David B Hart, continued ...
Before I go on to the subject of the post - more on David Hart's book, The Doors of the Sea - I want to point something out ...
There are blogs in blogdom where one can find brilliant and insightful discussions of David Hart's theology ... this isn't one of them. I'm more thinking out loud in my posts on him, hoping for comments from others, so that I can come to understand better (or at all) his ideas. Just don't want anyone to be disappointed :-) so ...
The last time I posted on the Doors of the Sea, Hart had discussed what he saw as a pretty good "problem of evil" argument by Dostoevsky (or Dostoyevsky, as Hart spells it) ... he had the character of Ivan wonder ... if you could bring about a universal and final beatitude for all beings by torturing one small creature [in this case, a little girl] to death, would you think the price acceptable?
I've now finished the book, and in it Hart writes that suffering and evil are meaningless - not part of God's plan in the sense of a "lesson" or a punishment, and are worthy of our hatred. - and that while God doesn't will evil, he permits it ... that our world is "fallen" and at the mercy of death (the devil), that it's this situation that causes life's evils, and that good will triumph in the end (see the Eastern Orthodox ransom theory of atonement).
It seems like Hart answers Ivan's argument by saying that he's asking the wrong question ... Ivan wonders how an all good and all powerful God can cause suffering in the world, even to bring about good eventual ends, but as I wrote above, Hart's God doesn't "cause" but merely "allows" evil.
But is that God so different than the one Ivan imagines? God doesn't cause evil and suffering but it's the price he allows us to pay. Hart admits that his theory would probably not satisfy Ivan, who might prefer oblivion to a life of free wiil that's bought with suffering, not only one's own, but also the suffering of others. I said in my last post that Ivan's argument is mine, and here too, I think I would agree with him.
Having said that, I have to admit, by the end of reading Hart's book, I was moved and touched, and more mixed up than ever.
Here below is a little (sorry for the hatchet job) of what Hart writes, just after giving Dostoevsky's argument ...
***********************************
What ... is "nature" or the natural world? ... It is easy, and among the most spontaneous movements of the soul, to revere the God glimpsed in the iridescence of flowered meadows .... But at the same time, all the splendid loveliness of the natural world is everywhere attended - and indeed, preserved - by death. All life feeds on life, each creature must yeild its place in time to another, and at the heart of nature is a perpetual struggle to survive and increase at the expense of other beings ...
The Christian should see two realities at once ... one the world as we all know it, in all its beauty and terror, grandeur and dreariness, delight and anguish; and the other, the world in its first and ultimate truth, not simply "nature" but "creation," and endless sea of glory, radiant with the beauty of God in every part, innocent of all violence. To see in this way is to rejoice and mourn at once ....
Christian thought, from the outset, denies that (in themselves) suffering, death, and evil have any ultimate value or any spiritual meaning at all. It claims that they are cosmic contingencies, ontological shadows, intrinsically devoid of substance or purpose, however much God may - under the conditions of a fallen order - make them the occassions for accomplishing his good ends ....
In the New Testament, our condition as fallen creatures is explicitly portrayed as a subjugation to the subsidiary and often mutinous angelic and demonic "powers," which are not able to defeat God's transcendant and providential governance of all things, but which certainly are able to act against him within the limits of cosmic time ... The cosmos, then, is divided between two kingdoms, that of God and that of death. And while God must triumph, death remains mighty and terrible until the end.
... 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 and the consequences that follow from it ...
Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue his creation from the absurdity of sin, the emptyness and waste of death - the forces, whether calculating malevolence or imbecile chance - that shatter living souls .... to see the goodness indwelling all creation requires a labor of vision that only a faith in Easter can sustain; but it is there, effulgent, unfading, innocent, but languishing in bondage to corruption, groaning in anticipation of a glory yet to be revealed, both a promise of the Kingdom yet to come and a portent of its beauty.
Until that final glory, however, the world remains divided between two kingdoms, where light and darkness, life and death grow up together and await the harvest. In such a world, our portion is charity, and our sustenance is faith, and so it will be until the end of days .... and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and he that sits upon the throne will say, "Behold, I make all things new."
********************************
There are blogs in blogdom where one can find brilliant and insightful discussions of David Hart's theology ... this isn't one of them. I'm more thinking out loud in my posts on him, hoping for comments from others, so that I can come to understand better (or at all) his ideas. Just don't want anyone to be disappointed :-) so ...
The last time I posted on the Doors of the Sea, Hart had discussed what he saw as a pretty good "problem of evil" argument by Dostoevsky (or Dostoyevsky, as Hart spells it) ... he had the character of Ivan wonder ... if you could bring about a universal and final beatitude for all beings by torturing one small creature [in this case, a little girl] to death, would you think the price acceptable?
I've now finished the book, and in it Hart writes that suffering and evil are meaningless - not part of God's plan in the sense of a "lesson" or a punishment, and are worthy of our hatred. - and that while God doesn't will evil, he permits it ... that our world is "fallen" and at the mercy of death (the devil), that it's this situation that causes life's evils, and that good will triumph in the end (see the Eastern Orthodox ransom theory of atonement).
It seems like Hart answers Ivan's argument by saying that he's asking the wrong question ... Ivan wonders how an all good and all powerful God can cause suffering in the world, even to bring about good eventual ends, but as I wrote above, Hart's God doesn't "cause" but merely "allows" evil.
But is that God so different than the one Ivan imagines? God doesn't cause evil and suffering but it's the price he allows us to pay. Hart admits that his theory would probably not satisfy Ivan, who might prefer oblivion to a life of free wiil that's bought with suffering, not only one's own, but also the suffering of others. I said in my last post that Ivan's argument is mine, and here too, I think I would agree with him.
Having said that, I have to admit, by the end of reading Hart's book, I was moved and touched, and more mixed up than ever.
Here below is a little (sorry for the hatchet job) of what Hart writes, just after giving Dostoevsky's argument ...
***********************************
What ... is "nature" or the natural world? ... It is easy, and among the most spontaneous movements of the soul, to revere the God glimpsed in the iridescence of flowered meadows .... But at the same time, all the splendid loveliness of the natural world is everywhere attended - and indeed, preserved - by death. All life feeds on life, each creature must yeild its place in time to another, and at the heart of nature is a perpetual struggle to survive and increase at the expense of other beings ...
The Christian should see two realities at once ... one the world as we all know it, in all its beauty and terror, grandeur and dreariness, delight and anguish; and the other, the world in its first and ultimate truth, not simply "nature" but "creation," and endless sea of glory, radiant with the beauty of God in every part, innocent of all violence. To see in this way is to rejoice and mourn at once ....
Christian thought, from the outset, denies that (in themselves) suffering, death, and evil have any ultimate value or any spiritual meaning at all. It claims that they are cosmic contingencies, ontological shadows, intrinsically devoid of substance or purpose, however much God may - under the conditions of a fallen order - make them the occassions for accomplishing his good ends ....
In the New Testament, our condition as fallen creatures is explicitly portrayed as a subjugation to the subsidiary and often mutinous angelic and demonic "powers," which are not able to defeat God's transcendant and providential governance of all things, but which certainly are able to act against him within the limits of cosmic time ... The cosmos, then, is divided between two kingdoms, that of God and that of death. And while God must triumph, death remains mighty and terrible until the end.
... 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 and the consequences that follow from it ...
Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue his creation from the absurdity of sin, the emptyness and waste of death - the forces, whether calculating malevolence or imbecile chance - that shatter living souls .... to see the goodness indwelling all creation requires a labor of vision that only a faith in Easter can sustain; but it is there, effulgent, unfading, innocent, but languishing in bondage to corruption, groaning in anticipation of a glory yet to be revealed, both a promise of the Kingdom yet to come and a portent of its beauty.
Until that final glory, however, the world remains divided between two kingdoms, where light and darkness, life and death grow up together and await the harvest. In such a world, our portion is charity, and our sustenance is faith, and so it will be until the end of days .... and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and he that sits upon the throne will say, "Behold, I make all things new."
********************************
posted by crystal | 9:57 PM
2 Comments:
Hi Crystal --
A David Hart post, again. I should do my own reading -- your posts really stimulate the curiosity.
As I mentioned earlier, I'm a daily witness to undeserved pain and suffering, at a pediatric hospital in Seattle. I had to come to my own personal terms with the question of evil/suffering, or I would have burned out long ago.
I can't say I really have an explanation; it's more like a truce (not exactly a peace!) between two realities. The first is the undisputable reality that there are beautiful, innocent children who suffer pain and death through no fault of their own, or any fault of their parents or extended families. Some of those deaths are not gentle passings, either; and parents struggle mightily to hold their own lives and their relationship together through it all, and for long into the future.
Sometimes parents ask me how God could allow things like that to happen. I don't know the answer to that, and I can't pretend that I do, especially to a distraught Mom or Dad. But -- if the circumstances are right -- I can share with them a belief that is just as real to me as suffering and death: that we do have a good God who does love us, and who does love our children, all of them.
I hope that doesn't sound too simple or naive.
Denny,
No, not simple or naive - that sounds honest. It's like there are two mutually exclusive things existing at the same time (evil/suffering and a loving/powerful God) ... it makes my head hurt, and my feelings too.
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