Theodicy is perhaps the one ultimately unsolvable issue in theology. It has baffled and bedeviled Christians from the beginning of the faith. This essay is a modest attempt to add something to the Christian discussion of theodicy. I offer it as a proposal, not as a final resolution of the issue. I make no claim that it is irrefutable or without conceptual problems. I am aware of some of those problems. I do not doubt that there are others that have not occurred to me. I make no claim to have done a thorough study of the issue, only to have given the matter considerable thought. Still, I find the solution to the theodicy problem that I offer here at least intriguing. I believe that it may produce fruitful results as I and, I hope, others continue to develop it. So here it is, for whatever it is worth. This brief essay is a much condensed version of a longer essay that I have written that is too long to post on a blog. In that longer piece I address some of those conceptual problems with this model of which I am aware. If you want a copy of that longer essay please let me know by sending an email to the address at the top of this blog. I’ll email it to you or, if necessary, send it to you snail mail.
Theodicy is the justification of God in the face of evil. It asks the question: How can a good and loving God permit all the evil, all the suffering, that so characterizes human life on earth? The issue of theodicy arises because of three assumptions that Christianity and the other monotheistic faiths make about God. Those assumptions are first that there is one and only one God, second that that God is good, and third that God does or at least can control events on earth. If any of those three assumptions is removed theodicy is no longer a problem. Dualistic religions solve the problem by positing two gods, one the source and ground of the good and the other the source and ground of evil. A monotheistic religion that understood God as evil would not have a theodicy issue either, although it might have a problem explaining where all the good in the world comes from. A faith whose God cannot control events on earth would not have a theodicy problem either, since that God could neither cause evil nor prevent it.
Christianity has a theodicy problem primarily because it is unwilling to give up any of the three basic understandings about God that create the theodicy issue in the first place. Christianity is monotheistic, even if its Trinitarian form of monotheism makes it look to those who do not understand like Christianity has three Gods not one. We believe in one ground and source of being, not in two. For Christians the one God is and wills only the good. Our God is gracious and loving. We know that God is good, gracious, and loving because we know God in and through Jesus Christ, who taught and lived God’s good, gracious, and loving nature. In addition, Christianity has always believed that God as least can control events on earth; and in the fact most Christians have believed that God actually does control events on earth. Thus arises Christianity’s theodicy problem.
I believe that there truly is no solution to the theodicy problem that does requires us significantly to modify at least one of these assumptions if not to discard one of them altogether, and I believe that Christianity cannot modify either its monotheistic assumption or its assumption that the one God is good and still remain in any recognizable sense Christian. Which of course leaves us with the assumption about God’s control of events on earth as the only possible candidate for the assumption that we must modify if we are to solve the theodicy issue. As I have stated it that assumption has two elements, or perhaps better it comes in two possible forms. One is that God can control events on earth. This is the assumption behind our calling God the Almighty, one of our favorite appellations for God. I’ll have more to say about that assumption shortly; but the assumption about God that I want to examine, and that I believe we must modify if we are ever even to approach a satisfactory resolution of the theodicy issue, is the assumption that God does control events on earth.
It should be relatively easy for Christians today to give up the assumption that God does control events on earth. The horrors of the twentieth century, especially perhaps but not only the first half of that late, unlamented century, make the belief that God actually does control events on earth simply untenable. If as we insist that God is one, and if as we insist that God is good, then the meaningless slaughter of a generation in World War I, the government mandated starvation of millions of Russian peasants in the 1920s and 1930s, the Holocaust, the firebombing of Dresden, the Japanese atrocities in Manchuria and Shanghai, and so many other instances of mass murder and genocide that the world experienced in the twentieth century prove that God does not control events on earth. The Hebrew prophets of the eighth century BCE could make God responsible for the destruction of Israel by the Assyrians. We cannot make God responsible for the meaningless horrors of our time. Whether God can control events on earth or not, that God does not control events on earth is, I believe, an unavoidable conclusion from the facts of world history in our time. Any God who would cause such massive suffering is not a God worth worshipping or following. Such a God is not the God of Christian experience and belief.
Christianity has long ascribed certain attributes to God, and one of attributes Christians have always attributed to God is omnipotence. We think that God must be omnipotent in order truly to be God. Since it is difficult if not impossible for us to imagine God not being omnipotent, and since human experience drives to the conclusion that God does not exercise God’s omnipotence, at least not in any way that we humans can recognize as omnipotent, the question inevitably arises for us of why the omnipotent God chooses not to control events on earth so as to prevent unjust human suffering.
The most common answer that our tradition has given to the question of why God does not intervene to control events on earth to prevent suffering is that God allows evil to persist in the world because God respects human freedom. It is I suppose clear that God could not overcome the evil that humans cause without overriding human freedom, and I believe that this traditional answer points in the right direction. Ultimately, however, this answer falls short in two major respects. First, it does not address the question of why God chooses to value human freedom over the safety and security of God’s people. Most of those people would be very happy to have God appear in a great display of power and majesty to put an end to evil in the world. The victims of the Holocaust were not, I dare say, much concerned with Adolf Hitler’s human freedom. The “God respects human freedom” answer to the theodicy question leaves us longing for an explanation of what so often appear to us from the perspective of this answer to be God’s tragically misplaced priorities. Second, this answer does not address the question of human suffering that results not from human intention but from natural disasters or from the accidental, unintentional consequences of human actions. The “God respects human freedom” answer to the question of theodicy in the end is inadequate to answer the question it seeks to answer.
So have we reached a dead end? Is there no convincing answer to the question of why God does not control events on earth? I think actually that we are not quite at a dead end. To see a way out of our dilemma we must look, I think, at the fundamental nature of God’s relationship to creation. We need to look at the nature of the creative process itself. I think that there is an understanding of God’s relationship to creation that preserves God’s status as God while explaining in a more comprehensive and convincing way than does the human freedom theory why God does not prevent suffering in creation. I call this understanding the “God respects creation as creation” answer to the question of theodicy. Let me explain.
For us Christians, and indeed for Jews and Muslims as well, God is first and foremost the Creator. There is good reason for the Bible to begin with its two great creation myths, the six days of creation of Genesis 1 and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2. It is not merely that creation comes before all else chronologically. Creation comes before all else conceptually. Everything else follows and flows from God as the Creator of all that is. If God were not first of all Creator we would not be here to call God Creator or to struggle with the question of God’s relationship to creation. Whatever God’s reason for creating may be, the important point for us is that God does indeed create.
The fundamental relationship between God and the world then is that of Creator and creation. God created the world and all the universe that we know. So we ask: What is the nature of the creative act, and is there anything in the nature of the creative act that helps us answer the question of theodicy? Let us then begin this phase of our inquiry with an examination of the nature of the creative act itself, and let us do that, as many others have done, by first examining a creative act with which we are all familiar and in which we have all participated as creation and in which many of us have participated as creator, the act of human procreation.
The essence of human procreation is that something new originates with biological parents as creators, then exists on its own as an autonomous being. The person created comes out of the persons creating. He arises within them but then exists apart from them. From the moment of birth, or even before birth, the new person has separate being, a separate identity from her parents. Creation is in essence an act of separation of the creature from the creator. In humans, that act of separation becomes a process of separation in which the child’s growth is a series of steps toward ever fuller separation from the parents. A newborn infant has separate being, but that being is still completely dependent upon the parents (or other parental figures) for nourishment, care, and protection. As the child grows and develops he becomes ever more separate, more autonomous. Sometimes the process of greater differentiation is gradual. Sometimes it proceeds in spurts, as during the “terrible twos” and during adolescence. If the child is healthy, and if the parents do their job well, the result of the process is a fully differentiated, autonomous human being who had her origin in her parents but who is distinct and separate from them. In a healthy relationship between parents and an adult child, the parents respect the autonomy of their child. They continue to love the child, to be present with and for the child, to offer the child support and guidance when the child needs and asks for it; but they do not seek to control the adult child or make his decisions for him. They are present, but they respect their child’s status as an autonomous human being.
God’s process of creation is of course not identical to human procreation, but God’s creating is nonetheless in many ways analogous to human procreating. Just as in human procreation a new, separate being comes into the world, so in God’s creation a new, separate sphere of being comes into existence. Just as the child is separate from the parent, so God’s creation is separate from God. God creates out of Godself something that has its origin in God but that is different from God and that has its own autonomous being. The Judeo-Christian tradition has never been pantheistic. Creation is not God. Creation is precisely creation. It is other than God precisely in that it is created being not divine uncreated being. Creation is existentially different from the Creator. It arose with the Creator, but it is fundamentally and necessarily separate from the Creator.
And here’s the crucial point: Precisely because it is God’s will to create, God always and necessarily respects the status of creation as creation. The traditional answer to the question of theodicy says that God respects human freedom, but that answer is nowhere near comprehensive enough. God respects human freedom because that freedom is part of creation’s autonomous status as creation, as other than God. What God fundamentally respects is the creaturely status of creation. The question of God’s relationship to creation, including the question of theodicy, must be understood in the context of God respecting the status of what God has created precisely as creation, that is, as existentially other than God, separate from God. It cannot be otherwise. God did not create another God. God created a world, a universe, that is in its essence other than God. Since we must assume that God did not create something other than what God intended to create, we must assume that God intended God’s creation to be what it is, namely, other than God. Theologians say that God is totaliter aliter, totally other than creation. It follows that creation must be totally other than God. If, then, God intended creation to be creation and not God, we can be sure that God has, does, and always will respect the status of creation as creation, that God will honor and respect God’s own intention in creating and will not violate that intention.
We have previously established that God does not control events on earth. Our understanding that God relates to creation precisely as Creator of creation provides the answer to the question of why God does not control events on earth. The answer is that God does not control events on earth because God’s exercising control over events in creation would be inconsistent with creation’s status as creation. God does not control events in creation because, quite simply, creation is creation and not God. God respects creation’s status as creation, as created, autonomous being that is other than God.
In this understanding, then, God cannot consistently both respect the nature of creation as other than God and interfere in creation to control events there. The autonomy of creation that is inherent in God’s act of creating that which is other than God precludes such interference. What happens on earth does not happen because God is Deus ex machina, sitting offstage and pulling wires and levers to make things happen on the stage of creation. What happens in creation happens according to the inherent dynamics of creation, not because God is intervening in creation to cause things to happen. God cannot do that without violating the nature of creation as creation, a nature that we must assume God intends to preserve.
The question of theodicy, the question of the justification of God in the face of evil, now appears in a different light. God’s not interfering in creation to prevent evil of any sort, whether caused by natural processes or by human beings, now appears to be an inherent, necessary, and unavoidable consequence of the act of creation itself. Evil exists because it is creation not God in which we live. God’s responsibility for evil therefore also appears in a new light. God’s only responsibility for evil, it turns out, is that God engaged in the act of creation. We of course cannot blame God for the act of creation. As believers in a Triune God we Christians believe that God is, to the extent we can know God, relational by nature. That is, it appears from our Christian experience of God that it is in God’s nature to be in relationship with another, both within the Godhead Itself between the Persons of the Trinity and between God and the universe in which we live, between God as Creator and creation. If we blame God for the evil in the world we blame God for the act of creation itself. Yet creation seems to be God’s nature, and who are we to blame God for being God?
So there it is. The suggestion here is that the answer to the question of theodicy lies in the very nature of the creative act. I have been thinking along these lines for at least a couple of years now. So far, this understanding works for me. Whether it works for you is not for me to say. I hope only that my discussion here will prompt some deeper thinking about the matter in you. Perhaps you will find that this way of looking at the matter works for you. If your deeper thinking leads you to a different conclusion that too will be a very good thing.
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