Who cannot cry out to God "Where are you!?!" in the face of such horrendous evil? I sit in silence and ask "why" and oftentimes do not come up with an answer.
And yet I cling to faith. It is all I have. I cling to the hope that God will somehow, someday make all things new and set these evils aright. I cling to the hope that this child buried under the rubble is either now or soon will be riotously celebrated in the kingdom of God to such an extent that her suffering on earth will seem small and trivial.
Of all the books I have read on the subject, David Bentley Hart's short piece of poetry-philosophy is the best. In his book The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? he writes the following:
"As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God but the face of his enemy. Such faith might never seem credible to someone like Ivan Karamozov, or still the disquiet of his conscience, or give him peace in place of rebellion, but neither is it a faith that his arguments can defeat: for it is a faith that set us free from optimism long ago and taught us hope instead. Now we are able to rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that 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 all tears away from her eyes -- and there shall be no more death, nor 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.'"
That is an answer! That is the hope I cling to.
Come, Lord Jesus, come.
I'm with you on the difficulty of answering these particular types of evil. In the class, "Pastoral Crisis Intervention" I was in a group who had to do a project on how to respond to natural disasters and the final paper had to include a section on theodicy related to the specific type of crisis the group dealt with. Though the class was not in philosophy, that was the single most difficult question to answer. Like you said, the only hope we really can have in the face of horrendous evil like this is to hope for the day when all things will be made new! Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteIt is a disturbingly interesting phenomena, this matter of suffering, viz., natural evil. I recall being in Northern Uganda a couple of years ago, not knowing if my own life would soon be taken by rebels in the region (moral evil). It was actually out of this milieu of pathos that I was actually challenged, at least in my own thinking, to return to the works of Kant. It was in Kant that I was forced to deal with my own a priori intimations, i.e., the fact that I even recognized the phenomena of suffering and tragedy as such, had to account for something at an embedded structuralistic-existential level. In other words, I was forced to ask: Not, "Why is this not acceptable?" But, "Why is it that I even recognize this as something not acceptable?" "Why is it not acceptable that hitting is an appropriate form of salutation?" So, is it that we are left with only two options? First, that of Nietzsche-simply needing to get over it: this is simply how it is, particular in an evolutionary paradigm. Or, secondly, Lewis' moral reinterpretation in Mere Christianity? Anyway it goes, you are correct Greg-we pray for a day in which God will make all things new . . .
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