Luy / Levering / Kalantzis Evil and Creation

Historical and Constructive Essays in Christian Dogmatics
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68359-435-2
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 280 Seiten

Reihe: Studies in Historical and Systematic Theology

'My help comes from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth.' Evil is an intruder upon a world created by God and declared good. Scripture emphasizes this: laments are regularly juxtaposed with declarations of God as creator. But evil is not merely a problem for the doctrine of creation. Rather, the doctrine of creation provides a hopeful response to evil. In Evil and Creation, David J. Luy, Matthew Levering, and George Kalantzis collect essays investigating how the doctrine of creation relates to moral and physical evil. Essayists pursue philosophical and theological analyses of evil rather than neatly solving the problem of evil itself. Including contributions from Constantine Campbell, Paul Blowers, and Paul Gavrilyuk, this volume draws upon biblical and patristic voices to produce constructive theology, considering topics ranging from vanity in Ecclesiastes and its patristic interpreters to animal suffering. Readers will gain a broader appreciation of evil and how to faithfully respond to it as well as a renewed hope in God as creator and judge.

David J. Luy (PhD, Marquette University) is associate professor of biblical and systematic theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is the author of Dominus Mortis: Martin Luther on the Incorruptibility of Christ. Matthew Levering (PhD, Boston College) is James N. and Mary D. Perry Jr. Chair of Theology at Mundelein Seminary. He is the author of numerous books, including Participatory Biblical Exegesis, Engaging the Doctrine of Creation, and Dying and the Virtues. George Kalantzis (PhD, Northwestern University)is professor of theology at Wheaton College and the director of The Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies. He is the author of Caesar and the Lamb: Early Christian Attitudes on War and Military Science.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Luy, David

Levering, Matthew

Kalantzis, George

Leseproben

1 INTRODUCTION Evil in Christian Theology David Luy and Matthew Levering The essays comprising this book consider evil in relation to the Christian doctrine of creation. A theological account of evil is not exactly the same thing as a response to the problem of evil, even if the former typically includes aspects of the latter. Some of the chapters in this book address the problem of evil (for example, chaps. 3, 7, 9), but the purpose of the collection as a whole is not to produce a theodicy. It is rather to reflect on the emergence of moral and physical evil from the standpoint of a particular doctrinal locus. In this introduction, we expand briefly on the nature of this task, calling special attention to the difference between a theological account of evil and a response to the problem of evil. BEYOND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL For ancients and moderns alike, the question of God is deeply intertwined with the riddle of evil. “At least in the western tradition,” Herbert McCabe observes, “nothing so affects our attitude to God as our recognition of evil and suffering.”1 In the late modern West, evil happenings in the world may seem to awaken religious skepticism. For those living downstream of Voltaire and David Hume (and in the shadow of twentieth-century atrocities), the intrusion of evil appears to call traditionally Christian notions of God automatically into question.2 The recorded experience of Christian saints across the centuries bears witness to an alternate possibility, however. The endurance of bitter suffering can serve to deepen rather than enervate religious commitment.3 It is true, McCabe acknowledges, that suffering may cause us to “reject God as infantile, as unable to comprehend or have compassion on those who suffer and are made to suffer in his world.” But it is also possible, he continues, that suffering may cause us to find, “as Job did, that it was our view of God that was infantile; we may in fact come to a deeper understanding of the mystery of God.”4 The second response and existential posture described here by McCabe implies a theological construal of evil and suffering wherein the bitterness of affliction has been incorporated into the broader task of faith seeking understanding. Suffering relates to the experience of God here in two primary ways. First, it functions as a purifying agent. Existential trials bear a potent capacity to expose the superficiality of theological frameworks unable to prove their mettle in the face of calamity.5 As Martin Luther (1483–1546) so often insisted, the true theologian is one whose religious commitments have been tested and steeled in the fires of affliction.6 In this sense, suffering refines the church’s theological understanding. At the same time, however, suffering can achieve significance for religious piety only to the extent that it is itself understood theologically. Affliction on its own is at best ambiguous so long as it remains abstracted from a theological framework. One of the essential functions of Christian doctrine within the life of the church is that it gives direction to the way in which Christians reflect on their experiences of evil and suffering in the world. Doctrine supplies the decisive hermeneutical framework in relation to which suffering becomes endurable for the Christian, even if evil itself remains to some extent an impenetrable mystery.7 A theological account of evil locates trial and affliction within a theological context, acknowledging that suffering also often quickens, purifies, and refines the church’s theological understanding. Such accounts are standard fare within the literatures of premodern Christian theology. Awaiting execution from his prison cell, Boethius (ca. 477–524) seeks consolation in his plight by reflecting on his experience in relation to a theological frame of reference (i.e., the mysteries of providence and divine eternality).8 Likewise, Macrina (ca. 330–379) ponders the immaterial soul and the bodily resurrection in conversation with her brother Gregory as she anticipates her impending death.9 In an exposition of Psalm 139 (138 in his Latin version), Augustine (354–430) situates earthly sorrow in more general terms by framing the volatility of human experience with a theological canvas. During this night, during this mortal life, human beings experience both light and darkness: the light of prosperity and the darkness of misfortune. But when Christ has come and made the soul his own dwelling through its faith, when he has promised a different light, when he has inspired and granted patience, when he has counseled men and women not to be too happy over prosperity lest they be crushed by adversity—then believers begin to treat the present world with detached indifference. No longer are they elated when things chance to go well with them, nor are they shattered when things turn out badly. They bless the Lord in all circumstances, not only in abundance but also in loss, not only in health but also in sickness. The promise sung of in another psalm is kept in their lives: I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall be in my mouth always (Ps. 33:2/34:1).10 Notice here that Augustine is not advancing a theoretical explanation for why suffering exists in the world. His purpose is rather to recontextualize the experience of suffering by situating it within a theological context. For Christians indwelled by the Spirit of Christ and illuminated by the light of a glorious, eschatological promise, the volatile realities of this earthly life lose much of their bitter sting. Johann Arndt (1555–1621) casts a similar vision. In his influential devotional text True Christianity (1610), Arndt writes: A magnet draws a heavy piece of iron toward itself, and likewise a heavenly magnet, the love of God, ought to draw the burdens of our cross toward itself, so that it becomes light and easy. Why then should man’s heart be troubled? Sugar makes bitter food sweet. How much then, ought the sweetness of divine love to make the bitter cross sweet? Because of this, the great patience and joy of the holy martrys arose, for God made them drunk by his love.11 The purpose of these theological meditations on suffering is pastoral. The reader or hearer is not summoned by Boethius, Nyssa, Augustine, or Arndt merely to adopt some new theoretical understanding of evil. The theological architecture these authors supply in the course of their examination of suffering is meant to evoke a new existential posture in relation to worldly vicissitude. In this respect, these premodern writers may be understood as seeking to outline a theological account of evil. Does such reflection need to be recovered in modern theological inquiry? To be sure, the impulse to make theological sense of suffering remains a constant for many faithful Christians living today. Surely it would be wrong to imply that such impulses receive no assistance whatsoever from the contemporary theological guild.12 Still, it has sometimes been the case in recent centuries that theological accounts of evil (as we term them) have been eclipsed by an abiding preoccupation with the so-called problem of evil. Susan Neiman has argued somewhat provocatively that the problem of evil is the defining theme of modern philosophy.13 From the devastation of Lisbon’s earthquake in 1755 to the atrocities of the Holocaust in the 1940s, modern philosophical discourse may be understood as a protracted struggle to rediscover a meaningful world after the collapse of the medieval synthesis. Since philosophy sprouts fundamentally from a “demand that the world be intelligible,” the emergence of evil in the world may thus be construed primarily as philosophical challenge.14 Radical evil evokes the grim possibility of a world governed by chaos.15 The challenge posed by evil in modern philosophical literature falls hardest on the classical Christian view, which insists even in the face of radical evil that Christians may affirm, on biblical and philosophical grounds, that the world is providentially ordered by a God who is maximally good, just, and powerful. For many critics, evil exposes such a notion as utterly absurd.16 As such philosophical criticisms have proliferated, it is understandable that the collective attention of modern theology has likewise migrated to the philosophical problem of evil and its modern permutations for the purpose of mounting a defense. The migration of attention is not by itself a problem. It becomes detrimental, however, when an elevated preoccupation with the problem of evil causes theological accounts of evil to wither from neglect or lapse entirely into desuetude. Another potential hazard of the shift arises when sustained preoccupation with the problematics of evil and suffering leads to a fundamental reconfiguration of the architecture of theology. Such is the case, we (David and Matthew) contend, for a number of recent theological proposals that seek to account for evil in the world by suggesting that the existence of evil is a necessary entailment of the act whereby God creates the finite order.17 This approach seems to allow a preoccupation with evil to overwhelm the doctrine of God (his transcendent freedom) and the doctrine of creation (its original goodness). Even if the account succeeds at making evil intelligible to some extent, from a dogmatic perspective the possible gain...