If God Exists… Good question!

If God Exists… Good question!

SCOPE OF THE DISCUSSION

First, if God exists yet cannot protect children ANYWHERE from abuse (sexual, physical, emotional, etc.) EXCEPT in his own place of worship, the question remains.

And THAT question resolves to the bigger question of if God can’t protect EVERY creature EVERYWHERE from ANY harm, then what good is he? Or she? Or it?

I’ve found .only two good arguments against the reasonableness of Christian belief. One is Occam’s Razor: if we can understand personality, history, and nature without recourse to the word, “God,” and the alleged reality denoted by that word, then that word should be excised as a needless and confusing multiplication of entities. That is the worldview of Naturalism.

The second good argument against the reasonableness of Christian belief is the evidential problem of evil.

The events that confront us with evil are historical (in which humanity itself is implicated) and natural (earthquakes, sickness, death itself, and the like).

The questions, on the other hand, that arise from evil include its genesis and its remedy.

Evil is a serious problem, not only for Christians, but for ANYONE who believes that, despite the chaos of history and nature, life in general (and human life in particular - and, self-absorbed person that I am, MY human life :-) ) is meaningful, purposeful, and valuable.

Only an idiot would deny the reality of evil.

Well, okay. And St. Augustine.

Yeah, yeah… and Buddhists, dammit.

But, other than that, NO ONE. :-)

ORIGIN OF EVIL

The traditional Christian (though not Jewish) answer to the origin of evil is humanity’s fall from grace occurring mythologically in eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (presumably of good and evil) in transgression of God’s command.

That (if you buy it) would explain the origin of human evil and, if you stretch it, natural evil in that in human transgression ALL of creation fell (as is indicated in the New Testament in Colossians where the writer (who might have been but probably wasn’t St. Paul) states that in Christ ALL creation is reconciled to God).

My homegrown and no doubt heretical take on it is that God creating the world and its people implies a certain separation between God and the world and, as people are free to transgress God’s will, so too does creation evidence an independence from God in which things (volcanoes, earthquakes, droughts, plagues) can go astray.

Unlike strict theism where God is utterly separate from creation (think Deism) and pantheism (where God is identical to creation), PANENTHEISM implies that God and creation are distinguishable but interpenetrate each other.

That to me seems similar to (if not the same as) the traditional Christian doctrine of Incarnation. That is, creation is separate from God but is the medium through which God is revealed to us.

Whatever the origin of evil, to me the issue is recognizing the reality of evil and the reality of God’s effective answer to evil.

THE ANSWER TO EVIL

“2 When I came to you, brothers and sisters,[a] I did not come proclaiming the mystery[b] of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. 2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. 3 And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling.”

1 Corinthians 2:1-3 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

First, I’ll make a Lenten confession that, like most of the theological guild, I LOVE “lofty words” and “wisdom.” And crucifixion? Well, not at all. Who would? :-)

The Jews anticipated that evil would be overthrown IN HISTORY when God’s champion, or messiah, comes on the scene.

The Greeks sought to overcome evil IN SPIRIT and, with the help of a mystery cult and a heaven-sent mystical guide who is “in this world but not of it”, ascend from physical life in a material world which, to them, was - at best - gross.

Paul (and, in this case, it very probably IS the Paul of history, not someone writing in his name) addresses a Corinthian church with mostly Hellenized Jews and Gentiles so he, himself a Hellenized Jew, works in both thought-worlds.

Leaning towards his Jewish salvation history side (“Heilsgeschichte” - I warned you. My kind LOVES that German crap (scheisse)! :-)), he goes the messiah route.

With a twist. A BIG one.

What if God’s champion against evil, instead of vanquishing evil through marshaling armies of the righteous and legions of angels and defeating it outright in pitched battle, INSTEAD  defeats evil BY ATTRACTING evil to himself/herself, ABSORBING its wrath, and SUCCUMBING to it?

And, despite being destroyed by it, to be raised OUT of suffering, evil, and death, DEFANGING and DISARMING them.

No longer terrorizing monsters that threaten the foundation of meaning, purpose, and value, they are instead revealed to be simply ordinary and universal experiences THAT AFFLICT ALL in the end, whether rich or poor, white or black, oppressor or oppressed though the privileged have the wherewithal to maintain the illusion of invulnerability.

This, I suspect, is why the poor, the outcast, the sick, and the criminal have always been quicker to recognize the gospel the successful and socially integrated: they encounter suffering, evil, and death without a safety net, lacking the means for self-deception.

One need not be a Christian to have this encounter with God in Christ.

I believe Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel encountered the same God in the camps.

God is not lost to Eliezer entirely. During the hanging of a child, which the camp is forced to watch, he hears someone ask: Where is God? Where is he? Not heavy enough for the weight of his body to break his neck, the boy dies slowly and in agony. Wiesel files past him, sees his tongue still pink and his eyes clear, and weeps. 

“ Behind me, I heard the same man asking: Where is God now? 

And I heard a voice within me answer him: ... Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows"

From “Night” (book by Elie Wiesel) cited from the article of the same name at Wikipedia.

I have no ideal how Wiesel interprets what he saw beyond God dying on the gallows.

Maybe he saw it simply as the death of the God of his youth and nothing more.

I see it as God encountering us IN THE MIDST of the darkest corners of human experience, whether it is man’s inhumanity to man, human suffering in the face of natural catastrophe, the routine debilitation of sickness and old age, or our deepest and apparently irredeemable moral failures.

In all of these and more, God in Christ sanctifying presence in the most ungodly of places and events mean that, in the end, there ARE no godforsaken places. And no godforsaken people.

If we are vulnerable to suffering, evil, and death is a free yet fallen world, we are even more vulnerable to God’s presence within those realities.

See The Evidential Problem of Evil