God, Floods, and Evil

My friend Harold Ernst, a theologian studying at Notre Dame, passes on these comments, regarding our discussion on "Tsunamis and Moral Anthropology":

Rob's concluding challenge, "What do we have to say for God?", draws to mind an

essay of the English Dominican Herbert McCabe, titled simply "Evil," that

appears in God Matters (Templegate, 1987).  It is a philosophical defense,

broadly Thomistic in character, to the kind of "God in the dock" perspective

Rob assumes.  The essay is useful, I think, for bringing some intellectual

clarity to which aspects require, and which do not require, recourse to what

Rob terms the mystery of God "cop-out."  What is more, the tenor of the essay

is methodologically instructive, for it only attempts to answer rational

attacks on the legitimacy of religious belief by rebutting those arguments on

their own terms.  This approach concedes (as Susan does) that such

argumentation cannot rationally prove faith convictions to unbelievers, but

only demonstrate that those convictions are not philosophically incoherent or

irrational (faith is above reason, but not against reason).  As Newman said,

"it is as absurd to argue men, as to torture them, into believing."

Two other brief comments, each of which may be a mere quibble given the context

of their overall remarks.  Rob notes the particular poignancy of this natural

disaster occurring at Christmas, for relative to its scale "the divine concern

for humanity promised by the Incarnation seems relatively meaningless."  While

this remark no doubt reflects an understandable degree of immediate despair

over the present enormity of human suffering, it nonetheless suggests a wholly

inadequate appreciation of what God has accomplished by means of the

Incarnation.  We live, after all, in the "in between times" where the kingdom

of God is both "already" and "not yet."  The promise of the Incarnation is

primarily of an eschatological reality, and those who seek to live in imitatio

Christi cannot reasonably expect that our earthly existence will be, as it

were, all beer and skittles.

Susan makes a similar point at the conclusion of her response to Rob, then adds:

"And God weeps along with us at their deaths and at the suffering of those left

behind."  In making this addition she touches on a highly controversial

question in contemporary theology, whether and how God (qua God) might suffer

in solidarity with suffering humanity.  A book length treatment that explores

the historical tradition on this point, and highlights how the contemporary

predisposition for affirming God's suffering is theologically problematic, is

Thomas Weinandy's Does God Suffer? (T&T Clark, 2000).

Rick