David B. Hart's Sophia
I don't want to sound like a David B. Hart fetishist, but I'm slowly making my way through his online writings and I came acrtoss an interview with him on the subject of evil in the world. There's a touch of panentheism, a potshot at Calvinism, a trust shown in God's goodness that I wish I could muster ... I'm not sure I agree with his conclusions, but they're attractive.
From The Christian Century; 1/10/2006, here is Where was God? An interview with David Bentley Hart.(Interview) ...
************************
DAVID HART'S 2003 book The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth was widely touted as a theological tour de force. He offers in that book a powerful and deeply learned statement of Christian truth that draws on the Eastern Orthodox tradition while engaging modern and postmodern critics of Christianity. After the tsunami in 2004 he wrote several commentaries in response to what he regarded as unhelpful attempts to understand that catastrophe theologically. His reflections were expanded in a book, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? . Hart, who next year will be a visiting professor at Providence College, spoke with us about evil and its place in the world that God created and loves.
It's often said that three claims of the Christian tradition--"God is omnipotent," "God is love" and "Evil exists'--present a logical contradiction. One of the claims has to be revised. Do you agree?
If by "evil exists" you mean that evil possesses a real substance of its own, and that it therefore exists in the way goodness exists (or, for that matter, a tree, a rabbit, an idea or a dream exists), in point of fact Christian tradition has usually denied this quite forcibly. Patristic and medieval thought (drawing, admittedly, on Platonic precedent) defined evil as a privation of the good: a purely parasitic and shadowy reality, a contamination or disease or absence, but not a real thing in itself. This, incidentally, is a logically necessary claim if one understands goodness and being as flowing alike from the very nature of God and coinciding in him as one infinite life.
That said, there surely is no contradiction between God's omnipotent goodness and the reality of evil. It may seem somewhat trite to invoke the freedom of creation as part of the works and ends of divine love, or to argue that the highest good of the creature--divinizing union with God in love--requires a realm of "secondary causality" in which the rational wills of God's creatures are at liberty; nonetheless, whether the traditional explanations of how sin and death have been set loose in the world satisfy one or not, they certainly render the claim that an omnipotent and good God would never allow unjust suffering simply vacuous. By what criterion could one render such a judgment? For Christians, one must look to the cross of Christ to take the measure of God's love, and of its worth in comparison to the sufferings of a fallen world. And one must look to the risen Christ to grasp the glory for which we are intended, and take one's understanding of the majesty and tragedy of creation's freedom from that.
In Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov famously points to the brutal killing of children and proclaims that he refuses to believe in any God who has arranged the world in such a way that it entails such suffering--regardless of what "meaning" can be attached to it. What does a Christian say to Karamazov's protest?
Actually, what Ivan ultimately refuses is not belief but consent: he will not acknowledge that there is any justice, any glory, any truth that is worth the suffering of a child. If he were merely a truculent atheist, he would be a boring figure. Instead, he is a rebel against the divine order, and intends to remain a rebel even if that order should--in some way transcending his finite understanding--prove to be perfectly just. One might very well read his protest not as a brief for atheism, but as a kind of demythologized Gnostic manifesto, an accusation flung in the face of the demiurge.
Still, the pathos of his protest is, to my mind, exquisitely Christian--though he himself seems not to be aware of this: a rage against explanation, a refusal to grant that the cruelty or brute natural misfortune or evil of any variety can ever be justified by some "happy ending" that makes sense of all our misery and mischance.
In a sense the whole of The Doors of the Sea was a response to Ivan's "rebellion"--and indeed a kind of endorsement of it. What I would say here is that it is important to understand the terms of the argument clearly: Ivan assumes--in good late-19th-century fashion--that the eschatological horizon of history and nature is, in a very direct way, the consummation of a process wherein all the apparent contingencies of history and nature have an indispensable part to play. For him, the Christian promise of the kingdom of God is the promise, as well, of a final justification not only of those who have suffered, but of their suffering, and of the part suffering plays in bringing the final kingdom of love and knowledge to pass. This is what he finds intolerable: the notion that the suffering of children will prove to have been meaningful, to have had a purpose, to have been in some sense a good and necessary thing; for him, the suffering of children is an infinite scandal, and his conscience could never allow it to sink to the level of some provisional passage through darkness on the way to some radiant future.
My contention is that this places Ivan's sensibility much nearer to the authentic vision of the New Testament than are many of the more pious and conventional forms of Christian conviction today. The gospel of the ancient church was always one of rebellion against those principalities and powers--death chief among them--that enslave and torment creation; nowhere does the New Testament rationalize evil or accord it necessity or treat it as part of the necessary fabric of God's world. All that Christian scripture asserts is that evil cannot defeat God's purposes or thwart the coming of his kingdom. Divine providence, of course, will always bring about God's good ends despite--and in a sense through--the evils of this world; but that is not the same thing as saying that evil has a necessary part to play in God's plans, and that God required evil to bring about the kingdom. As the empty tomb of Christ above all reveals, the verdict of God that rescues and redeems creation also overturns the order of the fallen world, and shatters the powers of historical and natural necessity that the fallen world comprises.
Christians often try to distinguish between what God wills and what God permits or allows. But does this distinction really help? If God allows something, or creates a world in which evil is allowed, then in some sense isn't it part of God's will?
Unless one thinks that God's act of creation is purely arbitrary--and it would be incoherent to attribute arbitrariness of any kind to a God of infinite goodness (an argument for another time)--then one must understand creation as a direct expression of God's own Logos. God does not create like an omnipotent consumer choosing one world out of an infinity of possibilities that somehow stand outside of and apart from his own nature. Here's one without cancer, there's one without Bach, over there's one with a higher infant mortality rate, and so on; this is the worst sort of anthropomorphism.
GOD CREATES the world of Jesus, the world conformed to his infinite love for his Son in the joy and light of the Spirit; he thereby also wills his goodness in all his creatures infinitely, which is to say he wills this world for eternal union with him in love, and he wills that we should become partakers of the divine nature.
There is no other world that God might have created, not because he is bound by necessity, but because he is infinitely free, and so nothing can hinder him from expressing his essential and infinite goodness perfectly, in and through the freedom of creatures created to be the fellows of his eternal Son.
That may seem obscurely phrased--it is, I know--but if one thinks through what it means to understand God as the transcendent source of all being, one must abandon the notion that God chooses to create in the way that I choose to buy blue drapes rather than red. God creates a realm of rational freedom that allows for a union between Creator and creature that is properly analogous to the Trinity's eternal union of love; or, stated otherwise, God creates his own image in his creatures, with all that that may entail.
Followers of Calvin have been particularly concerned to defend God's sovereignty. Do you think that tradition presents a particular problem for Christian thinking today?
Yes--and not only today. I quite explicitly admit in my writing that I think the traditional Calvinist understanding of divine sovereignty to be deeply defective, and destructively so. One cannot, as with Luther, trace out a direct genealogy from late medieval voluntarism to the Calvinist understanding of divine freedom; nevertheless, the way in which Calvin himself describes divine sovereignty is profoundly modern: it frequently seems to require an element of pure arbitrariness, of pure spontaneity, and this alone separates it from more traditional (and I would say more coherent) understandings of freedom, whether divine or human.
This idea of a God who can be called omnipotent only if his will is the direct efficient cause of every aspect of created reality immediately makes all the inept cavils of the village atheist seem profound: one still should not ask if God could create a stone he could not lift, perhaps, but one might legitimately ask if a God of infinite voluntaristic sovereignty and power could create a creature free to resist the divine will. The question is no cruder than the conception of God it is meant to mock, and the paradox thus produced merely reflects the deficiencies of that conception.
Frankly, any understanding of divine sovereignty so unsubtle that it requires the theologian to assert (as Calvin did) that God foreordained the fall of humanity so that his glory might be revealed in the predestined damnation of the derelict is obviously problematic, and probably far more blasphemous than anything represented by the heresies that the ancient ecumenical councils confronted.
Is universal salvation a corollary of your view of the absurdity of evil?
Probably not; but Gregory of Nyssa would say otherwise. The preferred Eastern Orthodox understanding of hell, one with profound patristic pedigrees, defines hell as something self-imposed, a condition of the soul that freely refuses to open itself in love to God and neighbor, and that thereby seals itself against the deifying love of God, thereby experiencing divine glory as an external chastisement. That hell I believe in, inasmuch as all of us from time to time have tasted it in this world. The refusal of love makes love a torment to us.
Does your understanding of evil have implications for pastoral practice in the face of evil?
I honestly don't know. I haven't a pastoral bone in my body. But I would implore pastors never to utter banal consolations concerning God's "greater plan" or the mystery of his will. The first proclamation of the gospel is that death is God's ancient enemy, whom God has defeated and will ultimately destroy. I would hope that no Christian pastor would fail to recognize that that completely shameless triumphalism--and with it an utterly sincere and unrestrained hatred of suffering and death--is the surest foundation of Christian hope, and the proper Christian response to grief.
So where was God in the tsunami?
Where was God? In and beyond all things, nearer to the essence of every creature than that creature itself, and infinitely outside the grasp of all finite things.
Almost all the reviews of The Doors of the Sea that I have read have recognized that, at the heart of the book, is a resolute insistence upon and adoration of the imperishable goodness of creation, an almost willfully naive assertion that it is the beauty and peace of the created world that truly reveal its original and ultimate nature, while the suffering and alienation and horror of mortal existence are, in an ultimate sense, fictions of fallen time, chains and veils and shadows and distortions, but no part of God's will for his creatures. This is why, at one point in the book, I grant the Gnostics of old the validity of their questions, though I go on to revile the answers at which they arrived.
To see the world in the Christian way--which, as I say in the book, requires the eye of charity and a faith in Easter--is in some sense to venture everything upon an absurd impracticality (I almost sound Kierkegaardian when I say it that way). But, as I was writing the book, I found myself thinking again and again of a photograph I had seen in the Baltimore Sun. The story concerned the Aldadam, the lowest social caste in Yemen, supposedly descended from Ethiopians left behind when the ancient Ethiopian empire was driven out of Arabia in the sixth century, who live in the most unimaginable squalor. In the background of the photo was a scattering of huts constructed from crates and shreds of canvas, and on all sides barren earth; but in the foreground was a little girl, extremely pretty, dressed in tatters, but with her arms outspread, a look of delight upon her face, dancing. To me that was a heartbreaking picture, of course, but it was also an image of something amazing and glorious: the sheer ecstasy of innocence, the happiness of a child who can dance amid despair and desolation because her joy came with her into the world and prompts her to dance as if she were in the midst of paradise.
She became for me the perfect image of the deep indwelling truth of creation, the divine Wisdom or Sophia who resides in the very heart of the world, the stainless image of God, the unfallen. I'm waxing quite Eastern here, I know. But that, I would say, is the nature of" God's presence in the fallen world: his image, his bride, the deep joy and longing of creation, called from nothingness to be joined to him. That child's dance is nothing less than the eternal dance of divine Wisdom before God's throne, the dance of David and the angels and saints before his glory; it is the true face of creation, which God came to restore and which he will not suffer to see corruption.
*******************************
From The Christian Century; 1/10/2006, here is Where was God? An interview with David Bentley Hart.(Interview) ...
************************
DAVID HART'S 2003 book The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth was widely touted as a theological tour de force. He offers in that book a powerful and deeply learned statement of Christian truth that draws on the Eastern Orthodox tradition while engaging modern and postmodern critics of Christianity. After the tsunami in 2004 he wrote several commentaries in response to what he regarded as unhelpful attempts to understand that catastrophe theologically. His reflections were expanded in a book, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? . Hart, who next year will be a visiting professor at Providence College, spoke with us about evil and its place in the world that God created and loves.
It's often said that three claims of the Christian tradition--"God is omnipotent," "God is love" and "Evil exists'--present a logical contradiction. One of the claims has to be revised. Do you agree?
If by "evil exists" you mean that evil possesses a real substance of its own, and that it therefore exists in the way goodness exists (or, for that matter, a tree, a rabbit, an idea or a dream exists), in point of fact Christian tradition has usually denied this quite forcibly. Patristic and medieval thought (drawing, admittedly, on Platonic precedent) defined evil as a privation of the good: a purely parasitic and shadowy reality, a contamination or disease or absence, but not a real thing in itself. This, incidentally, is a logically necessary claim if one understands goodness and being as flowing alike from the very nature of God and coinciding in him as one infinite life.
That said, there surely is no contradiction between God's omnipotent goodness and the reality of evil. It may seem somewhat trite to invoke the freedom of creation as part of the works and ends of divine love, or to argue that the highest good of the creature--divinizing union with God in love--requires a realm of "secondary causality" in which the rational wills of God's creatures are at liberty; nonetheless, whether the traditional explanations of how sin and death have been set loose in the world satisfy one or not, they certainly render the claim that an omnipotent and good God would never allow unjust suffering simply vacuous. By what criterion could one render such a judgment? For Christians, one must look to the cross of Christ to take the measure of God's love, and of its worth in comparison to the sufferings of a fallen world. And one must look to the risen Christ to grasp the glory for which we are intended, and take one's understanding of the majesty and tragedy of creation's freedom from that.
In Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov famously points to the brutal killing of children and proclaims that he refuses to believe in any God who has arranged the world in such a way that it entails such suffering--regardless of what "meaning" can be attached to it. What does a Christian say to Karamazov's protest?
Actually, what Ivan ultimately refuses is not belief but consent: he will not acknowledge that there is any justice, any glory, any truth that is worth the suffering of a child. If he were merely a truculent atheist, he would be a boring figure. Instead, he is a rebel against the divine order, and intends to remain a rebel even if that order should--in some way transcending his finite understanding--prove to be perfectly just. One might very well read his protest not as a brief for atheism, but as a kind of demythologized Gnostic manifesto, an accusation flung in the face of the demiurge.
Still, the pathos of his protest is, to my mind, exquisitely Christian--though he himself seems not to be aware of this: a rage against explanation, a refusal to grant that the cruelty or brute natural misfortune or evil of any variety can ever be justified by some "happy ending" that makes sense of all our misery and mischance.
In a sense the whole of The Doors of the Sea was a response to Ivan's "rebellion"--and indeed a kind of endorsement of it. What I would say here is that it is important to understand the terms of the argument clearly: Ivan assumes--in good late-19th-century fashion--that the eschatological horizon of history and nature is, in a very direct way, the consummation of a process wherein all the apparent contingencies of history and nature have an indispensable part to play. For him, the Christian promise of the kingdom of God is the promise, as well, of a final justification not only of those who have suffered, but of their suffering, and of the part suffering plays in bringing the final kingdom of love and knowledge to pass. This is what he finds intolerable: the notion that the suffering of children will prove to have been meaningful, to have had a purpose, to have been in some sense a good and necessary thing; for him, the suffering of children is an infinite scandal, and his conscience could never allow it to sink to the level of some provisional passage through darkness on the way to some radiant future.
My contention is that this places Ivan's sensibility much nearer to the authentic vision of the New Testament than are many of the more pious and conventional forms of Christian conviction today. The gospel of the ancient church was always one of rebellion against those principalities and powers--death chief among them--that enslave and torment creation; nowhere does the New Testament rationalize evil or accord it necessity or treat it as part of the necessary fabric of God's world. All that Christian scripture asserts is that evil cannot defeat God's purposes or thwart the coming of his kingdom. Divine providence, of course, will always bring about God's good ends despite--and in a sense through--the evils of this world; but that is not the same thing as saying that evil has a necessary part to play in God's plans, and that God required evil to bring about the kingdom. As the empty tomb of Christ above all reveals, the verdict of God that rescues and redeems creation also overturns the order of the fallen world, and shatters the powers of historical and natural necessity that the fallen world comprises.
Christians often try to distinguish between what God wills and what God permits or allows. But does this distinction really help? If God allows something, or creates a world in which evil is allowed, then in some sense isn't it part of God's will?
Unless one thinks that God's act of creation is purely arbitrary--and it would be incoherent to attribute arbitrariness of any kind to a God of infinite goodness (an argument for another time)--then one must understand creation as a direct expression of God's own Logos. God does not create like an omnipotent consumer choosing one world out of an infinity of possibilities that somehow stand outside of and apart from his own nature. Here's one without cancer, there's one without Bach, over there's one with a higher infant mortality rate, and so on; this is the worst sort of anthropomorphism.
GOD CREATES the world of Jesus, the world conformed to his infinite love for his Son in the joy and light of the Spirit; he thereby also wills his goodness in all his creatures infinitely, which is to say he wills this world for eternal union with him in love, and he wills that we should become partakers of the divine nature.
There is no other world that God might have created, not because he is bound by necessity, but because he is infinitely free, and so nothing can hinder him from expressing his essential and infinite goodness perfectly, in and through the freedom of creatures created to be the fellows of his eternal Son.
That may seem obscurely phrased--it is, I know--but if one thinks through what it means to understand God as the transcendent source of all being, one must abandon the notion that God chooses to create in the way that I choose to buy blue drapes rather than red. God creates a realm of rational freedom that allows for a union between Creator and creature that is properly analogous to the Trinity's eternal union of love; or, stated otherwise, God creates his own image in his creatures, with all that that may entail.
Followers of Calvin have been particularly concerned to defend God's sovereignty. Do you think that tradition presents a particular problem for Christian thinking today?
Yes--and not only today. I quite explicitly admit in my writing that I think the traditional Calvinist understanding of divine sovereignty to be deeply defective, and destructively so. One cannot, as with Luther, trace out a direct genealogy from late medieval voluntarism to the Calvinist understanding of divine freedom; nevertheless, the way in which Calvin himself describes divine sovereignty is profoundly modern: it frequently seems to require an element of pure arbitrariness, of pure spontaneity, and this alone separates it from more traditional (and I would say more coherent) understandings of freedom, whether divine or human.
This idea of a God who can be called omnipotent only if his will is the direct efficient cause of every aspect of created reality immediately makes all the inept cavils of the village atheist seem profound: one still should not ask if God could create a stone he could not lift, perhaps, but one might legitimately ask if a God of infinite voluntaristic sovereignty and power could create a creature free to resist the divine will. The question is no cruder than the conception of God it is meant to mock, and the paradox thus produced merely reflects the deficiencies of that conception.
Frankly, any understanding of divine sovereignty so unsubtle that it requires the theologian to assert (as Calvin did) that God foreordained the fall of humanity so that his glory might be revealed in the predestined damnation of the derelict is obviously problematic, and probably far more blasphemous than anything represented by the heresies that the ancient ecumenical councils confronted.
Is universal salvation a corollary of your view of the absurdity of evil?
Probably not; but Gregory of Nyssa would say otherwise. The preferred Eastern Orthodox understanding of hell, one with profound patristic pedigrees, defines hell as something self-imposed, a condition of the soul that freely refuses to open itself in love to God and neighbor, and that thereby seals itself against the deifying love of God, thereby experiencing divine glory as an external chastisement. That hell I believe in, inasmuch as all of us from time to time have tasted it in this world. The refusal of love makes love a torment to us.
Does your understanding of evil have implications for pastoral practice in the face of evil?
I honestly don't know. I haven't a pastoral bone in my body. But I would implore pastors never to utter banal consolations concerning God's "greater plan" or the mystery of his will. The first proclamation of the gospel is that death is God's ancient enemy, whom God has defeated and will ultimately destroy. I would hope that no Christian pastor would fail to recognize that that completely shameless triumphalism--and with it an utterly sincere and unrestrained hatred of suffering and death--is the surest foundation of Christian hope, and the proper Christian response to grief.
So where was God in the tsunami?
Where was God? In and beyond all things, nearer to the essence of every creature than that creature itself, and infinitely outside the grasp of all finite things.
Almost all the reviews of The Doors of the Sea that I have read have recognized that, at the heart of the book, is a resolute insistence upon and adoration of the imperishable goodness of creation, an almost willfully naive assertion that it is the beauty and peace of the created world that truly reveal its original and ultimate nature, while the suffering and alienation and horror of mortal existence are, in an ultimate sense, fictions of fallen time, chains and veils and shadows and distortions, but no part of God's will for his creatures. This is why, at one point in the book, I grant the Gnostics of old the validity of their questions, though I go on to revile the answers at which they arrived.
To see the world in the Christian way--which, as I say in the book, requires the eye of charity and a faith in Easter--is in some sense to venture everything upon an absurd impracticality (I almost sound Kierkegaardian when I say it that way). But, as I was writing the book, I found myself thinking again and again of a photograph I had seen in the Baltimore Sun. The story concerned the Aldadam, the lowest social caste in Yemen, supposedly descended from Ethiopians left behind when the ancient Ethiopian empire was driven out of Arabia in the sixth century, who live in the most unimaginable squalor. In the background of the photo was a scattering of huts constructed from crates and shreds of canvas, and on all sides barren earth; but in the foreground was a little girl, extremely pretty, dressed in tatters, but with her arms outspread, a look of delight upon her face, dancing. To me that was a heartbreaking picture, of course, but it was also an image of something amazing and glorious: the sheer ecstasy of innocence, the happiness of a child who can dance amid despair and desolation because her joy came with her into the world and prompts her to dance as if she were in the midst of paradise.
She became for me the perfect image of the deep indwelling truth of creation, the divine Wisdom or Sophia who resides in the very heart of the world, the stainless image of God, the unfallen. I'm waxing quite Eastern here, I know. But that, I would say, is the nature of" God's presence in the fallen world: his image, his bride, the deep joy and longing of creation, called from nothingness to be joined to him. That child's dance is nothing less than the eternal dance of divine Wisdom before God's throne, the dance of David and the angels and saints before his glory; it is the true face of creation, which God came to restore and which he will not suffer to see corruption.
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posted by crystal | 9:52 PM
16 Comments:
Crystal,
This looks intriguing. I'm going to print the whole thing out and give it a thorough reading. Thanks.
Hi Jeff - let me know what you think ... I'm thinking about it too.
Hi Crystal,
As an Eastern Orthodox theologian, Hart brings an attractive incarnational view to the table. It's a good critique of the platonic view we usually take on evil. I respect how he doesn't just accept pastoral banalities about the purpose of suffering. I've been trying very, very hard to shake off a platonic mindset, but it has been heavily imbued in me.
I admit that the Catholic Church was crying out for reform in the 14th century, but the last thing it needed was more platonism; to be dragged back into more Augustinianism.
You already know how I feel about that, the doctrine of Penal Substitutionary Atonement, and those who preach it. They took thousands of years of Judaism's history, with its moral exhortation, thirst for social justice, jubilee years, forgiveness of indebtedness, liberation of captives, concern for orphans and widows, and turned it all on its head. They hijacked it into a system in which God's primary concern is to hunt down and utterly crush and destroy any puny human who dares to take responsibility for his own actions and will, even though God made him the way that he is.
There is a Quaker fellow who goes by the name of Sharktacos. His web site is down right now, but it is called, "Why, God, Why? Exploring issues of human suffering and the silence of God". I think it is very good, and I referenced him when I blogged a topic on the atonement. You should take a look now and then to see if it comes back up. I think you'd like it.
Theodicy seems to be a very difficult topic for all theologians. One of the things I wrestle with is the fact that God created a world in which almost all living things survive by consuming other living things. Sudden and violent death is the fate of many organisms. I find that to be a curious thing. In light of that, is it so strange that God gives himself to us to eat as living bread? Does that sound crazy?
The reason why I like the Christus Victor model over Substitutionary atonement is that it stresses Jesus' victory over the forces of evil and death. The saving event is in the life, example, and resurrection of Jesus more than in his death. By partaking in Christ, by living in the spirit, we become sons and daughters by adoption, and God's promise to us is that in living in him, we conquer evil and death as well. We live by the theological virtue of hope. Yes, there is suffering, and depression, and pain, and random, inexplicable, untimely death, but we put our trust in him who deigned to take on our form and suffer with us. We trust God to keep his promises, and in going back to the Jewish tradition, we look for justice. Someday, somehow, somewhere, there will be justice, and God will set things to right. In the end, it is not our will that gets done, but His. I like this piece that Peter Kreeft wrote about the theological virtue of hope:
"Hope means that the agony and ecstasy of longing for a joy this world can never give is a sure sign that I was made by and for one who is joy itself, and him alone. Thus when I hope against hope that my friend will recover from a disease the doctors assure me is fatal, I am not playing the game of predictions and statistical averages against the doctors but prophetically asserting something about the nature of ultimate reality: that it is on my side in willing life over death, that death is the rind or epidermis or outer appearance of life, not vice versa; that ultimate reality is not this indifferent cosmos but an infinitely caring and loving will."
P.S. Sandalstraps has been posting a lot on theodicy lately.
Jeff,
thanks for the links. You know a lot more about theology than me, but here goes ...
Am I right in thinking that an Orthodox view sees God less as a person and in a more panentheistic way? If so, I think that's one way Hart can get away with not having God answer the question of why there's sugffering. I don't want to give up on God as a person, though.
I'm with you on the atonement thing. I'm reading a book now by James Alison - Faith Beyond Resentment - which is anti-atonement. There's also that srticle at American Catholic, The Incarnation: God's Gift of Love.
I also wonder why this is a world where cratures have to eat each other to stay alive ... one teacher I had in college said our decision to live was our decision that something else must die. Even if we're vegetarians, like me, nature is still "read in tooth and claw". John Stuart Mill said ... If there are any marks of all special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals
Mostly, I feel conflicted - I want to trust but even if I say it's ok for me to suffer and still find God good, I don't think I can say that for others who suffer. But I try to be hopeful, to think .. All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well ... like Julian of Norwich wrote. And I think about how Jesus was, and is, and that he said ... I make all things new. ... maybe he really will.
Hi Crystal,
You know a lot more about theology than me
Oh, I don't know about that! You seem pretty well read to me. In fact, I had to look up what "panentheistic" meant.
That panentheism is interesting, but the emphasis I had always noticed prominently in Eastern Orthodoxy is on divinization, or Theosis.
Theosis draws on Irenaeus for "recapitulation", or, as in the words of Julian, "making all things new". Not only us and our suffering, but of all creation.
Theosis also asserts the complete restoration of all people (and of the entire creation), in principle. This is built upon the understanding of the atonement put forward by Irenaeus, called "recapitulation".
For many fathers, theosis goes beyond simply restoring people to their state before the Fall of Adam and Eve, teaching that because Christ united the human and divine natures in his person, it is now possible for someone to experience closer fellowship with God than Adam and Eve initially experienced in the Garden of Eden, and that people can become more like God than Adam and Eve were at that time. Some Orthodox theologians go so far as to say that Jesus would have become incarnate for this reason alone, even if Adam and Eve had never sinned.
All of humanity is fully restored to the full potential of humanity because the Son of God took to Himself a human nature to be born of a woman, and takes to Himself also the sufferings due to sin (yet is not Himself a sinful man, and is God unchanged in His being). In Christ, the two natures of God and human are not two persons but one; thus, a union is effected in Christ, between all of humanity and God.
I love the Julian of Norwich quote. I've never read her, but I know I should get around to it.
Don't ever give up hope.
Theosis is not simply greater communion with God; theosis is becoming God.
Thanks for your comment. I think you're right, or at least that's my understanding of the Eastern Orthodox idea. That quote that Jeff gave is from Wikipedia's page on theosis.
Theosis is becoming a "god," not "God". As Athanasius said: God became man that man might become god. In the Orthodox perspective God came not just to offer forgiveness of sins, but salvation of the entire person. To fix peoples sinful nature, to, with God's grace, allow humans to be as they truly should be: Christ-like, thus god-like.
Also Orthodox think of God as three persons, so there is no loss of the personhood of God. Orthodoxy is the tradition in which the creeds took place and they hold them in very high esteem, the Nicene Creed is pretty much what you get, concerning God.
Sava,
Thanks for the comment. I'm afraid David Hart is the only Orthodox theologian I've read and I don't know a lot about Eastern Orthodox.
The Orthodox view is the patristic view. As such, is a part of the Catholic heritage as well. For a modern Catholic theologian that draws heavily on eastern patristic writers you may really enjoy Hans Ur von Balthasar, particularly his work on theological aesthetics, Maximus the Confessor, and Gregory of Nyssa.
I am an Orthodox convert, but I take that primarily to meant that I believe in the teachings of the Church prior to the schism - in the fullness of its catholicity. I pray of course for re-union but I also think there is a sense in which the divisions between our communions are artificially reinforced by "recent" history. Von Balthasar says to me in many ways that there can be a day ahead where we will be one again: he professes a faith that seems to me to reflect the catholicity of Christianity in its fullness.
Thanks for the comment. I like Hans Urs von Balthasar too. I especially like his idea that maybe no one goes to hell - have a pst post about it here. There is a lot I appreciate about the Orthodox view :)
Ah, very good. You will like Gregory of Nyssa even more, I suspect...
Panentheism is no part of Orthodox Spirituality. It is an idea that arose out of the German Enlightenment as a viable alternative to the Hegelian Pantheism so prominent at the time. It basically asserts that the World is a part of God's being, which is a very different thing from simply recognizing that God's being interpenetrates and infuses all of created being. Panentheism is described as being characteristic of Orthodox Theology by a few Modernist Orthodox scholars who really ought to know better.
Maxim,
Thanks for the comment. I have to admit, I wrote this a while ago and don't now remember why I mentioned panentheism. Maybe it was Hart describing God as the transcendent source of all being, but as you say, that's not really very panentheistic. Thanks for the input.
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