I read this small but beautiful book by the brilliant David Bentley Hart twice in the last two days. Written in the aftermath of the Tsunami of December 2004, this work attempts to explore a christian theological response to the subject of Theodicy. This, I am sure will be a much needed read during these times.
Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazav’s brilliant case against the “will of God” in human suffering is the basis for DBH’s work. Ivan by the way is my favorite character in Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”. It would do one good to read this magisterial work by Dostoyevsky, atleast, Part Two, Book V, chapters 3-5 to understand where Ivan Karamazov comes from.
DBH attempts to address this by touching on key theologies like Divine Freedom, Privatio Boni (a privation of the good), Divine Impassibility (God is in his nature, impervious to any external force of change, any pathos or affect) and Divine Providence.
Hart argues that to require evil to bring about God’s 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.
Hart reserves his brilliant rhetoric on support of Divine Impassibility. He says that the cross most definitely is not an instance of God submitting himself to an irresistible force so as to define himself in his struggle with nothingness or so as to be rescued from his impassibility by becoming our fellow sufferer; but neither is it a vehicle whereby God reconciles either himself or us to death. Rather, he subverts death and makes a new way through it to a new life. The cross is thus a triumph of divine apatheia, limitless and immutable love sweeping us up to itself, taking all suffering and death upon itself without being changed, modified or defined by it, and so destroying it’s power and making us, by participation in Christ, “more than conquerors”.
Easter, he says is an act of rebellion against all false necessity and all illegitimate or misused authority, all cruelty and heartless chance. Easter should make rebels of us all.
Divine Providence can only be rightly construed when one says that God has willed his good in creatures from eternity and will bring it to pass, despite their rebellion, by so ordering all things toward his goodness that even evil (which he does not cause) becomes an occasion of the operations of grace.
God may permit evil to have a history of its own so as not to despoil creatures of their destiny if free union with him in love, but he is not the sole and irresistible agency shaping that history according to eternal arbitrary decrees. The path that leads through nature and history to his Kingdom does not simply follow the contours of either nature or history, or obey the logic immanent to them, but is opened to us by way of the natural and historical absurdity - or outrage - of the empty tomb.
The fall of rational creation and the subjection of the cosmos to death is something that appears to us nowhere within the unbroken time of nature of history; we cannot search it out within the closed continuum of the wounded world it belongs to another frame of time, another kind of time, one more real than the time of death.
When the doors of the sea having broken their seals, rise up to destroy and kill without will or thought or purpose or mercy, at such times, to see the goodness indwelling all creation requires a labor of vision that only a faith in Easter can sustain; but it is there, effulgent, unfading, innocent, but languishing in bondage to corruption, groaning in anticipation of a glory yet to be revealed, both a promise of the Kingdom yet to come and a portent of its beauty. Until that final glory, our portion is charity, and our sustenance is faith, and so it will be until the end of days.
Yes, when I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God, but the face of his enemy. It is a faith that cannot defeat Ivan Karamazov’s arguments; for it is a faith that sets us free from optimism long ago and taught us hope instead.
God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that he will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, he will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes - and there shall be no more death, not sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and he that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”
Lent 2020