EVIL & EVOLUTION

Chapter 8

The God Who Suffers

The existence of evil is not the only obstacle to our faith in God, for it is equally a proof of the existence of God, and the proof that this world is not the only or ultimate one. (Nicholai Berdyaev, Freedom in the Spirit)

When all is said and done, at the heart of the problem of evil there remains a mystery. Broken down into its various aspects, physical evil, psychological evil, and moral evil (with the related question of human freedom) are each distinct"problems" which, although they may yield, to some extent, to a common evolutionary solution, nevertheless recoalesce ultimately around that mystery which is God.

God and evil are contraries; of this we have no doubt. And "if the problem of evil is altogether insolvable, there is an end of theism." With this judgment of James Ward (The Realm of Ends) we can also concur. But can we agree with his corollary "if God exists, there is nothing absolutely evil?" I, for one, cannot and I doubt that many others can, but I shall not belabor this point. Still, where does this impasse leave us, or what option does it provide us with, except in the end, to reexamine our concept of God?

To do so, however, means that we have to be willing to move out of the realm of mere problems and brace ourselves to confront mystery in all its fullness. For some, such a challenge is entirely unacceptable, for is not the admission of mystery the confession of ignorance? For others it is unthinkable, for to do so is to question the unquestionable; a near blasphemous enterprise to which the creature can claim no right.

Yet is it not possible that we have misread the divine intention? Rather than seeing problems as grim signposts warning us lest we trespass unwittingly into a forbidden mystery, may we not see them as invitations guiding us in the direction of a mystery that must be shared and lived by all, including God?

"The Lord of the Absurd"

"The world stands on absurdities, and perhaps nothing would have come to pass without them." This final rejoinder of Dostoyevsky's Ivan Karamazov, a theme taken up by the atheistic Sartre and the agnostic Camus, may just as well, as Berdyaev indicates, turn out to be the turning point to faith.

It is not altogether amazing as it may first seem that the Catholic theologian, Raymond Nogar, who had achieved some notoriety for his comprehensive book The Wisdom of Evolution, produced just before the end of his life a little work that appeared to present an entirely opposite view. Was The Lord of the Absurd a complete repudiation of all that he had held before, a total collapse of the world-view which had led him to extol the glories of a divinely creative evolution? Perhaps it was, but I do not think so. What took place was indeed a reversal of perspective, one in which the world of evolution was seen in a very different light. No longer, at least to Nogar's eyes, did evolution, for all its apparent directedness (the teleology that most scientists are loathe to admit) seem to be something inevitable, or as Teilhard believed, "infallible" in its final outcome. Rather must it not be admitted (again something that the scientists seem unwilling to do, at least completely) that the "evolution of life, and the emergence of man, is a natural process in which chance, failure, waste, disorder and death will ultimately prevail?" This is a hard conclusion, and it is one which drove Nogar, when speaking from what he finally concluded was the completely natural verdict on evolution, toward another faith-filled counter belief , one in which God "did not hesitate to shake the cosmic frame to its foundations and turn it topsy-turvy at the slightest inspiration of Divine madness."

Nogar's about-face, for our purposes, is highly instructive. What he was saying seemed to be simply the inverse of Aquinas' celebrated cosmological demonstrations of God's existence. All of them depend on a presupposition that the universe does make sense. And all of them, following the lines of Aristotle's analysis of the various types of causality, argue toward the coherence of the universe as being explainable only in the light of a divine Prime-Mover and Orderer of nature. What if, however, the universe does not make sense in the first place? What if, in the light of an overwhelming recurrence of evil, particularly senseless suffering, evolution is headed toward a dead end? This is the problem posed by the apparent "absurdity" of the universe and of a God who would make it so.

One answer to this is, of course, the "leap of faith" to a God who can make sense from nonsense and order from chaos. Such an existential act of faith remains an equally valid alternative to disbelief , despite accusations of bad faith, for one person's risk may be another's act of cowardice. Alienation from an absurd universe can follow as easily, if not more, from an atheistic viewpoint than from a belief in which there is a God to set things straight. But this kind of faith in a God who alone makes sense is no more satisfactory for the mass of believers than a nonsensical universe is for scientists. So where can we turn?

For the believer in the God of traditional Christian, Jewish, and Muslim theism, this question raises grave problems. All attempts to extricate this all-powerful and all-loving God from the dilemma posed by an "absurd" universe could easily lead the believer perilously close to some of the world-denying theologies of the East. However, the strong historical and revelational foundations of biblical religion, particularly the central incarnational doctrine of Christianity, will not allow this. God is truly involved, not only in the good, but also in the evil, of a real universe. This world may not be the ultimate world, but is the actual world nonetheless. Despite the reservations expressed in the deuterocanonical book of Wisdom (e.g., that "Death was not God's doing...To be -- for this he created all." 1:13-14) the Scriptures as a whole are quite explicit in their directness. Not only the good, but also the evil, is ultimately attributable to God, as shocking as this conclusion may seem. Not only life, but death, not just prosperity but adversity as well, flow from the hands of a God who both sanctifies as well as "hardens" hearts.

Even making allowances for the peculiarities of Hebraic thought,which tends to by-pass secondary causes and ascribe to God directly ever the moral failings of his creatures, we must conclude with Pascal that the God of Revelation has little in common with the God of the philosophers. Pascal's carefully considered conclusion was not lightly made. Periodically throughout the history of Christian (as well as Jewish and Islamic) theology, serious thinkers had repeatedly pointed out that certain aspects of biblical belief were irreconcilable with classical philosophy on a number of issues, not the least of which concern the divine nature and God's relationship to creation.

Not only was the world, as understood by classical Greek philosophers, coeternal with its divine origin (thus ruling out, it would seem, any act of creation in or with time) but this origin was itself an "unmoved mover", a "pure act", or complete actuality in contrast to a changing and imperfect world of unrealized potentialities and recurring defects. Western theology was able to modify this classical view of the world by insisting on its creation in time and later has even adapted it to an evolutionary understanding. The attempt, however, to reconcile the classical philosophical ideas of God with the biblical revelation, while leading to great theological advances, has left us heirs to considerable tension if not outright conflict. The remote and uninvolved supreme Truth and Beauty or First Cause of philosophy, although admirable, contrasts sharply with the supremely majestic but eminently personal God of revelation who, despite having unbounded love and mercy, occasionally appears to be surprisingly changeable, even angry and vindictive.

Such a contrast proved to be something of an embarrassment, not only to the early Christian theologians, but even to the Jewish philosophers who, like Philo of Alexandria, were desperately attempting to defend Judaism, even before the time of Christ, against the incursions of a more sophisticated classical culture. Proponents of this culture tended to view biblical religion, despite the attraction of its high ethical standards, as somewhat primitive, if not outright barbaric, in its understanding of God. The more loving and accepting Father presented in the Gospels may have mollified the situation somewhat but only temporarily, for, with the claim that this same God had become a human, the rift showed signs of becoming even wider. The Johannine writings, particularly the First Epistle of John, indicate to us a situation in which the philosophically-minded among the early Christians were being severely tempted to jettison the basic incarnational message of the apostolic preaching for an elaborate and philosophically acceptable reinterpretation of Christianity and the biblical image of God. This Gnosticism or "higher knowledge" was an attempt to have it both ways, and despite its failure to gain a foothold in the Church, it was soon to resurface in that Marcionism which totally rejected the Old Testament God in favor of a totally new image of deity which could be, presumably, discovered fully only in the Christ.

That such a solution must have been an attractive one, considering mounting Jewish-Christian tensions at that time, seems undeniable. Yet official Christianity resisted. Instead of taking what would seem the easy way out, orthodox Christianity insisted on the basic unity of the two testaments and the God they reveal. At the same time its theologians embarked on a difficult and perilous effort to interpret this biblical God in terms that were understandable and as fully acceptable to both doctrinal demands and philosophical reasoning as cultured ingenuity and spirited debate could devise.

Why this exhaustive, and as some, like Pascal, feel, exhausted effort? Was it merely for apologetic reasons? That is, was it simply to present the biblical message in terms that might be readily understandable and acceptable to the non-Jewish and particularly, the more highly-cultured, segments of the world? If so, this "Hellenization" of the Christian message might appear to many as the primary intellectual sin of official Christianity and the root of all future distortions of the Gospel message. On the contrary, what the Church was then engaged upon was not simply an effort to translate biblical revelation into philosophical formulations. Despite stories of theological arguments in the barber shops, probably most ordinary Christians were probably not much concerned with the philosophical insights into God any more than the Athenians were in the time of Socrates. What we see here was a genuine effort to deepen Christianity's insight into the true nature of the biblical God and to wrestle with the tensions that were inherent in the biblical belief . For these tensions were not just due to conflict with ideas drawn from the pagan philosophers but were already present in those paradoxes found within the biblical message itself.

What paradoxes? The biblical and Christian message is shot through with them from beginning to end: God, loving and/or just; eternal yet involved in time, impassible (unmoved) yet involved (thus moved), and, a God who is both One and Three; Jesus Christ, God yet man, who claims that whoever sees him sees the Father, yet the Father is greater than he; and, finally, good and evil -- which is really which? In the face of these endless contradictions, theology, as well as faith, seem inane.

As a solution some, claiming to follow Tertullian, would advocate retreat into a kind of "fideism," an appeal to "believe because it is absurd", especially when confronted with an even more absurd world. Many others, however, would question whether the effort to make sense out of chaos or the whole project of theology -- "faith seeking understanding" -- must not need be given up as futile. May the difficulty not lie in an inadequate philosophical framework? The obvious solution, as Teilhard once said, is that when one's philosophy no longer fits the facts, one must change one's philosophy. This is exactly what has been required of philosophy when our understanding of the universe shifted from static to evolutionary terms. A similar shift in theology is in order if we seriously believe that the God revealed in Scripture is the same God revealed in the universe that surrounds us.

For example, nature reveals itself to be in a state of constant, seemingly chaotic, flux, in a evolutionary process out of which novelty and ever-greater variety occur. Should we, then, be surprised that a theology which based its concept of God on the categories of eternal sameness and transcendent repose not only conflicts with our changed views of nature but doesn't even fit the biblical image of a God constantly involved in the vicissitudes of human history? Something is amiss when a view of God as "our fellow sufferer"(as A. N. Whitehead put it) is rejected as anti-Christian, simply because it does not tally with the orthodox formulations of Christian belief, even when these same formulations seem to contradict some of the most obvious statements of the Scriptures.

True, the Scriptures themselves more than hint of a God who is eternal, all-wise, and all-powerful. They even speak of a God who is "without shadow of change or alteration" (James 1:17). Yet they also reveal a God who acts, who creates, who despite faithfulness to solemn promises apparently changes his/her(?) mind when the situation calls for it!

If there seems to be something absurd in all of this, perhaps it is more in our persisting in the illusion that we can adequately define God, or even in our uncritical acceptance of the idea that the Bible can contain the whole of reality, despite the limitations of human language. No matter how divinely inspired these Scriptures may be, we constantly run the danger of misreading them or of failing to understand them, particularly isolated passages taken out of context. Even if these dangers are avoided, can we reasonably expect the limited powers of human logic, even when bolstered by the tools of "higher" scientific critical analysis, to lead us to unerring comprehension of the ways, much less the nature, of God? If there has been any single message from the mystics throughout the ages, it has been that any true knowledge of God escapes adequate human expression, but even the path to such knowledge is inevitably one of "unknowing" -- a collapse of all human reliance on logic, doctrinal formulation, and even of the tranquil assurances of the state of belief.

This being said, as forewarning, I will nevertheless suggest that we have generally failed to fully use the more normal resources at hand to cope with the mystery of God and God's self-revelation as they relate to the problem of evil and suffering in the world. If the world and justice of God in relation to this world seem absurd, it may be because we have failed to read the evidence that is clearly set before us.

"Absurdity," it has been said, "is sin without God." Is it not also suffering without God? If the concept of sin is nonsensical when God is removed from the picture, even though the consciousness of sin might inexplicably remain, what of the fact of suffering? If, as Dostoyevsky tells us, "without God, anything is possible" (at least within the limitations of conscience), how can we conceive of a universe in which pain and suffering make any sense except in relation to a goal which justifies the struggle or gives it some eternal meaning?

At the same time, how can we conceive of sin, pain, or suffering as evil unless they affect the outcome of the process, and, in doing so, unless they in some way affect even God? This, of course, raises the final problem. For if we admit that God can be so affected, can we still say with any surety that God remains God?

The resistance of the traditional theologies to the idea of a suffering God is grounded in strong logic. A God affected by sin is a God who suffers, and a God who suffers is no longer a God in complete control. Indeed, such a God would be a God who can be diminished, even eliminated as an effective force in the universe. Who could be compelled to worship such a God? Suppose there remained the possibility of a divine victory over evil. Would there not also be a possibility of a divine defeat, one in which the Lord of (that is, over) the Absurd, would turn out to be, instead the absurd Lord, one who is ultimately crushed by the senseless suffering and unredeemed sin of the universe?

The possibilities here are too staggering to contemplate. It is here that radical Christianity and the tradition of rational theism, long used to support Christian theology, part company for good. Perhaps the final break can be averted by a temporary separation but the prospects do not look encouraging. Philosophically speaking, Christian theology seems to have exhausted itself on this final problem of theodicy. Yet without some kind of a solution, can Christian faith (indeed, any biblically-based faith) remain anything but absurd?

The God Who Died

The basic answer of Christian faith to this dilemma, the Cross, has indeed been"a stumbling block to the Jews and an absurdity to the Gentiles"(I Corinthians 1:23). For the gentiles of St. Paul's time, particularly the philosophically sophisticated who held to an impassive and abstract theism of a supreme beauty or truth, the Christian answer was indeed absurd. As Jürgen Moltmann has pointed out, the classical philosophical approach to God is based entirely on the analogy between the perfection of the visible universe (despite all its faults as a lower order of being) and the inferred perfection of its invisible source. For those today who hold to such a deistic view of God as the Great Architect of the universe, the Christian answer still remains incredible. It is equally incredible for the "Jew", i.e.,the strict monotheist believing in the all-powerful and personal God of revelation who is the triumphant ruler and judge, imposing his will and guiding the course of human affairs for his own honor and glory. Such a God stands above human history and tragedy, and although compassionate and merciful, remains superior to all human entanglement.

For these, as well as for the Christian whose theology might lean towards either an abstract deism or an absolutist monotheism, the explorations of a radical Christian theology into the implications of Friedrich Nietzsche's proclamation that "God is dead" was deemed blasphemous. Bumper stickers and church announcement boards blossomed throughout the land with counterslogans such as "My God is alive and well...too bad about yours!" A good part of this reaction was sparked by widespread confusion over the varying interpretations of Nietzsche's phrase (James L. Christian's popular philosophy text first published in 1973 quoted fifteen variations ranging from outright atheism to a psychological "death" of God consciousness in modern man). No wonder that the passing of what seemed to be this peculiarly American theological fad was greeted with great relief by mainline and fundamentalist churches as well as serious theologians.

In the aftermath of that brouhaha, it might be profitable to consider what Teilhard de Chardin somewhat whimsically jotted in his own notebook years before the slogan became a theological catch-word. As Teilhard saw it,"God is not dead, he has just changed!" Before we hastily write off such an opinion as being a mere quip without serious merit, we should consider the possibility that Teilhard was not just referring to our changed image of the world necessitating a changed image of God. Could it be that the message of Christianity itself is one of a God who has radically changed divinity's relationship to the world? After all, how should we consider such pauline texts that tell us that God "did not spare his own Son, but gave him up to benefit us all" (Romans 8:32), making "the sinless one into sin" (2 Corinthians 5:21), becoming "humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross" (Philippians 2:8)?

Perhaps the only benefit of the "Death of God" movement in theology has been its challenge to explore anew the implication of such passages for our understanding of God in his relationship to the world. Can we, for example, continue to think of God as entirely impassive or unmoved when even such a world- renowned European theologian as Moltmann concludes that God has indeed suffered inasmuch as the Father has undergone grief at the death of his own Son? Does not the attribution of such a "psychological" passion to the Father imply that not only must the image of the impassive God of Greek philosophy be exchanged for a more biblical view of a loving (and sometimes angry and jealous) God, but also that God has become in some way "changed" in the Incarnation, Passion, death and Resurrection of Christ?

Any such "change"in God, if it has actually taken place, should demand, of course, a corresponding change in our understanding, not only of God's relationship to the world, but also in our understanding of the nature of God as such.

Such a change in understanding has, in fact, already taken place. Underlying the "foolishness" of the message of the Cross is the even greater"scandal" of the Incarnation and, underpinning both of these affronts to the highest human ideas about God, there are the great problems posed by the doctrine of the Trinity.

Christians wrestled with the intricacies of trinitarian speculation, at least in the beginning, not to challenge existing ideas about God but simply as part of the attempt to make comprehensible their belief in the dual nature of Christ as both God and man. The groundwork which made possible the formulation in Greek philosophical terms of Jesus as God (by nature or "substance") incarnate in a truly human nature as a single person (or "hypostasis"), also enabled the Church (through an analogous use of the same terms) to define God as a single "nature" manifested in three distinct "persons." But once such an understanding became established, such phrases as "the passion of my God" (Ignatius of Antioch in his Epistle to the Romans) somehow lost their force inasmuch as one could now revert to the classical philosophical concept of God, deeming it impossible that God (at least as God) could suffer, much less die. At the same time, by affirming that Christ suffered death in his human nature, one could state through a kind of linguistic sleight of hand (the"communicatio idiomatum") that "God died" in the person of Christ. But do such theological niceties really do justice to what actually took place, even granting their usefulness in avoiding crude misunderstandings?

True, in the light of such distinctions, the strict monotheist of the Hebrew tradition can be spared the scandal of being told that God in some way has ceased to be God. Likewise the philosopher can be reassured by continuing to see God as remote from all the vicissitudes of too close an involvement with the changing universe. So reduced, does not this old Christian balancing act run the greater danger of removing God from any real relationship to the world which Christians believe God (the Father) sent the Son to save? The logical result of this tendency to save God's traditional image then rebounds with one of two results: either Jesus of Nazareth is seen to be a mere man (albeit an extraordinarily holy one) who suffered death in much the same way as the other prophets before him, while God looked impassively on the scene from heaven, or else Christ is seen as a God who play-acts his way through a semblance of human life and death, but who is really never affected by it. Early Christianity rightly condemned these watered-down and over-simplified views of Jesus Christ as heresies, whether under the guise of a Docetism, Arianism, or Nestorianism (to take them in their historical order of appearance). Although the labels have long since disappeared, the tendencies have not, and regardless whether one begins with a bias toward eliminating the divinity of Christ (the natural position of the unbeliever) or his humanity (the recurrent tendency among believers) the result is much the same. Both the folly of the cross and the scandal of a God who suffers death are endangered to the point where the message of redemption from the evils and the sufferings of the world is lost.

It was precisely to avoid such deformations in the understanding of Christ that the Christian Church came to its definition of God as a Trinity. Although strongly affirmed in the New Testament (even without using the word "trinity"), it is quite evident that the idea of God as somehow "triune" in nature is not particularly Christian in origin -- both the Hindu advaitist concept of God as absolute "Being-Truth-Bliss" as well as St. Augustine's "psychological" exposition of the Trinity demonstrate the natural tendency to see God in this way. As such, although it was to develop much more profound insights about God on its own, the doctrine of the Trinity remains somewhat in a satellite relationship to the central Christian task of proclaiming Jesus as the Christ -- the Messiah-Redeemer who is God Incarnate.

Historically speaking, however, it is noteworthy that the biggest battles regarding the Church's doctrine about Christ (aside from the Arian heresy, which would have diminished Christ's divinity) were more often than not waged to protect the integrity of his humanity. It seems that "theological anthropology" (to use a more modern term) at least as it applied to the person of Jesus Christ, was most often the focus of concern rather than theology, the doctrine of God, as such. Why?

The reason, it appears, is that the classical understanding of God as supreme Truth/Beauty, unmoved mover, etc. was now so firmly entrenched in the Christian consciousness, along with a rethinking of the biblical God's transcendent majesty much along the same lines, that the primary problem became the reconciliation of the humanity of Jesus with his firmly accepted divinity. There seemed to be only two possible routes that would avoid head-on collision with the concept of a totally unchanging God. The first was to deny some part of Jesus' humanity (his bodily existence, on the one hand, or his human soul on the other, or perhaps just his human will) -- anything that would either eliminate his real humanity (and with it the humiliation that it implied for God) or leave a gap in his humanity that would allow a place for God (so that the person of Jesus really would be God and his "humanity" always a kind of appendage). The second strategy was simply to deny that there was any real, personal ("hypostatic") union between the two natures, that, in effect, you had merely a man (Jesus of Nazareth) who was in close, even the highest, union of mind and will or "grace" with God, but, of course, who was not the person of God at such. Again, of course, the Church managed to officially avoid such distortions in its doctrinal statements about what or who Jesus was , yet it resoundingly failed to convincingly explain how this could be. Hence, these ancient "heresies" are still alive and flourishing. There is no need to draw out the details of their modern counterparts, but simply to stress the fact that the reason they still exist is not to be found so much in the great christological problem of explaining the hypostatic union of divine and human natures in Christ, but rather in our assumption that we fully comprehend what is meant by the divine nature in the first place!

As a result, it seems that modern attempts to redefine the human nature of Christ in a way that better harmonizes with our concepts of divinity are, to say the least, somewhat backwards. All indications from Scripture point to the opposite approach, that aside from earlier, partial revelations and even human speculations about God, we can only fully begin to know God's nature from God's self-revelation in Christ, that is, in the humanity of this man Jesus. Thus, as far as I can see, there is no way we can avoid the implication that God directly participated in Jesus' life and death, not as some kind of outside ordering agent but rather by undergoing personally in some way what was happening to this man -- so much so that we must also say that God has in some way "changed", "suffered", or even "died" in this person.

Some would say, of course, that it is enough to say that the image of God has changed in him (Jesus:). But is it enough? If by "image" we mean only the modern commercial advertising or popular psychology concept of image, then we say either nothing about God as such (only that God has appeared to change in Christ) or else we are perhaps saying something we didn't intend at all -- that God has always been changing, only we've finally awakened to the fact! If it turns out to have been the latter, so much the better. But if that is the case, then we still haven't explained what it is in Jesus that has made all the difference -- except to alter our perceptions.

Not that this in itself would not be a major accomplishment. For the purposes of theodicy alone, a changed image of God from the impassive, aloof, and possibly uncaring God of classical theism, or from the capricious divine monarch of an exaggerated patriarchal monotheism, would be of immense value. the image of an "unsuffering" God has become altogether insufferable!

However, must not even more be said? This is not the time or place to get involved in the intricacies of "soteriology" or the controversies over the manner of Christ's "Atonement." But it is the time and place to insist that a convincing theodicy is more than a question of "images", that is, if images are nothing but mere illusions. Of course, this is not true. Images (eikones in Greek) are the visible manifestation of invisible realities; platonically speaking, the projection of spiritual ideas into the material world of representations. Or, if we might want to update this line of thought a bit by speaking in the manner of Whitehead (who in some aspects considered himself a Platonist), the image is the actual "concrescence" (or "concretization" as we might say) of the eternal possibility (or reality existing in God). In any case, even in the most idealistic philosophies, an image is no mere symbol. To say the very least that can possibly be said about him as an image of God, Jesus, however else he may be explained, reveals to us the fact that God is affected by creation, because God, who is in some way in Jesus, also in some way suffers through him. For the committed Christian this may be no easier to explain, but still a lot easier to say plainly, "God was in Jesus, reconciling the world to himself" (2 Corinthians 5:19). This is no play acting or pretending, it is not even the case of just another man, no matter how holy, "sympathizing" with God. It is God in him.

Once it could be admitted that God could change in this way, the task awaiting a truly renewed christology would then be how to explain this more convincingly and more effectively. It would begin by coming to grips with a more evolutionary or dynamic understanding of human nature, and it would, from this fresh start, enable us to begin again to confront the problems raised by the Gospels (if we would read them without the blinders imposed by a doctrinaire over-familiarity). Then, perhaps, we would be able to appreciate the full humanity revealed in their depiction of Jesus -- the temptations, the uncertainties, the fears, and not least insignificant, the faith of Christ -- yes, like you or I, Jesus had to believe:

From this would come, I believe, a new insight into just what is meant when we say that God became man, lived, suffered and died. The picture of a divine Son-Person ghosting a human Jesus person (which is the way we have tended to think despite the careful formulations of doctrine) would be replaced by that of a human who has been formed by the Spirit into the definitive revelation of God. Then we might recognize in him the Christ, the image or the Logos that is present in every aspect of creation (for "without him nothing has been made...") and yet which has longed from all eternity to express itself in a full, complete, and unrepeatable act of divine, self-emptying, all-fulfilling love.

Clearly, taken quite simply and squarely, Christianity has quite a problem to face, and that problem is not just in theodicy, The problem has only been exacerbated by theodicy, but the problem itself has had its origin in too ready an assumption that theology had a sure and clear grasp of the basic nature of God. Confrontation with the mystery of God -- that is, to "see" God in the Hebrew tradition -- means death. Certainly it must mean, if nothing else, the death of our easy theologies, our easy assumptions that we know what God is like. Nietzsche's Zarathustra proclaimed God's death, and it may well be that, in doing so, Nietzsche actually meant that our God-consciousness has died for, after all, Zarathustra claims that we ourselves have killed him. If so, there is very little new in this: men have been doing this for ages. There is blasphemy in that for sure, but it is not so much in God being declared dead as in man thinking he can kill him. The abstract God of the philosophers may well be dead, as well as the God of the Old Testament, at least when this divinity was pictured too one-sidedly. But it is not because we succeeded in killing that image. That kind of God is still alive in our theologies: it is still even somewhat alive in our atheism, haunting modern consciences with images of theologies once thought to be dead and buried. No, if "God is dead" it is because God would have these false images die -- the images of both the impassive un-moved mover and of the Oriental tyrant. In fact, God put them to death himself when God's true image, God's Son, died on the Cross. At that moment, whatever God was, or whatever man thought God was, died. Any death of God since then is the death of that "faith" in all those who thought they had God all explained.

Christ and "The Pain of God"

If there is a deep tension, even a contradiction within the Christian concept of God, even within the interpretation of Christ, how are we to remedy this state of affairs? Do we deny outright the legacies of classical philosophy and mystical experience with their exalted concepts of God as the Ground of Being or the unchanging unsuffering Godhead that stands behind all changing existence? I, for one, believe that this too could be folly. Philosophically such a God makes sense. Even the dynamic Process Theology drawn from the thought of A. N. Whitehead would insist on an "antecedent" nature of God that shares something of these classical notions of divinity. Nor, on the other hand, would it do to deny the truly personal God of Hebrew revelation (and not the distortions) who, for all his majesty, passionately cares for the good of the human race even when, all too often, he seems to remain silent. Both concepts, the fruit of human speculation and desire and the fruit of divine revelational initiative in the midst of human history, are valid as far as they go. But for Christians, they do not go far enough.

For Christianity, God must remain God (in the sense of the highest philosophical understanding) while, at the same time, entering fully and personally into the depths of human tragedy. For us this means that God does indeed suffer, not in the sense that God is afflicted unwillingly by forces beyond divine control, but rather that God has become willingly involved, even passionately so, in those sufferings that are part of the process that characterizes the expression of love. This is an active, committed suffering. It is the incarnate passion of a God who is love.

How can we describe this love - this God who is "love" (1 John 4:16)? The word used most generally in the New Testament is "agape". Distinct from the affective "eros" which primarily seeks its own fulfillment, agape has more in common with "philos" -- the loving friendship that draws like to like. There must, however, be no mistaking such love for something connatural or deserved by humanity. It is shared always as a pure gift, a grace ("charis") and such love or"charity" demands self- sacrifice. Hence we are called not only to "love your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 19:19, repeating Leviticus 19:18), but even to "love your enemies, do good to those who hate you" (Luke 6:27). Surely such love is bound to lead to suffering, to outright tragedy. Did it not do so in the case of Christ?

For all its eloquent vocabulary of love and its sense of the tragic, the Greek mind could not comprehend the self-sacrificing love of God and the pain that such love entails for God any more than the ancient Hebrew mind, with its concept of God's "hésed" or loving tenderness, could grasp how this kind of love could involve God's self-donation in Jesus -- the Christ who would die ignominiously for the sake of sinners. Is the human mind capable of wrestling with such an idea?

Kazoh Kitamori, a Japanese Evangelical theologian, believes that his own people can come to grips with such an idea, thanks to their peculiar sense of the tragic or "tsurasa" which entails the parental sacrifice of a son for a cause or for a person whose claims transcend all parental love. Kitamori points to the same phenomenon in Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac, but it remains without any one word (in Scripture) to explain it. Neither faith nor mere obedience can fully account for it (although the word sacrifice might describe it, even though the victim was refused by God). Neither does tsurasa, by Kitamori's own admission, adequately convey the full sense of "pain" (by which he translates the word) when this pain is God's own. This pain of God, might be understood as God's wrath transformed by love, involving not only the sacrifice of the only-begotten and beloved Son, but motivated by a divine love of what is unlovable -- humanity in its fallen state. However culturally (as well as theologically) determined it may be, this concept of loving pain may bring us closer to probing the heart of a God who truly grieves and sacrifices himself in his Son, and who makes it possible for our own pain to be transformed in the sufferings of Christ.

Writing as he did during the closing years of World War II, Kitamori saw an unique opportunity to share with the rest of the world something of the immense sense of tragedy experienced by his people in their almost suicidal commitment to a cause they had judged worthy but that had proved insane.

How much this peculiar Japanese sense of tragedy depends on the Buddhist concept of compassionate love is unknown to me. At first glance it would seem diametrically opposed to the calm, non-violent expression of nirvanic bliss that should characterize the realization of the essential oneness of all things. Sacrifice is the price paid for divisiveness. If all things are ultimately one, sacrifice is not only uncalled for, it would seem prolongation of the violence which characterizes the superficial level of the phenomenal world. Yet even in the realm of Buddhist thought there is something that throws additional light on the Christian attempt to understand the ultimate nature of love. For the Mahayana Buddhist, the compassion of the Buddha is best expressed in the Bodhisattva, the Buddha-to-be. This person, on the threshold of achieving nirvanic enlightenment, forgoes or postpones the unending enjoyment of the highest state of being in order to reach out to those who suffer and to endure their agony with them in order to lead them, along with himself, to ultimate bliss. Thus here we do find a strong element of self- sacrifice, one for an undoubtedly worthy cause, and like all sacrifice, it involves suffering.

Yet, in the kind of pain that Kitamori is attempting to describe, there is something more than the pains entailed by sacrifice as we usually understand it. There is the element of tragedy which goes beyond the description even of this pain as a kind of loving wrath. The peculiar Japanese sense of pain may have deeper roots yet -- possibly in the Taoist or generally far-Eastern sense of this world, in all its fleetingness, being or at least revealing ultimate reality. Hence, even Buddhism had to be delivered from its otherworldly Hindu milieu in which all change represented illusion and the only real tragedy was to be duped by this illusion -- something that could always be remedied in another life when one presumably would have another go at becoming enlightened.

On the contrary, if according to this transformed Buddhism (considered by its Zen followers as the only authentic Buddhism) nirvana or ultimate reality is samsara or the ever changing world, then sacrifice, particularly unrequited sacrifice, involves an equally ultimate pain.

Here may be the key to a deeper understanding of what we might mean by the pain of God. Here also maybe the reason that most critics of Christian theodicy have misinterpreted the seriousness of Christianity when it came to its evaluation of the tragedy involved in the problems of evil. Rather than an ultimate victory over evil being a cause for self-satisfied joy on the part of God, it -- more than any other victory -- also spells defeat. More than the fragile beauty of the solitary "thusness" of a single flower in a Zen study, even infinitely more tragic than the death of the Kamikaze whose sacrifice turns out to have been in vain, is the loss of a single immortal human soul -- a potential "god" who threw away the chance for eternal life and infinite fulfillment.

This sense of the tragic in God, which many Christian mystics saw revealed (rightly or wrongly depending on whether or not one attributes total foreknowledge to Jesus) in the Agony of the Garden of Gethsemane is what we are speaking of when we say that God suffers. Pain in the ordinary sense of the word) and death are primarily physical phenomena and, in that sense, only relative evils. Suffering, on the other hand, is primarily a psychological phenomenon, and to the extent that God is personal, that is, knowing and loving, makes God, it would seem, equally capable of suffering, even infinitely so if God's knowledge and love are infinite. Even sin, which may be the ultimate evil, nevertheless can be forgiven or, unrepented, be given its just deserts, but the suffering it may leave behind can continue forever.

It is in the light of this divine "Passion" that the Christian sense of compassion is given its greatest test, for we are called upon to sacrifice ourselves to an ideal of God-like love that could prove also to be at least partially in vain. We do not believe, as most Buddhists, in the essential unity or sameness of the universe in all its parts -- except for its common source in the creative act of God. It is, rather, the essential diversity of the universe and the growing freedom of creatures in the on-going process of their self-creation that makes it probable that any sacrifice for their sake will meet, at the most, with limited success. It is here that we meet with the distinctively kenotic aspect of the Christian idea of sacrifice, one which has its own peculiar tragic sense. Despite the assurance that the kenosis, or emptying out of the Son's divinity in his act of identification with the human race, will lead to an ultimate victory, it seems true that the refusal of God's invitation would subject God to some eternal diminishment. Again, more traditional theologians may object. Yet, short of a "universalist"restoration, which they ruled out when they condemned Origen, logic will prevail over mercy. God's pain will live on because God will always love. "Can a mother forget the child of her womb? Never shall I forget you, O Israel!" (Isaiah 49:15)

How, then, are we to understand our redemption? How do we see it as having been definitely accomplished in Christ? In the first place, it is something more than Christ suffering the wrath of God in place of the human race which deserves it. Similarly, it is more than the Christ being the embodiment God's love seeking our reconciliation. Although both of these Cross-centered insights are correct as far as they go, they are likewise insufficient for a theodicy that must account for suffering that goes beyond the boundaries of sin and guilt. All creation, not just the human race, suffers in the process of its evolution. Thus the importance of seeing the Incarnation as the embodiment, not just of God's pain, but of all creation's "growing pains." Thus, it is only when our (and all creation's) pains become God's pain, that Redemption begins to fully take place. It is in this appropriation of suffering by God that the great Irenaean theme of "God became man that man might become God" receives its fullest, its cosmic, expression.

From this we might find another possible answer to the apparent "excess" of human suffering. Might it not be, as Frederick Sontag has suggested (in a profund little book rather flippantly named God, Why Did You Do That?) the effect or at least the by-product of God's "excessive love?" We may differ with Sontag in his judgment that God was neither constrained by "necessity" (the very nature of the universe) nor by his "goodness" (which, from Sontag's point of view would have dictated a less cruel state of affairs). We might instead see this "excess"as the product of a compromise in which the pain of God is torn between a holy wrath over human misuse of freedom and an all-forgiving love that would, if it could, immediately remove all suffering on the basis of the sufferings of Christ and usher in, without further delay, the kingdom of God's justice, peace, and love. Instead, constrained by the conflicting demands of his wrath and his love, God can only suffer the "pain" of his own internal dialectic, and project, as it were, this conflict on creation. In such a projection we find not only what we misjudge to be the "cruelty" of God, a "cruelty" intensified in the infliction of a sacrificial death upon God's only beloved Son, but also, the expression of an excessive love that refuses to take No for an answer.

No doubt there is something very arresting in this vision of "The Hound of Heaven" who is compelled to completely identify himself with every human folly, even every cosmic accident, that God's creative love has visited upon the world. But in the end it suffers, I think, from much the same problem as does any theology that attempts to start with theories about God rather than the revelation of Christ and acknowledgement of the world for what it is. In doing so it becomes overly speculative and ends up in reveries over other "possible" worlds and scenarios of the eschaton. It is not that visions of a better world should not have their part to play, just as they did in the preaching of Christ. The point that we must always remember, however, (and this is always the crucial point in the most literal sense of the word) is that Jesus lived and suffered fully in the only possible world in his point in time. In him, the Christ, God took on this struggle fully as his own. In our own time we can only do the same. A better, more just, more loving world may indeed be possible, but it is impossible that it ever be except through the struggle of the Cross. An excess of suffering there may well be, as well as an excess of love, but any excess should not be understood as a surplus, but as that extra, of both love and suffering (for they are one) that is required for all creation to succeed in reaching its destiny.

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