Teaching theodicy: a sketch

Tomorrow I will be guest-lecturing on theodicy for a colleague’s class on pastoral care and theology. Knowing the problem of evil to be one of those prevalent digressions in the theology classroom, I agreed to teach a whole unit on theodicy some years ago with great reluctance. But it has since emerged as one of my favourite topics to teach, blending the theological and the pastoral as it does. Particular suffering of the sort encountered in pastoral ministry problematises theology’s preference for neat answers.

The best resource I have found for teaching theodicy is Rowan Williams’ essay “Redeeming Sorrows” (found in Wrestling with Angels). While I have only once set this essay as reading for a class, I always keep it in mind while teaching on suffering. In the background of tomorrow’s class will be his line from the essay, “I suspect that it is more religiously imperative to be worried by evil than to put it into a satisfactory theoretical context, if only because such a worry keeps obstinately open the perspective of the sufferer” (p. 272). Throughout, Williams is attentive to the “uncomfortable question of who theodicy is being done for” (p. 271).

Together with Williams, my classes on theodicy tend to be a mix of Simone Weil, Marilyn McCord Adams, John Hick, James Cone, Sarah Coakley, G. K. Chesterton, and lots and lots of Augustine. A serious theological discussion about theodicy will always dip into Dostoyevsky, reckon with memories of tsunamis, and include the silence of unspoken personal horrors, but I find that the emerging discussion always tends towards certain important emphases. I’ve attempted to lay them out here:

• Suffering is mysterious, which is why we should pay attention to it and talk about it as much as possible
• Evil is [sic] actually evil, which is why it is never covertly good
• God is not a finite agent, which is why we cannot expect God to respond to suffering the way we would
• Christ’s suffering is real and particular, which is why it does not provide a general principle that confers meaning upon all experiences of suffering
• In theodicy, the temptation is to justify God to ourselves, which is why we need to question our motives in attempting to provide a theodicy
• Christianity does not provide a theoretical answer to the problem of evil,  but particular responses to the experience of suffering
• The life of prayer is the best stimulant of compassion, which is why Christians pray “deliver us from evil”

Marilyn McCord Adams and horrendous evils

by Kim Fabricius

Marilyn McCord Adams presented the most recent Theological Society Lecture in Swansea, on the theme “Horrendous Evils: A Theological Problem of Evil and Its Solution.” After the lecture, Kim gave the following vote of thanks.

When Nigel told me that Marilyn McCord Adams was coming to lecture I jumped for joy. Firstly, because we were going to get something we haven’t had here for a while – a proper English accent. And then I thought: what’s the topic? As a medievalist who knows that Occam’s razor is not a product from Gillette, perhaps she would do the sums on how many angels can fit on the head of a pin – or at least show us that this question is not the idiotic one it’s proverbially taken to be. Or as a member of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement and a critic of the Windsor Report, perhaps Professor Adams would lecture on human sexuality, or Anglican polity – with a title like, say, “A Dog Collar’s Breakfast”. But as one who devoured her books Horrendous Evils and Christ and Horrors, my money was on the theme of theodicy, and it turns out that I won that little bet with myself – and I dare say that none of us here tonight feels short-changed either!

Mind, I wondered if Professor Adams knew just how away she was playing, lecturing at the university where the inimitable D. Z. Phillips held a chair; knew that she would be speaking to some people who will remember Professor Phillips’ lecture on God and evil five-and-a-half years ago. Dewi had problems with what he called Professor Adams’ “theorising” about evil. So too does another Swansea boy named Rowan Williams. And, as an adopted Abertawean, I confess my own concern when the title of Professor Adams’ lecture was announced: talk of “a solution” to the problem of evil suggested that we might be in for an evening of theological hubris. I’m glad to say that’s not quite how it has turned out.

Professor Adams, firstly, fully acknowledges the irreducible horrendousness of horrendous evils, the meaninglessness as well as the pain. Second, she knows that a moral taxonomy is insufficient to account for the sheer intensity and scale of suffering, and she knows that the free-will defence fails because of its overblown account of human agency (not to mention its competitive account of divine and human freedom). Third, if Professor Adams speaks of the participatory suffering of God, it is, quite unlike the process theologians, only in connection with a robust two-natures Christology: it is the crucified and risen Jesus who is the horror-bearer and-defeater. Finally, Professor Adams consummates her theodicy with a robust faith in universal salvation, not because all must win prizes but because God is good and resourceful, the maker and re-maker of meaning, and because the penal options (as she puts it) of “liquidation or quarantine” are hardly a satisfactory quid pro quo for hell on earth. And all so tightly argued: Professor Adams is, after all, a philosopher in the analytical tradition.

Perhaps not all of us will now think, “Ah, QED!” But then Professor Adams would not want us to. On the contrary, as she says at the end of her book Horrendous Evils, she would fully expect to “have said something to offend almost everybody.” She has certainly said enough to disturb any pious complacency, and to rouse us to rethink our own intellectual, pastoral, and personal “solutions” to the problem of evil.

Finally this: I checked out the website of Professor Adams earlier today. It has a click-on for “Recipes”. It is empty at the moment, but she has certainly cooked us up a feast tonight. Thanks, Chef!

A hymn on theodicy

Following our recent discussion of theodicy, I thought I’d post this hymn by Kim Fabricius, which is set to the tune of Scarlet Ribbons:

Children die from drought and earthquake,
     children die by hand of man.
What on earth, and what for God’s sake,
     can be made of such a plan?
Nothing – no such plan’s been plotted;
     nothing – no such plan exists:
if such suffering were allotted,
     God would be an atheist.

Into ovens men drive brothers,
     into buildings men fly planes;
history’s losers are the mothers,
     history’s winners are the Cains.
Asking where was God in Auschwitz,
     or among the Taliban:
God himself was on the gibbets –
     thus the question: Where was man?

God of love and God of power –
     attributes in Christ are squared.
Faith can face the final hour,
     doubt and anger can be aired.
Answers aren’t in explanation,
     answers come at quite a cost:
only wonder at creation,
     and the practice of the cross.

Ten propositions on theodicy

by Kim Fabricius

1. Unde malum? Primers on theodicy easily put the question: God is supposed to be both all-loving and all-powerful, yet evil and suffering demonstrably exist. Therefore either God can do something about it but won’t – in which case God is not all-loving; or God wants to do something about it but can’t – in which case God is not all-powerful. Gotcha! Or so it would seem.

2. It is quite astonishing that Christians have allowed themselves to be set up in this way – or at least post-Enlightenment Christians. For as Kenneth Surin points out, “It is no exaggeration to say that virtually every contemporary discussion of the theodicy question is premised, implicitly or explicitly, on an understanding of ‘God’ overwhelmingly constrained by the principles of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophical theism.” And Surin goes on to observe that the ‘God’ this discussion seeks “to justify is the very ‘thing’ that the adherent of a properly Christian ‘understanding’ of God will find herself being disposed to abjure.” Of course pre-modern Christians wrestled with the reality of evil and suffering, but their faith was not intimidated by it, nor did it throw their belief in the divine goodness into a crisis of coherence. Unde malum? Rather Quis Deus! Not the god of theism who is discussed remoto Christo, but God the Trinity, the Deus incarnatus et crucifixus, who is known in worship.

3. Alas, many Christian theologians themselves do not seem to know this God. They think God requires an apologetics, and their defence takes the form of accusation and explanation. First, they are Job’s comforters, resembling “a circle of police around a suspect” (Girard), reading a list of the charges to the suspect from Uz; and then they are attorneys for God in the dock, arguing the case of their client in absentia with cool calculation and untroubled conviction. The irony is that in explaining evil and suffering, theodicists inevitably explain them away. Wittgenstein said that “What’s ragged should be left ragged,” but the post-Cartesian theodicist, intent on “reducing the muddy and mixed to the clear and distinct,” not only “idealizes the reality of evils” but also, in his theoretical detachment, connives in the conditions that give them purchase (Terrence Tilley); and in making a pact with death in order to defend the deity, he unwittingly turns God himself into a capital criminal.

4. Process theologians are the greatest explainers. Their strategy turns on free will. Evil, they urge, is the inevitable risk of human agency, and if it results in free-fall and its attendant wreckage, well, (a) we can’t blame God; and (b), still, this valley of death is also a vale of soul-making (i.e. suffering has pedagogical or therapeutic value). But even apart from the question “How real is our freedom?”, can bad choices alone account for the sheer scale of suffering, and therefore can the buck be so easily passed? And can so-called second-order virtues bear the burden of vindication that is placed upon them? Marilyn McCord Adams declares that, given “horrendous evils” – the physical agony, the eclipse of meaning (what Simone Weil called “affliction”) – this putative god would be paying us “an inappropriate respect,” and indeed “would not thereby honor but violate our agency by crushing it with responsibility for individual and cosmic ruin.” And D. Z. Phillips refers to the argument from character development as “the outward-bound school of theology,” and suggests that “to rescue sufferings from degradation by employing cost-benefit analysis is like rescuing a prostitute from degradation by telling her to charge higher fees.”

5. Calvinists are the greatest defenders. David Bentley Hart writes of a Calvinist minister who, “positively intoxicated by the grandeur of divine sovereignty, proclaimed that the Indian Ocean disaster – like everything else – was a direct expression of the divine will, acting according to hidden and eternal counsels it would be impious to attempt to penetrate, and producing consequences it would be sinful to presume to judge” (with chapter and verse, of course). More extreme still are the false prophets who thundered that the denizens of the Sodom of New Orleans only got what was coming to them when the whirlwind of Katrina tore into the city. I admit to finding this whole track of retributive thought so unbearably desolate that I will only say, in answer, that here we see the dead and deathly end of late medieval nominalism, see that potentia absoluta is at best a theological solecism, and at worst sheer satanic power. It is also the inevitable result of the deity known in abstraction from the concrete reality of Christ. God cannot will evil and suffering, either directly or indirectly.

6. And here we come to the nub of the matter. The divine nature is the grammar of the divine will. “God’s action has been held, in orthodox Christian thought, to be identical with God’s being – that is, what God does is nothing other than God’s being actively real” (Rowan Williams). And in being and act, God is love – all the way down and all the way out. The conundrum of the divine love and the divine power that theodicists accept and then attempt to resolve is thus a false one. God is not all-loving on the one hand and all-powerful on the other: no, the only power of God is the power of love:

Here is God, no monarch he,
throned in easy state to reign;
here is God, whose arms of love
aching, spent, the world sustain.
(W. H. Vanstone)

7. Rejecting, then, the Calvinist collapse of secondary into primary divine causality, shall we say that God permits the evil that is contrary to his will? Philosophically (with Aquinas) it would seem to be a necessary distinction to make, but I remain uncomfortable with the language of permission, and for two reasons. First, because it suggests that God has a psychology like ours only bigger, conjuring up an image of one who has to make allowances for the world to be other than he really intends it to be, “on the lines that the poor fellow couldn’t help it, he’s only God after all” (Herbert McCabe). And, second, because we are still playing the game of explanation. Evil, we must insist, cannot and must not be explained. If the language of permission still seems inescapable, then continuing to insist that the free-will defence is a busted flush, we must confess that we don’t have the faintest idea why God permits evil. Ultimately we can only gaze at the iconic image of the crucified and, like a rabbit caught in a car’s headlights, freeze at the mystery of iniquity – and then, in faith, be drawn into the more unfathomable mystery of a love that is stronger than death.

8. We must also be modest with the discourse of eschatology. Certainly we must hold fast to the vision of “a new heaven and a new earth,” when God “will wipe away 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” (Revelation 21:1, 4). But two points. First, hell. Whatever the Bible says to the contrary – and the Bible actually says many things to the contrary of the contrary – it beats me how an eternal Auschwitz (under a righteous commandant to be sure) could provide an adequate retributive balance to the temporal Auschwitz. If for some the idea of hell performs a successful operation in the theatre of theodicy, for me it kills the patient. And, second, children. When we speak of the glory of ultimate, we must not out-shout the cries of the penultimate; we must speak softly and tenderly, and never say anything that we could not say, paradigmatically, in the presence of parents who have watched their child torn limb from limb by a pack of hunting dogs, or tossed to and fro on soldiers’ bayonets.

9. The images, of course, come from Dostoevsky’s unsurpassable The Brothers Karamazov, as Ivan challenges the faith of his little brother, a novice monk, with a rending litany of human depravity, and then declares that “It is not God that I do not accept, Alyosha. I merely most respectfully return him the ticket,” i.e. to the slaughter-house of history. Mark well that Ivan is not an atheist, he is a rebel. He has been to the house of God and knows its liturgies better than many a believer – but he cannot kneel and he will not pray. And also mark well that Alyosha accepts Ivan’s argument that human freedom, ultimate victory, everlasting punishment, all finally fail to persuade: he concedes the case that the universe is not morally intelligible. Theoretically, nihilism triumphs…

10. … But, practically, nihilism fails. It can be thought, but not lived: Ivan himself becomes a monster, twisting the mind of his half-brother Smerdyakov, turning him into a patricide – and he himself finally commits suicide. But Father Zosima presents Alyosha with an alternative – not an alternative explanation but an alternative praxis, presupposing conversion, issuing in awe at reality (Job) and compassion for others, and mediated by the church, the harbinger of horror-healing. It is participation in God’s own triune love overflowing in the cosmos, and in the universal salvation wrought by the atoning death of Christ. It is “joy over the abyss” (Barth). The logical problem of evil and suffering is not thereby solved, rather it is dissolved in the existential narrative of discipleship. As a hymn of mine concludes:

Answers aren’t in explanation,
answers come at quite a cost:
only wonder at creation,
and the practice of the cross.

Explaining evil?

David Bentley Hart’s little book on theodicy, The Doors of the Sea (2005), is a work of profound insight. Hart observes that attempts to justify evil by appealing to its broader meaning in God’s plan simply render the universe “morally intelligible at the cost of a God rendered morally loathsome” (p. 99). Against all such theodicies, Hart rightly argues that “suffering and death – considered in themselves – have no true meaning or purpose at all: and this is in a very real sense the most liberating and joyous wisdom that the gospel imparts” (p. 35).

The Christian faith, Hart notes, “denies that … suffering, death, and evil have any ultimate value or spiritual meaning at all.” Instead, “they are cosmic contingencies, ontological shadows, intrinsically devoid of substance or purpose, however much God may – under the conditions of a fallen order – make them the occasions for accomplishing his good ends” (p. 61).

To offer a rational explanation or “justification” of evil is thus to explain what God himself refuses to explain. In Karl Barth’s words, evil is das Nichtige – it is futility, vanity, emptiness, nothingness. It is that which passes away. It is the absurd nothingness which God refuses to interpret or explain or endow with meaning. It “is” only in as much as God rejects it utterly. It “exists” only as that which God vanquishes and overcomes in the death of his Son. It is that horror which is never synthesised or redeemed, but only cast out. It is the shadow of violence which Jesus Christ exposes and expels with the light of his peace.

Thinking theologically about theodicy

The topic of theodicy is often discussed merely as a philosophical problem. In the worst cases, it’s little more than an intellectual puzzle about reconciling various abstract divine attributes with an abstract concept of “evil.” What we really need, however, is to approach the so-called problem of evil from an explicitly theological standpoint – which is to say, from the standpoint of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

A number of books have taken up this challenge in different ways. If you wanted to read just four books, I’d recommend these ones:

• Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/3, §50 “God and Nothingness” (1950)
• Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (1973)
• Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (1999)
• David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (2005)

Genesis 3 and the origin of evil

The story of the fall in Genesis 3 has at times been used to explain the “origins” of sin and evil. But Helmut Thielicke is exactly right when he says: “The very point of this ancient story is that it shows us that we put the question wrongly when we ask how evil came into the world. That is to say, when anybody asks the question in this way he is diverting attention away from himself.”

—Helmut Thielicke, How the World Began: Man in the First Chapters of the Bible (London: James Clarke, 1964), p. 165.

Speaking theologically in times of crisis

Jim West has offered these further reflections on the need for theologians to speak up in times of crisis.

As I said before, I think there are times for silence—times when words would only cheapen the reality of human suffering, times when any words except prayer are wasted breath. Job’s comforters, after all, acted rightly for the first seven days. But as Jim says, there are also times when we must speak—times when we must attempt somehow to say the word “God” within a concrete situation of human suffering.

And in such times—when we do speak—we had better hope that we really have something to say. God forgive us if in such times we indulge in philosophical speculation about “the problem of evil.” God forgive us if in such times we utter pious jargon about “divine sovereignty.” God forgive us if in such times we resort to cheap talk about “the consequences of Adam’s Fall.” Most of all, God forgive us if in such times we merely find an occasion for preaching about heaven, hell, and the brevity of human life—so that the suffering and death of real human beings are reduced to a trivial moralistic example for the rest of us.

In short: God forgive us if in such times we have anything at all to say except the gospel. I’m not talking about a simple repetition of the gospel, but rather a concrete translation of this message, such that Jesus Christ himself is encountered anew right here and now in the depths of crisis and desolation.