To conclude I shall explore some of the implications for understanding the place of suffering and evil in God’s world that derive from understanding the relationship with God as one within which suffering can be protested and where our relationship is with a God who himself suffers.
First, protest within relationship implies freedom (2 Cor. 3: 6 & 17). Relationship with God cannot therefore simply involve unquestioning obedience and, were this to be the case, then God could be served just as well be automatons. Relationship with God must then be something freely entered into and freely maintained. This has important consequences for our understanding of evil in God’s world. For human beings to have this freedom requires an ‘epistemic distance’ from God which appears to have been achieved through biological evolution.
Biological evolution, however, brings the twin issues of becoming - an evolving world contains imperfections, which are, or result in, natural evils - and selfishness - development through the ‘survival of the fittest’. Left to their own devices these two would seem to hopelessly bias humanity against relationship with God but they are counter-balanced by the order within the universe and by cultural evolution which is predicated on co-operation not opposition, leaving human beings living with free will within a deterministic framework. This freedom does not just apply to our ability to choose or reject relationship with God but also to what happens within relationship as well. After all, as Christians we believe that the truth/Christ sets us free for freedom.
This leads on to the second implication, that protest within relationship implies intimacy (2 Cor. 3: 7 – 18). Such freedom to argue, berate, converse, debate, discuss, and protest within relationship can only occur where there is trust and long-term commitment. Between human beings this occurs most clearly within marriage relationships where we can choose to become naked in both our bodies and our thoughts. This is one reason why marriage imagery is often used of the relationship between God and his people.
The most significant learning that occurs within human lives occurs by observation, action and discussion within relationships, firstly within our birth families and then within relationships of choice. It is no different in relationship with God, within this intimacy we can observe, discuss and imitate in naked honesty. It is this pattern that we see in the lives of those who come closest to God - Abraham, Moses, David, Jeremiah, Job and, supremely, Jesus. Within this intimate relationship it is possible to become like God, learning a way of life that is counter to the selfish determination of biological evolution.
The third implication then, is of maturity (2 Cor. 3: 18). Growth occurs within relationships that contain the freedom and intimacy that we have examined. This growth, which is growth in partnership with God, is what God has offered humanity from day one of consciousness. It is pictured in the creation stories in the imagery of ruling in God’s image, tending the Garden at God’s request and naming the animals that God brings. It is the privilege of developing further the world that God has made, through the selfless imagination of the possibilities inherent in each aspect of creation, until it reaches its full perfection. It is growth that is individual, cultural and cosmic. It is this, towards which the choosing of Israel and the giving of the Law lead.
It is appropriate then that it is the one to whom the Law leads who, through his life as a divine-human Jew, his suffering and his rising again, opens up the possibility of entering into this partnership relationship with God for all once again. A possibility that is only achieved through the self-emptying and suffering of God leading to the awareness that those entering in to this free, intimate, maturing partnership to perfect creation will follow where God has led and themselves accept and embrace suffering (2 Cor. 4: 7 – 12).
Finally, there is the implication of an eschatological resolution to the problem of suffering and evil in God’s world (2 Cor. 4: 16 – 18):
“... God has ordained a world that contains evil - real evil - as a means to the creation of the infinite good of a Kingdom of Heaven within which His creatures will have come as perfected persons to love and serve Him, through a process in which their own free insight and response have been an essential element.” (John Hick)
Again, this is a perception that is common to both Christians and Jews and one that is seen by Jews such Cohn-Sherbok as providing “an answer to the religious perplexities of the Holocaust”. “The promise of immortality offers,” he suggests, “a way of reconciling the belief in a loving and just God with the nightmare of the death camps”.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Johnny Cash - Redemption.
No comments:
Post a Comment