God, freedom and evil

Thanks to Joe Katzman at Winds of Change for a short posting about an essay by Howard Owens on the relationship between God and evil and freedom.

Owens says that our present enemies hate us because we are free. I would add that the freedom hated is not simply political freedom, but theological freedom. The foundation of the present war is not basically political, as we understand politics. It is religious, but in the minds of the radical Islamists we are fighting, there is no strong distinction between the religious and the political. For a fuller explanation than I care to post here, please see my long essay, Why We Were Attacked: Religious Motivations for Anti-Western Violence.

However, even without al Qaeda there is still evil in the world. The theological term for the problem of evil in Christian and Jewish theology is "theodicy," literally meaning, "judging God." The term comes from the book of Job, in which Job, suffering radically for no just reason, demands the right to judge God's dominion over creation.

I think most Christians would be surprised to learn how much of our understanding about God actually springs from Greek philosophy rather than the Hebrew of Jewish scriptures. Augustine (354-430), the most important theologian of the first millennium, was thoroughly Platonic. Thomas Aquinas (~1225-1274), still considered by the Roman Catholic Church as the foremost theologian of all, was strongly influenced by Aristotle's writings.

(The works of the ancient Greeks were discovered by Europeans in the Near East, ironically having been preserved by the Muslims. In fact, the Muslim scholar Avicenna (ibn Sina), 980-1037, is still considered by many Aristotelians to be one of the leading expositors of Aristotle.)

In the 16th century, Martin Luther used Platonic categories to argue against the Catholic church, which by then was heavily Aquinian.

Classical theism

In classical theism, God "is believed to have created the entire universe, to rule over it, and to intend to bring it to its fulfillment or realization, to ‘save it'"(1). Classical theism draws on "intuitions and assumptions of Greek philosophy as much as biblical images," says Tyron Inbody (2).

Catholic Scholasticism developed Aristotelian formulations of God "as absolute, changeless, eternal being or actuality" (3). This idea of impassive immutability remained in the Reformation, though the Reformers emphasized God's sovereignty as unchallenged, absolute power, wholly righteous and gracious. God was understood to have "absolute priority and decisiveness" in divine election. Always known as powerful in the Jewish and Christian traditions, God was now understood as absolutely omnipotent, able to do anything God chose. "The concept of God's omnipotence is located at the center of classical theism" (4), and so is at the heart of theodicy problems.

Theism's Breakdown in Theodicy

Daniel Howard-Snyder observed that theism is the "view that there is an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being"(5). In theodicy issues these qualities are often highly problematic. Gregory Boyd tells the true story of Zosia, a little Jewish girl in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, to illustrate why. Zosia had beautiful eyes which caught the attention of a German soldier.

"I could make two rings out them," he said, "one for myself and one for my wife. Let's see whether they really are so beautiful. And better yet, let's examine them in our hands." A witty soldier proposed they take the eyes out. There are screams from the mother and child and laughter from the soldiers. Whom will God hear first? What happens next is that the fainting child is lying on the floor. Instead of eyes two bloody wounds are staring. The mother, driven mad, is held by the other women. Later, the Nazis found it necessary, of course, to eliminate the blind child (6).

Such horrors present classical theism with its greatest challenge. Boyd says, "Assuming (rightly) that God is perfectly loving and good, and assuming (wrongly, I hold) that divine omnipotence entails meticulous control, the problem of evil . . . becomes simply unsolvable." With God's power and goodness both claimed to be unlimited, John Hick says evil "is a problem equally for the believer and the nonbelieiver. In the mind of the latter it stands as a major obstacle to religious commitment, whilst for the former it sets up an acute internal tension to disturb his faith and to lay upon it a perpetual burden of doubt"(7).

This problem was the subject of my Master thesis at Vanderbilt. I'll post more over time.

Bibliography:
(1) Langdon Gilkey, "God," in Christian Theology, an Introduction to Its Traditions and Tasks. Edited by Peter C. Hodgson and Robert H. King, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 90.

(2) Tyron L. Inbody, The Transforming God, an Interpretation of Suffering and Evil. (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1997), 37.

(3) Gilkey.

(4) Inbody.

(5) Daniel Howard-Snyder, "The Evidential Argument from Evil," in The Evidential Argument from Evil. ed. Daniel Howard-Snyder. (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1996), xi.

(6) Gregory A. Boyd, God At War. (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 33-34.

(7) John Hick, Evil and the God of Love. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977), 3.