The Death of Death: The Doors of the Sea, Book Reflection Pt. II

RECAP OF PART I 

Why does a good and all powerful God allow suffering in the world, both from natural disasters and from man made tragedy? This is the question we ask after we see horrors like tsunamis, or earthquakes, or footage of war, famine, genocide... How do we make sense of a world like this and still hold to a belief in a God of Love?

This is the question David Bentley Hart is musing on in his book; The Doors of the Sea.

So far we have seen that Hart is not as interested in immediately answering the question, but first in showing us how inadequate and ultimately disastrous are our attempts to justify the evil in our world by appealing to a secret divine will, or to some higher plan of God's.

As Hart puts it in his article prequel to TDOTS, Tsunami and Theodicy; 

"It seems a strange thing to find peace in a universe rendered morally intelligible at the cost of a God rendered morally loathsome."

If forced to choose between the two, Hart boldly asserts the the atheist's absolute moral rejection of that universe (and it's god) is preferable to the crocodile tears of one who mourns suffering, only to offer consolation in saying that the world is playing out exactly as God wills, for his own maximum glory.

"Voltaire sees only the terrible truth that the actual history of suffering and death is not morally intelligible. Dostoevsky sees — and this bespeaks both his moral genius and his Christian view of reality — that it would be far more terrible if it were." (T&T)

So what do we do about  such a stubborn paradox?

A THEOLOGICAL TUNE-UP

Hart proposes a "theological tune-up"; getting back to classical Christian doctrine, which (he thinks) will help us modern Christians make better sense of God in a world of suffering. After all, it's not like this is a new question in Christian thought. 

So here are 5 points (let the reader understand) around which Hart wants to recenter our theology, in hopes that they will rescue our understanding of God from some modern pitfalls.

1. Transcendence;  God is not a 'being' but the source of all being

OK, I'm going to try to get the most abstract and heady one out of the way first.

I think we can (or at least should) all agree that God is not a being somewhere out there, as in we can't look into the sky and point and say "look, there's God". That's what it means for God to be transcendent. God is not like Zeus, sitting on a mountain somewhere. But in our modern times we have a pretty stunted understanding of transcendence, for modern (especially protestants) transcendence just means that God is a being outside time and space, and he's really powerful. That is true, but it isn't the whole of what Christians have believed.

“God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him." (1 John 4:16)

"Christian metaphysical tradition...asserts that God is not only good but goodness itself, not only true or beautiful but infinite truth and beauty...Thus everything that comes from God must be good and true and beautiful. As he is the sole source of being - as he is being itself in its transcendent plentitude, beyond all finite being - everything that is, insofar as it is, is entirely worthy of love." (TDOTS 54-55)

So what you should take away from this is that, insofar as anything has being, it gets that being continually from God, as a gift. Colossians 1:17 say that Christ; 

"himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together"

and Paul (quoting an ancient Greek philosopher) says;

"In him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28).

If God is good, and he sustains all things by his own over-flowing of being, than everything that truly exists, is good. This is confirmed in Genesis where God creates everything that exists, proclaiming that it is "very good".

Any more explanation would be way beyond my philosophical pay-grade, so if you want to understand more, I suggest you read David Bentley Heart's much larger work The Beauty of the Infinite, otherwise i'll just have to move on... It will all start to come together, don't worry.

2. Undoing of Creation; Evil as Privatio Boni

This second point flows logically from the first; "If everything that God made is good, what is evil?"
I can't say it any better than this;

“high among Christian tradition’s most venerable and most indispensable metaphysical commitments is the definition of evil as a… privatio boni, a privation of the good, a purely parasitic corruption of created reality, possessing no essence or nature of its own.  ‘God is light and in him there is no darkness at all’ (1 John 1:5) and he is the source of all things, the fountainhead of all bring, everything that exists partakes of his goodness and is therefore, in its essence entirely good.” (72-73)

and this;

“Evil is born in the will: it consists not in some other separate thing standing alongside the things of creation, but is only a shadow, a turning of the hearts and minds of rational creatures away from the light of God back toward the nothingness from which all things are called. This is not to say that evil is somehow illusory; it is only to say that evil, rather than being a discrete substance, is instead a kind of ontological wasting disease.” (73)

Finally; 

"To say otherwise would involve either denying God’s transcendence (by suggesting that he is not the source of all being) or denying his goodness (by suggesting that good and evil alike participate in the being that flows from him…)” (74)

So evil isn't part of God's creation, therefore isn't something God needs to redeem, and definitely is not an instrument of his salvation or glory (we'll come back to that theme in a bit). 

3. Limitless Love and Freedom; Impassibility or Apatheia

The doctrine of divine impassibility, means im- no, and passio- to suffer.

This has historically been a confusing and sometimes contested doctrine, but Hart says it is indispensable for making sense of a God who is genuinely perfect love.

Impassibility or apatheia doesn't mean God is a cold machine, or that God has no feelings. Impassibility means that God is always the initiator of God's action. God cannot be "moved" into doing something; God cannot have his will determined by any force outside himself. God cannot be forced or coerced.

So when we talk about God's mercy or God's wrath, we didn't MAKE God act these ways, they are contingent expressions of his eternal character (which is love).

This might sound impersonal, but it means that God's love is always unconstrained, unconditional, and free. And that no amount of evil, or righteousness, can make God love you more (or less) because Love comes from God's impassable and eternal nature. That's good news! That's what it means for God to BE love, and not just loving.

“As Trinity, God always already possesses the fullness of charity [love] in himself...though he had no need of us, still he loved us when we were not. And this is why love, in its divine depth, is apatheia.” (77)

“His freedom is the impossibility of any force, pathos, or potentiality interrupting the perfection of his nature or hindering him in the realization of his own [unlimited and unchangeable] goodness” (72) 

“Love [for God] is not - in its inmost sense - a reaction.” (77)

 This is important for our understanding of theodicy, because it rules out the idea that God could "need" evil to accomplish some bigger plan, to need anything would be to make God dependent on something outside himself. Or the alternative would  be that evil is something internal to God's being, which also is a horrific conclusion.

For example;

For theologians like Jonathan Edwards, R.C. Spoul, John Piper, James White Etc... God's ultimate purpose in the world is to "glorify himself through the full display of his attributes". 

One attribute God needs to display to fully exhibit his glory is wrath.This is why God is said to have decreed evil to come about through the fall of Adam, so that in his just punishment of sinners, God's justice and wrath could be displayed. 
(That is a gross oversimplification of how they would explain it, but I think it holds). 

Therefore God needs hell to be fully glorified, which would entail; 

"that there are certain ends that God can accomplish in his creatures only by way of evil (which grants evil substance and makes God it’s cause)” (74).

No less metaphysically incoherent — though immeasurably more vile — is the suggestion that God requires suffering and death to reveal certain of his attributes (capricious cruelty, perhaps? morbid indifference? a twisted sense of humor?). It is precisely sin, suffering, and death that blind us to God’s true nature." (T&T)

This is the kind of theology that either makes God passible, or wicked (probably both) and will no do for Hart, or me.

4. Interim Age of Cosmic Dualism.

Christians are taught to be nervous about dualism, since much of modern evangelicalism has swung toward material-despising dualist tendencies that James K.A. Smith somewhere called "excarnation".

Hart though, wishes to reassert a proper New Testament kind of provisional dualism. One that remembers that there are free wills that exist in the cosmos other than God's. 

“it is clearly the case that there is a kind of ‘provisional’ cosmic dualism within the New Testament: not an ultimate dualism, of course, between two equal principles; but certainly a conflict between a sphere of created autonomy that strives against God on the one hand and the saving love of God in time on the other.” (62-63)

"Patristic theologians understood that 'humanity was created as the methorios (the boundary or frontier) between the physical and the spiritual realms, or as the priesthood of creation that unites earth to heaven, and that thus, in the fall of man, all of material existence was made subject to the dominion of death.'" (63)

"The incarnate God enters “this cosmos” not simply to disclose its immanent rationality, but to break the boundaries of fallen nature asunder, and to refashion creation after its ancient beauty — wherein neither sin nor death had any place." (T&T)

This means that evil, death, hell and sin are not parts of the divine will and plan, but genuinely enemies to be defeated by God (which the New Testament affirms all over the place). This is also good news!

"Simply said, there is no more liberating knowledge given us by the gospel — and none in which we should find more comfort — than the knowledge that suffering and death, considered in themselves, have no ultimate meaning at all." (T&T)

That isn't to say that God doesn't bring good out of evil, or that God isn't especially present among the suffering ones, it means that God didn't intend or create the situation in the first place. 

5. P...The Conclusion (best I could do.)

To sum up. Hart is saying we should definitely NOT strive for a philosophical or theological way to rationalize or justify the suffering in the world, it makes us bad comforters. 

We are also not to try to "make peace" with suffering, because that would be to make peace with an enemy of God.

St. Athanasius has this awesome quote;

"A very strong proof of this destruction of death and its conquest by the cross is supplied by a present fact, namely this. All the disciples of Christ despise death; they take the offensive against it and, instead of fearing it, by the sign of the cross and by faith in Christ trample on it as on something dead." (On the Incarnation, 5.27)

We genuinely must admit that in the revelation of Christ we don't get a comprehensive explanation of the mystery of God's sovereignty and it's relation to created freedom. We do get a revelation of a God committed to liberating us, even at the cost of his own Son, his own self.

“Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation; our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred. For while Christ takes the suffering of his creatures up into his own, it is not because he or they had need of suffering, but because he would not abandon his creatures to the grave. And while we know that the victory over evil and death has been won, we know also that it is a victory yet to come, and that creation therefore, as Paul says, groans in expectation of the glory that will one day be revealed. Until then, the world remains a place of struggle between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and death; and, in such a world, our portion is charity.” (T&T)

I hope you enjoyed this book reflection. Feel free to leave a comment.

Expect to see more book reviews in the future (hopefully something a bit less academic next time!)