God of the Past – Part 1

THIS IS LONG.  Take your time. 

Article “Pannenberg on the Past” previously published

Part 1

God of the Past

More than 50 years ago, Wolfhart Pannenberg wrote the book that was translated into English as Jesus – God and Man.  On page 230 of that work, Pannenberg makes a suggestion about the relationship between Jesus’ proclamation concerning the true nature of the creation and the end of this world age.  It reads:

            . . . the true nature of creation is revealed for the first time in the light of the approaching end. This has fundamental significance also for the understanding of creation itself.  Creation is not to be understood as an act that happened one time, ages ago, the results of which involve us in the present.  Rather, the creation of all things, even including things that belong to the past, takes place out of the ultimate future, from the eschaton, insofar as only from the perspective of the end are all things what they truly are.  For their real significance becomes clear only when it becomes apparent what ultimately will become of them. Therefore, the nearness of the imminent Kingdom of God puts all things into that relation to God which belonged to them as God’s creatures from the very beginning.  It is just this that demonstrates the universal truth of Jesus’ eschatological message:  it reveals the “natural” essence of men and things with an urgency nowhere achieved outside of this eschatological light.

It is difficult to grasp the extraordinary significance of this statement on first reading, but with a careful, thoughtful review of the implications of Pannenberg’s insight, we find the key to a puzzle that has baffled professional theologians and common believers alike for many centuries.  The implications of Pannenberg’s statement lead us to consider the entire question of God and time.  In particular, his articulation about the significance of Jesus’ message concerning the immanence of the Kingdom can help us answer several critical concerns about the apparent intractability of the past—and God’s singular ability to reconstruct it.

If you are a thoughtful believer, at some time you have probably raised the following question for yourself: “Why, oh Lord Most High, have You let this tragedy come upon me?  If You are truly the God of loving kindness, and all things are possible for You, then why have You not sheltered me from adversity, kept evil from my path, delivered me from this sorrow and suffering?  If I were the perfect loving Father, I would do that for my children.  And yet, somehow, my world is filled with horrors and pain.  Why?”

It is the age-old question of the abiding presence of evil in the creation of a good and loving God.  And the age-old answers seem not too comforting despite their ancient origins.  How can a good God allow such evil? We have been taught to accept one or more of several suggested solutions.

The first solution deals with the issue of culpability. It begins by asserting that God is not responsible for this mess.  This is a very old solution.  It comes in many forms, the most current simply says that evil is somehow a result of the Fall of Man.  God’s creation was good but it was utterly and permanently corrupted by Man’s desire to become as God.  Today’s evil is the result of human divine defiance.  There are some ancient variations on this theme.  Plotinus, for example, proposed a descending series of lesser creations, each one a bit further removed from the perfect original until, somehow, evil got in the mix.  Plato believed that the problem lay in the shadowy replication of the ultimate where the copies were never quite as good as the originals.  Some theologians have placed the blame at the foot of Lucifer and his rebellious army.  But most of the time, the mess we are in is eventually laid at our own feet.  We, in the prototype of Adam, made some pretty bad choices and now we have to live with the consequences.  It wasn’t God’s fault.  It was ours.

There is an obvious retort to this statement about God’s moral innocence.  After all, if it is really His creation, if everything that is is a result of His activity, then the retort is simple: God must have created beings that were capable of defiance and evil.  In fact, He created them in spite of knowing that they would defy Him.  And His knowing that Man would rebel before He created Man means that He created us knowing full well that we would bring destruction to the perfect moral order through our rebellion.  That certainly makes Him responsible, for even though He may not have pulled the trigger, He put the loaded gun in our hands, placed our finger on the trigger and dared us to squeeze.  Perhaps this solution isn’t as adequate as it first seems.

Another response attempts to counter this renewed attack on God’s culpability.  It invokes the risk-love principle.  Yes, God did know that we would rebel.  Yes, He created us with the full knowledge that we would defy Him and bring about the Fall.  But choice is a prerequisite of true love.  God could have made us incapable of defiance, but then we would not have been able to love, for love always involves choosing another instead of myself.  God did not want robots.  He wanted sons and daughters.  So the risk of evil was present in the creation.  But risk is not the same as the blame.  God created us under the canopy of risk in order that we might choose Him freely and discover love.

Of course, there are rebuttals to this excursion as well.  We may be left feeling a little uncomfortable about the smoothness of this answer when we face the immensity of evil in the world.  At the personal level, I might be inclined, with some mental gymnastics, to say, “All right.  I see that love must be a choice.  And for that choice, I must have the freedom to do otherwise.  So my personal evil is my fault, a result of my choices.  And yes, I also see that some of the evil that I endure at the hands of others is also the result of personal choices. I acknowledge human culpability for choices that are passed down through their consequences from generation to generation.  All of this I can rationally justify.  I recognize that I am at fault for many things.  I see that God is not to blame for the actions of my evil choices.  Even though He may have created me knowing my potential for evil, in some sense I can acknowledge that He didn’t actually make me do it. But what about Job?”

Job is a real problem for this particular answer.  Here is a man who loved God, who was blessed by God, who was chosen by God.  Job, of all people, is not personally responsible for the terrible evil that befalls him.  He is God’s pawn, in the worst sort of game.  God simply allows the Devil to take Job’s life apart.  And for what?  Theologians answer: so that we might see the power of God, so that Job would learn humility, so that the very depth of our souls will experience the insidious nature of defiance.  It sounds academic, correct, even rational.  But it is not very comforting, especially when we consider that even though Job’s fortune is restored and he begets a new family, his old life cannot be more than undeserved, unremitting heartache.  His children are dead, his friends forsake him, and he sees a side of his wife he might just as soon forget.  Pain in the past is his watchword.  Memories are not easily erased in this world.  Time does not heal all wounds.  Job will shed tears for his past as long as he lives.  How could he not?  Who among us would easily forget the death of all our children?  The answer may be academically sound, but it is of little comfort to Job, and to us.  If God plays this sort of game, then our tragic existence must be His fault, no matter who says otherwise.

So what about Job?  Is the divine prerogative to play dice with his life recompensed by multiple blessings after tragic endurance?  How many head of cattle does it take to pay back the death of a child?  How many acres of land make up for the loss of faith by one’s mate?  How much treasure is needed to erase a memory?  The story of Job is remarkable not for its difficult interpretation but for its very presence in the holy text.  If we were going to write about our interaction with other sentient beings, and we wanted to avoid the knotty problem of divine culpability, we would certainly not have included Job’s story in the mix.  And yet there it is.  Standing in utter defiance of all that we would like to say about God’s innocence is this story that recounts the full disclosure of His hand in Job’s misery.  It is as though God were saying, “Look.  I am the Creator and you are the creature.  What I have in mind is not for you to judge.  Understand who is the boss here and stop complaining.”

In fact, this sort of response opens another passageway out of the maze we are in.  Sometimes we hear references to this approach when someone proposes the “potter and clay” analogy.  We are the created.  He is the Creator.  Who are we to object to how we are treated?  He’s the Boss, with a capital ‘B’.  But this is not an explanation as much as it is a capitulation.  It implies that we, as created, have no rights, even to an explanation.  And some would argue that is really the case.  But the sting of this rebuttal does not evaporate so easily.  If He made us rational, sensitive, inquisitive, we may not deserve an answer but we certainly long for one.  To say that the only answer is He doesn’t have to tell us is not very helpful.

Some theologians have taken a flanking position claiming that God as the creator of all, really is responsible for evil, but in a sort of “I couldn’t help it” way.  We see this in the argument of Augustine that we will examine in a moment.  Other theologians have been bold enough to assert that our very conception of freedom is ultimately illusory and the real truth is that we are predestined by causal connection to either good or evil.  God is responsible, they assert, but we can’t know why He does what He does and so we cannot rightly judge what is moral or fair.  This is a little like the corrupted Golden Rule – He who has the gold makes the rules.  The implication is that what is moral is not up to us to decide.  It is up to God.  And since God is always righteous, whatever He does must be moral.  Sort of a solution by definition.  This is a version of the “I’m the Boss” position.  Let us examine these two arguments a little more carefully.

The story of Job creates a kind of moral dyslexia.  In order to understand its meaning, theologians usually ask us to read it in a rather odd way. Until we have been “theologically trained” otherwise, we are not very happy with the implications of Job’s story for two reasons.  The first is the moral impact of an attitude that says, “I am the boss, I can do what I want.”  While we might acknowledge that this is true, that God is the potter and we are the clay, it just doesn’t help very much when we think about fairness.  Even if our concept of “fair” is humanly myopic, it still seems pretty certain that “fair” has something to do with “moral.”  If God creates other sentient beings only to go around allowing them to have pain and suffering, even if He is the Creator, it just doesn’t seem very moral.  Wouldn’t those creatures be better off not being created at all?  Moreover, this picture of God seems in conflict with the picture of a loving Father.  Nevertheless, one historical theological camp has used this approach as the last word about evil.  Their argument goes like this: God is God.  His ways are not our ways.  He may do as He pleases and we are assured that what He pleases to do is consistent with His holy character.  So, if He chooses to make us agents who are capable of evil, and even if He seems to act in ways that promote this evil, we must simply accept this apparent contradiction as an example of our inability to understand the ways of a Holy God.

We might label this the a priori approach.  Its fundamental tenet is that God is holy and therefore, whatever actions He takes are holy.  This is the a priori condition of trying to understand what God does.  And if for some reason we are not able to see how such actions of God are holy (that is, if these acts appear to be less than holy), then we must fall back on our presupposition that they are holy no matter how they appear to us.  This certainly solves the problem about culpability, but it does so by dismissing the problem as a non-issue.  Clever, efficient, but not entirely satisfying.  It is somewhat equivalent to the parent answering the child’s inquiry with the reproach, “Because I said so, that’s why!”

The second reason for our discomfort with this moral dyslexia also depends on the a priori condition of God’s holiness. It attempts to redefine the notion of freedom.  This solution is not so brash as the first declaration, although ultimately it amounts to the same thing.  This solution begins with the assumption of God’s foreknowledge of our evil acts.  Since God is infallible in His knowing (that is, He can never be mistaken about what He knows), then it seems to follow that if God knows we will commit evil acts before we actually commit those acts, the very fact that He knows this to be the case predestines us to commit those acts.  To counter the implied divine culpability, this solution takes the more gentle approach by suggesting that what God knows in His infallible foreknowledge is that we would freely choose to do evil.  It is not the case that God’s knowledge of our acts before we do them preconditions us to do only what He knows to be the case.  It is rather that God knows what we will in fact freely choose to do.  We still make the free choice, but God knows what that choice will be.

St. Augustine may have been the first to suggest such a wonderfully constructed semantic solution.  Theological tradition has passed this answer down for centuries in the form of foreknowledge and predestination.  But this solution does not remove the discomfort of imagining that God knows I will sin before I actually do sin, and that His knowing it means that I will (freely?) sin.  The final line of the argument must still rely on the a priori holiness of God.  When I respond that I cannot for the life of me understand how God could be moral and actually know that some of His created beings will sin in such a way that He will in fact send them to eternal punishment, when my mind cannot fathom how a good God can relegate beings to everlasting punishment for choices that they somehow were predestined to make no matter what adjective I use to describe the condition of their predestination, then theology comforts (?) me by saying that God is holy and I am human and I just can’t understand because I am not built for such knowledge.  As Kierkegaard would say, it is believable precisely because it does not seem to be rational[1].  It requires the wonderfully escapist “leap of faith.”

In the end, by these arguments we are reduced to a sort of determinism.  It may not be the hardened form of determinism claiming some direct causality between God’s actions and ours.  Nevertheless, our free acts are finally not free in the usual sense of the word.  They are rather technically free; that is, they are not to be ascribed to some causal chain that begins with God.  But in every other sense, they are caused.  Our evil choices are free only in the sense that they cannot be ultimately explained – that there is no chain of causation which ultimately accounts for the action – only because the final link in the chain, the link to our very existence, is a priori forbidden as a violation of the holiness of God.

Where does all of this leave us?  We seem to have inherited a single, although somewhat convoluted, stream of theological thought regarding God’s relationship to evil.  That stream basically says:

1. A priori God cannot do evil, be evil, or be culpable for evil.
2. A large majority of evil acts are the direct result of human choices for which human beings, individually and collectively, are to blame.
3. Those choices are either particularly (specifically) or corporately (collaboratively) free choices.
4. God’s (fore)knowledge of these free choices does not logically determine the choices although His (fore)knowledge does imply their actual occurrence.
5. Catastrophes, disasters, or unexplainable evil befalling the world both corporately and individually which do not appear to be caused by any known direct or indirect consequence of free human evil choices do not imply that God is therefore culpable for such acts for there are also spiritual and other invisible forces perpetrating evil upon the creation.
6. Finally, since God created the present existence, and since God sustains the present existence in all its forms, we may confidently conclude (based on statement  #1 above) that God created all present existence good and that whatever evil has befallen creation is not of His doing and is sustained only because His plan for the ultimate goodness requires this present existence even in its current fallen form.

Now this is a very odd philosophical conclusion.  It implies that there are two ultimately uncaused things in the universe.   The first, of course, is God’s existence.  There is no answer for the question, “Who made God?” because God was not created.  God is.  He is, as Aristotle pointed out centuries ago, the uncaused cause.  There is no explanation for His existence.  He is rather the explanation for everything else.

But now we see that tracing the causal chain of our own free will evil acts leads us to the conclusion that those acts must also be uncaused.  They cannot be ascribed to God since God is not the author of evil.  And yet they exist.  So if God is not their source, what (who) is?  And for this we have no answer.  For everything depends on God for its existence.  Yet God cannot be the cause of evil.  We have reached the NO EXIT sign.  Is that Kierkegaard in the shadows whispering, “Only believe”?

Is it any wonder that theologians have reiterated time and again the intractability of God’s wisdom?

In summary: We are quite uncomfortable suggesting that God is responsible for evil.  We would like to understand (explain) the existence of such evil and at the same time show God’s moral righteousness.  No one is really happy with the suggestion that God really is responsible and we just are too stupid to see how He is blameless.  And no one wants to really live life with the conviction that what I freely chose to do is either predestined in some way or else a ubiquitous human illusion. Where are we to go?

Pannenberg’s statement about the creation may offer the hidden exit out of this dilemma.

(Conclusion to come)

Topical Index: Pannenberg, past, part 1

[1] There is another step usually attached to this solution.  It is the commitment to “timelessness.”  Very simply, the position is that God is not “in time” but rather somehow stands outside the temporal schema so that He does not literally see (know) my freely chosen evil act “before” I commit it but rather He knows a-temporally (from outside time) my decisions.  This spatialization of time allows the theologian to assert that God’s knowledge was neither “before” nor “after” my action and therefore cannot have pre-determined my action.  I am not predestined by God’s knowing since His knowing is not temporally conditioned.  There are a great number of problems with this solution despite its lengthy history.  I have examined those problems in a much longer work.  Suffice it to say here that I am convinced that this solution neither provides an adequate explanation of God’s immanent domain nor addresses the knot of freedom and determinism.