has a fitting resound-ness in its authority, not needing more. The installation calls up associations of historical religious imagery as well as, most notably perhaps, the Stations of the Cross. The use of gold leaf goes back to Byzantium and icons. The central gold-leaf panel in Dark Adaptation is hung amidst a large swath of velvet drapery, which extends from the top of the wall to the floor where it pools in folds that mirror the radiating creases in the gold-leaf panel. The large scale of the excess drapery on the floor has as much presence in the narrative of the installation as the panel paintings and benches do. Drapery, as seen in clothing and interiors, has a long history in Western painting. Its religious significance extends from the medieval era to the veils of pure color in the abstract paintings of Mark Rothko (1903–70) in the 1950s and 1960s. It is very prominent in the abundance of paintings with the theme of The Descent of the Cross, in works, for example, by Rogier van der Weyden (1400–64), Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), and Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69). Christ is lowered from the cross, surrounded and sometimes partially wrapped with a large, usually white, cloth drape. The drapery creates a frame for Christ’s body, making the shape of his death central, articulate in contour, and undeniable. The folds and contours of the drapery behind Christ are like flesh without bone. Like the armature of a body without internal support, the drapery is pulled by gravity downward like the dark drape falling and lying on the floor of Dark Adaptation. Hamilton’s choice to install the gold-leaf painting on the drape underscores the profound tension articulated in the entirety of the installation – our need to wait for presence to meet us in the extremes of suffering while we become incrementally, or suddenly, aware of our need for hope.

FURTHER REFLECTIONS Works of art, visual and nonvisual, can provide abundant resources for reflecting on the nature of suffering and the problem of evil, both within a Christian perspective and in non-Christian contexts. In literary works by Christians, one may readily observe the subtle interplay or tension between positive and negative theology: in the writings of Simone Weil, Gwendolyn Brooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, Countee Cullen, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, Toni Morrison, Mary Oliver, and Christian Wiman, or in classic works by Hildegard of Bingen, Dante, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky. We end with the suggestion that some works of art can provide a window or even a door or portal through which to encounter things that transcend our immediate, personal circumstances. Works of art can play their own role in illumination, purgation, union, and even address the dark night of the soul and the via negativa by giving form to our inner lives as we suffer both alone and collectively.

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FURTHER READING Flora, Holly. Cimabue and Early Italian Devotional Painting. New York: The Frick Collection, 2006. McNeill, William H. Plagues and People. New York: Anchor Books, 1976. Morris, Colin. The Discovery of the Individual 1050–1200. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. Stark, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity. San Francisco: Harper, 1997. Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. Mineola: Dover Publications, 1911, 2002.

CONTRIBUTORS

Alexander L. Abecina received his PhD in theology from the University of Cambridge in 2021. James N. Anderson is Carl W. McMurray Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte, North Carolina. Jonathan Arnold is Director of Communities and Partnerships in the Diocese of Canterbury, Kent, and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Kent. Yechiel Michael Barilan is Associate Professor of Medical Education at Sackler School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University. John Barton is Emeritus Oriel and Laing Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford. Ankur Barua is University Senior Lecturer in Hindu Studies at the University of Cambridge. Richard Bell is Professor of Theology at the University of Nottingham. Gregory A. Boyd is Senior Pastor of Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. J. H. W. Chan is Academic Director and Lecturer in theology at St. Paul’s Theological College, Malaysia. C. K. Martin Chung is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government and International Studies (GIS) and Associate Coordinator of GIS Programme at Hong Kong Baptist University. Shannon Craigo-Snell is Professor of Theology at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Kentucky. Brian Davies is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, New York. Michael P. DeJonge is James F. Strange Endowed Chair of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida. Katharine J. Dell is Professor of Old Testament Literature and Theology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St Catherine's College, Cambridge. James K. Dew, Jr. is President and Professor of Christian Philosophy at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Paul Dominiak is Senior Tutor and Fellow at Jesus College in the University of Cambridge. Bryan R. Dyer is Adjunct Professor at Calvin University, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Alex Englander is Research Fellow at the International Center for Philosophy NRW at the University of Bonn. Jil Evans is an artist whose work has been internationally exhibited and is held in private and museum collections throughout the United States, including Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Flaten Art Museum, and Halle Ford Museum of Art. Joshua R. Farris is Professor of Theology of Science at Missional University, North Augusta, South Carolina, currently being on a Humboldt Fellowship at the University of Bochum, Germany. Paul S. Fiddes is Professor of Systematic Theology in the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at Regent's Park College, Oxford. David F. Ford is Emeritus Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. Georg Gasser is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Augsburg, Germany.” before Erhard S. Gersternberger Erhard S. Gerstenberger is Emeritus Professor of Old Testament at the University of Marburg, Germany. John Goldingay is the David Allan Hubbard Professor Emeritus of Old Testament in the School of Mission and Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary, California. Matthias Grebe is Lecturer and Tutor in Theology at St. Mellitus College, London. He also serves as the Associate Vicar at St. Edwards, King and Martyr, Cambridge. Johannes Grössl is Assistant Professor of Fundamental Theology and Comparative Studies of Religion at the University of Würzburg, Germany. David Grumett is Senior Lecturer in Theology and Ethics at the University of Edinburgh. M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall is Professor of Psychology at Rosemead School of Psychology, Biola University, La Mirada, California. Nadine Hamilton is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Erlangen, Germany. Almut Hintze is Zartoshty Brothers Professor of Zoroastrianism in the Department of Religions and Philosophies at SOAS University of London.

CONTRIBUTORS

 691

Joshua Hordern is Professor of Christian Ethics in the Faculty of Theology and Religion and a Governing Body Fellow of Harris Manchester College at the University of Oxford. David P. Hunt is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Whittier College, California. Adam J. Johnson is Associate Professor at Torrey Honors College at Biola University, La Mirada, California. Paul Dafydd Jones is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. Christopher King is Adjunct Faculty at the Humanities and Natural Sciences Department at Toccoa Falls College, Georgia. T. J. Lang is Senior Lecturer in New Testament at the University of St. Andrews. David R. Law is Professor of Christian Thought and Philosophical Theology at the University of Manchester. Oliver Leaman is Professor of Philosophy and Zantker Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. Peter J. Leithart is a Presbyterian minister and president of the Theopolis Institute in Birmingham. Matthew Levering is James N. Jr. and Mary D. Perry Chair of Theology at the University of St. Mary of the Lake, Mundelein, Illinois. Joseph L. Mangina is Professor of Systematic Theology at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto. Esther McIntosh is Professor of Feminist Theology and Ethics and Director of the Centre for Religion in Society at York St. John University. Richard McLauchlan is an independent scholar based in Scotland. Chad Meister is Affiliate Scholar at the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion at the University of Notre Dame. Adrian Mihai is Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. Rachel Muers is Chair of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. Thomas J. Oord is Director of the Center for Open and Relational Theology and Professor at Northwind Theological Seminary, Sarasota, Florida. Pheme Perkins is the Joseph Professor of Catholic Spirituality in the Theology Department of Boston College.

692

CONTRIBUTORS

Sarah K. Pinnock is Professor of Contemporary Religious Thought at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas. Stephen J. Plant is Dean and Runcie Fellow at Trinity Hall and lectures on Christian theology and on ethics in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. Simon D. Podmore is Associate Professor of Theology, Philosophy and Religious Studies at Liverpool Hope University. Shelli M. Poe is Visiting Professor at Iliff School of Theology, Denver, Colorado. Anthony G. Reddie is Director of the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture in Regent’s Park College in the University of Oxford. He is also Extraordinary Professor of Theological Ethics and a Research Fellow with the University of South Africa. Matthias Remenyi is Professor of Fundamental Theology and Comparative Studies of Religion at the University of Würzburg, Germany. Nasrin Rouzati is Associate Professor and part-time faculty member of Religious Studies at Manhattan College, Riverdale, New York. Daniel Rumel is Spiritual Director of Meditation and Spirituality in the Archdiocese of Paderborn, Germany. He also teaches meditation and spirituality worldwide with VR Technology in different contexts. Mark W. Scarlata is Lecturer and Tutor in Old Testament at St. Mellitus College, London. He also serves as Vicar-Chaplain at St. Edwards, King and Martyr, Cambridge. Lydia Schumacher is Reader in Historical and Philosophical Theology at King’s College, London. Mark S. M. Scott is Associate Professor at the Department of Religious Studies and Theology at Stonehill College, Easton, Massachusetts. Jongseock (James) Shin is Adjunct Professor of Systematic Theology at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California. Bethany N. Sollereder is Lecturer in Science and Religion, School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. Christopher Southgate is Professor of Christian Theodicy at the University of Exeter. Daniel Speak is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California. Robert Stackpole was Professor of Theology at Redeemer Pacific College, Vancouver, British Columbia. He serves as director of the John Paul II Institute of Divine Mercy.

CONTRIBUTORS

 693

Mehrunisha Suleman is Director of Medical Ethics and Law Education at the Ethox Centre and Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford. She is also Senior Researcher at the Health Foundation. Kenneth Surin is Emeritus Professor of Literature and Religion and Critical Theory at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. Charles Taliaferro is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Emeritus Oscar and Gertrude Boe Overby Distinguished Professor at St. Olaf College, Minnesota. Jonathan D. Teubner is Research Fellow at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiryand is currently Visiting Faculty at the Human Flourishing Program, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University. Rachel Teubner is Research Fellow of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Australian Catholic University. Kevin Timpe is William H. Jellema Chair in Christian Philosophy at Calvin University, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Stephen Torr is Tutor in Theology at Emmanuel Theological College, Chester, and serves as a priest in the Church of England. Sean Turchin is Department Chair and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Liberty University, Virginia. Philip Walsh is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at York University, Toronto. Vernon White is Visiting Professor of Theology at King’s College, London. Clifford Williams is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College in Deerfield, Illinois. Jeremy Worthen is an Anglican priest and currently the Team Rector of Ashford Town Parish in Kent in the Church of England. Hilary Yancey received her PhD from Baylor University, Texas, in 2020. Simeon Zahl is Professor of Christian Theology at the University of Cambridge.

694

SUBJECT INDEX

Page numbers followed with “n” refer to footnotes. abhidhamma  570 ableism  533 absence of good. See privatio boni abundant life  335–6 Abuyah, Elisha ben  546–7 accidental evil  592 actus purus  233, 257, 264 Adam  66, 125, 602 and Eve  104, 113–16, 123, 146–7, 239–40, 249, 310, 430, 633 sin of  502, 504 free will  148 Advaita Vedānta  562 afflictions  93, 96, 98–100, 142–3, 178–81 African American women  634–6 Afridi, Mehnaz  619 After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Rubenstein)  550, 612–13 Ahriman  578, 585 Ahuna Vairya prayer  584–6 Ahura Mazdā  578–86 Alba, Avril  618 Alcock, John  320 Alighieri, Dante Commedia  131–5 contrapasso (counter-suffering)  133, 134 evil  131–5 Inferno (hell)  132–3, 135 Paradiso (heaven)  134–5 Purgatorio (purgatory)  133–5 suffering  131–5 Allah  607, 608, 609 alleged monism  23–5 Altarpiece (Grünewald)  334 Alyosha  421 Amelius, form of evil  391 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)  524 Améry, Jean  613 Amundson, Ron  530 analytic theology  638–9

anatman (no self)  570 androcentrism  638 Anfechtungen (spiritual afflictions)  142–3 Anglican churches  353 Angra Mainyu (Destructive Force)  578, 581–7 Anima Christi Prayer  680 animal suffering  501–4 and predation  506 redemption of  508–9 animal violence  504, 505 anitya (impermanence)  570 anointing of the sick (extreme unction)  362 Anselm/Anselmian  256, 397, 400, 402, 407 cross-theological soteriology  6 ontological argument  278 Anthropocene  189 anthropocentrism  207, 316, 318, 324, 438 anthropomorphism  17, 165, 246, 272–4, 340, 553 anthropotrophism  13 Antichrist  107 Antiochus IV Epiphanes  332 anti-realism cognitivist  484–6 non-cognitivist  483–4 antisemitism  186, 350, 611, 615–19, 667 anti-theodicy  616, 617. See also theodicy defined  419–20 aph charah  60 Aphormai pros ta noeta (Sententiae, Porphyry)  391 Apocalypse  102, 105 apocalyptic  102, 330, 331 n.9 apokatasis  331, 331 n.10 Apollinarian heresy  301 apophatic theology  7–8 Aquinas, Thomas  127, 223–4, 256, 397, 438, 461, 502, 631, 633 evil  128–30

696

God  127–9 badness  127–9 as good  129 goodness  127–9 morality of  130 Arendt, Hannah banality of evil  183–5 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil  182, 184 The Origins of Totalitarianism  182–3 radical evil  182 concentration and death camps  183 argument from evil  1–2, 8 classical solutions  2–5 Argument from Incompetence (AI)  462 Argument from Neglect (AN)  462 Aristotle  127, 128, 270, 388–90, 393, 395 Nicomachean Ethics  444 phronesis  603 privation (steresis) and coincidence  389 Arnesen, Trude  516, 517 al-Asfār al-Arbaa (Shirāzī)  593 Ashʾarite school of theology  594, 596, 601, 602 atheism  481–2, 484 Platonic  488 atonement  6, 18, 21, 45, 91 n.23, 278, 280–2, 306, 306 n.3, 307, 308, 311, 313 Atonement (Stump)  226 Augustine  113, 231, 246, 256, 261, 274, 278, 339, 368–9, 493, 494, 502, 631, 679 Confessions  132 definition of prayer  367 evil as privatio boni  138, 151, 231, 430 and evolution  125–6 free-will theodicy  124, 429–32 metaphor of charity  370 monastic community  369, 370 natural evils and suffering  124–5 original sin  210 sin and origins of evil  123–6 suffering  369–70 theodicy  214, 215 totus Christus  369, 374 women  633 Auschwitz  199, 200, 202, 206, 261, 549, 550, 613–18 authentic theodicy  161 Avesta  577–9, 581, 584, 587 Avestan words  583–4

SUBJECT INDEX

avidyā  562 avoidance  525–9 confronting  530–4 passive  525, 526 stigmatizing  525, 526, 529, 532 Awakening of Faith  574 Ayer, A. J., emotivism  483 Babylon  109 Babylon the great  108 Bach, J. S.  660, 662 bad  128 karma  566 bad-difference of disability  526–8, 530 badness  127–9 Baggini, Julian  445 Bainton, Edgar  659 Balthasar, Hans Urs von  195, 271, 273, 283, 337, 466 Holy Saturday  196 on suffering  195–7 Theo-Drama  195, 197–8, 272 Trinitarian life  195–6 banality of evil  183–5 baptism  356–9 baptismal water  356–9 Barnes, Elizabeth  526 Barth, Karl  186, 246, 248, 263, 264, 330, 334, 339, 505 Church Dogmatics III/3 (Barth)  186–9 das Nichtige  187–8 Epistle to the Romans (Barth)  186, 187 evil  186–9 suffering  188–9 Basri, Rabiya  605 Beecher, Henry  519 Beethoven  656 Belmont Report  519 Benedictine Rule  362, 370–2 Benjamin, Walter  205, 206 Berdyaev, Nicolas  281 Bergmann, Michael  413 Berkeley, George, phenomenal idealism  478, 479 Berkovitz, Eliezer  612 “best of all possible worlds” (alGhazālī)  597 Bhagavad-gītā 8:5-6  564 Biblical eschatology  331 Bielik-Robson, Agata  556 big bang  320, 449, 453, 455, 456 bioethics  511, 513

SUBJECT INDEX

controlled drugs for suffering  520–1 end-of-life care in  519–20 suffering controlled drugs  520–1 critics of medicine and medicalization  522 humanitarian aid  518–21 mathematics of  516–18 nature of  514–16 biological evolution  324–5 biomedicine  513, 516 Biostatistical Theory (BST)  536 Black suffering  642–4 women  635–6, 650 Black British Christians, suffering and evil  644–7 Black Christian theism  648 Black church  634, 636 Blackness  643 Black theology  641 evil and suffering  642–7 God in  648–52 typologies  647–52 blindness  526 Bloch, Ernst  205–6 Blumenthal, David  557–8, 613–14 Bodhi-Tree  571, 574 bodily sensations  471 body of Christ  369, 370, 374 Boethius  278, 366 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich  241, 244, 247, 249, 368 costly grace  191–2 cross of Christ  190–3 description of God  192–3 evil  190–2 Letters and Paper from Prison  192 suffering  190–2 God  192–3 Bontshe Shvayg (Bontshe the Silent, Peretz)  544 The Book of Common Prayer  359–64 book of Job  160, 542 death  32, 33 evil  31–8 God knowledge of  38 limitations of  37 morality of  36–7 purposes  36 God–human relationship  35, 38

 697

overview and orientation  31–6 retributive justice  37 suffering  31–8 theodicy  36–9 book of Revelation  102, 328, 379 keys of Death and Hades  103–4 unmasking the powers  106–9 unsealing the scroll  104–5 Boorse, Christopher  536 Bourdeaux, Michael  660 Bowne, Bordon P.  305 Boyd, Gregory  505 Braaten, Carl  383 Brahman  562, 563, 570 Brahmasūtra (2.1.32-36)  563 Brahmin  572 Braiterman, Zachary  419, 617 Brazilian women  636 breathing  358 Brenz, Johann  287, 289 bright sadness  663 British colonialism  643 The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky)  421 Brown, David  303 Brueggemann, Walter  426, 659 Buddha Shakyamuni  565, 572 Buddhism Bodhisattva  572–3 demons  574–5 idea of evil  570–1 suffering  569 Mahāyāna tradition of  572–3 Noble Eightfold Path  571 theodicy  573–4 twelvefold chain of conditioned arising  571–2 Bulgakov, Sergius  230, 231, 235, 237, 237 n.45, 238, 240, 298 Bultmann, Rudolf  330 Byrne, Brendan  268 Calvin, John  256, 286, 318, 339, 438, 502, 634 Christian eschatology  147 classical Christian theism  146 creation ex nihilo  146 evil and suffering  146–8 Fall  146–7 meticulous divine providence  147–9 Camus, Albert  322 Candide (Voltaire)  402

698

Carlsen, Magnus  405 Cartesian Skepticism  415 Cassell, Eric  514 Catholic  352, 353 causal relations  259 central skeptical thesis (STC)  413–14, 416, 417 Cesarani, David  185 Chadha, Monima  565 Chalcedonian Definition  284, 290, 292, 301 character-forming  242, 243 chattel slavery, Black people  642–5, 647 Chemnitz, Martin  287–9 choice grapes  62 n.10, 63 Christendom  349 Christian eschatology  147 suffering  142, 171 theism  481–2, 486–8 Christian ethics  490–1 finding the paths of righteousness  497– 500 love’s entanglement with suffering and evil  493–5 suffering and evil  492–5, 497 Christian faith  187 godhood of  277–9 Christian orthodoxy, Incarnation  302 christocentrism  137 christological self  88 Christology  193, 205, 614 cosmic  317–18 eschatology and  343 problems of evil and suffering  277–83 chronic pain  472 n.13, 536 chronic suffering  511 Chrysostom, John  679 Church as agent of violence  348–51 as cover for abuse  351–2 forgiveness  352 holiness of  354 as repentant sinner  352–5 teaching and practice  351–2 Church Dogmatics (Barth)  186–9, 232 n.16, 263 n.51, 309 n.13, 343 n.23 Church of England  358–62, 364 Cicero  59 Cimabue. See Pepo, Cenni di classical theism  277, 280 Clayton, Philip  454, 462–4

SUBJECT INDEX

Clemente, San  656 Cobb, John  318 cognitivist antirealism of good and evil  484–6 relativism  485 utilitarianism  485 Cohen, Arthur A.  550 Comblin, José  317 comfort theodicy  447 Commedia (Alighieri)  131–5 Commemoration Service  644 common prayer  370–2 commonsense atheist  416 Common Worship  362–4 communal sufferings  42–3 communicatio divinarum idiomatum  288 communicatio idiomatum  284–7, 424 in the early church  284–6 genus apotelesmaticum  288, 292 genus idiomaticum  287–8 genus majestaticum  289–90 genus tapeinoticon  290–4 in Lutheran Orthodoxy  286–7 community choirs  655 community’s sufferings  92–4, 682–5 compassion  303, 304, 498–9, 513 of God  252–3, 256, 257 theodicy  150, 153, 154 compound theodicy  509 concealment  552, 557 “The Concept of God After Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice” (Jonas)  549 concupiscence  123 Cone, James H.  534, 641–2, 646, 651, 652 confessions  22, 45, 97, 245–6, 251, 252, 316, 362 of evil  186, 210 confirmation  361–2 conscience  153–4 consciousness  300–2 Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius)  366–7 Constantine  349 consummation  335–6 Context Principle  443 contingency  320, 320 n.35 contrapasso (counter-suffering)  133, 134 controlled drugs  521–2 Cosin, John  361 cosmic Christology  316 cosmic pneumatology  316–21 cosmic Spirit  317–21, 324 cosmos  90, 91, 115, 595

SUBJECT INDEX

evil and  85–7 costly grace  191–2 counterfactuals of freedom  399, 401–3, 434, 436 countertestimony  426 covenant  50 disobedience  15, 17, 20 faith  51–5 Craig, William Lane  434, 526 Crawford, Elaine  650 creatio continua  315, 321, 324, 326, 327 creatio ex creatione sempiternalis in amore  455–9 creatio ex nihilo  146, 200, 231, 246, 247, 315–17, 315 n.3, 324, 327, 451–5, 457, 459, 461, 553, 556 creatio ex vetere  326 creatio in nihilo  200 creation  87, 151, 179–80, 188, 315, 449–50 everlasting  456 and Fall  249, 505 freedom to creation  261, 265 God  230–40, 423–4 goodness of  245–50 narratives  245–6 from nothing  451–2 problems  452–3 rejected  451–2 today  453–5 voluntary divine self-limitation  453–4 no universe, creature, or chaos predates God  457 and redemption in Jesus Christ  250–4 Spirit in  315–18, 326 dynamic and particular presence  323–6 subjected to futility  383 suffering  251–2 and problem of evil in  248–50, 252–4 Trinitarian concept of  200–1 Trinitarian-pneumatology  316–17 of universe  449–56 creatio originalis  315 n.3 creativity  443–4 Creator/Creatorship. See Spirit (the Creator) Creatorship  315 n.3, 318 Credo in Jesum Christum (Pärt)  661, 662 Creed, Nicene  250, 329 Creegan, Nicola Hoggard  505 Creel, Richard  259, 262

 699

Crisp, Oliver D.  638 Critique of Judgment (Kant)  161 cross of the Christ  190–3, 200, 262, 282, 283, 322 The Crucified God (Moltmann)  199, 200, 202 crucifixion  83, 106, 144, 147, 294, 334, 677–80, 684 trial and  78, 81–2 Cruz, Helen de  535 cup of suffering  672–3 Cyril of Alexandria  275, 284–6 Dale, Benjamin  659 Dalferth, Ingolf  246 Damian, Peter  397 Dan, Joseph  557 Da Pacem, Domine (Pärt)  663 Darwin, Charles  503 Darwinism/Darwinian  413, 504 das Nichtige  187–8, 246 Day of Pardon  353 The Day of the Lord (Rahner)  331 Deaf-gain  531 deafness  526, 531 Deane-Drummond, Celia  505 death  32–3, 147, 503, 535, 650 and dying  607–8 of God  200, 612, 668, 669, 673, 674 of Jesus  668, 674 suffering and  578, 581–2 de Bos, Christiane  28 deep desires  225 defense  1, 2, 8 deflationary accounts of moral concepts  483–4 deification  275 deism  267–8, 503 Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min aḍl-ḍalāl, al-Ghazālī)  596 De malorum subsistentia (Proclus)  392 Dembski, William  504 Demiurge  391, 392 de Molina, Luis  121, 399, 432–4 demonization  633 demons  71, 86, 87, 87 n.11, 313, 377, 379, 380, 382, 574–5 desires  142, 441, 442, 515–16 Deus Absconditus  281, 283 deus non in genere  340 Deutero–Isaiah  20 “Deuteronomistic History”  51–5

700

covenant faith  51–5 Qohelet’s questions  55–8 Deuteronomy  13, 15 devils  77, 78, 86, 94, 97, 106, 107, 132, 357–8, 377–9, 383 incarnation  249 Dew, James K. Jr.  526 dharma  561 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Hume)  400–1 Diamond Sutra  573 Diaspora, African  643 slavery  647 Dictata super Psalterium (Luther)  141 disability  524 association with suicide  526 bad  526–8, 530 and evil avoidance  525–9 confronting avoidance  530–4 good of being of use  527–9 health and disease  536 and horrendous evils  531–2 identity harm  533 instrumentalizing individuals  528–9 medical model  536 problematic and harmful  530 radiation exposure on disabled individuals  529 suffering  525, 527–32, 534, 535 well-being and  530 disabling philosophy of religion  534–6 disaster  24–8, 32 disciplinati or battuti  682 divine causality  23, 324, 341 healing  426 influence  463 judgment  17 justice  605, 634 life  121 love  14, 19, 21, 82, 109, 121, 134, 135, 138, 139, 220, 235, 493, 605 mercy  15–17 mind  478, 479 omnipotence  397–8, 400 omniscience  397–400 pathos  175–6 patience  105 power  105, 397–8 providence  147–9, 400, 592 punishment for disobedience  350

SUBJECT INDEX

purposiveness  594 suffering  304 will  149 divine action in specific events  343–4 divine–human friendship  220 Divine One  442–4, 447 docetism  290 Doctors without Borders  518 doctrinal theodicy  159, 160 Dodd, C. H.  64 Does God Suffer? (Weinandy)  285–6, 293, 304 domination  633 Dominican cognition  223, 225 Donati, Piccarda  134 Donne, John  312 Dorner, Isaak  290 Dostoevsky, Fyodor  84, 421 Dougherty, Trent  417 Douglas, Kelly Brown  643, 651 doxology of judgement (Gerichtsdoxologie)  28 Draper, Paul  416–17 dualisms  631 good and evil  632–3 mind and body  633 problem with  632–4 subject/object  633–4 duḥkha  559, 568, 569 karma  562–6 līlā  566–7 ecclesial pilgrimage  498 ecclesial repentance  353 ecclesiology  205, 347 Catholic  353 Church as agent of violence  348–51 as cover for abuse  351–2 as repentant sinner  352–5 Edwards, Denis  323–4, 326 Edwards, Jonathan  269–70 Eichmann, Adolf  184, 185 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Arendt)  182, 184 Eichrodt, Walter  18 Ellis, George  322 Ellis, Marc H.  613 Emery, Gilles  274 emotional pain  448 emotions  256–9, 270, 445 empathy  447, 513

SUBJECT INDEX

emptied (ekenōsen)  287, 300 end-of-life care  519–20 Muslim  605–7 endurance in suffering  93, 96, 97, 99–100 Engberg-Pedersen, Troels  87 Engelhardt, Jeffers  661 enlightened mind  574 Ennead I 8  389 Ennead II 4  390 Ennead II 5  390 En Sof  553–5 entropy  319–20 Epicurus’ principle  59 Epistle to the Hebrews, suffering community’s past and present  92–4 and evil, responding to  96–100 reality of  94–6 Epistle to the Romans (Barth)  186–7 Erik, Nord  516, 517 eschatological assertions  329–32 Rahner, Karl  330–1 in Scripture  330, 331 eschatological hope  96–7, 651 eschatological knowledge  330–1 eschatological theodicy  200–2 eschatology and Christology  343 defined  329 essential evil  592 eternal kenosis  196 ethical naturalism  486 ethical reasoning  494 ethics  490 Eucharist  206, 359–62 eucharistic prayer  360 Euthanasia  519, 520 evangelic mystery  119 evil  121, 151, 152, 188, 230–1, 238–41, 243, 245, 260, 262, 490–1, 505, 630–1. See also suffering Alighieri, Dante  131–5 Amelius  391 and androcentrism in analytic theology  638–9 Aquinas, Thomas  128–30 Arendt, Hannah  182–5 Aristotle  389 atonement and  313 banality of  183–4 baptism and  356–8 Barth, Karl  186–9

 701

in biblical tradition  377–9 Black British Christians  644–7 in Black theology  642–7 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich  190–2 book of Job  31–8 Buddhism  570–1 Calvin, John  146–8 Christian ethics  492–5, 497 cognitivist antirealism  484–6 and cosmos  85–7 defining the doctrine of  230–1 as dharmic disintegration  561–2 disability and avoidance  525–9 confronting avoidance  530–4 divine power and patience in  104–5 on earth  135 events  345 form of, Amelius  391 God and  130 good and  48 dualisms  632–3 Heschel, Abraham Joshua  173–5 Hick, John  215–16 Holocaust  611, 613, 617, 618 of ignorance  119 in Islamic revelation  590–1 philosophy and theology  591–5 judgment for  332, 335 Julian of Norwich  136–9 Kant  159–62, 188 Leibniz, C. F. W.  155–7, 230–1 love’s entanglement with  493–5 McCord Adams, Marilyn  218–20 McFarland, Ian  230–1 matter as Plotinus  389–91, 393 Porphyry  391–2 moral thinking about  492–5 natural  3, 5, 124–5, 147, 164, 230–1, 383–4, 428, 504, 505, 526, 532, 599, 603 in Neoplatonism  389 as non-being, Olympiodorus  394–5 non-cognitivist anti-realism  483–4 origins  123–4, 126, 229–44, 248, 249, 254 and problems of Islamic history and theology  601–3 in paradise  134 as parhupostasis, Iamblichus  392 personal  379–81

702

pollution of  118–20 powers of  69–71 practical responses to  211–12 precondition for  233–4 as privatio boni  130, 151, 430 problem of (see problem, of evil) in purgatory  133–4 question of  77, 248, 251 in Qur’an  602 Ricœur, Paul  210, 211–12 sacramental representation of  356–65 Schleiermacher, Friedrich  164, 165, 167 secular theory of  162 skeptical theism, argument from evil for  408–18 soul as the cause of, Simplicius  394 as source of suffering and death  581–2 of speech, ethics in moral teaching  495–6 spirits  377 and suffering  96–100, 124–5, 128–9, 137, 189–91, 242, 345–6, 360, 364, 367, 420, 422 in Black theology  642–3 Christian response to  425–6 in creation  248–50, 252–4 nature and role of God  422–4 role of humans  424–5 symbols and myths of  210 and tsimtsum (contraction)  554–6 as uncaused, Proclus  392–4 Weil, Simone  178 as women  636, 632–4 Zoroastrianism  580–8 Evil and the God of Love (Hick)  113 Evil Claws (Malebranche)  132 Evil Tail (Malacoda)  132 evolutionary biology  125, 126 Existential Crucifixion  643 exorcism  356–9 expectations  401–7. See also reality expectations–reality gap  401–3 experiential knowledge  303 exploitation  633 Exposition of the Psalms (Augustine)  369 extreme unction. See anointing of the sick Ezekiel  24 Fackenheim, Emil  550, 612 Fairbairn, A. M.  272 Fall, the  38, 125, 146, 148, 239–41, 245, 253, 430, 634 animal suffering without  506–8

SUBJECT INDEX

creation and  249 critiques  506 retaining  504–6 of Satan  505 fallenness  5, 239 n.50 False Prophet  107 Farewell Discourses  79–80 Farmer, Paul  518 Fee, Gordon  300 Feldmeier, Reinhard  249, 253 feminist theologies  635 Fergusson, David  235, 337 Fiddes, Paul S.  251 fideism/fideistic  7, 155 finding the paths of righteousness  497–500 finitum capax infiniti  287 finitum non capax infiniti  286 first sin  164, 430 The Flagellation of Christ (Pepo)  680–2 Flint, Thomas  340, 434 Floyd, George  632, 651 The Flying Dutchman (Wagner)  667 forbidden fruit  239 forgiveness  20, 45, 74, 166, 212, 329, 352, 359, 668 Formula of Concord  291, 292 Forsyth, P. T.  280 Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Moltmann)  199 Franciscan cognition  223, 225 freedom  238–41, 249, 260, 261, 264, 265, 507 of choice  241–3 counterfactuals of  399, 401–3, 434, 436 God  307–10, 312, 313 of natural processes  465 and perfection of God  236–7 providence and  340–2 and supramundane Fall  238 free knowledge  433 free process defense  464, 465, 507 free will  124, 148, 214, 215, 249, 260, 398, 651 defense  5, 218, 259–61, 398, 399, 429, 464, 465 libertarian conception of  432 theodicy  410, 560 Augustine  429–32 Molina, Luis de  432–4 mystical  557 Open Theism  435–7

SUBJECT INDEX

and theism  437–9 Fretheim, Terrance  18, 21 Ganssle, Gregory  482 Geach, Peter  127 Gebara, Ivone  636–8 general divine action  461, 464 general-policy theodicy  439 genuine freedom  436 genuine gratuitous evil  4 genuine theodicies  5–6 genus apotelesmaticum  288, 292 genus auchematicum. See genus majestaticum genus idiomaticum  287–8 genus majestaticum  289–90 genus tapeinoticon  290–4 Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid al-  600, 602 “best of all possible worlds” statement  597, 600 theodicy of  595–8 Giessen Christology  289–90 Glassman, Bernie  618 global meaning-making  621 glory  72, 80 gnosis  281 God agency in suffering  143–4 Aquinas, Thomas  127–9 badness  127–9 good  129 goodness  127–9 morality  130 benevolence  279 Bonhoeffer’s description of  192–3 character of  308–11 compassion of  252–3, 256, 257, 303, 304 concept of  2–3 counter-purposiveness  160 creation  230–40, 260–1, 423–4, 449–50 everlastingly in love  455–6 and Fall  249 freedom to  458–9 goodness of  245–50 narratives  245–6 from nothing  451–5 and redemption in Jesus Christ  250–4 suffering of  251–4 creative power  456 Creator/Creatorship  315 n.3, 316–17 death of  200, 612, 668, 669, 673, 674 desire to eliminate evil  4

 703

dipolarity  263 dipolar theism  263 divine predetermination  434 division and duality  233–4 does not need creation for God to exist  457–8 emotions  256–9, 270 essential love  455–6 evil and  130 suffering, Black theology of  648–52 suffering, nature and role of  422–4 faithful of people  431 First Cause  270 freedom  243–4, 307–10, 312, 313, 341, 645 free knowledge  433 friendship with  220–1 fulfillment of the new creation  321, 326 general divine action  461, 464 goodness of  308–9 healing of the human  224 immutability  192, 196, 199, 202, 257, 258, 263, 264, 293–4, 301, 302 impassibility  257–9, 262–4 impassible  192, 196, 199, 202, 262–4, 301, 302 incarnation  251 judgment of  332–3 justification and sanctification  224 knowledge of evil  3 love  14, 19, 21, 82, 109, 121, 134, 135, 138, 139, 220, 234–5, 240, 243–4, 256–8, 294, 493, 605 loving creatures  454–6 as meaning  311–13 mercy  256, 257, 270 middle knowledge  433 of Molinism  406 mystery of  685 natural knowledge  432–3 non-coercive creative process  322 “not even once” policy  454 omnipotence  2–3, 199, 202, 240, 250, 279, 302, 397–8, 400, 403, 529 omnipotent  202, 397–8, 400 omniscience  279, 302, 303, 330, 397–400, 437 omniscient  262, 265 passibility  258–9, 264 passible  255, 256, 258, 259, 262–5 passion  257 patience  307, 309–12, 323

704

perfection of  236–7, 341 permission of evil  147 power to eliminate evil  3 problem of evil in  248–50, 253–4 providence  400, 434, 529, 645, 647 punishment  268, 269 reconciliation  332 resurrection  312 righteousness (tzedeqah)  64, 307, 309–10, 312, 313 salvation  20, 68, 84, 103, 279 economy of  138, 318, 466 Schleiermacher, Friedrich evil  165, 167 sin  164–5, 167 suffering  165–7 self-justification  282 on the Cross  191 self-limitation  233 self-revelation  282 sovereignty  147, 148, 151, 250, 400 stages to defeat evil  218–21 suffering  192–3, 199–203, 251–2, 258, 259, 261–5, 293–4, 304, 423, 507–8 transcendence  340 Trinitarian history of  200–1 voluntary self-limitation  453 wrath (anger)  65–6, 137–9, 267–72 godhood of Christian faith  277–9 godly will  138 Goebbels, Joseph  328 Golden Calf  14, 19, 20 Golgotha  199, 200, 202 good  127–9, 132, 143 cognitivist antirealism  484–6 and evil  48, 239 dualisms  632–3 non-cognitivist anti-realism  483–4 good death  609 Good Friday music  675 good karma  566, 571 goodness  127–9, 151–3, 156, 158, 401, 482, 483, 486, 487 of creation  245–50 of God  308–9 Gore, Charles  301 Górecki, Henryk  664 Gorgias (Plato)  394 Gospel of John  76–83, 251, 254, 334, 382, 672 abundance  335–6

SUBJECT INDEX

Gould, Paul  486 Grant, Jacquelyn  635, 639 gratuitous evils  409–11 great deed  137 great harm  136 Greenberg, Irving  611–12, 614 Gregory of Nyssa, On Infant’s Early Deaths  118–21 Gregory the Great  372–4 Griffioen, Amber L.  639 Gruber, Heinrich  612 Grünewald, Mattias  334, 682–4 Gurney, Ivor  659 Gutiérrez, Gustavo  186 Hadith Qudsi  604, 605 Halivni, David Weiss  550–1 Hall, Delroy  643 Hamilton, Amanda  685–7 Hanser, Suzanne  658 Hanslick, Eduard  676 Hanson, Anthony Tyrrell  65–6 happiness  123–5 hard problem of consciousness  470 hardships, causes and treatment  44–7 Harnack, Adolf von  370 Hart, David  338, 421 Hartshorne, Charles  263, 265, 278 Hasker, William  121, 400, 435–6 general-policy theodicy  439 Hauerwas, Stanley  424–5 Haynes, Stephen  617 healing  426 health and disease  536 heaven  134–5 Hebblethwaite, Brian  299 Hebrews 11  95 Hegel, G. W. F.  211, 212, 272 death of God  673, 674 Heiman, Henry  528 hell/hells  132–3, 573, 602, 604, 605, 609, 671 Hendricks, Perry, Preclusion Argument  413–14 Henry VIII  433 hermeneutics of eschatological assertions  329–32 Heschel, Abraham Joshua  13–14, 61, 62, 263, 270–1 suffering and divine pathos  175–6 tridimensionality of evil  173–5 Heschel, Susannah  175

SUBJECT INDEX

Hewlett, Martinez  326 Hick, John  113–16, 280, 302, 405, 428, 437 Augustinian theodicy and  214 evils  215–16 pain and suffering  215–16 paradise world  214–15 soul-making theodicy  214–17, 435 Hill, Christopher S.  471 Hillier, Paul  662 Hinduism  559 duḥkha (see duḥkha) “the Hindu karma theodicy”  563 Hinnells, John  579, 587 Hitler  108, 612, 613 Hollaz, David  288 Holocaust  350, 398, 545, 547, 611 Christian responses  614–17 evil  611, 613, 617, 618 Jewish responses  611–14, 617 memorials and museums  618 recent responses  616–19 Remembrance Day  618 ritual activities  618 suffering  611–15, 617, 618 Holy Church  137, 139 Holy Grail  668, 672 Holy Saturday  196 Holy Scripture  300, 301 Holy Spirit  79, 80, 83, 141, 240, 244, 308, 358, 361, 363, 369, 370, 424 homophobia  632 Hooker, Richard  150 Certaintie  153 conscience  153–4 On the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity  150–4 participation in Christ  151–2 theodicy  150, 153, 154 worship  152–3 Hoover, Jon  594, 600 Hopewell, James  466 horrendous evils  218–20, 490, 531–2 Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (McCord Adams)  218–19 horrors  219–20 Hosea  16 Hubbard, David Allan  50 human freedom  157 subconscious  300 will  151

 705

humanitarian aid  518–19 humanocentric theism  648, 649 Hume, David  400–1, 428 humiliation  72 Hurtado, Larry  300 hypothesis of indifference  416, 417 Iamblichus  395 evil as parhupostasis  392 Iatrogenic suffering  522 Iblis (Satan)  602–4, 609 idealism  477–80 idealization  633 Idel, Moshe  556 Illich, Ivan  421, 446, 522 imago Dei  234–5, 234 n.27, 318, 633 impairment  532. See also disability Inati, Shams  600 Incarnation  6, 219, 220, 279 n.6, 280, 296, 423 Christian orthodoxy  302 faith  280 Holy Scripture  300, 301 Moderate Kenotic Model (Moderate KM)  298–304 Two-Nature Christology (TNC)  297–8, 300, 301 individual suffering  42, 43, 46 inequality  632 Inferno (Alighieri)  132–3, 135 Inferno XXVI  372 intelligible matter  389–90 intra-Trinitarian relations  201, 275, 276 invisible church  353 ira Dei  59 “Irenaean soul-making” theodicy  214–17 Irenaeus  113–16, 502 The Isenheim Altarpiece (Nikolaus and Grünewald)  682–5 Islamic eschatology  604 ethico-legal paradigm  608 history and theology, origins and problems of evil  601–3 philosophy and theology of evil  591–5 scholarship, evil and suffering  599–601 Jackson, Sherman  600, 601 Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa  561 James, William  380 Jaspers, Karl  183

706

Jātaka-Mālā of Arya Śura  572 Jātakas  572 jealousy  59, 61–2, 65 God as “Jealous”  61 Jesus Christ  269–70, 273–5, 278, 308–13, 329, 332, 333, 350, 354, 357, 359, 378, 379, 382–3, 616, 671 atonement  306, 306 n.3, 307–8, 311, 313 becoming a man  312 communicatio idiomatum (see communicatio idiomatum) compassion  63 creation and redemption in  250–4 crucifixion  294, 334, 677–80, 684 death  6, 281, 284, 286, 288, 292, 293, 668, 669, 674 divine nature  298–300, 304 and human natures  284–94, 297, 301 Flagellation of  680–2 love  77–9 Moderate Kenotic Model (Moderate KM)  298–304 omnipotence  289, 290, 293 omnipresence  290, 293 omniscience  289, 290, 293 as redeemer  288, 289 resurrection  278, 280, 281, 294, 316–17, 326 suffering  6, 285–6, 288, 291, 294, 360, 373, 374, 651, 677, 679–80, 682–4 Two-Nature Christology (TNC)  297–8, 300, 301 woundedness and healing  334–5 wrath  63 Jesus of Nazareth (Wagner)  668–9, 672 Jews  541, 545, 612 John of Damascus  268–9, 318 Johnson, Elizabeth  507 John the Baptist  333–5 John Paul II, Pope  353–4 John the Seer  102–3, 105–8 Jonas, Hans  231, 251, 549–50 Jones, William R.  648–50 Joseph of Arimathea  672 Joseph Paradigm  645 Judaism  542, 544, 545 Judas Iscariot  77–9 judgement  496–7 of God  332–3

SUBJECT INDEX

Julian of Norwich  82, 466 christocentrism  137 evil  136–9 great harm  136 problem of evil  136–8 Revelations of Divine Love  136, 139 sin  137–9 suffering  136–9 Jung, Carl  37 Jüngel, Eberhard  234 kabbalistic Din  555 Kant, Immanuel  155, 157, 159–62, 367 anti-theism  160 belief in God  160 critics on Leibniz  159 critique of doctrinal theodicy  160 Critique of Judgment  161 evil  159–62, 188 God and  159–60, 162 radical evil  182 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason  161 theodicy  159 “unsocial sociability” of humanity  161 Karamazov, Ivan  260, 339 Kärkkäinen, Veli-Matti  315, 317 karma  562–6, 570 kath’ hypostasin  285 Kellenbach, Katharina von  617 kenosis  196, 232, 235, 287, 290, 292–3, 292 n.30, 301. See also tapeinosis Kenosis-Krypsis controversy  289 kenoticism/kenoticist/kenotic 2, 196, 201, 272, 284, 286, 291–3, 298–301, 326 Kenotic Christology  298–9 locus classicus of  300 Kerr, Fergus  371, 375 Al-Khadir  605 Kierkegaard, Søren  168 inwardness  169 relation between God and a human  169–70 religious life and  169–71 sin  169–70 suffering  169–71 Kilby, Karen  137, 195, 423, 466 Kim, Jaegwon  474 Kingma, Elselijn  536 Kingsley, Charles  508 Kirk-Duggan, Cheryl  646

SUBJECT INDEX

Kitzberger, Ingrid  83 Knapp, Steven  454, 462–4 Knierim, Rolf P.  451 Knight, Christopher  316, 464 knowledge of good and evil  38, 239 koinonia tōn theiōn  288 Kripke, Saul  471 Kristin  440–2, 445, 447 Kusti prayers  584 Kyriai doxai (Epicurus)  59 Lactantius  502 Lady Reason  193 Lamb  105, 106, 108–10, 336 wrath of  63–5 Lamentations  27–8 Laplace, Pierre Simon de  461 Lash, Nicholas, Christology  277–83 Last Supper  77–82, 359–60 last things  329, 333 Lawless, George  370 Lectures on Romans (Luther)  141 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm  159, 211, 212, 230–1, 246, 248, 429 evil  155–7, 230–1 “On the Miscarriage of all Philosophical Trials in Theodicy”  159 theodicy  155 Leo the Great  284 Letters and Paper from Prison (Bonhoeffer)  192 Levenson, Jon  451 Levertov, Denise  82 Levinas, Emmanuel  19, 544, 613 Lewis, C. S.  482, 505 Lewis, Jane  606 libertarian free will  398 Liddon, H. P.  298–9 Liebner, K. T. A.  293 līlā  566–7 Lindström, Fredrik  24 Littell, Franklin  615–16 Little Flowers of St. Francis  401 Lloyd, Antony C.  394 Lloyd, Michael  505 locus classicus of Kenotic Christology  300 logoi  323 Logos  235, 263, 284–6, 289, 292, 316, 321, 323. See also Spirit (the Creator) logos asarkos  292, 298 logos ensarkos  292, 293

 707

Lohengrin (Wagner)  667–8, 675 Loofs, Friedrich  290 love  255–7, 259, 293, 294, 446–7 for creation  455 of enemies  74 God  14, 19, 21, 82, 109, 121, 134, 135, 138, 139, 220, 234–5, 240, 243–4, 256–8, 294, 493, 605 of Jesus  77–9 “The Love of God and Affliction” (Weil)  179–81 Luria, Isaac  231 tsimtsum  552–4, 556–8 Lurianic kabbalah  550, 552, 554–7 Luther, Martin  193, 249, 263, 286, 318, 502, 634, 673 Anfechtungen (spiritual afflictions)  142–3 suffering function of  142–3 God  674 theodicy and God’s agency in  143–4 theology of  141–4 tentatio, Anfechtung  143 theologia crucis  190 Lutheran Christology  286, 289 cross-theological soteriology  6 Orthodoxy  286–7, 291 Maccabees  332 McCord Adams, Marilyn  306 n.3, 335, 527, 529 friendship with God  220–1 God to defeat evil  218–21 horrendous evils  218–20 Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God  218–19 rejection of evil and suffering  219 suffering  219 McFague, Sallie  639 McFarland, Ian  137 evil  230–1 McGilchrist, Iain  655 MacKinnon, Donald  80, 195, 282 MacLeish, Archibald  31, 33, 36, 38 Macmillan, Ernest  659 MacMillan, James  665 Magid, Shaul  557 Mahāyāna Buddhism  572–3 Mahler, Gustav  404 Maimonides, Moses  543–4, 546, 547

708

Malebolge (Evil Pouches, in Inferno)  132 Malevich, Kazimir  685 malum culpae  128 malum morale  570 malum poenae  128 Malysz, Piotr J.  143 Manchester Survivors’ Choir  658 Māra  574–5 March of the Living  618 Marcion  59, 62, 65 Mark  69–71 marriage  363–4 Marsh, Thomas  363 Martel, Charles  134 Martensen, H. H.  262 The Mastersingers of Nuremberg (Wagner)  676 material creations  578–81, 583, 586 matter as evil Plotinus  389–91, 393 Porphyry  391–2 Matthew  67–74 Matthew 25:31-46  332–3 Maturidi theology  601 Maximus the Confessor  269, 307, 323 meaning, patience and  311–12 meaning-making  621–2, 627 theodicy and situational  623–4 meaning of life  440–2 achieving goals  442–3 after death  447 creativity of  443–4 giving and receiving love  446–8 suffering and  440, 442–4, 446–8 virtue  444–6 medical cannabis  520–1 medicalization, critics of  522 medical suffering  514, 519–20 medicine  513, 516 critics of  522 Meister, Chad  425, 526 memoria passionis  205–6 mercy  256, 257, 270 merry-go-round analogy  450–1 Messer, Neil  505 Messiah  65, 67, 79, 90, 103, 105, 106 metaphorical soteriology  217 metaphysical devaluation  527 metaphysical evil  230 Metaphysics (Aristotle)  389 Metz, Johann Baptist  614–15 anamnestic reason  206

SUBJECT INDEX

biographical notes  204–5 Christ’s memoria passionis  205–6 new political theology  204–7 question of suffering  205–7 theology as theodicy  205–7 middle knowledge  121, 399, 399 n.6, 401, 406, 433 Middle Persian  578, 584, 587 Milne, Pamela J.  632 mind–body problem  471–4 mindfulness  572 minimalist theism  403 Minnich, Elizabeth  185 “The Mirror of Evil” (Stump)  222 misery, kinds of  41–4 mishpat  63 Missionary Christianity  642, 643 Moderate Kenotic Model (Moderate KM)  298–304 Molina, Luis de  432 Molinism  121, 342, 399, 432–4 God of  406 Moltmann, Jürgen  199, 204, 230–1 247, 258, 262, 322, 333–4, 423, 507, 614, 650 creation of God  231–3, 235, 243 criticism Rahner, Karl  202 Sölle, Dorothee  202 on Tzimtzum doctrine  202 The Crucified God  199, 200, 202 Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology  199 God’s self-limitation  233 inward and outward acts  232, 232 n.16 suffering God  199–203, 252 theodicy of theology of the cross  200 theology as biography  199 Theology of Hope  199, 200 Trinitarian history of God with the world  200–1 monastic community  370 Augustine  369, 370 prayer and suffering in  370–2 monasticism  369, 370, 372 moral dualism  633 justification  338, 339, 345 principles  486–8 quality of speech  496 realism

SUBJECT INDEX

ethical naturalism  486–7 non-natural non-theistic moral realism  487–8 regeneration  565 statements  483–5 moral evil  5, 231, 238, 244, 260, 357, 428, 432, 526, 535, 599, 603, 604, 638 morality  36–7, 219, 325 of God  130 moral teaching, avoiding evils of speech  495–6 moral thinking about suffering and evil  492–5, 497, 498 Moritz, Joshua  325 Morris, Thomas  301, 443 Moses  13–14, 52, 61, 66, 95, 97, 100, 541, 605 Deuteronomic vision of  20 divine judgment  17 mercy  15–17 pathos  13–14, 16–18, 20, 21 intercession  15–17 as prophet par excellence  14, 18 punishment  20 sacrificial act  18–20 as suffering servant  13–21 Muffs, Yohannan  15, 17, 20 Muhammad, Prophet  601, 603–4 Mullins, Ryan Thomas  265 Murphy, Nancey  322 Murray, Michael  507, 509 Murray, Paul  466, 467 music  654 compositional process  663 evolution, and social cohesion  655 liberation of Baltic States  661 songs of  659–60 under oppression  659 Pärt, Arvo  661–5 in religious persecution  660 as therapy for physical and mental suffering  656–8 war period  658–9 Muslims  601, 618–9 death and dying  607–8 suffering beliefs about  608–9 through end-of-life  605–7 Muṭahharī, Morteza  595 Muʿtazilite school of theology  594, 597, 601

 709

myth of evil  210 of Sisyphus  442, 443 Nagasawa, Yujin  481–3 Nagel, Thomas  472 National Socialism  612, 614 natural evil  3, 5, 147, 164, 230–1, 383–4, 428, 504, 505, 526, 532, 599, 603 and suffering  124–5 natural knowledge  432–3 natural theodicy  5 cosmic Spirit in  318–21 Necessary Being  592 Necessary Existence  592 Neiman, Susan  185 Nekrolog (Pärt)  661 Neoplatonic cosmology of Origen  115 Neoplatonism  387, 388 concept of evil in  389 Amelius  391 Iamblichus  392 Olympiodorus  394–5 Platonic and Aristotelian sources  388–9 Plotinus  389–91 Porphyry  391–2 Proclus  392–4 Simplicius  394 new creation  85 n.3, 90–1, 109, 187, 201, 244, 316, 321, 326–7, 508–9, 581 fulfillment of  321, 326 New Jerusalem  109, 110 “New Spiritual Music” (Pärt)  664 New Testament  50, 59, 63, 65, 246–8, 250–2, 274, 300, 306, 333, 349, 377–9, 381, 383 eschatology  330, 332 Newton  461 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle)  444 Nietzsche, Friedrich  84–5, 512, 513, 670 Christianity  85 n.4, 91 and Paul  90–1 nihil  233, 238 of creatio ex nihilo  202 Nikolaus of Haguenau  682, 684 nirvāṇa  570–3 nitty-gritty hermeneutics  649 Noble Eightfold Path  571 non-cognitivist anti-realism, of good and evil  483–4 non-human suffering. See animal suffering non-identity theodicy  492–5

710

non-natural non-theistic moral realism  487–8 non-reductive physicalism  473–4 non-theological speech  497 Nord, Erik  516 noseeum reasoning  411 Nostra Aetate (II. Vatican Council)  10 Not Even Once precept (NEO)  454, 463 nothingness concept  505 Noûs  389, 395 “No Weight Thesis”  417 “number of the beast”  107–8 O’Donovan, Oliver  494 Oettingen, Alexander von  291 O Felix Culpa  148 Old Avesta  577, 578 Old Testament  13, 14, 23, 38, 40, 44, 50, 51, 60, 65, 86, 170, 239, 246, 250, 261, 359, 377, 378, 614, 656, 658–9. See also New Testament Olympiodorus  387 evil as non-being  394–5 omni-attributes  401–3, 405 omnipotence  2–3, 199, 202, 240, 250, 279, 289–90, 293, 302, 397–8, 400, 403, 529 omnipresence  290, 293, 430 omniscience  279, 289–90, 293, 302, 303, 330, 397–400, 437 On Infant’s Early Deaths (Gregory)  118–20 The Onion  366 On Matter (Plotinus)  389–90 On the existence of evils (Proclus)  394 On the Heavens (Aristotle)  395 On the Impassibility of Things without Bodies (Plotinus)  390–1 On the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity (Hooker)  150–4 “On the Open view” (Speak)  398–9 ontological argument  278 ontological dualism of mind and body  633 ontological idealism  477–80 On what evils are and where they come from (Plotinus)  389 Oord, Thomas J.  263–5 Open Theism  2, 3, 341–2, 398, 399, 406, 424, 435–7 criticisms of  436–7 critics of  403 opioid epidemic  520 Oppy, Graham  483 Opsomer, Jan  391

SUBJECT INDEX

ordination (holy orders)  364–5 O’Regan, Cyril  337 Origen  60, 113, 115–16, 116 n.18, 268, 284. See also Irenaeus original sin  123, 124, 148, 163, 238, 634 critique of, Ricœur  210–11 origin of evil  123–4, 126, 229–44, 248–9, 254 The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt)  182–3 Ormsby, Eric  599 Orthodox baptismal rite  357, 358 Orthodoxy versus reform  545–6 Page, Meghan  535 Page, Ruth  508 Pahlavi texts  578, 579 pain  469–70 chronic  536 idealism  477–80 medicine  520 phenomenality of  478 physical  471–5, 478, 480 sensation of  471–2 substance dualism (SD)  474–7, 479 and suffering  315, 318, 319, 322, 404–5, 416, 417, 431, 483–4, 515 Paley, William  503 pancausality  24, 25 Panchuk, Michelle  535 Pannenberg, Wolfhart  320–2, 505 Paradiso (Alighieri)  134–5 Paramananda, Swami  563 Paramhangsa, Ramakrishna  566 parasitic existence (parhupostasis)  393 Parfit, Derek  515 parhupostasis, evil as  392 Park, Crystal L.  621, 623 Parsifal (Wagner)  666, 669, 671–5 Pärt, Arvo  661–5 participation of God  151–2 Participative Black theology  645, 645 n.18 participatory consciousness  152 participatory self  88, 89 Pascal, Blaise  269 passible immutability  294 passive avoidance  525, 526 pathos of God  13–14, 16–18, 20 paths of righteousness  490 finding  497–500 Pathways to the Intelligible (Porphyry)  391 patience God  307, 309–12, 323

SUBJECT INDEX

and meaning  311–12 patient endurance  99, 103 patriarchy  632 patricompassianism  200 patron saints  113–16 Paul the Apostle  6, 52, 59, 64–6, 68, 75, 84–5, 251, 307, 334, 335, 378, 379, 383, 679 angels and demons  86, 87 cosmos  85–7, 90, 91 evil  85–7 God’s wrath  267–8 last things  333 letter to the Romans  309–10 Nietzsche, Friedrich and  90–1 problem of suffering and evil  310 Satan  86–7 suffering and problem of evil  90–1 and self  87–90 Paulus-Gesellschaft  205 Paul VI, Pope  354 Peacocke, Arthur  324 Pepo, Cenni di  681 Peretz, I. L.  544 perfection of God  236–7 personal evil  379–81 personal relations  259 personal self  88–9 Perszyk, Ken  400 Peter, Simon  64, 69, 71, 73, 78–81 Peters, Ted  326 Peterson, Michael  419 petitionary prayer  366–7, 375 phenomenal consciousness  474 phenomenal idealism  478, 479 phenomenalism  478 phenomenal sensation  471 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel)  674 Philo  59, 60, 270, 400, 452 philosophical theism  278 philosophy of religion, disabling  534–6 physicalism  472–3, 477, 479 physical pain  448, 470–5, 478, 480 physical sensations  478 physician-assisted suicide  519 The Physics (Aristotle)  389, 390 pilgrimage  498 Pinn, Anthony B.  642–3, 649, 650 Plantinga, Alvin  278, 398, 399, 429, 434, 453, 455 Plato  59, 388, 394, 465–6, 601 Platonic Atheism  488

 711

Platonic axiom  59–60 Platonism  4 plērōsis  235 Plotinian system  389 Plotinus  387, 391, 392, 395 “emanationist” system  390 evil as privation  430 matter as evil  389–91, 393 metaphysical system  389–91 political ethics  494–5, 499 political pluralism  349 Polkinghorne, John  324, 326, 461, 464, 465, 507 Porges, Heinrich  673 Porphyry  395 matter as evil  391–2 post-holocaust theology  557 post-modern context  380 power relations  634, 638 Powers, the  379–84 The Powers (Wink)  381–2 practical theodicies  6–7 prayer contemporary perspective  366–8 in Covid  374–6 for exorcism  356–8 sacramentality of  372–4 and suffering in monastic community  370–2 “the Preclusion Argument”  414 precondition for evil  233–4 predation  506 primordial kenosis  232 primordial nature (fitra)  602 privatio boni  4, 466 evil as  138, 151, 231, 430 privation  107, 124, 128, 132, 157, 188, 230–1, 235, 240, 367, 394, 506, 592, 595, 600, 685 privation (steresis)  389, 390, 430 problem of evil  1, 2, 6–9, 22–4, 29, 31, 32, 37, 38, 63, 85, 105, 137–9, 147, 150, 155, 159, 167, 173, 174, 212, 218, 222, 223, 225, 245, 281, 306 n.3, 307, 308, 310–13, 348, 397–404, 406–8, 438–9, 454, 479, 481, 482, 494, 495, 497, 499, 524–7, 530–4, 536, 555, 556, 559, 560, 562, 564, 589, 591, 594, 597, 600, 622, 623, 630–2, 666, 667, 670, 682, 684, 687 atheism  481–2 background  307–8

712

expectations–reality gap  401–3, 405–7 suffering and  90–1, 277–83 in creation  248–50 of suffering  25, 28, 29, 55, 136, 137, 245, 259–63, 306, 308, 310, 311, 326, 469, 498, 669, 671, 673 “The Problem of Evil” (Stump)  222 “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism” (Rowe)  409 “The Problem with Evil” (McFarland)  230 process theology  2, 251–2, 260, 263, 265, 319 process theism  436 process thought  263 process thinker  263, 265, 436 Proclus  387–9, 391, 394, 395 evil as uncaused  392–4 Proof of the Apostolic Teaching (Hick)  115 prophecy  62 Proslogion (Anselm)  278 prosperity of the wicked  28–9 Protestant  352, 353 Reformation  349 providence  120, 121, 134, 147–9, 151, 187, 238, 299, 307, 318, 323–5, 337, 343, 461 divine  147–9, 400, 592 and freedom  340–2 meanings of  339–40 and theodicy  342–3 and theodicy  461 Psalms  28, 247, 326, 497, 613, 646 civil rights freedom songs  659 “the desires of the heart”  493 of the poor  43 sufferings causes and treatment of  44–7 kinds of  41–4 theological evaluations  48–9 psychological suffering  520 psychology  620–1, 627–8 psychoneuroimmunology  658 punishment  24, 25, 64, 268, 269 suffering as  25–8 Purgatorio (Alighieri)  133–5 Qohelet’s questions  55–8 qualia  372, 473, 474, 476, 478 qualified passibility and impassibility  258, 259 quality-adjusted life years  517 quality of life  516–17 Qur’an  590–1, 593, 598, 601–5

SUBJECT INDEX

racism  533, 635, 636 radical divine transcendence  343 radical evil  182, 183 radical identification  651 radical transcendence  340, 341 Rahner, Karl  202, 204, 330–1, 333, 334 raison d’être  281 Ramsey, Michael  296 Raphael, Melissa  551, 557, 614 rational faith  9 Rauser, Randal  638 reality  401–7 rebirth. See saṃsāra reconciliation (confession)  362 recovering baptism  362 Red Cross  518, 519 Redeemer  315–18 redemption  253, 275, 288, 317, 324–6, 345, 346, 614–15 of animals suffering  508–9 reductio ad absurdum  417 reductive physicalism  473 Reformation  353 Reinhardt, Ad  685 relativism  485 religions  187, 623–4, 627 disabling philosophy of  534–6 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Kant)  161 religious coping (RCOPE)  624 religious epistemology  8–9 religious faith  7 renounce Satan  358 renunciation of the devil  358 repentant sinners  352–5 reproaches  92–3 The Republic (Plato)  388, 393, 404 restoration  362 resurrection  83, 278, 280, 281, 294, 312, 316–17, 326, 335 of Jesus of Nazareth  278, 280, 281 revelation  19–20, 64, 197, 274, 281–2 Revelations of Divine Love (Julian)  136, 139 The Revival of the Religious Sciences (Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm ald-ḍīn, al-Ghazālī)  596–7 Rgveda  561 Ricœur, Paul  186 critique of original sin  210–11 theodicy  211 evil  211–12 philosophical background  209–10

SUBJECT INDEX

suffering  211–12 The Symbolism of Evil  209–10 righteousness (tzedeqah)  63, 64 finding the paths of  497–500 God  64, 307, 309–10, 312–13 Ring of the Nibelung (Wagner)  668–9, 675 Rist, Johann  674 Ritchie, Jane  606 Ritchie, Sarah Lane  464 Rolston III, Holmes  467, 508 Rolston, Loren  508 Roman Canon  360 Roman Catholic  353, 356, 357 Rowe, William  409–17, 447 Rubenstein, Richard L.  550, 612, 613 Ruether, Rosemary Radford  615, 632–4 Rule of Benedict  362, 370–2 Rushd, Ibn  594 Russell, Robert  320 Sacks, Oliver  657 sacraments anointing of the sick (extreme unction)  362 baptism  356–9 confirmation  361–2 Eucharist  359–62 grace  152 marriage  363–4 naturalism  464 ordination (holy orders)  364–5 prayer and suffering  372–4 reconciliation (confession)  362 St. Athanasius  275 Saliers, Don  659 Śaṃkara  562, 563 Sāṃkhya-Yoga  562 saṃsāra  559, 562–3, 566, 570 sanctification  224 Sanders, John  398, 406 Sands, Kathleen M.  634, 639 Sarot, Marcel  258, 259 Sartorius, Ernst  291–3 Sarug, Israel  554, 555 Sasa-Jātaka  572 Satan  31–4, 32 n.2, 37, 69, 73, 78, 79, 86–7, 107, 313, 356, 358, 377–80, 382–3, 506, 547, 602, 667 Christ and  106 corrupting work  505 Schellenberg, John  525 Schleiermacher, Friedrich evil  164

 713

God’s relation to evil  165, 167 sin  164–5, 167 suffering  165–7 suffering  164 Schmemann, Alexander  358, 359 Schmidt, W. H.  25–6 Scholem, Gershom  183, 232 tsimtsum (contraction)  550–8 Schopenhauer, Arthur  669–72, 674, 675 Schreiner, Thomas  267, 268 Schulz, Hermann  290 Schumann, Robert  656 science  460, 464 Scripture  316, 425, 426 eschatological assertions in  330, 331 “Second-person Accounts and the Problem of Evil” (Stump)  223 Second Vatican Council  9–10, 204, 348–9 self-consciousness  674 self-surrender  272–3 sensible matter  390 sensus divinitatus  438 Sentence 20 (Porphyry)  391–2 Sentence 30 (Porphyry)  392 servanthood  635 servitude  635 sexism  533, 635, 636. See also racism; women sexual abuse  351 Shapira, Kalonymous Kalman  550–1 Sharma, Arvind  566 Sharma, Ursula  564 Shekina  232, 552 Shi’ite Islam  595, 601 Shirāzī, Șadr al-Din  592, 593 Shoah  549–52, 556–8 Shuger, Deborah  152, 153 Siddhartha. See Buddha Shakyamuni Sider, Ted  535 Siegfried (Wagner)  669 Simard, Suzanne  509 Siṃhamukhā  575 Simplicius  392, 395 soul as the cause of evil  394 sin  123–6, 151 of Adam and Eve  502, 504 baptism to remove  357, 358 and evil  164, 166 Julian and  137–9 Kierkegaard, Søren  169–70 Schleiermacher, Friedrich  163–5, 167 and suffering  133, 137, 139, 156

714

Sīnā, Ibn  592, 595, 600 Singing Revolution  661 Sisyphus, myth of  442, 443 situational meaning-making  621 and theodicy  623–4 skeptical theism  7–8, 408, 560, 564, 568 analogies, limitations, principles  412–13 appeals to analogy  412 argument for  413–14 evidential  413, 416, 417 in context  408–12 critic of  417 defenses of  413 dissatisfaction with  415–17 epistemic principle  413 evidential arguments from evil for  408–18 human cognitive limitations  412–13 justification  412–13 slavery, Black people  642–3, 645, 647–9 slave trade  642, 644 abolition of  644 Smet, Jonathan de  535 Smith, Mark S.  451 Smith, Yolanda  646 social cohesion, music for  655 Soelle, Dorothee  615 soft problem of consciousness  470 Sölle, Dorothee  202, 251, 423 Sollereder, Bethany N.  150 Sorabji, Richard  389 soul-making  241–3 theodicy  5–6, 113–16, 410, 435–6, 560, 562 Hick, John  214–17 souls  115, 119–20, 133–4, 389, 390, 395 as the cause of evil  394 Southgate, Christopher  504, 506, 507, 509 Speak, Dan  398 special divine action  461–4 specific-benefit policy  439 Spenta Mainyu  578, 579 Speyr, Adrienne von  197, 273 Spieckermann, Hermann  249, 253 Spiegel im Spiegel (Pärt)  662 Spinoza, Baruch  543, 547 Spirit (the Creator)  260, 315–17, 315 n.3, 318 compassionate  322 cosmic  317–21, 324 creative  321–4 dynamic and particular presence  323–6 liberating  322

SUBJECT INDEX

redemptive  317, 324–6 spiritual bodies  334 spiritual creations  578–9, 586 spirituals  646, 647 resurrection  674 self-consciousness  674 stallion analogy  457 Stangneth, Bettina  185 status reversal in God’s reign  72–4 Steel, Carlos  393 stigmatizing avoidance  525, 526, 529, 532 Strauss, David  290 Stringfellow, William  108 structural evil  533, 535, 639 Stump, Eleonore  8, 493, 494, 529, 534 Atonement  226 Dominican cognition  223, 225 evil  222–5 Franciscan cognition  223, 225 “The Mirror of Evil”  222 narrative theodicy  222–3 “The Problem of Evil”  222 “Second-person Accounts and the Problem of Evil”  223 story of Job  225 suffering  222–5 superficial and deep desires  225 Wandering in Darkness  223–6 subject/object dualism  633–4 subordination  633 subsistent by-product  393 substance  138–9 substance dualism (SD)  474–7, 479 substitution  19 suffering  242, 255–9, 302–4, 335, 338, 339, 343, 490–1, 510, 603–5 Alighieri, Dante  131–5 alleviation of  515 Augustine  369–70 Balthasar, Hans Urs von  195–7 Barth, Karl  188–9 bioethics and controlled drugs  520–1 critics of medicine and medicalization  522 mathematics of  516–18 biomedicine and  513 Black British Christians  644–7 in Black theology  642–7 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich  190–3 book of Job  31–8 Buddhism  569 Calvin, John  146–8

SUBJECT INDEX

Christian ethics  492–5, 497 and Christian life  466–8 community’s past and present  92–4 of creation  251–4 and cross  190 and death  578, 581–2 defined  514 disability  525, 527–32, 534, 535 end-of-life care for  519–20 endurance in  93, 96, 97, 99–100 evil and  96–100, 124–5, 128–9, 137, 189–91, 252–3, 345–6, 360, 364, 367, 420, 422 Christian response to  425–6 nature and role of God  422–4 role of humans  424–5 gender dysphoria  520 God  192–3, 199–200, 251–2, 258, 259, 261–5, 279 n.6, 293–4, 423, 507 growth related to  625–7 research on  627 in hell  133 Heschel, Abraham Joshua  175–6 Hick, John  215–16 Holocaust  611–15, 617 human innocence in  47 humanitarian aid  518–19 involvement of God in  47 in Islamic revelation  590–1 philosophy and theology  591–5 Jesus Christ  285–6, 288, 291, 294, 360, 651, 677, 679–80, 682–4 Jewish  612, 615, 617 Julian of Norwich  136–9 as karmic teleology  562–4 Kierkegaard, Søren  169–71 kinds of  41–4 leading to growth  621–2 love’s entanglement with  493–5 Luther, Martin, theology of  141–4 meaning-making model  621–2 and meaning of life  440, 442–4, 446–8 memory of  211 Metz, Johann Baptist  205–7 in monastic community, prayer and  370–2 moral thinking about  492–5 music therapy for  656–8 Muslims beliefs about  608–9 through end-of-life  605–7 natural evils and  124–5 nature of  511–13

 715

in bioethics  514–16 pain and  315, 318–19, 322, 404–5, 416, 417, 483, 484, 515 in paradise  135 prayer for  366–8 and predation  506 problem of (see problem, of suffering) problem of evil and  90–1, 277–83 in creation  248–50 as punishment  25–8 in purgatory  133–4 quality of person’s life and  516–17 question of  204, 206, 207 rational reflection on  512 reality of  94–6 religious views of  623–4, 628 sacramentality of  372–4 Schleiermacher, Friedrich  164–7 and self  87–90 sin and  133, 137, 139, 156 theodical struggles to reconcile  622 of Trinity  271–5 visual art (see visual art) Weil, Simone  178–9 women  637 suffering community  368–9 suffering servant  634 summum bonum  430 Sunnite Islam  594 Sunni theology  601 superficial desires  225 supramundane Fall  238 Svendsen, Lars  443 Swinburne, Richard  230, 241, 243, 298, 301, 432, 476, 526–9 Swinton, J.  425, 426 The Symbolism of Evil (Ricœur)  209–10 symbols of evil  210 Synoptic Gospels  332, 333 Syphilis, Tuskegee  529 systemic injustices  634, 638 systemic oppressions of women  637 systemic racism  651 Tagore, Rabindranath  567 Talmudic tsimtsum  552, 554 Tannhäuser (Wagner)  667–8 tapeinosis  292, 292 n.30, 293 Tavener, John  664–5 Taylor, Kevin  197 Taylor, Richard  442, 443 Taymiyyah, Ibn  594, 600, 602 tentatio, Anfechtung  143

716

Terrell, JoAnne Marie  651 tertium quid  301 Tertullian  59, 631 Thankfulness for Slavery  644 Theaetetus (Plato)  388 theism anti-  160 Black Christian  648 Christian  481–2, 488 classical Christian  146 dipolar  263 free-will theodicy and  437–9 humanocentric  648, 649 minimalist  403 Open (see Open Theism) philosophical  278 skeptical (see skeptical theism) theodicy and  437–9 Theistic Minimalism  406, 407 defense of  400–3 hypothesis of  400 theodicy  1, 28, 50, 229, 280–2, 337, 462, 464, 620–1 book of Job  36–9 Buddhism  573–4 critiques of  421–2 emerging areas and future research  627–8 free-will, Augustine  429–32 genuine  5–6 karmic  562–6 meanings of  338–9 providence and  342–3 and middle knowledge  121 Molinist  432–4 natural law  5 Open Theism  435–7 practical  6–7 providence and  461 rejection of  419–22 and religious epistemology  8–9 situational meaning-making and  623–4 soul-making  5–6 theoretical  6 theodicy problem  277 cross to solve  190–2 Theo-Drama (Balthasar)  195, 197–8, 272 theologia crucis  190, 192, 199, 281, 283 theologian of glory  142 theologian of the cross  142 Theological Minimalism  400 theological strategies  6–7

SUBJECT INDEX

theology analytic, androcentrism in  638–9 as biography, Moltmann, Jürgen  199 Black (see Black theology) of suffering  141–4 White supremacy as a great sin  534 theology hope  650 Theology of Hope (Moltmann)  199, 200 Theophilus of Antioch  502 theoprepes  59 theoretical theodicy  6. See also practical theodicies Third Symphony (Górecki)  664 thirst  569 thirteen attributes  19 Thomas, R. S.  282 Thomasius, Gottfried  272, 292, 293 Thomism  222, 223, 324, 341 tikkun (restoration)  551, 555, 557, 558 Tilley, Terrence  277, 533 tintinnabulation (tintinnabuli)  662, 664 Tolkien, J. R. R.  109 Torah  64–5 Torrance, Iain  633–4 totalitarianism  182–3 total pain  513 totus Christus  152, 369 Townes, Emilie M.  634–5 traditional medical ethics  517 Trakakis, Nick  7, 565 trauma  513 Tree of Knowledge  239, 239 n.52, 249 trial and crucifixion (John 18-19)  78, 81–2 tribulation  90, 103 Trinitarian doctrine  195–6, 200 history of God with the world  200–1 Trinitarian-pneumatology of creation  316–17 Trinity  196, 201, 220, 221, 232, 234–5, 240, 263–4, 279 n.6, 293, 466 suffering of  271–5 The Trinity (Augustine)  125 Tristan and Isolde (Wagner)  669–75 Tristan chord  674, 675 triune God  234–5, 265, 273, 317, 322 of love  234 true church  353 Trump, Donald  434, 435, 632 Tsevat, Matitiahu  37 tsimtsum (contraction) after Shoah  556–8 from concentration to withdrawal  552–4 creation myth  557

SUBJECT INDEX

and evil  554–6 Luria, Isaac  552–4, 556, 557 Lurianic  553, 554, 556, 557 Scholem, Gershom  550–8 traces of  549–52 Tübingen Christology  289–90 twelvefold chain of conditioned arising  571–2 Twilight of the Gods (Götterdämmerung, Wagner)  669, 672 Two-Nature Christology (TNC)  297–8, 300, 301 Tzimtzum doctrine  202 Unde malum  229, 243, 247, 249–50 unenlightened mind of ignorance  574 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum  618 universe  449–56 creation of  449–56 non-existence of  456–7 unrighteousness  65, 308, 309. See also righteousness (tzedeqah) Upaniṣads  561 utilitarian ethics  491 utilitarianism  183, 485, 511, 515–517 Valk, Heinz  661 The Valkyrie (Wagner)  668–9 van Buren, Paul  616 Vanhoozer, Kevin J.  423–4 Van Inwagen, Peter  215, 525 Veda  561, 562 Vedāntic philosophical theology  562 Vedic cosmos  561 vegetative state  519, 520 vicarious self  88 vicarious suffering  164 Vidēvdād ceremony  578 vigilance  572 Vigna, Cesare  656 vijñāna (panentheistic vision)  566 violence, church and  348–51 Virgil (poet)  132, 133 virtue  444–6 visible church  353 visual art crucifixion  677–80 Dark Adaptation (Hamilton)  685–7 Flagellation of Christ  680–2 The Isenheim Altarpiece (Nikolaus and Grünewald)  682–5

 717

Vital, Chayyim  553–5 Vitale, Vince  492–5, 497, 499 voluntary self-limitation  453 Von Rad, Gerhard  19, 24, 239 n.48 Wagner, Richard antisemitism  676 The Flying Dutchman  667 idea of suffering with Christ  674 Jesus of Nazareth  668–9, 672 letter to Ludwig II  673–4 Lohengrin  667–8, 675 The Mastersingers of Nuremberg  676 Parsifal  666, 669, 671–5 Ring of the Nibelung  668–9, 675 Siegfried  669 as suffering man  675–6 Tannhäuser  667–8 as theologian  666–73 Tristan and Isolde  669–75 The Valkyrie  668–9 Walton, Kendall  404 Wandering in Darkness (Stump)  223–6 Ward, Keith  324, 438 wars of religion  349 Webb, Stephen  504 Weber, Max, Karma doctrine  563 Weil, Simone affliction  178–81 evil  178 “The Love of God and Affliction”  179–81 suffering  178–9 Weinandy, Thomas  257, 276, 285–6, 293–4, 301, 303, 304 Wesendonck, Mathilde  670, 672 Wesley, John  438 Westermann, Claus  19 n.27, 21 n.31, 236 n.38, 451 Weston, Frank  301 Whiteness  643 White women  635 Widmer, Michael  18 Wielenberg, Erik  486, 487 Wiesel, Elie  199, 206, 557, 614 Wildman, Wesley  463 Wilkinson, Loren  508 Williams, Daniel Day  255 Williams, Delores S.  636, 637 Williams, Rowan  339, 467 Williams, Scott  531 Wink, Walter  381–2 Winter, Timothy  600, 601

718

Wolf, Susan  440–2, 446 Wolff, Hans-Walter  16 Wolterstorff, Nick  528 women African American  634–6 Black  635–6 as evil  632–4 intersectionality  634–7 servanthood and servitude  635 suffering  635, 637 systemic oppressions  637 White  635 Wood, Frances E.  635 World Council of Churches (WCC)  347 n.2, 354 worship  152–3 woundedness and healing  334–5 wounds of the crucified Christ  680 wrath of God  17, 137–9, 267–71 history of  65–6 of lamb  63–5 of Yahweh  59–63 Wykstra, Stephen  411, 413 Yahweh  377, 378 wrath of  59–63

SUBJECT INDEX

Yasna  578 ceremony  584 Yasna 29  581–2 Yasna 35.2  586 YHWH (Yahweh)  16–21, 24, 26, 27, 37, 43, 45–7, 50–5, 57 Yogasūtra (Patañjali)  562 Zarathushtra  577, 578, 581, 582, 584–6 Zeus  397, 407 Zimzum  231–3, 243 zombies  473 Zoroastrian cosmology  580 Zoroastrianism Ahuna Vairya prayer  584–6 Ahura Mazdā’s creation  578–82 Avestan words  583–4 evil  580–2 fighting  583–8 healing life  586–7 health approach  587 mantras for healing life  586–7 sources  577–8 suffering and death  578, 580–1 Zoroastrian medicine  587 Zwingli  286

SCRIPTURE INDEX

Old Testament (OT) Gen. 1 33 1:1 246 1:2 246, 248 1:6-8 504 1:22-28 250 1:26  234 n.27, 241, 247 1:27 234 1:28 237 1:30 502 1:31  85, 247, 321, 327, 462 2:1-3 254 2:3 250 2:7 60 2:16-17 47 2:17 249, 541 3:2-5 44 3:4-5 47 3:9 252 3:14-19 113, 250, 541 3:15 106 3:16 631 3:22 38 4:1 239 4:7 174 6–9 48 7:22 60 8:21 61, 174 9:16-17 260 12:1-3 306 18:20-32 541 22 33 22:1-19 541 30:2 60 32 334 32:25-31 253 35:8 44 39:19 60 40:5-19 44 44:5 44 47:9 516 49:6 60

49:7 49:11

60 62 n.10

Exod. 2:23-25 14 3:3 13 3:7-8 14 3:14 251 4:10 13 4:14 60, 61 4:22 15 6:9 512 7–12 41, 461 15:7 60 15:8 61 15:21 659 18 13 25:1–27:19 552 n.26 25:8 21 30–32 14 32:7 15 32:8 15, 377 32:10 15, 61 32:11-13 14 32:13 16 32:19 60 32:25-28 17 32:30 18 32:32 18 32:34-35 17 33:11 13 33:12-23 14 33:12–34:9 61 34:6 17 34:6-7 19 34:9 14 34:29 13, 18 34:33 19 Lev. 5:1-6 45 10:6 61 13:2-3 44 13–15 41 25 44 n.11

26:14-33

41

Num. 1:53 4:15-20 5:11 11:33 12:8 12:10-14 14:1-22 14:1-24 14:12 14:36 17:11-13 20:1-13 22–24 22:22-23 25 25:7-9

61 62 n.4 46 42 n.9 13 42 n.9 14 n.6 20 15 n.9 42 n.9 42 n.9 52 46 86 59 42 n.9

Deut. 1:34-37 3:22-28 4:12 4:21-22 4:21-24 4:34 5:9 10:14 11:13-17 11:26-27 18:9-11 24:16 28:15-44 30:11-20 31:29 32:4 32:17 32:21 34:10-12

20 20 57 20 61 15 61 506 542 542 44 27 41 174 174 176 377 62 13

Josh. 6:20-21 7:19 24

658 28 51

720

SCRIPTURE INDEX

Judg. 4:4-5 44 9:13 62 11 53 17:1-3 46 19 53 20:26 45 1 Sam. 1–11 2:1 2:30 4 6 6:17-18 9:3-10 10 12 12:13 13:13-14 15:22-26 16:13 16:14 16:15-16 17 19 22 28 28:8-19 29:4

51 660 53 53 53 62 n.4 44 53 51 53 53 53 363 n.45 377 656 53 53 53 44 44 86

2 Sam. 2:13 6 6:1-11 7 11–20 12:5 12:7-14 12:25 17 19:23 22 24:1 24:10-14 24:10-16

53 53 62 n.4 54 51 60 45 62 n.10 52 86 53 53 53 41

1 Kings 14:1-3 44 15:5 54 18–21 54 22:21-23 377 n.1

2 Kings 4:29-35 46 5:10-14 46 21:10-16 54 24:1-4 27 1 Chron. 21:1

86, 377

2 Chron. 11:15 21:8 33–35 35:3

377 n.1 53 56 44

Ezra 9:6-15

45

Neh. 5:1-13 8:1 9:6-37

44 n.11 44 45

Job book  6, 22, 31–9, 44, 47, 146, 160, 170, 211, 223, 402, 542–3 1–2 86, 461 1:1 32 1:5 32 1:6-12 377 1:7 32 1:9 32 1:22 32 2:1-7 377 2:3 33 2:5 33 2:10 33 3:8 377 n.3 3:24 34 6:24 34 7:12 377 n.2 7:21 53 9:8 377 n.2 9:13 377 n.3, 505 9:21-22 34 9:24 176 14:3 57 14:13 63 19:23-27 34

21:17-18 28 21:30 60 24 29 26:12-13 377 n.3 30:19-21 34 33:19-22 42 38 22 38–41 506 38–42 312 38:2 35 38:4 35 38:6-11 505 n.24 38:8-12 377 n.2 38:35-37 35 40:4 35 40:5 35 41:1-34 377 n.3 42:2-6 35 42:3 36 42:7 36 42:8-9 36 42:11 36 Ps. book 40–9 2:4 176 2:5 60 3 45 3:2-3 47 3:6-7 49 4:6 49, 491 n.8 6 42 n.6, 45, 63 6:6-8 42 6:11 46 7 46 7:4-6 41, 46 7:6 60 7:10 62 8 48, 66 9–10 41, 43, 46 10:3-11 46 11:7 49 12:6 236 14 45 17 46 17:15 49 18:15 61, 505 n.24 18:30 236 19:7 236 20:5 61 22  46, 67 n.2, 70 n.13

SCRIPTURE INDEX

22:1 70 22:1-3 42, 44 22:1-22 42 n.6 22:4-6 49 23 49 23:3 490 24:1 506 26 46 27:1-3 49 29:3-4 377 n.2, 505 n.24 29:10 377 n.2 31:1-4 48 33:10 660 34:14 174 37 41, 43, 46, 63 38 42 n.6, 45 38:4-9 42 38:4-11 41 39 41, 44, 46, 47 40:7 18 n.19 41:7 42 41:8-10 43 42 46 42:6 44 43 43, 46 43:10-12 44 44 42, 43, 46, 47 44:18-27 43 49 43 51 42 n.6, 45 51:2 362 55 42 n.6, 46 55:13-15 43 56 45 59 42 n.6 63 45 63:10 46 64 45 66 42 66:10-12 43 68:2-4 46 n.22 68:22-24 46 n.22 68:39-31 46 n.22 69 42 n.6, 44 69:8-9 47 69:28 18 71:1-3 48 73  29, 41, 43, 44, 46, 47, 63 74 42 74:10 377 n.2 74:10-13 505 n.24

 721

74:13 356, 377 n.2 74:13-14 377 n.3 77:16 377 n.2 78 45 78:49 60 78:58 62 80:8-13 62 82:1-7 377 n.1 83:3 189 88 42 n.6, 44, 46 88:1-3 42 88:4-8 42 88:7-9 47 88:15-18 42, 47 88:16 271 89 42, 46, 47 89:5-10 377 n.1 89:9-10  377 n.3, 505 n.24 90 41, 44, 46, 47 90:8 45 90:11 270 91 46 91:1-8 48 96:8-13 43 102 41, 42 n.6 103:14 174 104:3-9 505 n.24 104:6 377 n.2 105:7-45 48 106 42, 45 106:9 505 n.24 106:23 16 106:37 377 106:43-47 43 107:4-32 41 109 42–6, 46 115:1-8 61 135:1-14 48 136:1 247 137 42 139:7-12 48 139:16 18 140–143 42 n.6 143 45 143:2 57 143:12 46 Prov. 1:1-7 5:3-5 6:12-14 8

38 632 46 38

8:27-29 8:29 25:21-22 31 31:10

505 n.24 377 n.2 74 n.29 631 632

Eccles./Qoh. book  22, 44, 47, 50–8 1:1 55 1:12–2:26 55 1:14 56 1:15 56 1:37 52 3:1-8 56 3:11 56 3:19-21 56 3:26 52 4:20 52 4:21 52 5:6 52 6:12 52 7:8 52 7:15-18 56 7:19 57 8:1 57 8:1-6 52 8:12 57 8:12-14 56 8:14 52 9:1 56 9:2-3 56 9:10 56 9:11 57 10:8-9 57 11:5 56 12:3 41 12:8 57 12:11 57 12:12 57 12:13 57 12:13-14 57 15 52 17 56 21 52 24:10 53 26:6-7 52 32:51 51 Isa. 1:21-24 3:14 5:1

25 57 62 n.10

722

5:2 62 n.10 5:3 63 5:5-6 269 n.13 5:7 63 5:8-10 25 5:8-23 63 5:16 63 5:24 63 5:25 62 5:26-30 63 7:5-8 25 9:19 60 10:6 60 10:15-19 61 11:4 61 14:12-23 378 n.10 18 68–4 22:12-14 25–6 24:21 377 n.1 25:6-9 328 26:19 68 n.4 27:1 377 n.3 28:15-16 26 29:18 68 n.4 30:20 176 30:77 377 n.3 35:5-6 68 n.4, 334 38:1-3 42 45:7 23, 24, 461, 506, 506 n.32 45:9 24 48:9-11 61 49:6 90 n.17 51:9-10 377 n.3 51:9-11 377 n.2 52:13–53:12 86 53:4 303 53:4-6 20–1, 634 53:10 21 55:8-9 408 n.1 61:1 68 n.4 61:1-2 69 65:17 85 n.4 Jer. 4–5 41, 42 8:19-23 22 n.2 10:10 62 11:18-23 22 n.2 12:1-2 28 12:1-6 22 n.2 12:7-11 261 n.40

SCRIPTURE INDEX

14:2-10 14:13-22 15:10-21 17:14-18 18:11 20:7-13 21:5 25:12-29 26:13 29:10-14 31:20 31:29-30 45:3-5 51:7 51:8-10

42 n.9 61 22 n.2 22 n.2 175 22 n.2 62 66 175 491 n.7 261 n.40 27 261 n.40 61 61

Lam. 1–2 1:10-15 1:18 2:5-8 2:16 4:4-5 4:9-10 5:1-10 5:7 5:11

41, 42 42 27 42 42 42 42 42 27 42

Ezek. 2:9-10 13:4ff. 16:38 18 20:5 20:25 23:25 23:35 28:1-19 29:3-5 33:1ff. 34:1-16 36:6 39:25 Dan. 8:6-8 10:3-20

18 n.19 19 61 27 27 24 61 65 378 n.10 377 n.3 19 19 65 61

61 377 n.1

Hosea 10:8 72 n.23 11:5-7 17 11:8-9 16 11:11 17

Amos 1:3–2:12 3:6 3:10-11 5:11-12 5:16 6:4-7 7:16-17 8:4-6

41 23, 24 26 44 n.11 26 44 n.11 26 44 n.11

Jon. 3:8-9

61

Mic. 2:1-4

26

Nah. 1:4

377

Hab. 1:4 1:13 2:2-3 3:8, 15 3:8-15

153 29 96 377 n.2 505 n.24

Zeph. 1:15 1:18 2:8-9 3:15

60 60, 65 26 67

Zech. 1:4 1:18 3:1-2 3:4 5:1-4 7:3-5 8:2 8:18-19

25 61 86, 377 53 18 n.19 42 61 45

Mal. 2:17 3:16

29, 174 18 n.19

New Testament (NT) Matt. 3:7 63 3:13-17 359 n.14 4:1-11 69, 378 4:3 382 n.25 5:1–7:27 69

SCRIPTURE INDEX

5:3-12 72 5:13-16 75 5:17-20 68 5:22 64 5:37  378, 382, 382 n.25 5:38-48 74 5:44 370 5:45 74 6:9-13 73 6:12 333 6:13 75 6:14-15 73 6:21-22 382 6:25-34 73 6:34 73 7:1-5 496 n.25 7:7 366 7:11 73 7:12 74 8:1-4 70 8:11-12 63 8:17 634 8:28-34 70 8:30-32 357 n.6 9:10 198 9:20-22 70 9:27-31 64 10:15 63, 64 10:28 64 10:40-42 73 n.25 10:41 68 n.4 11:19 68 11:27 273, 289 11:45 68 n.4 12:37 68 n.4 12:39-41 63 15:17-20 636 16:21-28 69 n.12 17:22-23 69 n.12 18:9 64 18:15-35 73 18:20 684 18:34-35 64 19:6 364 n.52 19:17 250 19:28 332 20:17-19 69 n.12 21:33-46 64 22:1-7 64 22:30 86 23:33 64 23:35 63

 723

23:37-39 24:2 24:36-44 24:45-51 25:31-33 25:31-46 25:42 25:46 26:14-16 26:24 26:28 26:29 27:3-19 27:26 27:43 27:46 27:52-53 29–30 37–39 38 43–45

68 63 69 n.11 64 333 73, 332–3 378 68 n.4 70 n.16 359 n.20 68, 359 n.18 359 n.19 70 n.16 680 67 274, 312, 511 357 n.3 64 63 63 63

Mark book 1:9-11 1:12-13 1:21-28 1:24 1:40-45 2:15 3:5 3:19 4:31 5:1-20 5:11 5:24-34 6:3 8:31 9:12 9:30-32 10:9 10:13-16 10:17-22 10:18 10:32-34 12:25 13:19 13:31-32 13:32-36 14:10-11 14:21 14:24 14:25

69–71 359 n.14 69 69 75 70 198 63 70 n.16 382 70 357 70 198 69 n.12 253 69 n.12 364 n.52 64 71 250 69 n.12 86 93 333 69 n.11 70 n.16 359 n.20 68, 359 n.18 359 n.19

14:34 14:35-36 15:15 15:31-32

672 n.34 253 680 67

Luke 1:1–9:50 74 n.30 1:46-55 72, 659 1:67 659 2:13 659 2:28 659 3:7 63 3:21-22 359 n.14 4:1-12 378 4:1-13 69 4:2 378 n.9 4:5-6 379 4:16-21 299 n.5 4:16-30 69 6:20-26 72 6:22 75 6:27-36 74 7:34-36 198 8:26-39 70 8:32-33 357 n.6 9:22-27 69 n.12 9:35 273 9:43-45 69 n.12 9:56 288 11:2-4 73 11:13 73 12:16-21 72 n.24 12:22-34 73 12:49 68 12:57-59 496 n.25 13 378 n.6 13:1-5 74 n.32, 338 n.8 13:31-35 68, 72 15:11-32 252 16:19-31 72 n.24 17:22-37 69 n.11 18:14 84 18:31-34 69 n.12 19:41-44 72 20:36 86 21:23 63 22:20 68, 359 n.18 22:24-30 70 22:31 378 n.8 22:34 359 n.22 22:40 73 22:44 673

724

22:46 23:27-31 23:43 24:26 24:29-31 24:36-47

SCRIPTURE INDEX

73 72 68, 72 68 n.3 198 634 n.13

John book 76–83 1:1-3 251 1:3 246 1:5 76 1:14 76, 80, 299 1:18 76 1:29-34 359 n.14 1:41 363 n.46 2–12 82 2:10 82 2:11 80 2:12-17 64 3:8 288 3:13 288 3:16  79, 333, 634, 669 3:36 63 4:6 198 4:14 82 5:27 289 7:16-17 382 n.24 8:44 78 9:1-3 74 n.32 9:1,2ff. 338 9:3 461 9:5 80 10:10 378 10:10-11 82, 336 11:4 80 11:40 80 11:22 64 11:33 81 11:35 81 12:2 198 12:27 81, 672 n.34 12:27-28 254, 672 n.34 12:28 80 12:31 78, 313, 378, 382, 382 n.25 13–17 77–80 13:21 82, 359 n.20, 360 n.23 13:27 359 n.22 13:34 240

14–16 14:1 14:6 14:11 14:26 14:30 15:13 16:11 16:12-13 16:33 17 17:5 17:24 18–19 19:1 19:25-27 20–21 20:25 20:27 20:31 21:19 21:24

79 360 n.23 76 382 383 378 81 379 n.14, 382 383 n.27 93 76, 240 301 166 81–2 680 78 77, 83 334 334 79 80 329

Acts 1:11 68 n.5 1:18-20 70 n.16 2:22-24 64 2:32-36 68 n.3 3:13-23 64 3:15 288 4:27-28 147 7:54–8:3 88 8:32 634 9:1-2 88 9:22 363 10:36 377 10:38 299 11:19 93 13–21 88 14:16 64 15:28 383 17:30-31 64 19–20 88 22:1-5 88 26:4-12 88 26:17 379 33–40 64 Rom. 1:1-4 1:3 1:5

309 288 308

1:17-18 64 1:18 59, 65, 308 1:18-32 66, 309 1:20 308 1:24 268 1:26 268 1:28 268 1:28-32 461 2:4 309 2:5 59, 65, 310 2:5-6 267 2:5-16 64 2:7 268 2:8 65, 267, 268 2:8-9 65 2:12-16 309 2:16 64 3:21-25 310 3:25-26 310 4:15 64 4:17 246, 452 5:3 84, 93, 93 n.10 5:3-5a 335 5:4 151 n.11 5:9 64 5:15-17 308 5:18 309 6:3-11 89 n.14 6:4 85 n.4 6:7-23 308 7:7-11 65 7:12 65, 308 7:14 65 8:1-2 333 8:11 316 8:18 88, 91, 310 8:18-23 326 8:18-25 383 n.29 8:18-30 307 8:19-22 260 n.37 8:20-21 87, 253, 383 8:21-22 675 8:22 252, 253 8:25 189 8:30 431 8:31-39 313 8:34 89 8:35 88, 89 8:36 89 8:38 378 n.7 8:38-39 86, 181

SCRIPTURE INDEX

9:14-21 52 9:20 24 11:32 310 11:33 308 11:36 236 12:1-3 490 12:2 236, 308 12:4-5 684 12:9 365 n.55 12:12 93 n.10 12:17 74, 362 n.36 12:17-21 74 12:19-21 66, 74 n.29 12:21 490 12:32 308 13:1 378 n.7 13:1-7 66 15:5-7 684 15:17-29 88 16 59 16:19-20 86 16:20 313 1 Cor. 1:4 93 1:11 90 1:23 679 2:6 378 n.7 2:8 288, 378 n.7 3:17 65 4:9-13 88 n.12 4:10 89 5:5 87 6:3 66, 86 7:5 87 7:31 90 8:4-5 87 n.11 8:5 378 n.7 8:6 245, 251 10:1-13 65 10:20-21 87 n.11 10:22 65 10:26 506 n.30 11:3 631 11:10 86 12:12-27 89 12:26 89 13:12 327 15:9 88 15:12-19 91 15:14 513 15:20 334 15:21-24 326

 725

15:24-28 86 n.8 15:28 87, 201, 203, 466 15:32 91 15:47 288 15:51-57 86, 90 15:52-54 326 2 Cor. 1:5 89 1:6 89, 93 1:8 88 n.12 1:17 89 2:9-11  378 n.9, 379 n.13 2:11 87, 378 n.8 3:18 244 4:4 86, 378 n.7, 379 4:11 89 4:16 244 4:17 171 5:17  85 n.4, 90, 187 5:19-21 68 6:4 93 n.10 6:4-10 88 n.12 6:18 250 8:1-5 69 n.8 8:2 69 n.8 8:9 301 10:3-5 379 n.13 11:3 378 n.8, n.9 11:14 86, 87 11:23-32 88 12:7 86, 87 12:10 88 n.12 13:4 288 15:24 378 n.7 Gal. 1:4 90 1:8 86 1:13-14 88 1:22-23 88 2:20 89 4:3 378 n.7 4:8-9 378 n.7 5:22-23 444 5:22–6:2 68 Eph. 1:10

313, 383

1:20-22 86 n.8 1:21 87, 378 n.7 2:2 86, 87, 90, 378 n.7, 379 3:10  87, 89, 378 n.7 4:13 236 4:18 254 4:26-27 379 n.13 4:27 86 5:6 65 5:22 631 6:10-17 379 n.13 6:11-12 86, 87 6:11-17 87 6:12 378 n.7 Phil. 1:23 1:27-30 1:29 2:6 2:6-7 2:6-8 2:6-11 2:7 2:8 2:10 2:13 2:17 3:4-6 3:10 3:12

85 67 88 n.12 316 300 239 n.51 71 287 292 313 243 89 88 89 236

Col. 1:3-4 1:13 1:15 1:15-17 1:15-18 1:15-20 1:16 1:23 1:24 1:28 2:9 2:14-15 2:18 3:6

91 379 316 302 251 383 n.29 87, 378 n.7 89 84, 85, 90 236 289 379 n.14 86 65

1 Thess. 1:6 1:10

93 64

726

SCRIPTURE INDEX

2:13-16 64 2:14-16 67 2:16 65 2:18 87 3:5 378 n.9, 382 n.25 4:13-17 326 2 Thess. 1:4 93 n.10 2:1-12  64, 87 1 Tim. 1:13-15 1:20 2:4 2:12 3:6-11 3:7 4:1 5:15

88 87 378 n.10 631 86, 378 n.10 378 n.9 87 n.11 87

2 Tim. 2:13 2:26 4:6

458 86, 378 89

Heb. book 1:2 1:3 2:7 2:9 2:10 2:14 2:16 3:6 3:14 4:1 4:2 4:14-16 5:8 5:9 6:1 6:11 6:11-12 6:12 6:13-15 7:11 7:16 7:19 7:25

92–101 96, 236, 251 302, 316 66 97, 301 97, 242 97, 379 97 97 97 97 99 97 95, 242 97 97 100 97 99 99 236 97 97 97

9:9 97 9:14 97 9:26 96 10:1 97 10:14 98 10:20 97 10:22 97 10:23-25 97 10:25 96 10:32-36 92, 93, 97, 100 10:35-36 96 10:35-38 97 10:37 96 10:38 99 10:39 97 11 99, 100 11:1 298 11:3 246, 452 11:4 99 11:7 99 11:12 99 11:13 97, 99 11:16 97 11:21 99 11:22 99 11:24-28 99 11:26 97 11:32 92 n.2 11:32-38 94 11:35b-38 95 11:37 99 11:39-40 97 12 98 12:2 135, 682 12:2-3 97, 99 12:3 99 12:5-13 98 12:7 96 12:9 98 12:10 98 12:11 97 12:28 97 13:3 93 13:7 99 13:13 97 13:14 96 13:14-16 97 James 1:3 1:25

93 n.10 236

4:7

378 n.9

1 Pet. 2:20 2:22 3:8 3:9 3:15 3:19 4:12-19 5:8

93 n.10 634 684 362 n.36 329 316 75 378

2 Pet. 3:5

452

1 John 2:18 2:26-27 3:2 3:8 4:11 4:16 5:19

107 383 n.27 166 379 n.14 684 422 379

2 John 1:7

107

Jude 1:6

378 n.10

Rev. book 102–12 1:1–3:22 103–4 12 106–7, 378 n.7 12:1–22:5 106–9 12:9f. 328, 378 n.10, 379 13 107–8, 379 6:16 64 14:8 379 n.12 15:6–16:21 66 17:5 379 n.12 18 379 n.12 20:11-15 64 20:12-13 333 21:1 326, 327, 378 n.7, 669 21:1-4 335 21:5-7 336 21:8 64 21:22-27 336 1:9 93 n.10

SCRIPTURE INDEX

Apocrypha Wisd. of Sol. 2 2:13-18 2 Macc. 7:28 7:33-36

68 67 n.2 246, 451 332

Non-Christian Scriptures Quran [Q] book 68 n.5, 589–93 2:30 590, 602 2:155 6 n.23 2:155-157 603 3:104 603 3:180 590 6:165 6 n.23 7:11-18 602 7:19-25 603 7:172-3 602 8:55 590 11:7 591 n.7 15:28-40 602 15:85 602 18:7 591 n.7

 727

25:34 27:88 32:7 37:103-107 38:27 45:23 51:56 67:2 89:15-16 90:4 93:1-11 94:1-8 95:4

590 602 602 591 n.8 590 603 602 6 n.23 591 n.9 603 603 n. 12 604 n. 15 602

Yasna [Y] 10.9 587 19.1-4 585 27.1 584 29 581 29.5 582 29.9 582 29.10 582 31.8 579 31.19 586 34.5 585

35–41 35.2 39.1 44.2 44.3 45.4 47.2

578 n.5 586 582 586 579 579 579

Vidēvdād [V] 7.44 587 16.7 587 19.5 586 20.4 586 22.1-2 583 Yašt [Yt] 3.7 7.5 8.2 8.47 10.38 17.16 19.16 19.18 19.80-81

583 586 586 586 582 579 579 579 585

728

729

730

731

732

733

734