The Monday Morning Quarterback

Yesterday I continued the series on "Where is God in Evil?" Both scriptures and orthodox Christian theology maintains that God is all-powerful and God is love. Theodicy tries to explain how this can be: how a just God that is all-powerful and love itself can then allow for the reality of evil, natural evil and moral evil.

Some respond to the reality of evil by believing that God is all-powerful and not good. In this case you can either spend life trying to appease and manipulate this angry god or you can shake your fist at this god and try to live as best you can. You can also decide that God does not exist, and that we are on are own.

Some respond by believing that God is good but not all-powerful. God is not the source of evil and suffering, but God is not able to prevent it from happening. This is the conclusion that Rabbi Harold Kushner came to in his book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

The theological understanding of a major stream of orthodox Christian theology is to acknowledge that both God is all-powerful and God is good and that freedom has something to do with the current state of affairs. David Bentley Hart in The Doors of the Sea writes about God's freedom and its relation to evil in this way:

For God is infinite actuality, the source and end of all being, the eternally good, for whom mere arbitrary "choice"--as among possibilities that somehow exceed his "present" actuality--would be a deficiency, a limitation placed upon his infinite power to be God. His freedom is the impossibility of any force, pathos, or potentiality interrupting the perfection of his nature of hindering him in the realization of his own illimitable goodness, in himself and in his creatures. To be "capable" of evil--to be able to do evil or to be affected by an encounter with it--would in fact be an incapacity in God; and to require evil to bring about his good ends would make him less than the God he is. The object of God's will is his own infinite goodness, and it is an object perfectly realized, and so he is free (71-72).

According to Hart, God has made the creation in freedom and in that very freedom is the possibility of resisting God and God's will. He writes, "God has fashioned creatures in his image so that they might be joined in a perfect union with him in the rational freedom of love. For that very reason, what God permits, rather than violate the autonomy of the created world, may be in itself contrary to what he wills" (82).

This does not give a definitive answer, but for me it opens up "space" that I can ponder. Can it be that the freedom that God has given to creation is so important that God will not violate that freedom even though God could choose to do so? One of the points that Hart makes--reflecting on a point of Thomas Aquinas-- is that even though God gives the creation freedom, that the misuse of that freedom cannot ultimately "prevent him from accomplishing the good he intends in all things" (83). The good that God intends is based on God's work in Jesus on the cross and in the resurrection. It is to this that we will turn in the concluding sermon this week.