[SB] Scrambling towards Zion: Homer (Feb. 17)

[Molly Wolf]

Homer


I yield to nobody (except his family) in my affection for my former rector Mike+.  He did yeoman service for me in the pastoral care department -- and he is not, I think, someone to whom pastoral care comes easily. At one point when I badly needed a bulwark and defender, he bulworked and defended. We had some good times talking theology, too; it's something we both enjoy, although our mileage varies considerably. When it comes to God-talk, I am an old-fashioned existential liberal, and Mike (IMO) is a post-mod neo-con evangelical.

All that being duly stated, I feel obliged to report that I think Mike's theodicy sucks.

Backing up for a second: I first encountered the Problem of Evil at the age of six or seven in a fascinating Time/Life photo history of World War II, which book I had snuck for private perusal behind the old grey overstuffed rocking chair. The book had grim, frank, crystalline pictures from Auschwitz. The problem has been stated memorably, "If God is God he is not good; if God is good, he is not God." Why*do*  bad things happen to totally innocent people? (and to other beings, but theology hasn't got round to non-human critters yet). It was several decades before I learned the correct term for the Problem of Evil: theodicy. Even then, I could only remember the word by association with Homer: the Iliad, theodicy. In theology, as in botany, mnemotics rule.

Mike and I got into a substantial theological hoohah after a parishioner died tragically of a really horrible disorder (Pick's Disease) and Mike preached that death comes as a result of human sin. I showed up in his office the next morning as soon as I'd had my coffee and we vigorously whomped theodicy back and forth like a squash ball, but without resolving the issue. Mike took the position that no Fall of Man = no Death. I took the position that death had been around for one hell of a lot longer than human beings had and I had at least one fossil in a rock by the garage door to prove it. If death precedes humanity in earth time, then humanity's choice to disobey God can't create death. Mike disagreed. And we eventually left it there, because both of us were merely reshuffling our beliefs instead of debating the issue. This happens with dreary regularity in theology.

But my position hasn't changed. Yes, past Christian theologians argued that tribulation was God's punishment for sin, but their data were incomplete: no geology, no microbiology. There is faith and there is science, and the two are fundamentally interested in different fields, rather as astronomy is not much interested in beekeeping and vice versa. But astronomy and beekeeping can keep company in this universe without quarreling, and when theology and science argue, it's far more likely because of human intransigence and puffy egotism (on both sides!) than anything real and important. Yes, there's stuff in the Bible for which we have no factual proof. Some of it's myth; some of it's imagination; some of it (for me, the Resurrection) is just something I accept on trust, as I accept the theory of plate tectonics on trust. I have seen neither the empty tomb nor subducting zones.

Back to theodicy. The problem, I would like to have said to Mike (one never thinks of these things at the time) is that once humankind has acquired the critical data, trying to pretend that we don't know what we*do*  know is cheating. It's dishonest. Once you know that the Black Death of 1349 resulted from the bacillus_Yersinia pestis_  spread largely zoonotically (fleas and rats) to a population whose immune response had been weakened by repeated famine, you really can't thunder on about God's retribution for parti-coloured hose or papal schism or whatever humankind was supposed to have done to earn the trauma of horriblegawdawful terror and death. We have reasonable, evidence-based explanations for much of what left Augustine and Aquinas puzzled, and we can't pretend otherwise. No, we don't know what causes Pick's Disease, but I don't think it had anything to do with Adam and Eve.

Why does this matter so much? Because theodicy is where the rubber most truly hits the road.  If our answer to the great "Why? Why this? Why her? Why me?" is clearly fudging what even Grade Sixers know, then we look like either ignoramuses or hypocrites, and that stands in the way of our passing on any Good News at all.  Doesn't matter who we're lying to -- the inquiring or bereaved, the curious, the scornful, ourselves, or God: if we cover our eyes with our hands and loudly chant "ya! ya! God's punishment for sin!" when the answer is (and we know it should be) "food poisoning" or "undersea earthquake", then we are being unconvincing to those who ask, however well we've convinced ourselves. They will walk away from a God who strikes so indiscriminately, as well they should, and from a faith that demands that they turn off their brains at source. Moreover, blaming humankind for the great tsunami of 2005 is simple egregious injustice. Egotistical too, now that I think of it.

Nor can Christians plead ignorance of the basics of physics and biology any more.  This stuff is all over the media; our kids bring it home from school like the rhinovirus; we learned it ourselves, or should have, in Grade 10.  Wilful ignorance will cut no mustard. Nor can we plead that Scriptural truth somehow trumps "lesser" truths, not now that we know that the Bible evolved, in a complicated way, among complicated people struggling with their immediate spiritual issues. One especially brilliant Old Testament scholar, whom it is my delight to hear occasionally, observes that much of the Old Testament is the Jews' response to the question "Why did You let shit happen to us?" after the Babylonian Captivity. And while Joshua might have fit the battle of Jericho, modern archaeology has conclusively established that the walls didn't come tumblin' down.

Somehow, in writing and preaching and talking about faith, we have to accommodate these inconvenient truths. We can't hide from them or pretend they don't exist, not without a crippling dishonesty. The record of Creation bears the mark of God's finger every bit as much as do the struggles of Job or Paul's convoluted clauses. We have to find mental and spiritual room for physical science at the inn or we can kiss evangelism goodbye. It isn't even difficult to do so; a perfectly adequate theodicy comes by accepting that God dealt out three wild cards, biology, physics, and human free will, because from those three -- not just the last -- all earthly suffering ultimately flows.  But all three are also ultimately necessary liberations, without which Creation cannot dance.

It's the last of the three, human free will, where the mystery really lies and where Mike's theodicy finds a place to rest its head. Why are we so coldly selfish to each other? What causes us to worship power and to feed alienation and hatred? Why are we so terribly afraid? -- for fear lies at the bottom of much cruelty. Psychology is still a baby science, and its infancy is complicated by the birth of its younger sibling, neuroscience. We *don't* know, which isn't to say that we will never know. If the myth of the Fall has rightful power, it's in the recognition that something goes terribly wrong in us sometimes, driving us away from God and deep into the bramble bushes of terror, hatred, and despair.

But there's an equal and opposite mystery to the Problem of Evil and that is the Problem of Love.  What force drives us to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God? What brings us to be tender and generous, to suffer with the suffering, to heed the call to forgive? because something does.  There is a right way of being not laid out in any one scripture but present in all scripture of merit, and that way of being is something we respond to instinctively, as we instinctively yearn for a Home beyond mere home.  Even when we're doing wrong, we're generally aware of it, or working extremely hard to stay in denial. I don't know if there's a name for the Problem of Love. No doubt someone will tell me.

As for physics and biology, those two great wild cards, Creation is bigger than us, and older, much, much older, and we should acknowledge this and stand before it with wonder and without arrogance or solipsism. We need to pay tribute to its beauty, to do it justice, to live with it lovingly, and to marvel at Whatever caused it into being.

But no; we are not so powerful as to will death into existence, any more than we can will the tide to back away.  We aren't big enough or old enough for that. We are*creatures*, very new to this world compared to crocodiles and cockroaches, and all creatures -- even creatures as big as galaxies -- have their beginnings and their endings in this life.  What exists on the other side of the death we all will come to -- that is, of course, an entirely different matter.


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