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This week’s column introduces our 2018 Lenten series, “God of Our Silent Tears”, based on a book of the same name by The Rt. Rev. Dan Edwards, Bishop of the Diocese of Nevada. The material in this issue will be discussed in small groups after church on Sunday Feb.18th.
Our Lenten series will focus on the age-old question of theodicy: If God is good and all-powerful then how can God let terrible things happen to undeserving people? Our Lenten series will not presume to offer tidy answers to this question but will instead offer participants a fuller and perhaps new way of thinking about God and God's agency in the world and in our lives. Our series will point us toward Holy Week--in particular Good Friday--and Our Lord's question from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
Participation in this small group discussion series is enhanced if you read the corresponding issues of The Rector's Pen ahead of time. You'll be able to find them all on our website as soon as they are written.
The schedule for our Lenten series is as follows:
The Rector’s Pen (TRP) Feb. 13th edition—features material to be covered in Session 1 on Sunday Feb. 18th
TRP Feb 20th edition—features material to be covered in Session 2 on Sunday Feb. 25th
TRP Feb 27th edition—features material to be covered in Session 3 on Sunday Mar. 4th
TRP Mar 6th edition—features material to be covered in Session 4 on Sunday Mar. 11th
For the fifth and final session of our Lenten series, on Sunday Mar. 18th, Bishop Edwards will be our guest speaker and discussion leader, as together we explore lingering questions and new insights.
For more information on the book, including how to purchase, visit http://www.godofoursilenttears.com/
Click on the “purchase” button. Then select “Cathedral Bookstore”. (Amazon.com currently shows the book as being unavailable.) Bishop Edwards will also have signed copies of his book available for purchase after his talk.
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As our promo advises, if you are looking for “the” definitive answer as to why evil things and people seem to run rampant in a world created and overseen by a loving and present God, you’re going to be frustrated by our Lenten series. Further, if your concept of God is cast in mental cement and the prospect of shattering that conception feels uncomfortable, you’re going to be frustrated by our Lenten series. If the idea of discussion that might lead to more doubt instead of more certainty is daunting, then you may want to pass on our Lenten series. In the foreword to Bishop Dan’s book, John Westerhoff points out that “doubt is a necessary dimension of faith.” (xi) Reading that statement is one thing. Living it is another level of challenge altogether.
If, however, you’re feeling up to the possibility you may be left with more questions than answers, then please join us for our Lenten series. You will find other brave souls—both parishioners and clergy—who struggle with this question just like you, and who are eager for the new theological insights and new relationships that small group discussion on Edwards’ book can offer.
In his foreword, Westerhoff reflects that “the greatest deterrent to the human quest for wholeness, health, and well-being has been unhealthy images of God” (xii), and such radically different images of God can lead to great dissension in the church (xiii). Those of you who participated in this past fall’s “Embarking on the Spiritual Journey” will recall our discussing this same assertion made by The Rev. John P. Gorsuch. Westerhoff promises that if we hang in there through the book, we’ll likely emerge able to draw a better connection “between the church’s abstract doctrine of the Trinity and our striving to believe in a good God in a cruel world.” (xiii)
In the first chapter, Edwards acknowledges that it’s okay to want our faith to make sense: “For those who believe in God, senseless sorrow shakes our faith. We lose not only a child, a lover, a hope, but also our sense that life is good and meaningful. We lose our faith. We want faith to make sense. We need our beliefs to be reasonable so we can trust them. Disasters don’t fit with our trust in God’s benevolent care. They make belief in an all-powerful loving God appear absurd.” (2) Edwards notes that today people equate “evil” with terribly immoral behavior, but historically the definition of “evil” has been much larger, and has natural disasters and misfortune in addition to people doing bad things to one another. This more expansive definition of “evil” is the one he will use throughout his book, and so shall we in our discussion.
Edwards believes that to begin the discussion we need to look at our own inner conflicts about evil and God. We want to “let go and let God”, we want God to find our car keys, heal our cousin, and intervene to stop mass shootings, but if God is really powerful enough to do all that, then why doesn’t he? Does he want us to grovel? That’s an unappealing thought. Maybe he’s not interested enough. Maybe he lacks the power.
Those are unappealing thoughts as well. On the other hand, if God is stern and uninterested, then how do you account for miracles and serendipitous happenings?
Edwards warns us not to blame God for suffering and evil, because if God is the ideal to which we aspire, then blaming that ideal can corrupt our souls. Feeling boxed in? I don’t blame you! Nor would Edwards! He offers this: “Instead of using life’s sorrow as an occasion to deny God, we will reconsider who God is.”(5)
A second inner conflict Edwards points out is whether or not we really want an answer to the question (of why evil exists or happens). “On the one hand, we desperately need to make sense [of the horrible thing] that has happened; on the other hand, we refuse to make sense of it because that implies accepting things we know are unacceptable.” We try to find meaning in tragedy, but we are obliged to concede that certain “horrors [cannot] be defended or justified by any transcendent meaning.” (6-7) Think of the Holocaust as one example.
Edwards promises the reader “images of God that console, sustain, and inspire” and he invites us to let go of our images of God as patriarch and “omnipotent domination”. (8) It is in the doctrine of the Trinity that Edwards grounds his hope. We’ll get to that doctrine in a later session. First, we look at the different kinds of evil and how theologians have tried to make sense of it.
Theologians group bad things into two main categories: natural evil and human evil. “Natural evil refers to destructive events that happen without respect to human conduct or decisions—like hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, cancer, and birth defects…[Human] evil refers to destructive actions by human beings—like terrorism, the holocaust, slavery, crime, discrimination, and neglect of the poor.” (15) Theologians treat these two categories differently, since “Nature does not function with a will like people do.” And yet, natural evil is the kind we most often attribute to God.
Part of being human is being finite (mortal) and having the freedom to make choices. We’d hate to give up either of those, because they give meaning to life. Being frail and full of faults gives us compassion for the frailty and brokenness of others. Still, says Edwards, those don’t justify “the extent of human suffering or the randomness with which people die.” (17)
He turns next to natural law, and notes that every element in the created order that sustains life for us can also kill us: water is necessary to life…and it can inundate our homes and drown us. Gravity is necessary so we don’t fly off into space…and it can kill us when we fall and tumble down the face of a mountain. (18) So did God design a system that seems to sustain us on the one hand and can kill us on the other? What does that say about God? (19) To make things even more complex, consider chaos and randomness—both of them biological phenomena that are essential if the earth is to sustain life. Edwards wonders if these make God irrelevant. (21)
Turning from natural evil to human evil, Edwards explores (and rejects) a number of explanations that have been given for the problem. “One explanation is that God makes people do evil for some secret greater good.” (25) This is the “silver lining” defense, and the problem is that it makes God into some sort of twistedly cruel puppet master. Not helpful.
“The free will defense is easily the most widely held belief explaining why an omnipotent good God would allow people to misbehave,” says Edwards. “The argument goes that freedom is essential to make life meaningful and valuable. We are given freedom so our relationship with God can be personal and authentic. God wants real lovers, not ‘Stepford Wives.” (26) It’s been further argued that evil is the price of freedom and a free but evil world is better than a good world with no capacity for choices. Choices are good because they allow us to grow spiritually. (26) Theologians have not always believed in the veracity of individual free will, however. Prior to the mid-18th century such a notion was considered heretical. We were considered chained to sin because of the fall of Adam, our common ancestor. Thus, sin was not a result of our poor moral choices but rather a force to which we were helplessly enslaved. (26)
Such an outlook jived with the fact that—prior to the Enlightenment—people more willingly accepted the notion of an unseen dark world populated by evil spirits, demons, and Satan. St. Paul wrote of the “powers and principalities” to the Church at Ephesus: “Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:11-12)
Edwards pokes at the “enslaved to evil forces” defense by questioning why there is “the presence of demonic influence in a world created and ruled by a good God.” (30) In answer, he presents former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who said that “God creates by allowing the presence of that which is not God…Since God allows the creation freedom, some parts of creation can cut off relationship with God or set themselves in opposition to God.” (31) God elects not to control the universe but instead allows it to unfold in harmony or in discord.
In closing the first section of his book, Edwards offers—and rejects—the explanation of St Augustine, who put forth the doctrines of original sin (we are sinful because we are all descended from Adam, who “fell” from God’s favor in the Garden) and “privatio boni” (evil is the absence of good) to try explain why good and beautiful human beings made in the image of God do terrible things. God only makes good things, said Augustine, and evil is not a thing—it is, rather, the absence of lack of a good thing. The problem with this explanation says Edwards, is that it comes close to making suffering, pain, and death not real, and we know from sad experience just how real and tangible they are. Augustine further described sin as a disordered love. He reasoned that everything we do is motivated at its root, by love, but sometimes that love becomes warped or misdirected or self-centered. Fair enough, responds Edwards, but then where did that self-centeredness come from in the first place?! (31-32) As I promised, for every answer there arises another question. Such it is with faith.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:
1. Think of a joyous occasion that involved someone you care about. If there were no sin, no sorrow, and no death in the world, how might that affect your experience of the joyous occasion? If there was no such thing as pain, would you be able to define pleasure? If so, how might you define it?
2. Of all the defenses (for a God who co-exists in a world where there is evil and suffering) offered by theologians over the years, which one makes the most sense to you? Which is the least satisfying explanation? Have you developed for yourself an explanation (or a coping strategy) as to why there is intractable pain and horrific evil in the world? Can you share that explanation?
3. Recall a time in your life when you have endured unjust suffering, undeserved pain, or evil. Did that experience change your thinking about God? If so, how?
4. Edwards says that prior to the Enlightenment, people tended to consider human evil as the product of our enslavement to the dark principalities and powers of the universe (a Pauline view). The notion that an individual has free will had been posited but was considered heretical until around the mid-18th century. Now, the concept of individual free will has become a cherished Western World ideal. Which makes more sense to you—enslavement or free will?
Consider these questions posed by Edwards (33): “How much free will do you think people have? Are we all equally free? If people are not free, is it fair to hold us accountable for our actions?”
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How we’ve thought about God and Evil through History
1. Prior to the end of the Babylonian exile (538 BCE) the ancient Jewish people were not fully monotheistic. They believed themselves bound by sacred covenant to the God of Israel, but they acknowledged the presence and work of other gods. Psalm 44 was written during the exile and it is “a powerful protest that Israel had kept the covenant with God but God had, nonetheless, failed to deliver them from their enemies.” (Edwards 41)
Around 515 BCE, Jewish monotheism took clearer shape but was still not fully formed. For the Jews God was powerful and supernatural and controlled the weather, war, politics, and fertility. (Edwards 39)
2. 1st century CE—Philo of Alexandria (Hellenistic Jewish philosopher, b. 25 BCE, d. 50 CE) introduces the idea of assigning Platonic philosophy’s “transcendent absolutes” to the God of Israel. These transcendent absolutes were: Absolute Truth, Absolute Beauty, Absolute Goodness, and Absolute Power.
3. 2nd century CE—Justin Martyr (a pagan reared in a Jewish environment who became a Christian in 132 CE; early Christian apologist; 100-165 CE) took up Philo’s work and wove it into Christianity. For Justin, God was unchangeable and transcendent. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Justin-Martyr
4. 4th century CE—With the Christian God now imbued with Platonic absolutes and having become “an omnipotent Greek” (39), people began to wonder why God didn’t stop evil from happening. Augustine drew upon the Greek philosophers Plato and Plotinus to offer an explanation. (See Edwards pp.31-32)
5. 1485 CE—Thomas Aquinas writes the Summa Theologica and posits an Aristotelean image of God as the “unmoved mover” who causes all things to happen, and is responsible for whatever happens. (Edwards 40) Using Greek philosophical precedents, Aquinas adapted Augustine’s arguments so as to defend God’s choice to make the world as it is. (40)
6. 16th century CE—After several hundred years during which theologians argued whether God’s unfettered will or God’s unchanging nature was more important (Edwards 40), John Calvin (French theologian and reformer, 1509-1564) defined God in terms of absolute “sovereignty”. (40) Followers of Calvin would subsequently “equate sovereignty with total dominance.” (41) God became… “the puppet master of the universe.”
7. 18th century CE—Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) asked: “If God is omnipotent and perfectly good, then why is there evil in the world?” This question had already been brewing for a couple hundred years in several countries, and had prompted the German Gottfried Leibniz to coin the word “theodicy” in 1710, meaning “the defense of God’s goodness in the face of the existence of evil.” (Edwards 41, 59)
Today’s issue provides material for the 5th and final of 5 sessions in our adult forum series on The Spirituality of Aging. Session 5 meets on Sunday February 11th. All issues of The Rector’s Pen will be posted on our website as they are written. Quotations in today’s issue are drawn from Joan Chittister’s book “The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully.” Page numbers are referenced in parentheses.
We live in a society that idolizes doing—making things happen. The elderly, who are in transition from doing to being, are also in the process of separating from this world, and yet they have much to offer it. Indeed, the elderly have riches of experience and wisdom the world desperately needs. The elderly offer quality in a world obsessed with quantity. Chittister writes: “[T]o be meaningful to the world around us means that we need to provide something more than numbers. It means that we are obliged to offer important ideas, sacred reflection, a serious review of options, and the suggestion of better ideas than the ones the world is running on now. It means that we prod the people around us to reflect on what they themselves are doing—while they can still change it.” (11)
We become more intense as we age, says Chittister, because we become more and more aware of the meaning of some things, and the meaningless of others. (179) We review our lives—the inadequacies, mistakes, and broken relationships—and realize that we can’t go back and change the past. Even if we could, many of the people involved are no longer alive. (180) The elder years are a time of spiritual reflection, a time to ask the question: What have we become as a result of those missteps, those thoughtless acts, those sinful commissions and omissions?
She writes: “Did we become a fuller human being—or did we only go through life proclaiming our innocence despite the soul song within that told us how guilty we really were? This is the period of life when we must begin to look inside our own hearts and souls rather than outside ourselves for the answers to our problems…This is the time for facing ourselves, for bringing ourselves into the light.” (181)
“As the body begins to go to air, as we begin to melt into the beyond, are we able” asks Chittister, to put down those things in us that have been an obstacle between us and the rest of creation all our lives?...Can we begin to see ourselves as only part of the universe, just a fragment of it, not its center?” (182)
When we are intense, younger people often mistake us for being difficult. Not so, says Chittister. We have simply come to the place in life where we have gone deep within ourselves in reflection and have elected to drop our masks, stop pretending, and embrace being human with all its effort and imperfection. (183) Like Velveteen Rabbits, we are discovering what it means to become Real.
And because we have been freed from the societal expectation of incessant doing, producing, and accomplishing, we are finally able to make the space and time—both in our lives and in our interior selves—to look for and appreciate Mystery—those manifestations of the divine that are everywhere for those who are attentive. “Mystery,” writes Chittister, “is what happens to us when we allow life to evolve rather than having to make it happen all the time…There is something holy-making about simply presuming that what happens to us in any given day is sent to awaken our souls to something new…Mystery takes us into a whole new awareness of the immanence of God in time.” (75-76)
In her essay on religion, Chittister states that “it is in our later years that the real subject of religion—the relationship between a human being and the Creator, the evaluation of our life goals and behaviors, and the consequent surrender to the spiritual meaning of life rather than simply to the material things of life—becomes real.” (102) Chittister observes that while religion functions as a set of guideposts or a map to direct life from birth to death, it serves different functions according to our stage of life. For the young, religion forms and shapes conscience. For the middle aged, religion guides and measures our relationships with others. For the aged, “the ecstasy of life and the surrender to the Mystery become the last of the revelations of religion.” (102-103)
Chittister speaks reverently of the calling of the aged: “It is the older members of society who not only teach us how to live. They also teach us how to die, how to make sense of the unity between life and death, how to love life without fearing death—because we know ourselves to have been always on the way, even when we did not know where we were going.” (103) A blessing of these years is the growing awareness that there is a God, a Mystery, a Holy One, from whom we all come and to whom we shall all return home.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:
1. What has the transition from “doing” to “being” been like for you so far? Do you find yourself apologizing for not “doing”, or for doing less? If so, to whom do you most often find yourself apologizing? How might you turn around that apology and “own” the new person you are becoming?
2. Can you identify a broken or unfinished relationship in your life, one where the other has vanished from your address book or is no longer alive? Have you reviewed your role in this relationship—as Chittister says, have you “brought yourself into the light” and looked at your own share of the culpability? If so, how has that shaped who you have become or are becoming?
3. Think of someone you admire who has “become Real.” Can you share a short story about what it is exactly you admire in that person? In other words, what have they taught you?
4. When you think about your own death, and imagine where you will go, and what and how you will be, does Chittister’s assertion ring true—that we are returning home to the One who created us? If that assertion does not ring true for you, what do you imagine?
5. What insights or blessings have you gained from participating in this series on The Spirituality of Aging? How do you feel called to share those insights with the younger members of our parish? Please be thinking about this, and we’ll spend some additional time at the end of Session 5 bringing all participants together and talking about it.
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