THE PRICE OF GOD’S LOVE

Jerry Harkins

It is Easter Sunday in the year of the coronavirus and I have received some fairly saccharine greetings from classmates and the heads of various schools I have been associated with.  These are people I respect and admire even if they are more conservative than I think Christians (or anyone else) should be.  Some include e-cards with links to medieval hymns in Latin.  Regina caeli lætare, alleluia!  I wish I could believe the Queen of Heaven would intervene on our behalf with the God who seems to be uninterested in our plight.

Then this morning came a New York Times opinion piece by Ross Douthat (Harvard, magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, 2002), one of the gray lady’s house conservatives and a convert to Roman Catholicism, pondering the meaning of death and suffering in a world “rife with misery,” a world created by “a good and loving God.”  His conclusion is there is no certain answer but we should still seek one.  Why?  Because, “…meaningless suffering is the goal of the devil, and bringing meaning out of suffering is the saving work of God.”  Say what?  God’s job is to save us by finding meaning in our suffering?  Save us from what?  Original sin?

Mr. Douthat is certainly right that there is no certain answer and, I would add, no logical one either.  His notion that squaring the circle –– bringing meaning out of suffering  –– is nonsensical and possibly heretical in that God’s salvation is said to be the result of Christ’s suffering on the cross.  Many theories about the role of suffering in God’s plan have been advanced over the millennia and Douthat alludes to some of them but not the one given in the Bible:  punishment for the disobedience of Adam and Eve.  As the loving God says later (Exodus 20:6, Deuteronomy 5:9), “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.”  And he wasn’t kidding.  This is the God who thought to himself “I made a big mistake when I created human beings so I’m going to drown every single living thing on earth except for crazy Noah, his family and one pair of each species of the animal kingdom.  That way I can start the whole thing all over again.”  Of course, he didn’t defeat evil the second time any more than he had the first.  Christian doctrine has struggled with this failure since Saint Paul.  If you’re interested, you should investigate the gobbledygook that has been committed under the heading of free will.

You see where this is going.  Since there is no rational answer to the question of a good God creating or even tolerating evil and, assuming there is a God, there must be something wrong with the question.  Before we get there however we need to resolve a more basic question.  Is there anything an omnipotent God cannot do?  The “anything” in that question always reduces to a paradox which is logically fallacious.  For example, can an omnipotent God create a rock too heavy for him to lift?  The answer must be yes or no.  But either answer proves that God is not omnipotent.  The problem of evil falls into the same class which is why Douthat is right in saying it is unanswerable.

The very existence of evil, then, argues that either there is no God or there is a God but he or she cannot be described as all good.  (Actually, there is a third answer given by the Gnostic heretics which holds that there are two gods, one good and the other evil.  The evil demiurge created the material universe which is thoroughly evil and which has concealed the good God from all but a few of us.  At least it’s logical but the Holy Inquisition slaughtered the heretics at the direction of Pope Innocent III who mounted the Albigensian Crusade against them in 1208.). But let’s take a critical look at the two possibilities for a believing Christian.

The idea that there is no God is obviously a non-starter or at least it used to be.  However, beginning with the emergence of “non-creedal” Quakerism and other dissenting movements in the middle of the seventeenth century, many Christians began to hedge their bets.  Today, there is a growing number of denominations that are non-theistic but that look to the teachings of Jesus as a guide to the moral life.  Roman Catholicism seems occasionally to be drifting in the same direction.

In his first encyclical, the ultra-conservative Pope Benedict XVI can easily be read as reviving a radical thesis that was debated by the early fathers and doctors of the church.  It is a cautious treatment but one given some prominence in its title, Deus Caritas Est, God is love, which is rhetorically identical to the proposition that love is God.  The phrase is borrowed from the author(s) of the gospel and the three letters of John who may have believed literally that, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8). But love is a nebulous idea which suggests that God is also an idea.  Maybe John meant it.  His gospel begins with the claim that, “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and God was the word.  Logos in Greek means word in the sense of idea.  (In Christian Orthodoxy, Jesus is said to be the Word of God referring to his role as the explicator of God’s law.)

Maybe Benedict meant that the idea of love is what made the world possible.  Not an orthodox position of course but attractive nonetheless to Enlightenment thinkers including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith.  The problem with it is that love becomes the cause of suffering which is just as unsatisfying as the notion that a good God created suffering.  Perhaps there is a way to avoid this conundrum by extending the insight of Dame Julian of Norwich who reported the revelation that God created sin so that we might experience his forgiveness and thus know his abiding love for us.  In a similar fashion, God may have created suffering so that we might know joy.  It’s not so far from the church’s medieval teaching that doctors should not relieve pain because pain is a gift of God that reduces the time we must spend in Purgatory.  As the popular hymn has it, “Bear patiently the cross of grief and pain.”

Attractive as it is, the notion that God is love flies in the face of biblical mythology and human experience.  As Saint Paul tells us, “ Love is patient, love is kind.  It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.   It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs” (1 Corinthians 13:4-5).  That is not the God of the Flood or of Job or  of the coronavirus.  Which brings us back to the unhappy but logical conclusion that there is no God, good or otherwise, that acts in history and is knowable to human beings. 

 Atheism has logical and scientific appeal as a resolution to what I will call the Douthat Dilemma but the idea of God has been comforting to most people throughout history precisely because it provides an answer to life’s mysteries.  Those reluctant to abandon that idea are left to confront the second possible resolution that God cannot be described as all good.  There is no reason God has to be good and a great deal of evidence that the God of Abraham and almost all other gods who have perpetrated vast amounts of pure evil as have their acolytes and their hierarchs.  My favorite example is the way our God treats his upright and blameless servant Job.  He slaughters his wife and children, destroys his wealth and denounces him often and loudly, all to win a whimsical bet with Satan.  Remember, he did not have to continue denouncing Job who never wavered in his submission to God’s will.  The same God goes on and on about Jesus as his “beloved son” and then requires him to suffer an agonizing death.  Why?  Because Adam and Eve ate an apple they had been told not to eat.  Their act was not evil because, before they ate the apple, they did not know good and evil.  On the cross Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  It’s a fair question to ask about a God who commands to his human subjects, “Thou shall not kill.”

Only in Wonderland can God be considered all good.  In any real world mediated, however imperfectly, by a sense of morality, Douthat’s God frequently appears as a sociopath.  This raises the question of whether that God can be simultaneously good and evil in the same way Schrödinger's cat was said to be simultaneously alive and dead in a quantum environment.  The answer to both is a definitive no.  At any given moment, God must be either good or evil.  Any other state would, like the quantum cat, be a paradox which, by its nature, is self-contradictory.

Of course, good people often do bad things.  Might God be successively good and evil like most of his creatures?  Again, no.  Theologians have long agreed that immutability is one of the defining attributes of God.  God cannot change.  As another well-known hymn says, “Change and decay in all around I see; / O Thou who changest not, abide with me.”  This, in turn, derives from James 1:17, “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows.”  Another overarching attribute of God is goodness.  Everything that God does is worthy of approval.  But Jesus told Peter, “Whatever thou shall bind upon earth shall be bound also in heaven.”  Thus, whatever the church does is also worthy of approval, a proposition that is at a minimum ahistorical.

God does not exist and the question of his goodness is moot.  It is possible that there was a first cause that set off the Big Bang but, if so, it and anything else that may have existed, was obliterated in the explosion. The universe –– reality –– is what it seems to be.  It is indifferent to itself and to us.  We have evidence that it had a beginning and will have an end.  There is much we do not know but we are not ignorant.  We know the earth is round and that it orbits the star we call the sun.  We have visited our moon and several of our fellow planets and we know they are not made of green cheese.  We do not know whether this knowledge is unique to us.  It seems unlikely and we keep on looking for other self-reflecting creatures just as many continue to search for meaning in the form of a Supreme Being.  Both quests speak well of us even if one (or both) of them is truly hopeless.

Note

Because this is an essay, not a book, about the goodness of God (of which there are many), I have not felt it necessary to burden it with endnotes.  But there are two issues that merit mention.  First is my diagnosis of Noah.  If you have any doubt about his insanity, you may wish to re-read Genesis 9:20-27 about why he invented slavery to punish one of his sons.  Second is my assertion that Schrödinger's cat cannot be simultaneously alive and dead in a quantum environment.  The reason is that the cat cannot exist in a quantum environment in the first place.  Nor can a cat be simultaneously alive and dead.  Schrödinger and his colleagues knew all that of course but needed a concrete metaphor for what they were really talking about.