From: hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: some musings on theodicy
Date: 10 Apr 92 08:53:52 GMT

One of the subjects that has come up over and over is the moral
implications of judgement.  It's hard to understand how a God who
loves everyone could torture them eternally.  I don't claim to have a
complete solution to theodicy, but I thought it was worth putting some
of my thoughts down and asking for reactions.

One thing I've never heard suggested is the possibility that there's
actually a *reason* why only people with faith can survive in heaven.
The common picture is that heaven is a sort of boring place.  You sit
around playing harps around the divine banquet table.  However the
Biblical evidence doesn't support this -- what little we see of the
world beyond suggests that there are conflicts going on involving
spiritual issues at a level beyond anything we deal with.  God's
angels are busy people, who may arrive late for appointments (Dan
10:12).  Aside from warfare, there could be other kinds of activities
going on that would be dangerous to the ill-prepared as well.  In this
world, the power to do things is typically associated with dangers.
It's hard for me to believe that it will be different in the next
world -- I would assume that it would have its own dangers which would
dwarf the ones we see here.

What I'm suggesting is that it's not that God intentionally damns
people and throws them into the fire, but that those without proper
spiritual preparation can't survive.  Whether this means that they
simply disintegrate, or that they fall prey to the forces of evil, I
wouldn't care to speculate -- I think Biblical images such as the fire
of eternal destruction can be read either way.

This does not necessarily absolve God of responsibility.  If we assume
that he's responsible for the whole setup, he still chose to create
the dangers.  Ultimately I think I fall back on what amounts to "the
free will defense".  Yes, God created a dangerous world, and probably
we can hold him responsible for that.  But he may not have been able
to create a safe world and still end up with results that were worth
having.

Christians have had a tendency to say things about God's power that
I'm suspicious of.  The Bible certainly sees God as ultimately
responsible, and it suggests that he has is all-powerful in at least
some context.  But the Bible does not discuss things in quite the
abstract terms that many of these discussions reach.  Are there at
some level constraints on God?  I rather suspect that there are.  It
may be that even God can't set things up so that people are both free
and guaranteed to make the right decisions.  It may also be that
there's a certain level of real danger needed to accomplish his ends,
whatever they are.  (I don't claim to know all of God's final goals.)
I don't see anything in the Bible that requires me to say that he is
free of such constraints.

Note that the only book in the Bible that deals with these issues at
length is Job, and in Job it seems to be considered perfectly
legitimate for someone to be upset at God for what he has done. The
stories of the patriarchs and the Psalms are full of people protesting
against God's actions.  I believe that God cares, and that he will
help us live through the dangers he has created, but ultimately I'm
not sure Christians can avoid the concept that God is not entirely
nice.  A science fiction book, "A Canticle for Liebowitz", ends with
the poignant question of whether it is appropriate for someone to say
that they forgive God for what he has done to them.  Can God need
forgiveness?  In an ultimate sense, if you understand all of his
motivations, maybe not.  But from our point of view, I think maybe so.

I happened to be reading a biography of Luther today (Bainton's book
"Here I Stand").  I was struck by the following comment.  This was
made in reaction to the Zwickau prophets, people who believed they had
revelations from God.  Luther rejected them because they spoke too
glibly.  Bainton quotes him:

  Those who are expert in spiritual things have gone through the valley
  of the shadow.  When these men talk of sweetness and of being
  transported to the third heaven, do not believe them.  Divine Majesty
  does not speak directly to men.  God is a consuming fire, and the
  dreams and visions of the saints are terrible.