Welcome

I'm not blogging here any longer, and I'm afraid I probably won't pick up on any new comments either. I'm now blogging at The Evangelical Liberal but I'm leaving these old posts up as an archive.

Thursday 28 January 2010

Further thoughts on God and suffering

In earlier posts I've pondered on why God allows evil in the universe, and why he allows natural disasters and all the terrible suffering they bring. These are, I think, two very different questions. Suffering and evil are not the same things, nor are they even always part of the same problem.

Hurt versus harm

US psychologists Cloud and Townsend draw a useful distinction between 'hurt' and 'harm', or in other words suffering and evil. They use the example of eating sweets, which harms our teeth but doesn't initially hurt, compared to having a filling which hurts but doesn't harm. Suffering always hurts but it doesn't always harm - in fact, sometimes it's part of the healing process. Evil always harms but it doesn't always hurt.

Often pain and suffering are unavoidable though uncomfortable counterparts to liberation, maturation, transformation and healing. Indeed, it would be hard to envisage life outside of a padded cell that didn't involve them. Furthermore, all parents have to stand by and allow their children to experience some pain and difficulty without stepping in to fix it, otherwise those children would never become responsible adults. God too cannot merely bail us out and fix all our problems, and nor can he be held to blame for all the crap that happens in a universe full of free moral agents.

Nonetheless, the deliberate causing of pain and suffering, except in the context of healing, is generally sadistic and evil. So which category do natural disasters fall into?

Natural disasters and evil

An earthquake, hurricane or volcano, though terrible, is not inherently evil. But to deliberately cause or send one would surely be evil. The only time it might not be would be if it were to wipe out evil - say if a freak landslide had hit a Nazi rally in 1939. However, sending an earthquake that indiscriminately wipes out hundreds of thousands of average people, including children, would surely be an unspeakably evil act.

But what about allowing - rather than actively sending - natural disasters? This perhaps depends on the context and reason. If earthquakes and hurricanes are part of the vital systems and processes of the world's natural order, then to allow that order to run its course without intervention may not be evil. Especially if that natural order turns out to be the only means by which morally responsible, free and loving beings can evolve in the universe.

However, even if this is the case does the end justify the means? Another possibility, discussed in an earlier post, is that the natural order has been corrupted by evil which God allows to continue for the present while he ongoingly and painfully redeems the cosmos.

Suffering and redemption

It's important to note that in the Christian view, God both fully enters into and redeems our suffering - that is the central message of the cross and of Easter. Though suffering is not good in itself, it becomes the means of good. The enduring power of Christ's gospel is that it can transform evil into good, disaster into triumph, despair into hope.

Finally, you cannot have God without God's kingdom, the incoming realm in Christ in which wrongs are righted, harms healed, and love and justice made perfect. If this present order were all there is, then death and tragedy might be the strong arguments against belief in God that A.C. Grayling imagines. But if not, it is not only perfectly plausible to believe in God in the face of earthquakes and holocausts, it may actually be the only belief that has something better than nihilistic despair to offer.

    Friday 22 January 2010

    Blue Monday, Grey Friday

    Well, the week started with so-called 'Blue Monday', the third Monday in January which has been unreliably calculated by somebody on the back of a cornflakes packet to be the most depressing day of the year. In my part of the world it's been rounded off with a miserably grey and damp Friday, and in between we've had the tragic backdrop of the Haitian earthquake and the dismal sound of politicians slugging it out in the run-up to a general election, plus the sight of Cadbury's being swallowed up by Kraft (never mind, it'll rot their teeth). And I've got typhoid, cholera and diphtheria rolled into one - or it might possibly just be a heavy cold.

    Going back to an earlier New Year gripe, the infallible and inerrant Wikipedia tells us that 'In England, the Feast of the Annunciation on 25 March was the first day of the new year until the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar in 1752'. Please can we go back to the Julian calendar? - it might actually feel like the New Year if it happened in springtime rather than the cold, dead heart of winter.

    Oh well, on the plus side it was both our children's birthdays this week (4 and 7)... though that does mean two days of parties to look forward to...

    Reality as Sacrament and Icon

    No, I'm not turning Catholic or Orthodox (though I see much good in both). Rather I've recently been discovering a new (actually probably very old) set of ways of understanding and relating to God and the world - or rather to God in and through the world. These ways are best described in words like sacrament, icon, transcendent immanence, transluminence and super/naturalism. I'd sum it up as the idea of God as the Reality behind reality.

    I'm tentatively starting to see each new moment, sight, experience and encounter - the whole world and all of life - as potentially sacramental. Each new sight, meeting or creature can become a sacrament, a physical vessel or conduit of the divine presence, mediating God's reality to us. So in and through the things of the natural world we can potentially encounter God, receive his love and grace, hear his inaudible voice.

    Related to this is the idea of the world and all in it - all of physical reality - as icon. An icon is not an idol, an object of worship, but rather a channel of worship, a window through which we glimpse a little of the God whom no image can capture or truly represent (Christ alone is the perfect icon).

    Anything can be an idol if put in place of God; almost anything (with the exception of that which is inherently evil) can be an icon or sacrament. Each place can become a sacred space; each moment can be a holy moment, every mundane activity can be worship. God is not contained in his creation, but (for those with eyes to see) he saturates it, pervades it, shines through it so that truly 'Earth's crammed with heaven / And every common bush aflame with God'. I'm calling this shining-through transluminence.

    Closely linked to this is the idea of the extraordinary in the ordinary - the miraculous in the mundane, the eternal in the everyday. Sometimes you may see a familiar face or some perfectly ordinary thing but you see it afresh, as though for the first time. These epiphanies again reveal the ordinary stuff of life as sacraments and icons through which we glimpse the divine.

    Transcendent immanence is the idea that God is at the same time both totally transcendent (beyond, above, over, outside, greater than) and also totally immanent (present, near, within, through, beneath). The Trinity is a potent symbol of this - God's Spirit makes the transcendent, timeless God present within/through each part and particle of created time and space, and perhaps the Son is the floodgate through which the Spirit enters the cosmos, the bridge-maker between the eternal and temporal realms. (NB when I say the Trinity is a symbol I don't mean that it isn't real.)

    Alongside all these ideas is what I'm calling super/naturalism, aka supernatural theism. This sees the realms or dimensions of natural and supernatural, physical and spiritual, visible and invisible as integrated, intersecting at all points - not separate but part of a seamless unity. There is therefore no division between 'sacred' and 'profane' or physical and spiritual - each touches on the other and is a part of the other, just as body and soul co-inhere (if that's a word). This allows us to see God as intimately involved in the physical world, acting in it through natural events and circumstances.

    We therefore don't need to make a distinction between miraculous 'God' events and normal, natural events that somehow operate apart from or without God. By the same token, a 'natural' or scientific account of some phenomenon need not deny or exclude God's presence or activity within and through it. We do not need, for example, to choose between Creation and Evolution - we can affirm the both/and as we can affirm that each baby is 'created' by God yet at the same time formed through normal, natural everyday biological processes. So belief in the supernatural is not 'gilding the lily' as some atheists suggest - it is merely seeing the lily in the fullness of its (sacramental) reality.

    This does not of course mean that everything in nature is equally or fully good, God-filled or God-ordained. God's world is infected throughout and in every part with evil and corruption (see previous post on God and evil). Almost no object or experience is a pure sacrament or perfect icon; as yet we only ever glimpse God 'as through a glass darkly' (and writing this through a heavy cold on a grey January day, the glass does seems pretty dark). But the glimpses are genuine, and it is from the matter and spirit of this corrupted but originally good world that God is here and now invisibly building his new, redeemed and restored creation - his kingdom, in which his love will reign fully and his face be seen perfectly.

    Finally, if all of reality is in some way sacramental, then I am - you are - as well. We each dimly, stumblingly, often unwittingly yet uniquely reflect and transmit glimpses of God to others.

    Wednesday 20 January 2010

    Why does God allow evil?

    'Rushing in where angels fear to tread' springs to mind, but in for a penny... ;-)

    If God is perfect (and if he isn't, he's not God), why does evil exist and why does God allow it to continue?

    A few quick provisos:
    • A blog post can't do more than skim the surface of such enormous issues
    • There are probably as many ways of answering the questions as there are thinkers about it
    • People of faith have wrestled with these issues for millennia and the struggle has often enriched their faith without producing any simple answers
    • A lot depends on our definitions/understanding of 'good' and 'evil', which there's not room for here. But for example, is all pain and even all suffering actually evil, or merely very unpleasant and difficult? Is death always and inherently bad? Can destruction sometimes be good (say of a cancer)?
    • Ultimately, evil is not a riddle to be solved but a reality to be dealt with.
    My own (tentative and provisional) view is that Evil is an unavoidable potential inherent in Good. Evil is not a separate entity from Good; it is merely Good corrupted, twisted, misused, misplaced or attenuated. It is the shadow side of Good: where there is freedom to bless, there must also be freedom to curse; where there is freedom to build, there must also be freedom to destroy, and so on. And as noted above, sometimes destruction (e.g. of a cancer) may be a right and necessary and thing. 

    So God did not create or plan evil, but evil was inherent as a potentiality within the good.

    Furthermore, Christian theology holds that God wanted morally free, responsible agents whose actions could have genuine significance; who could genuinely love and embrace the good out of free choice. Again, this implies freedom not to act this way; the potential for good inherently includes the potential for not-good, or less-than-good, or good twisted.

    At some point then the potentiality for evil becomes the reality of evil, infecting and corrupting the goodness of the cosmos and perhaps even of all things in it. When this happens, one option would be for God to wipe everything out and start again - a bit like a writer ripping up a whole manuscript because of a flaw running through all of it. But this is not the action of one who truly, passionately loves. In all the corrupted things and creatures there is still so much of the original good, and God chooses the long, slow, painful path of redemption and restoration - ultimately even involving his own self-sacrifice and death - to heal the damaged creation. This is, more or less, the Christian story.

    In Matthew 13:14-29 Jesus tells a story about a farmer who planted a field of wheat, but an enemy came and planted weeds among the wheat. Rather than trying to pull up the weeds and risk pulling up the good wheat too, the farmer let the two grow side by side until harvest time when they could be separated without damage. This is a picture not only of the cosmos but of everything in it, including our own hearts - good and evil are for the moment inextricably entwined, and God will not risk destroying the good by ripping out the evil. I for one am very grateful for this, as I know too well that many of my thoughts, attitudes, words and deeds do not put me unqualifiedly in the 'good' camp.

    Anyway, these are all just my suggestions, not some definitive statement.

    Sunday 17 January 2010

    Earthquakes and God - why does God allow natural disasters?

    As I said in a previous post, even if it's possible to explain why an all-powerful loving God allows natural disasters that wipe out millions, no explanation is likely to satisfy us emotionally.

    The overall problem of evil and pain is difficult enough - and will have to wait for another occasion - but natural disasters come into an even harder category because they seem so random and so indiscriminate, and because they cannot easily be blamed on anyone apart from God.

    There are many ways people have tried to understand natural disaster in the light of their faith in God.

    1. God's wrath. It seems hideously insensitive even to mention in the light of the current tragedy, but some (rather scary) people have indeed interpreted such disasters as acts of God punishing the wickedness of humanity (citing the biblical Sodom and Gomorrah for example). I personally can't accept this. Yes, you only need to read the newspapers or look hard in the mirror to see that humans aren't shining examples on the whole, yet all of Jesus' teaching and example would seem to argue against the idea that God would indiscriminately wipe out whole populations - including many of his followers - for the sins of some, or even of all. And why does Robert Mugabe remain alive and well while children die in Haiti?

    2. Evil. Some want to blame that other convenient scapegoat, Satan, or let's just say the great primal forces of evil and chaos loose in the universe. There's certainly a strand of Christian thinking that Satan was present and active from the outset in creation, well before humans ever came on the scene, and Charles Foster (mentioned in an earlier post) believes that Satan was responsible for selfishness-driven natural selection and predation. However, these are murky waters - and is evil really responsible for the plate tectonics which shape our planet and yet also lead to earthquakes, volcanoes and tidal waves? (The question of why God allows evil to remain present and active in the universe will have to wait for another time.)

    3. Human responsibility. A third possible culprit is seen to be humanity - that somehow all the sins and selfishness of mankind disturb the natural order and balance of the planet, leading to natural calamities. Certainly we're all increasingly aware of the environmental damage we're doing to the planet and the disastrous ecological consequences this could unleash. And if Chaos theory is right and the flapping of a butterfly's wings could ever lead to a hurricane on the other side of the globe, who knows - perhaps my sin could lead to a natural disaster somewhere. All a bit imponderable and impenetrable though.

    4. Natural order. A fourth and, to my mind, more likely option is that natural disasters - like pain and death - are simply a necessary part of the complex geological, biological and climatological systems of our planet, systems which allow life to exist and flourish at all.

    We are fragile beings in an immense universe and our lifespan is short, whether cut off abruptly by a natural disaster, war, disease or violence, or allowed to play out to a full natural lifespan. I may not have died in this week's Haitian earthquake but I may be hit by a bus tomorrow or by cancer next year, and I will certainly die sometime within the next 70 years or so. Perhaps the real issue is whether we - whether I - can learn to live well here and now, ready to face death whenever and however it may come.

    I realise this is a very partial and provisional response, and it costs me nothing to theorise from the comfort of my non-earthquake-damaged armchair (well, slightly human-damaged swivel chair to be precise - the back-rest keeps falling off). To my mind a far more important response is active compassion in the face of human suffering, anger at the evil in the universe and in ourselves, humility in the face of mystery, and prayer in the darkness.

    Saturday 16 January 2010

    Shades of Grayling - the dullness of philosophers

    Woke up this morning (and this isn't the opening to a blues song) to the un-dulcet sound of humanist philosopher A.C. Grayling on Radio 4, dismissing belief in God as utterly illogical on the basis of the recent Haitian earthquake.

    There's something about humanist philosophers that brings out the worst in me. They seem so smug, so utterly certain, and so unutterably dull; acknowledging no shades of grey, yet somehow sounding as grey as a November day. Grayling and his ilk are children of the enlightenment, modernists and positivists to the core and apparently unable to embrace the richer both/and insights of post-modernism; they mock at mystery and cannot live with paradox and untied ends.

    Yes, it's hard to understand how there could be an all-loving, all-powerful God in the face of horrendous natural disasters - no-one's denying that. But for those of us who believe - who cannot but believe because of the whole experience and evidence of our lives and our hearts - these are problems we can live with, paradoxes we can embrace. There are of course many possible ways of trying to explain how God can be good and yet there can be natural disasters; maybe I'll explore them in another post but of course they are all partial and provisional, and personally I'm inclined not to bother too much over them. They may perhaps satisfy the intellect, but the heart has very different needs.

    What makes me smile wryly is that for all Grayling's insistence on cold, hard logic, he then segues on without a blink to speak of how what really matters is responding to the disaster with compassion and kindness. I completely agree, but where's his logic in that? How on earth do kindness and compassion fit into his tight A+B=C conceptual framework? Nonetheless I'm very glad to find that his humanity is better than his philosophy. Love is greater than logic and maybe those who try to justify God but don't help their stricken fellow man are further from the kingdom than philosophers who reject God but feed their neighbour.

    Friday 15 January 2010

    Unapologetics

    Okay, so apologetics - which I've always thought was a duff name - is the attempt to defend or present the truth of God or Christianity by means of overwhelming evidence, either logical/rational or miraculous. Great Christian apologists of the last century included C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, both of whose work I've often attempted to emulate in the past.

    But God is not a hypothesis to be tested, a proposition to be proved or a problem to be solved. God is a reality - The Reality - to be encountered, experienced, engaged with, entered into. I can never prove God either by logic or by display of supernatural power. Miracles can be doubted as hoaxes, and by definition they can never be scientifically tested. And logic and reason can only take you so far in demonstrating that which is completely beyond all language and all human ability to conceptualise. They can't even satisfactorily describe something as normal and natural as, say, my love for my wife - reason is a useful tool but it is not the only or even the best way of knowing, particularly when what you need to know is a person more than it is an idea.

    God and Christianity are not less than reasonable or rational; they are more than. I believe Lewis's greatest works were not his apologetics - good though those are - but his mythopoeic fiction, which allow us imaginatively to encounter and experience something of the divine reality which his powerful logic could only weakly hint at.

    Selfless Genes and Zennish Prophets

    I've just finished Charles Foster's The Selfless Gene: Living with God and Darwin. I was expecting a straightforward Christian defence of theistic evolution, but what emerged was both more fascinating and more frustrating and raised as many questions as it set out to answer. Read my review here.

    Unrelatedly, except that I was given them both for Christmas, I've also just finished Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Profound spiritual genius or meaningless New-Agey nonsense wrapped up in impenetrably poetic prose? In this it reminded me strongly of Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist and also of William Nicholson's Wind on Fire and Seeker trilogies. Maybe I've still got too much evangelical baggage to be able to handle books which mix up Christianity, Buddhism and Islam quite so freely (though I loved Life of Pi).

    Rejoice with me...

    ...for our lost car key is found.

    :-) x 160 (which is the number of pounds sterling it would have cost to get a new one cut.)

    Unfinished books list

    I'm a great starter of books but I've only recently faced up to what a terrible finisher I am. Here's a list of all the books I've started in the last few years and which are crying out piteously to me to finish them. It's not a reflection on the quality of the books - just on my staying power as a reader.
    • A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth (fantastic but just too damn long!!)
    • A Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal by Asne Seierstad
    • The Snow Geese, William Fiennes 
    • Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels 
    • Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis (the only Lewis book I've not managed to finish) 
    • All Hallow's Eve, Charles Williams 
    • A Voyage to Arcturus, David Lindsay
    • The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham (our copy was missing its last pages - aarrgh!)
    • Head Over Heels in the Dales, Gervaise Phinn
    • The Flight of the Sparrow, Fay Sampson
    • Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen (after watching a TV adaptation, so already knew the ending)
    • Mansfield Park, Jane Austen (ditto)
    • The Road Less Travelled, M. Scott Peck
    • Lesslie Newbigin, Missionary Theologian: A Reader, Paul Weston
    • Love Beyond Reason, John Ortberg
    • Life of the Beloved, Henri Nouwen
    • Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, Henri Nouwen
    • Prayer, Philip Yancey
    • Renovation of the Heart, Dallas Willard
    • God of Surprises, Gerard Hughes
    • The Christian and the Pharisee, R.T. Kendall and David Rosen
    And that's nothing to the pile of books I've borrowed, bought or been given but haven't even started reading yet!

    Saturday 9 January 2010

    The Joy of Sledging



    I'm a late starter, but finally at the advanced age of 36 I managed to get on a sledge today for the first time. It was flipping marvellous.

    Friday 8 January 2010

    Cheap pyrotechnics

    All you need is a candle and some orange peel...

    Monday 4 January 2010

    Happy New Year? ;-(

    Ah, the New Year... when transport fares and VAT go up for no apparent reason; your weight has gained an unfeasible number of pounds and the bank balance has lost an even less feasible number; you have to face returning to work, and the days are still dark and cold. On top of that we've all got the official most depressing day of the year to look forward to (I think it's about the fourth Monday in January, probably the point when most New Year's resolutions have come to a sorry end, though if I'd made any mine wouldn't even last that long).

    Think positive, think positive - new year, new hope...! Only 2 and a half months till Spring... :-)

    Saturday 2 January 2010

    Clive Sexist Lewis?

    Was C.S. Lewis really a rampant racist /sexist / arch-conservative monarchist? Lots of people think so, but his writings have long been a favourite of mine so I've decided to defend him against some of the many charges that have been levelled at his writings over the years. Have a read here and see what you think.