“Pain can be a useful thing (as any leper knows).My pain allows me to be creative; my pain allowsMe a deeper understanding of God, because I suffer. The Bible is frequented with many attractive, tragic figures who found redemption in the Lord. For me the Bible offers nothing more beautiful than David’s Psalms, Job’s struggles or Jesus’ pleading in the Garden of Gethsemane.”

Oliver Carruthers, Walking the Dog, Third Way, May 2005, p15

From Book review in ESSSAT news, Sept 2003

The viewpoint of British philosophical theologian, Keith Ward, seems to fit best here, though itappears much later in the book. In contrast to the programme of reducing all explanations to thelevel of physics, which he represents by quotations from E.O. Wilson, Ward argues for theindependent validity, essentiality and indeed primacy of explanations in terms of value. Theseoperate both in relation to human affairs and behaviour, and in relation to God. He writes of theDeity in the tradition of classical theism, and arrives, in cooler prose, at a stance towards the evilin the cosmos which is consonant with Rolston’s. “If there is evil in nature, in the form ofsuffering or the frustration of creative endeavour, the theist will have to account for it as anecessary condition or consequence of the sorts of values that a universe of a specific sort makespossible. The cosmos will have to be such that it does realize very great and not otherwiseobtainable values, and all disvalues within it will be explicable as necessary parts (or asnecessarily possible parts) of the general structure it must have to fulfil this purpose” (258).

Where was God on September 11th 2001?

Towards thinking Christianly about the existence of evil in

God’s world

Paradise lost?

Problem

Christians want to say a number of things about God and the world:

1. God is all-powerful (omnipotent)2. God is everywhere (omnipresent)3. God is all-knowing (omniscient)4. God is all-loving (omnibenevolent)5. There is evil and suffering in the world

Purpose

Ask the fundamental question: “What did God think He was doing when he Created the Universe?”

If you were God, what would you want to bring about?

Could you do it instantly?

If not, how long would you allow for the process?

What scope might you allow for your creation to make its own decisions – to shape its own destiny?

Plan

In order to create the kind of universe in which LOVE is possible, it is necessary to give creatures a measure of FREE WILL.

This entails letting go; it is risky but needful.

Love and its consequences

“Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give your heart to no-one. Wrap it carefully … and lock it up safe in the coffin of your own selfishness. But in the coffin – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken, it will become unbreakable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love is Hell.”

C.S. Lewis

Pain

In a dynamic world in which change and development is possible, and in which the evolution of consciousness is required, pain will be inevitably feature.

So-called ‘natural evil’ is a necessary concomitant of a universe that is going to be creative of new forms, some of which are conscious and self-conscious.

Arthur Peacock quote

“For any concept of God to be morally acceptable and coherent, the ubiquity of pain, suffering and death as a means of creation through biological evolution entails, that if God is also immanently present in and to natural processes, in particular those that generate conscious and self-conscious life, then we cannot but infer that – in some sense hard to define – God, like any human creator, suffers in, with and under the creative process of the world with their costly unfolding in time.”

Process

All that we know about the history of the world so far implies that it is in the process of changing.

“God is working His purpose out, as year succeeds to year.”

“The Spirit / the Creation / we / groan” Romans 8

Passibility: only a suffering God can help

Passibility is the term to describe the fact that God ‘feels’, that he is moved by the suffering in the world as well as delighting in all the good things about it.

God suffers too. He understands.

Powerless?

In one sense God is unable to act to stop every disaster.

If He stepped in every time someone fell, literally or metaphorically, our freedom would not only be compromised, it would be effectively denied to us.

God is self-limiting

Passion Nowhere

better shown than in the life and death of Jesus.

But note the resurrection – the source of all our hope in the face of the last enemy, death.

Break for a prayerful meditationA poem by Godfrey Rust posted on the Greenbelt Forum on September 11th 2001

After the accounting of the dead, when the insurance claims are settled, and the markets are back to their normal jittery selves, we have all seen what Hell looks like. In future we will avoid tall buildings, slowly move away from cities, fly less often, view our fellow passengers with circumspection, seek refuge in more virtual reality and trade within the safer evils of the Internet.We listen doubtfully to our leaders’ words as they struggle to fill their own shoes.

Four planes flew out of Pandora’s box, and when men armed just with razor blades can bring the whole wide world to a juddering halt we know too much and care too little to believe that this will be the last time.The big game of Monopoly is over. The loser’s tantrums have become too dangerous. Even before our anger cools we see the moral high ground is just a pile of smoking rubble.

Jesus kneels in and writes with his index finger in the white dust of Manhattan: Let him who is without sin launch the first missile.

Who is our enemy and what can we fight him with? Where are our allies? Where was God on September the Eleventh?

He was begging in old clothes in the subway beneath the World Trade Centre. He was homeless in Gaza, imprisoned in Afghanistan, starving in Somalia, dying of Aids in an Angolan slum, suffering everywhere in this fast-shrinking world; and boarding a plane unwittingly in Boston, heading for a meeting on the 110th floor.

When the time came he stretched out his arms once again to take the dreadful impact that would pierce his side. His last message on his fading cell phone once more to ask forgiveness for them all, before his body fell under the weight of so much evil.We bring our cameras to his massive tomb for any chance of resurrection; now we know the kind of story that it really is, united by a common enemy – sin’s terrorism – that we never dreamed could bring such devastation. This is war. We line our weapons up: faith, hope, obedience, prayer, forgiveness, justice; and the explosive power of love.

Overview – did you spot the alliteration?

Problem Purpose Plan Pain Process Passibility

Powerless? Passion Potential Promise Perfection Paradise

Potential

We have the capacity to transform the world in ways that God would like.

This is the challenge to answer the prayer, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done, On earth …”

Obedience is simply aligning our (free) will with that of our Creator.

Disobedience brings its own inevitable destructive consequences.

Promise

Scripture is clear that there will come a day when “God will wipe away the tears …and swallow up death for ever” (Isaiah 25)

Will we, in heaven, still be in the position of experiencing all that goes with loving others?

If we are in the likeness of Christ, is our current calling what Paul means by his desire to “share in the sufferings of Christ?”

If we have a God who suffers, will He continue to know the pain He took into Himself as Creator and Redeemer?

Perfection

What is this? If it is a dynamic future

then whatever the perfection to come is, it will not be static (and not boring?)

“God’s gonna give me a planet” – Barry McGuire

Paradise regained

There was never a golden age from which we have fallen.

God’s plan for us is that we grow into a future paradise – whatever that is going to look like.

See you there? But for now our calling is to live for God in the world He loves.

ESSAY

[1] Compare and contrast the approaches to moral evil taken by Augustine and Irenaeus. [33 marks]

[2] Is one approach preferable to the other in the 21st century? [17 marks]