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Prolegomena to a Dissolution to the Problem of Suffering
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 August 2011
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Few criticisms of Christianity are so emotionally charged or so inexorable in their logic as the argument against the almightiness and goodness of God based on the fact of human suffering. “Either God cannot abolish evil or he will not; if he cannot, then he is not all-powerful; if he will not, then he is not all-good.” Numerous solutions to this dilemma have been offered by theologians, philosophers and poets which have pointed to the educational value of suffering, the realization of such second-order goods as compassion from the existence of first-order suffering, the promised compensations for earthly suffering in another existence, and so forth. Even the best of these solutions leave great dark areas. Suffering, in fact, is not always ennobling. Must God have created so much and such devastating first-order evils to produce compassion? Can we possibly comprehend what could count as a “compensation” for the brutal, pointless agonies to which human beings are subject? We seem constantly faced with the necessity of saying in extremis that it is, after all, “a mystery.” I happen to agree that it is a mystery, but in Christianity “mystery” means not merely a problem that we cannot see through but something that is revealed. The problem is of such importance that we simply cannot be satisfied with a few rhetorically convincing forays signed off with the reminder that God's will is inscrutable. I agree with Fr. Daniélou, “The question is fraught with anguish for too many sorrowful hearts to be lightly put off: we must get to the bottom of it.”
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- Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1964
References
1 A reader of Gabriel Marcel can recognize that what I am attempting in this article is a denial of the problem of suffering in favor of the mystery of suffering. See, G. Marcel, The Philosophy of Existence, trans. M. Harari (London: Harvill, 1948), pp. 1–31, on the distinction between mystery and problem. For reasons of clarity I have avoided an existentialist analysis, though the relation of what I claim to existentialism will be evident to many readers. One can regard this article as a philosophical foundation for an existentialist, scriptural or Christological theology.
2 Jean Daniélou, S.J., The Lord of History, trans. Nigel Abercrombie (London: Longmans, 1958), p. 161.
3 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949).
4 Flew, Antony, “Divine Omnipotence and Human Freedom,” in New Essays in Philosophical Theology, Flew, A. and MacIntyre, A. eds. (London: SCM, 1955), p. 156Google Scholar.
5 Ibid.
6 Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959), p. 48.
7 The word “existential” is used with some anxiety because of the heady life it has led in various “existential theologies.” I am not relying on any special sense of the word. Its meaning and the reason for choosing it will, I hope, be made clear by the examples. The fact that my dissolution is existential, however, does provide a basis for many existentialist discussions of the issue.
8 For an extended critique from a “formalist” position of the legal realist see H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford, 1961). Hart continually complains that the realists fail to account for this or that aspect of the law but he fails to attack the main contention of the realist that laws are really illusions. Hart's mode of analysis is descriptive or phenomenological, while the realist's is inevitably reductive and metaphysical. Thus Hart complains that the Austinian theory fails to account for the fact that judges appeal to the law for justification, but the realist will reply that this “appeal” is only a rationalization for their action, not a reason. Hart is interested in “saving the appearances,” the realists are not.
9 Thus Julian the Apostate agrees with Marcion about the inconsistency of the God of the New and Old Testaments but concludes that this is perfectly consistent with a God who chooses to reveal himself as Will rather than Reason. See C. N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), Ch. vii, passim.
10 See A. Flew, “Theology and Falsification,” in Flew and Maclntyre, op. cit., p. 107.
11 I. M. Crombie, “Theology and Falsification,” Flew and MacIntyre, op. cit., p. 126.
12 For a critique of all attempts to understand Jesus Christ in terms of positive characteristic virtues, such as love, trust, and so on, see Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper and Bros., 1951), pp. 11–29. On Love, Niebuhr concludes: “Jesus nowhere … exhibits the complete dominance of the kindly over the aggressive sentiments and emotions which seems indicated by the idea that for him love must ‘completely fill the soul,’ or that his ethics is characterized by the ‘ideal of love.’”
13 For a brilliant discussion of the primacy of existence in any discussion of the Christian God and what happens to Christianity in a Platonic framework where existence is given a secondary position in relation to more important considerations like order and intelligibility, see Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2nd ed., 1952). The reluctance to degrade God by saying that he exists is a sentiment shared by Christian theologians and avowed atheists. J. N. Findlay defends his disproof for the existence of God in terms that might please Paul Tillich. “It is … because I think so highly of certain ideals, that I also think it unworthy to identify them with anything existent… For I am by temperament a Protestant, and I tend toward reatheism as the purest form of Protestantism,” in Flew and Maclntyre, op. cit., P. 74.
14 Quoted by Daniélou, op. cit., p. 155.