Tenison Woods and MacKillop Centre News: The problem is evil

But Moses pleaded with the Lord his God. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘why should your wrath blaze out against this people of yours whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with arm outstretched and mighty hand? Remember Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, your servants to whom by your own self you swore and made this promise: I will make your offspring as many as the stars of heaven, and all this land which I promised I will give to your descendants, and it shall be their heritage for ever.’ So the Lord relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened.

Exodus 32:13 - 14

The Hebrews had a worldview in which the hand of God was ever-present, and many of the troubles visited upon them they saw as a response to their infidelity. That God would strike people down, cause great catastrophes, is beyond the relational God revealed through Jesus. And yet many cannot move beyond a God who allows children to die or permits disasters - natural and human.

There are some extraordinarily compelling stories about the problem of evil and the consequential loss or lack of faith in a loving God. It has been a heck of a year thus far. The natural disasters that have struck Central Italy and Ecuador, and the unnatural acts of terrorism in Jakarta, Iraq, Nigeria, Syria, Afghanistan, Orlando and Turkey, have left humanity wondering. Wondering what it is that these victims have done to deserve the tragedy of loss of home, livelihood, family and life itself. Thinking about why evil appears to prevail in a world when we so firmly believe in a loving, life-giving God, has a name: theodicy. It is the problem of evil.

When 316,000 die in an earthquake and 300,000 left injured (in Haiti's earthquake of 1 December 2010), and uncountable millions are left homeless, it puts paid to our tidy universe. And we have three ways to respond – we can bend our heads seeking an answer; we can do all we can to alleviate the suffering of the victims, or we can do nothing. I am all for seeking an answer to this problem, some of the greatest minds of the past two millennia have attempted to solve it – Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Gottfried Liebniz. There are no satisfactory conclusions to their quest. That probably leaves us with two choices.

Empathy is the capacity to feel what others are experiencing, it means to suffer with them. The calls on our empathy, and our pockets have been consistent. The media cajoles us into responding, and over time it becomes easier to ignore. Some describe it as disaster fatigue.

Yet, the ways we can respond are many. There is, foremost, prayer. Prayer is a powerful tool. It engages the mind, heart and soul, proceeding to action. We can donate: that includes our time, money, goods, expertise. We can become involved through joining a relief agency, giving monthly, lobbying politicians to do more – about terrorism, about global warming, about education, about development. It is not just about giving money, though giving money is a great beginning. It is about self-giving, self-emptying. Indeed, it is being Christ-like.

The world of 2016 is as intimate as mobile phone, or television. What you see on the news begs of you to respond with similar intimacy and compassion. The tormented lives you see are those of living human beings, they are our neighbours, our earthly companions, fellow journeymen whose hopes and dreams have been destroyed. Give them hope, and give.

The closest I can get to find an answer to the problem of evil is: God gives us the capacity the reject evil and assists us in transforming the world, imperfect as it is, into his kingdom. In that imperfect world the Hebrews saw the absence of disaster as the mercy of God, for in that mercy God had heard their cry for help and in his relenting he would give life.

Peter Douglas

HEAD OF SCHOOL SERVICES, NORTH

How God as Trinity Dissolves Racism

by Richard Rohr

This summer, as has been true for the past few summers, racism has made headline news. Deep divisions have been put in the spotlight, and it can sometimes feel as if that spotlight has served to dig them even deeper.

But we can’t confront racial strife if we don’t acknowledge that it exists. The challenge is that racism does not just have a deep root, but has many deep roots in our lives, communities, and country.

Like much of our nation, I’ve been doing substantial soul-searching to seek understanding about my own actions, beliefs, and behaviors, as well as the systemic patterns that write collective actions, beliefs, and behaviors in quite large letters across our society.

What I’m coming to understand through this reflection is startling, and might surely seem like a non-sequitur. But here it is:

The widespread Christian failure to understand and experience God as Trinity has provided a breeding ground for both implicit and explicit racism.

To understand a sin that is as old as history, it is helpful to go back to one of the oldest questions of human inquiry.

When I studied the history of philosophy in the early 1960s, I was told that the first and foundational philosophical problem that keeps recurring in every age and in different forms is “the problem of the one and the many”: How can there be any primal unity to reality when what we see is so much obvious and seemingly conflicting diversity? Is there any unifying pattern to “the ten thousand things” that overwhelm our horizon?

This remains our issue today, at least for those of us who look for “big-picture narratives” that speak to the confusion that still confronts us. Theology always made the claim that it had the power to offer us the biggest picture of all (the “Reign of God” in Jesus’ language), even though it all too often offered us rather small, self-serving, and tribal images of God. Without knowing it, and contrary to its own unique revelation, I think much of Christian history did the same thing.

Let’s look at one of the very destructive effects of a diminished, anti-transformative image of God on the perennial and ubiquitous issue of racism. Today, most Christian notions of the Divine are much more formed by pagan and Greek conceptions than by the central Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Even the Latin word for God, Deus, is a direct reformulation of the Greek word for the head of the gods, Zeus. I believe racism is often rooted in this distorted view of divinity; rather than reflecting the One who created all things in God’s own “image and likeness” (Genesis 1:26-27), we instead make God into a mascot who, as Anne Lamott brilliantly quips, hates all the same people we do.

When you start with a conception of God as an old white man sitting in the clouds, it is of little surprise that white men, preferably empowered white men, are considered the closest to God and the most worthy of respect and value. It becomes a top-down universe, a pyramid much more than the circular dance (perichoresis). Perichoresis, the Trinity as dance, is indeed the precise and daring image that ignited some of our early church fathers’ finest intuitions, prompting consensus around this utterly new revelation of God. It took them three centuries to make full sense out of Jesus’ often-confusing language about what he named “Father,” how he understood himself, and what he named the “Holy Spirit.” Our common form of dualistic thinking just could not process such three-fold and one-ness evocations at the same time.

It was frankly, illogical — and even silly.

How could we reconcile what seemed like a huge logical and theological conundrum, especially for thoroughgoing monotheistic Jews? The human ego is so resistant to anything its mind cannot quickly process and control; it prefers separateness and a sense of superiority — precisely what the Trinity rejects and denies.

Yet if we do not discern and celebrate difference on the level of what visible humanness means, what hope is there on issues where “difference” is often much more striking (gender, power, class, education, etc.)? Every one of these issues is searching for its own locus of authority today, and as naïve as it might sound to some, I believe Trinity does provide such an appropriate locus of authority for those who are willing to trust and allow it. God is precisely one by holding together very real difference.

The Godhead itself maintains separate identity between Three, with an absolutely unique kind of unity, which is the very shape of Divine Oneness.

God’s pattern and goal has never been naïve uniformity but radical diversity (1 Corinthians 12:4ff) maintained in absolute unity by “a perfect love” that infinitely self-empties and infinitely outpours—at the same time.

This Divine pattern is, of course, most beautifully revealed in “all the array [pleroma, or fullness] of creation” (Genesis 2:1). God is forever “making room” and “infilling”; this is the Way of the Flow. This is, in our finite understandings, an utterly new logic and is the foundational template for the success of the human project for those ready to embrace at the level of experience what they already confess in the creeds. Indeed, many collaborative and synergistic souls “outside the fold” of Christianity live this better than some who formally believe in the doctrine of the Trinity.

Of course, it is precisely self-emptying that the human ego resists and opposes; without this the whole waterwheel of divine love does not flow at all — at least through us.

We like infilling, but we do not know how to make room for that infilling.

This is always and forever the spiritual problem. This is racism, sexism, classism, ageism, lookism, homophobia, transphobia, imperialism, patriarchy, and all that the tradition courageously refers to as “sin.”

In my reading of the Gospels, this explains why Jesus had to dramatically come and personally exemplify the entire path of self-emptying (the kenosis of Philippians 2:7) and making room for “otherness” (John 16:7 and implied throughout John 14-17). The Jesus path is a constant visible lesson in both allowing and handing on, receiving and giving away what is received. He makes the Divine Waterwheel visible and attractive, so we can trust this always-daring process ourselves and even fall in love with it (1 John 1:1-2). To step into what this mighty river of God’s mercy and restorative justice has always been doing — challenging idols of totalizing false oneness under their guise of uniformity, while allowing the flow of many streams together into genuine oneness.

Christ is the choreography of new creation made visible, and we are still being invited to take this dance.

https://sojo.net/articles/how-god-trinity-dissolves-racism