Thanks, Bart, for your response and further statement. I suspect we are both going to find that we start hares running in one another\u2019s minds which there won\u2019t be time to chase. I think the question of the definition and description of apocalyptic had better be one of those; we could talk another time perhaps . ..
\nBut I want to begin where you end, which is the key question of your book.<\/p>\n
\n(And of course I am very much alive to the importance of the emotions within the whole debate, and don\u2019t at all want to reduce it to cold logic; but if one is making an argument, then multiplying examples of the problem doesn\u2019t actually add to the force of that argument.)
\nYour question is, How can there be all these horrors \u2018if there is a good and all powerful God in charge of the world?’ My comment, in my previous posting, was that in the Gospels, Jesus\u2019 claim is, in effect, \u2018This is what it looks like when God is running the world\u2019 (one way of saying \u2018the kingdom of God is at hand\u2019). Of course I am alive to the different emphases and nuances between the Gospels, but in their different ways they agree, I think, on this: that what was going on during Jesus\u2019 public career actually was the inauguration of \u2018God being in charge of the world\u2019 in a new way. (In this, despite their various emphases, the canonical gospels agree over against the non-canonical, wouldn\u2019t you say?)
\nOf course, it didn\u2019t look like Jesus\u2019 contemporaries were hoping it would (victory for Israel against her enemies; new levels of purity attained; etc.). In the same way, it doesn\u2019t look like what we would want (God abolishing disease, war, hatred, natural disaster, etc. at a stroke). But it seems to have been Jesus\u2019 claim that this is what Israel\u2019s God, the world\u2019s creator, was actually up to.
\nFrom that point of view I suppose the Gospels constituted, and still constitute, a challenge to all expectations, particularly in that they link \u2013 as readers for hundreds have years have found it difficult to do \u2013 the story of Jesus\u2019 kingdom-inauguration with the story of his crucifixion and resurrection. Somehow, they are saying, this is what it looks like when the good, all-powerful and all-loving God is in charge of the world. You may say that if this is what they\u2019re saying then the God of whom they speak is not \u2018all-powerful\u2019 in the way we might have imagined, and I suspect that is in a sense correct. Near the heart of Jesus\u2019 proclamation lies a striking redefinition of power itself, which looks as though it\u2019s pointing in the direction of God\u2019s \u2018running of the world\u2019 (if that\u2019s the right phrase) in what you might call a deliberately, almost studiedly, self-abnegating way, running the world through an obedient, and ultimately suffering, human being, with that obedience, and especially that suffering, somehow instrumental in the whole process. What \u2018we would want God to do\u2019 \u2013 to have God measure up to our standards of \u2018how a proper, good and powerful God would be running the world\u2019! \u2013 seems to be the very thing that Jesus was calling into question.
\nThe mystery of Jesus himself, then, is for me near the heart of \u2013 not \u2018the answer\u2019, because I don\u2019t think there is such a thing as \u2018the answer\u2019, but \u2013 the matrix of thought and life within which God\u2019s people are called to continue to grapple with the problem. This is where, in Evil and the Justice of God, I try to draw together traditional discussions of \u2018the atonement\u2019 and traditional discussions of \u2018the problem of evil\u2019 and suggest that it\u2019s odd that they should ever have been separated, since they seem to go together so closely in the Bible itself. (And can\u2019t be reduced, I suggest, to the \u2018God punishes sin\u2019 logic; I have tended to include some elements of that within the Christus Victor motif, which, yes, involves suprahuman cosmic powers and all that. Hard though they are to describe adequately, they are even harder, in my view, to ignore.)
\nThat\u2019s why, in my view, the gospels are written not just to draw Israel\u2019s story to its climax (I hear what you say about the big story and the multiple little stories, by the way; I love the little stories that cut across the seam, but I persist in thinking that it is part of the task of a Christian theologian to read the Bible as a whole and see its larger currents of thought as well as its smaller ones. This is partly a re-run of the Plato\/Aristotle debate, isn\u2019t it? I think we need both, the big picture and the little details) . . . but also to generate a story which continues, in my view, to this day and indeed to the day when God renews all things at last: the story of those who, following Jesus, make his dealing-with-evil project a reality in and through their own lives. That\u2019s why the early church spread, not by thumping dogmas into people\u2019s heads but by living in a way which brought healing and hope, a way rooted in the achievement of Jesus in his kingdom-inauguration and, not least, in his kingdom-establishing death and resurrection. (And of course \u2013 just in case anyone was in any doubt \u2013 all Christians who lived before modern medicine knew far more about multiple pain, suffering and apparently pointless death than most of us do, and it was close up and in the family a good deal of the time. And it didn\u2019t shake their faith, or not too drastically. \u2018The problem of evil\u2019 as we think of it today is largely a post-Enlightenment construct.)
\nYou see (to come back to it again), I do persist in thinking that if Jesus didn\u2019t rise from the dead then there would be no reason to hold any form of Christian faith. A wistful Judaism, perhaps, but not a faith in one who would be, then, a failed prophet of the kingdom. It is because I believe in Jesus\u2019 resurrection that I believe that the creator God has inaugurated his new creation in which, at the last, he will wipe away all tears from all eyes. I don\u2019t think you can start from observation of the world and somehow reason up to Christian faith, because one meets precisely the problems you have so rightly and graphically raised. But \u2013 and I wonder if this is actually the position you held when you yourself were still a practicing Christian? \u2013 if one believes, not merely as an intellectual assent to doctrine but as a living relationship with God through Jesus Christ, then the dark mystery of suffering can be seen within the context of his suffering, and be transformed by it.
\nOf course, for its fullness this necessarily generates, as I said, the life of the church in and through which evil is then addressed. Part of the \u2018transformation\u2019 is that Jesus\u2019 followers go to work as healers, reconcilers, and so on. That\u2019s why the last two chapters of my book are a small attempt to say that the work of believing people in addressing the urgent needs of the world is actually a part of the biblical answer \u2013 if you can call it an \u2018answer\u2019 \u2013 to the problem. And, in the course of that, I explore the notion of \u2018forgiveness\u2019 as the thing which not only releases the person forgiven from the burden of their own guilt, but also releases the person who forgives from the burden of going on being angry. And I suggest that this might even apply to God himself, at the end . . . though I guess that\u2019s a bridge too far for some people, and certainly for yourself.
\nI guess I do hope that I can help other people come to a view similar to mine (though, as I used to tell my students, 25% of what I say is wrong but I don\u2019t know which 25% it is). I wasn\u2019t implying that was a bad thing to want to persuade people, only that if you didn\u2019t think you were mounting a potentially conclusive argument it raised the question as to whether this was the main or leading reason why you yourself stopped being a Christian. But that may be a question for another time.
\nI sense we\u2019re just beginning… but even if your next post is your last one in this sequence, thanks for the fun of thinking round these complex but pressing issues.
\nTom<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thanks, Bart, for your response and further statement. I suspect we are both going to find that we start hares running in one another\u2019s minds which there won\u2019t be time to chase. I think the question of the definition and description of apocalyptic had better be one of those; we could talk another time perhaps…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-is-our-pain-gods-problem"],"yoast_head":"\n