In my final post on the
inconsistent triad found in David Bentley Hart’s essay “God,
Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilo”, I’d like to
talk about theodicy.
Let me say up front that, I
don’t want to talk about “theodicy” as if it’s a fancy academic issue. The word "issue" makes it seem optional, a subject for discussion within the safe confines of an ivory tower, as if we can choose when and wear to engage with it. But we can only talk about "theodicy" in the context of a suffering and evil that humanity cannot seem to avoid, whether it be self-inflicted or
not. It is not academic or abstract. It’s with that in mind that I hope to proceed.
Hart’s
inconsistent triad:
- God freely created all things
out of nothingness
- God is the Good itself
- It is certain or at least
possible that some rational creatures will endure eternal loss of God
In the previous post, I
paralleled Hart's triad with Tom Talbott's triad. Here, I'd like to do
the same thing with a well-known triad involving the troubling question of
theodicy.
The theodicy triad in its simplest form:
- God is omnipotent
- God is the omnibenevolent
- Evil exists
The question is, can all 3 of
these propositions be true?
As with Talbott, there are
some distinct parallels between DBH’s triad and the theodicy triad. (Note that Talbott touches on some of the
differences and similarities between his triad and the theodicy triad in his
Reply to Michael J. McClymond).
If (as I proposed) Hart's 1st
proposition (God freely creates out of nothingness) is an articulation (or at
least closely related to) the matter of God's creative sovereignty,
then we have a parallel with the first proposition in the theodicy
triad (God is omnipotent).
Hart's 2nd proposition is,
again, closely related to the 2nd proposition found in the theodicy
inconsistent triad. God is the Good itself is, at a bare
minimum, close related to the statement that God is omnibenevolent.
But here’s the thing. Theologians of all stripes and theological
persuasions don't hesitate to pick apart this theodicy triad
in ways that seek to demonstrate that the triad isn't actually inconsistent. They argue that all 3 can be true. If these 3 theodicy propositions can all be
true, and these 3 are closely related in form to Hart's proposed
inconsistent triad, is Hart’s triad not actually inconsistent? Can the same arguments that make the theodicy triad not inconsistent be applied to Hart? If not, what differentiates them?
The forms that these theodicy arguments
take may vary in their level of sophistication and intended audience, but they generally come back to
the same thing: we can only answer the theodicy question in terms of the end, eschatologically.
In other words, God may permit certain evils for a time, but this temporal “permission”
does not necessarily disprove God’s sovereign love and goodness. While temporal evil is tragically real, it is temporal. Evil is not eternal. It is not permanent. Given the reality of suffering and evil, any
talks of its impermanence risks sounding trite and dismissive. As true as that may be, what remains is that only the possible impermanence of evil saves the triad. Only the possibility of the redemption of what evil and suffering have destroyed opens the possibility that the triad is consistent.
Now this issue of permissive power may trip up those who possess
a meticulous interpretation of divine sovereignty. In the meticulous view, all things are the outworking of God’s
will. There can be no meaningful
distinction between what God wills
and what God permits. So in this view, there is
no difference between God permitting a child to die of cancer and willing a
child to die of cancer. They are one and the same, and it would be foolishness for humanity to judge God's "goodness" here based on
our finite standards of goodness. There
is some truth to this of course, but the argument ultimately undermines God-talk
and the possibility of faith. Hart,
having no sympathy for the argument, does not mince words:
But, when any meaningful difference between will and permission has been excluded, and when the transcendent causality of the creator God has been confused with the immanent web of causation that constitutes the world of our experiences, it becomes impossible to imagine that what God wills might not be immediately convertible with what occurs in time; and thus both the authority of Scripture and the justice of God must fall before the inexorable logic of absolute divine sovereignty.
(The Doors of the Sea, p 90)
The fact is, while (obviously)
believing his own triad to be inconsistent, Hart also paints the theodicy triad as not inconsistent. All 3 in the theodicy can be true.
How so?
It’s the distinction between
the temporal/finite and the eternal. Perhaps some answer can be offered to make sense of history, but the theodicy triad would not fare so well if evil and it's effects were given the last word.
We can all appreciate, I imagine, the shattering force of Vanya’s terrible question to Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov. If universal harmony and joy could be secured by the torture and murder of a single innocent child, would you accept that price? But let us say that somehow, mysteriously – in, say, Zosima’s sanctity, Alyosha’s kiss, the million-mile march of Vanya’s devil, the callous old women’s onion – an answer is offered that makes the transient torments of history justifiable in the light of God’s everlasting Kingdom. But eternal torments, final dereliction? Here the price is raised beyond any calculus of relative goods, and into the realm of absolute – or infinite – expenditure. And the arithmetic is fairly inflexible.
(God, Creation and Evil, p 12)
There may yet be an answer for
these “transient torments of history”. For now, however, no answer has been given.
every death of a child, every chance calamity, every act of malice; everything diseased, thwarted, pitiless, purposeless, or cruel; and, until the end of all things, no answer has been given.(God, Creation and Evil, p 5)
I have to confess, I want an
answer. I want reason. Justification. And yet, independent of want I think I want, a “bare choice” remains, one that strikes me as profoundly true:
As soon as one sheds the burden of the desire for total explanation -as soon as one has come to see the history of suffering as a contingency and an absurdity, in which grace is ever at work but upon which it does not depend, and has come also to see the promised end of all things not as the dialectical residue of a great cosmic and moral process, but as something far more glorious than the pitiable resources of fallen time could ever yield -one is confronted with only this bare choice: either one embraces the mystery of created freedom and accepts that the union of free spiritual creatures with the God of love is a thing so wonderful that the power of creation to enslave itself to death must be permitted by God; or one judges that not even such rational freedom is worth the risk of a cosmic fall and the terrible injustice of the consequences that follow from it. But, then, since there can be no context in which such a judgment can be meaningfully made, no perspective from which a finite Euclidean mind can weigh eschatological glory in the balance against earthly suffering, the rejection of God on these grounds cannot really be a rational decision, but only a moral pathos. (The Doors of the Sea, p 68)So in the end, the final consistency of the theodicy triad (all 3 can be true) is contingent upon the non-finality of evil, the non-finality of all that is not well. Hart’s inconsistent triad simply draws upon the implications of the hope of that proposition, the hope of the Gospel:
Rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, he will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes – and there shall be no more death , nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things have passed away, and he that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.” (The Doors of the Sea, p 104)
