The Transgression of the Integrity of God: Essays and Addresses

By Craig Keen, Nathan R. Kerr and Stanley Hauerwas

"In this dark, when we all talk at once, some of us must learn to whistle."

In this comprehensive collection of his work, Craig Keen's voice emerges as that of a theologian who has indeed learned to whistle. In a day when much of what passes for academic "theology" is careful to maintain a safe distance from any determinate act of faith or work of praise, Keen evinces a single-minded determination to think and to speak, to write and to live doxologically. And whether writing or lecturing, teaching or conversing, Keen understands theology to be nothing less than an invitation to work out one's faith with fear and trembling.

Throughout this volume Keen argues that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus disrupt all metaphysical attempts to determine the reality of "God," and suggests instead that theology is to be done liturgically and eucharistically--as the work of a people whose labor is carried out with open hands, free from all attempts to grasp and control. Keen discusses doctrinal issues--the Trinity, incarnation, creation--as well as a number of critical theological concerns--church and culture, justice, holiness, Christian education--in this light. The result is a profound set of reflections on the ways in which the word of the cross simultaneously transgresses our constructions of "God" and gives us to live transgressively in love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Mar 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781621893479

Craig Keen

Craig Keen is Professor of Systematic Theology at Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, California. He is the author of the forthcoming After Crucifixion (Cascade Books).

Book preview

Richard W. Kropf EEMG4 R W Kropf 2 22 2004-08-03T17:26:00Z 2012-04-03T19:15:00Z 2012-04-03T19:15:00Z 1 79824 455000 PRCA 3791 1067 533757 11.9999 141 0 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

Evil and Evolution

A Theodicy

by

Richard W. Kropf

Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 West Eighth Avenue, Suite 3

Eugene, Oregon 97401

Evil and Evolution: A Theodicy

By Kropf, Richard W.  1932-

Copyright© March 2000 by Kropf, Richard W.

ISBN: 1-59244-798-8

Publication date: 2004, 2012

Previously published by Fairleigh Dickinson University/

Associated University Presses, 1984

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Kropf, Richard W., 1932-

Evil and Evolution: A Theodicy

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1.  Good and evil.    2.  Theodicy     1. Title.

BJ1401.K74    1983            231’.8        81-72041

ISBN

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Preface to the Second Edition

In her 2003 book, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, Susan Neiman has quoted Hanna Arendt’s rather sarcastic description of theodicy as being …one of those strange justifications of God or of Being, which ever since the 17th Century, philosophers felt were needed to reconcile man’s mind to the world… Neiman herself goes on to state that Theodicy in the narrow sense allows the believer to maintain faith in God in the face of the world’s evils and that Theodicy in the broad sense, is any way of giving meaning to evil that helps us face despair. The aim of my book, despite its brevity, has been not only to do both but considerably more.  It is not enough to be reconciled to the world or to simply face despair. Nor is it enough to maintain faith in God: too often this belief has been an excuse for doing little about evil. Instead of reconciliation with the world or mere maintenance of belief, we must strengthen and deepen our theological motivations for conquering evil in all its forms.

While the term theodicy may be relatively new, (see Appendix for more on that) the attempt  to justify God’s ways to man has been part of an effort that reaches far back in human history—even beyond the biblical Book of Job back to the various creation myths and other stories of ancient times—and yet again, forward into recent times. But it seems that none of these attempts, no matter how elaborate, have proved satisfactory when we have to face the really hard questions concerning evil in all of its forms. Over and over again theodicy has turned out to be the moment of truth for theology, and when judged by that standard, it seems that most theologies have failed.

Why is this? I believe that the failure has been because, in our desperate attempts to find a solution, we have too often ended up denying the reality of any one or more of four crucial components.

Some (and this usually has been the fault of many religious thinkers) have seemed to deny the reality of evil, or at least its importance, often because it is seen as being but a temporary phenomenon to be ignored with the counsel that this too shall pass.  After Auschwitz and the other genocides of recent memory, such a denial is hardly tolerable today.

Others, for very similar reasons, but usually expressed in more philosophical terms, have even denied the reality of he world.  The impermanence of all things in this world, indeed,

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perhaps of the whole universe itself, too often exerts a strong temptation not to take anything all that seriously, either in life or in death.  But, again, except for those who would retreat into a kind of world-denying idealism, such a strategy can be seen only as an escape from reality itself.

Then there are those who would deny the reality of human freedom, hence any human responsibility for evil in the world.  Although this view may have the advantage of seeming to get us off the hook, so to speak, still, if it were consistently followed, would also fatally undercut, even more preemptively than the first set of denials, any efforts to make this world a better place.

Finally, there are those who would deny the reality of God, which although it might seem to offer a quick solution to the problem by taking the theos out of theodicy. But this still leaves us with the riddle of dikê or justice, trying to figure out why this world might or should be an even better place, or why it is so often as terrible as it is.

What then makes me think that this effort, in this small book, will have been any more successful?  My answer to that, in addition to insisting on the reality of the four components or entities listed above, is to argue in favor of two radical suggestions.

The first of these (which might be seen as a philosophical position based on scientific theory) is that free will has its origins in the evolutionary ramifications of indeterminacy or chance. If this can be shown to be the case, then evolution itself may be the key, or indeed the missing link, that previous theodicies have been lacking. So if this proposition proves to be plausible, then, perhaps for the first time, we may be able to see a causal connection between the inevitability of what seem to us to be catastrophes in nature and the possibility of human freedom. In other words, what I propose is that there is a necessary and fundamental connection between the so-called acts of God and the emergence of free will.

The second suggestion is that we take more seriously the theological idea that God, as both the ground and the goal of evolution, is deeply involved in the evolutionary process itself, so much so that we might say that the sufferings of this world and of humanity are in some very real sense, also the sufferings of God. While this idea of a suffering God remains a very controversial topic within theological circles, for those who are familiar with the more radical trends in theology that have taken place in the past century or so, particularly since World War II, this suggestion will come as no surprise.  In this regard I have drawn on some more recent writings on the subject, which also

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accounts for some rather extensive changes made especially in Chapter 8 of this new edition, so extensive that if I had a chance to re-title this book, I would not hesitate change the word mystery in my original working title (Evil, Evolution and the Mystery of God—which on second thought seemed to me perhaps a bit too sweeping or pretentious) to "…the Suffering of God".

If these two suggestions, along with some observations taken from physics and contemporary theories in cosmology (some of which have had to be updated yet again since this book’s first printing), have led to some rather drastic reinterpretations of other traditional Christian beliefs, so much so as to make this book appear to be too radical, or even heretical, I would also suggest that the reader stop and think about the history of theology‘s relationship to our knowledge of the natural world. It was the great 13th Century Franciscan theologian, St. Bonaventure, who is said to have claimed that to understand the whole of God‘s revelation we have to read two books: not just the Holy Scriptures, but the Book of Nature or Creation as well.  It is not a question of either religion or science, but rather of finding God in both.

The problem is that the apparent harmony that existed between the two in the medieval mind has been severely disrupted ever since the time of Copernicus and Galileo. Prior to then, believers tended to interpret Nature through the lens of biblical language, failing to sufficiently appreciate that the language of the Scriptures (understood not so much as dictated by God but rather as the inspired reflections of those who received God’s special revelations) has been largely determined by the world-views of the times in which they were written. Unfortunately, especially for religious beliefs, today the situation needs to be largely reversed.  Contemporary science has given us a radically different picture of the world, one that has rendered much of the scriptural language obsolete, if not largely incomprehensible, for all but those who are willing to reenter the mental world of the ancient past. Accordingly, in this book, one of my aims has been to translate the fundamental religious concepts and spiritual values contained in the Scriptures into language that at least begins to make some sense in view of the understanding of Nature current in the contemporary world.

As for the sources of or major influences on my thinking, although this is not a book about the evolutionary thought of the Jesuit priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, my dependence on his ideas will be obvious to all those who are

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familiar with his thought. I have also drawn liberally from the process theology inspired by the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and his followers. While I have also added some useful insights gathered from more existential thinkers, especially Gabriel Marcel, I have also drawn here and there from ideas and themes found in a host of other writers, most of whom are not quoted but at least mentioned, if not in the text, then in the bibliography. Nevertheless, I must confess that this book still remains Teilhardian to its core, especially in its attempt to present an approach to the problem of evil that reflects the convergence of what Teilhard believed were the triple hallmarks of truth: coherence, fecundity, and a psychological dynamism—this latter especially needed in the face of evil when it comes to spurring us to action.

However, I must admit that, in producing this second and newly revised edition of this book, I also have been spurred by a number of much more recent authors.

First, there is Rabbi Harold Kushner and his 1982 book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Although his book was first published two years previous to mine, its continued popularity and his personal encouragement after reading mine have spurred me on in my efforts to understand a suffering God, and to explain more fully why these bad things happen when they do—this despite our different theological interpretations regarding the identity and role of that Jesus whom Christians call Christ.

Next is theologian Terrence Tilley and his scholarly 1990 critique, The Evils of Theodicy, in which he denounced classical theodicy as a strictly academic subject for academics that is liable to make things worse rather than better. This has given me a renewed determination to show, in a less academic format, how theodicy can, and must, avoid all these evils that Tilley described.

Then there is the work of Cambridge University physicist, turned Anglican clergyman, John Polkinghorne, whose ventures into the realm of science and religion, and especially his affirmation of the linkage between human freedom and the world of quantum physics in his 1995 Quarks, Chaos, and Christianity, has confirmed, to my mind, the paradoxical relationship between free will and chance.

Finally, there is Neiman’s book, which I have already mentioned and which has convinced me more than ever that in this post-modern world, even after the collapse of the evil empire, a rational explanation of the world’s evils, even if it has long eluded us, must be sought. It has become all too clear, especially since the disaster of September 11, 2001, that an appeal to strictly religious or faith-based solutions are apt to be more a cause of evil than its cure.

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While I have incorporated the insights of quite a few others in this new revision, I have tried to do so in ways that avoid cluttering up the text with footnotes or endnotes—as was unfortunately the case with the first edition. Nevertheless, I must acknowledge the help of Dr. Raimundo Panikkar in my treatment of Asian philosophies in Chapter 4, of Dr. Robert Francoeur in dealing with matters of biology and genetics in Chapter 6, and, most recently, Dr. William Stoeger, SJ, of the University of Arizona and the Vatican Observatory, for his help in keeping up with cosmological data and theories in Chapter 9 of this newest version of this book.

Again, I will stress that this is a book that was originally intended more as a meditation (or a series of meditations) than a treatise, but which because of the difficulty of the subject, needs to be read slowly and pondered. Accordingly, despite the necessity of sometimes going into more detail on some matters of scientific, philosophical, or theological importance, nevertheless, the reader will need to try to keep, as much as possible, the bigger picture in mind.  With this object, I deliberately designed each chapter to in some way anticipate the final outcome—something like the procedure of a mason who builds, not by throwing up completed pre-fab walls or panels, but patiently adds a course or two of stones or bricks along one side of the structure at a time, then moves to another side to support what he has already done. If this approach seems a bit repetitious at times, it is also deliberate.

I also want to thank the many friends who patiently read through and discussed with me various parts of the original draft, sharing with me their own reactions to it in the light of their own sorrows and joys.  Among them were Fr. George Zabelka, Chuck and Brigit Geroux, Srs. Dorothy Smith, SSJ, and Donna Kushtusch, OP, and Gretchen Sullivan and still others, who, like my own father, Richard B. Kropf, were mentioned in the original list of acknowledgments or in the epilogue, have since passed on to their eternal reward. I also want to thank John H. Wright, SJ, and the other reviewers of this book, whose encouragement and critiques, I hope, have made this latest revision even better than the fiirst.

R W Kropf

August 2004

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CHAPTER 1

Problems, Mysteries, and Truth

… if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then  I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.

— Feodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The truth against which Dostoyevsky’s character, Ivan Karamazov, protests is most difficult. At its core is the riddle that has plagued human belief and trust in God from the very beginning. From the earliest cave wall attempts to ward off the unseen spirits that disturbed the order of nature, to the anguished cries of those who died, or even survived, the agonies and outrages of totalitarian labor and death camps, the protest has constantly been raised: Oh God, how could you? or Oh God, why me?

The first and most obvious truth that must concern us is the fact of evil. Yet for many, stunned by this truth, the existence of God is not so obvious. Thus Ivan Karamazov, the archetypal unbeliever, confronts his younger brother Aloysha, the would‑be priest, with the undeniable fact of evil in the face of the hidden God.

For Ivan, given the catastrophes of nature and the atrocities of humankind, the truth was unacceptable. Had Dostoyevsky only lived to even begin to imagine Dachau or Auschwitz after his own exile in Siberia, or even only to see the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, belief in a God who would allow such things to happen might be more difficult if not impossible. Surely, the confrontation with the truth presents us with a problem and, beyond that, a mystery.

A.  Problem and Mystery

What is truth? To Pontius Pilate’s scoffing question Jesus remained silent. For Aristotle, truth was the conformity of the mind to what really is—the accurate grasp by the human intelligence, as far as possible, of reality. Jesus had already told Pilate the truth and Pilate was not

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interested. Pilate thought that his power came from Rome, even though this was only superficially true. Perplexed by the problem of what to do with this man who stood meekly before him, who he himself had declared innocent, Pilate yielded to political expediency, first sentencing him to scourging, and then, finally, to death. Thus for Pilate the truth was a problem.

For those who call themselves Christians, this man Jesus was, and is, the truth. This truth is (as Peter attested him to be) the Author of Life who had to die before the truth could make us free. And therein lies the mystery.

A problem, according to the philosopher Gabriel Marcel, can be pondered, analyzed, and eventually solved. But a mystery, a true mystery, can only be lived. Problems confront us as immediate and apparent contradictions or dilemmas while mysteries are, by definition, hidden and unyielding to logical analysis. The truth that Pilate could not grasp, and which the elder Karamazov (who stands for the unbelieving side of us all) refused to accept is such a mystery. Approached merely as an isolated problem, any answer to the question of evil runs the danger of compounding the very evil that supposedly is to be explained. Thus in treating the Jews as a social problem (which indeed Christians had long made it to be) Hitler supplied an ultimate solution that compounded the evil of anti‑Semitism to a degree scarcely imaginable. The price of ignoring the mystery of God’s first chosen people remains a disaster for Jew and Gentile alike. No amount of problem solving can dissolve a true mystery and the so‑called Problem of God remains insoluble in the face of evil only for those who, like Ivan Karamazov, refuse to enter fully into the mystery of God’s life—and death.

But there is another danger here, and that is the one of mystification—a danger that Ivan rightly protests. To mystify is to attempt to make a mystery out of what is basically a problem by failing to use the evidence and logic that may be available to clarify an issue and resolve it. That this often occurs is understandable, but it is never helpful, generally misleading, and in the end obscures the true mysteries in life. Yet this is just what has often happened in dealing with the question of evil. Most primitive tribes, even in our own day, ascribe all death and sickness, and even old age in some cases, to malevolent spirits. So too in our own history—witness our own tradition’s story of Eve and the Serpent!

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Yet, if there has always been an inclination to thus mystify the problem of evil, there have often been efforts to de-mystify the problem as well. One tribe in present day Papua (New Guinea), seeks to solve the problems caused by the lack of

knowledge and understanding of disease, old age, and death, by holding a ritual trial each time someone falls ill and dies. In this way they attempt to fix the blame on some member of the tribe or anyone who might have conceivably caused this person’s death. In a society where headhunting only recently ceased, such logic is not altogether faulty, for many deaths were the result of murder.

Similarly, in the Old Testament Book of Job, we are presented with a dramatic encounter in which Satan makes a deal with God to allow him to inflict God’s good servant Job with a series of disasters in order to test his fidelity to God. Three well‑meaning friends who come to console him in the midst of his woes attempt to solve the problem by accusing Job of wrongdoing—anything, even something he can’t remember. Through all this, Job’s wife, taking what might be called the Ivan Karamazov approach, suggests that Job curse God and die! Curiously, later translators and manuscript copyists, shocked by this attitude, changed her words to bless God and die—thus attempting to give a supposedly more religious interpretation of what Job should do.

But we must not smile too much at these halting attempts to explain the problem of evil. They are attempts, however crude, to de-mystify the question. There may very well be, as the psychiatrist-philosopher Carl Jung has pointed out, a dark or shadow side of God that accounts for the evil in the universe. The Book of Job, even when tampered with, seems to have at least confronted what our Western religious tradition has otherwise failed to even recognize.

Thus Dostoyevsky as well as the original author of Job have each made their point, which is the real blasphemy that an overly facile mystification of evil presents. To ascribe evil directly to a God who we claim to be all good and powerful is not only a seeming contradiction of logic as well as an insult to such a God, but it is also the surest way to legitimately question whether such a God could possibly exist. Should we, like Job, refuse to be consoled by easy and even seemingly logical answers and be ready to bow down before the true mystery—the unfathomable mystery of God? Or should we take the advice given by Job’s wife? We shall see more of what Dostoyevsky’s Ivan has to say, but for the moment let it be clearly understood that the unnecessary mystification of the problem of evil solves nothing and only does violence to the true mystery of God.

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Yet the question must be posed: Do the attempts to solve the problems surrounding the existence of evil really remove the mystery? For example, if an innocent child dies due to a senseless mistake in a hospital, does it help or hinder human understanding and acceptance of a fact that cannot be changed (a dead child) to ascribe blame to human failure (a hospital employee careless about antiseptic procedure), or to malevolent agents (somebody with a grudge against the parents or child), or simply to nature (a microbe going about its parasitic life‑cycle)?

Now the possibility is that one or any combination of these factors could be responsible for the child’s death. Yet does it do any good to engage in such detective work so long as we persist in adding to all these possible causes the idea that God wanted a new little soul for heaven? Would not this pious rationalization be the worst mystification of all? Yet if we truly believe that God is the creator of all natural processes and of all the agents (human or otherwise) that played a part in this child’s death, do we not find ourselves forced to admit that there is at least a certain permissive will of God that, although it may not have ordered any of these things to happen, nevertheless allowed them to? If so, it seems in some way logical to blame God.

Personally, I think there is enough mystery in God without adding to that mystery those problems of evil that are apparently solvable.  Nor do I agree with Marcel’s opinion that the existence of evil will forever remain a mystery. To mystify evil is to come perilously close to glorifying it — to worshipping it in place of God. Not too many years ago, a nurse who went to a Central American country to assist some missionaries was warned by the padres not to go near a certain mountain village because the natives there had decided to worship thirteen devils. One would suspect, knowing the disease‑ridden and poverty‑stricken conditions of these mountain tribesmen, that the easy answers so long repeated about suffering according to God’s permissive will had finally backfired. In their simple minds, Ivan Karamazov’s faith‑shattering protest had found a primordial answer. For them a good God was not in control; the devils were. Prostrate yourself before me and it shall all be yours. (Luke 4:7)

Must we give up and worship the thirteen devils whose captain