Theodicy without Theodicy

Derrida captures both the imagination and the critical faculties with his theme of 'religion without religion'. Perhaps his greatest expositor, John D. Caputo, has ridden that horse all the way to the bank, if philosophers get to take anything to the bank, as it were. In his 'weak theology', Caputo offers his reading of Derrida's late writings, not to mention the various seminars in which these ideas play out on a stage of phenomenology, post-phenomenology and even a God without being. Caputo describes the deconstruction of confessional religions, and discovers the 'unconditional without sovereignty' which he identifies as the 'weak force of God'.

A religion without religion contains within it the deconstruction of classical theodicy, and perhaps points to a theodicy without theodicy. I might make the case that a religion without religion does not recognize anything that looks like a theodicy, whether with or without theodicy. Be that as it may, a theodicy without theodicy might take as its point of departure the power structure Caputo attributes to God in the metaphysical attitude: the problem does seem to boil down to power, its expression and its non-expression, its deployment in the world and its non-deployment.

I share with Caputo his disgust with theodicy as it usually plays out, as a means of explaining or justifying the misery, suffering and injustice visited upon the world, particularly upon the innocent. To drop 'mystery', a 'greater good' at the doorstep of horror and unspeakable suffering mocks God and the world, and constitutes the definition of obscenity.

Any reasonable person would think that, after the horrors of the 20th century (indeed the horrors of history), the 'end of theodicy' would have been a decisive one. Surely religion and theodicy would have died a permanent death by now, certainly by now; yet theodicy, like religion, lives on: what good is the death of God if theodicy and religion always rise again? 

Caputo's The Weakness of God dots its argument for the 'unconditional without sovereignty' with such occasions of the meaning and presence of the Omni-God against the weakness of God. But what of theodicy's corollary, the request (if not a demand) for an explanation or justification, the quality of which determines reason's permissibility of God? Playing out on the horizon of being, this crucial flip-side of theodicy allows God into, or disqualifies God from, the horizon of knowledge (albeit a certain kind of knowledge) and of being. God lives and dies by the swords of all kinds of positivisms, regardless of the side they take in the classic version of the great debate.

In a recent discussion on the 'priority of love' with a philosopher and friend, my interlocutor equated such priority with a 'theodicy without theodicy', and so I began this piece with the analogy of a religion without religion. His critique, which burns with concern for 'needless, unnecessary suffering of catastrophic proportions', runs adjacent to a critique of the Johannine Lazarus texts, and formulates its argument thus: Jesus, alive then and now, can call Lazarus or anyone else, then and now from death, but he doesn't. Now certainly the lingua franca of this critique is power itself, but also power within a will. The question asks, with all seriousness, why anyone ever suffers and dies, while a Jesus, very much alive and sporting a track record of doing nifty stuff, stands idly by and simply withholds miraculous power.

The question itself pokes at divine power and justice, but I do not think this question exhausts its theodical gesture by interrogating power. Its gesture also calls into question the various claims of religion for God and Jesus, in particular, Christian claims. So where do we start, start again? In other words, how is the priority of love, that God loves before he is, a theodicy without theodicy? Is it simply a fait accompli that a God who loves before he is, is a God who does not deploy power analogically (in terms of the human deployment of power), or deals in the structures of power at all? What is the difference between love and power when God does the loving? If Creation itself is an act of love, and not of sheer power, does a univocity of love put us in a position to create---is the power of love as intelligible as the love of power?

The problem gets even more complicated. How does one account for the urgency of the theodical gesture, and its logical aftermath---atheism---on the part of the positivist, when the theist finds this question oddly less than urgent? Can such urgency reduce to the desire to declare God nonsense under the scrutiny of sharply defined criteria for and of evidence? Do all theists secretly subscribe to Caputo's weak theology, acknowledging the obscenity of the theodical reply to the theodical question, yet somehow resolve to retain a faith in thematic religion (religion with religion), such as Catholicism? Are we all, deep down, Caputo's radical theologians? Do we radical theologians argue for an evidence invisible to the various positivisms in all sincerity? Is there any other place to go for a 'theology of the event'?

For the sake of this preliminary sketch of a theodicy without theodicy, we might speculate that God has as much use for theodicy as he does for religion: God has no use for what passes for religion---What are your vain sacrifices to me? 'Vain' sacrifice, the religious gesture with a gargantuan injection of religion. Is sacrifice always a gesture of power? Religiously speaking, the only sacrifice that God ever asks is the one he asks of himself, and the one ostensibly carried out on Calvary. A sacrifice of God for humanity. That sacrifice is the only possible sacrifice that completely absents vanity. This is not to say that the unconditional call of the event of God asks nothing of us; it simply does not ask us to sacrifice because of its inherent vanity. Even Abraham doesn't get to sacrifice, not even in the most famous sacrificial near-miss of all time.

So, then, the urgency of the question: a power than declines its exercise --- a will that wills not the 'good', where the very existence and meaning of that power hangs in the balance---no exercise, no being. Is it here, I wonder, where a theodicy without theodicy finds itself and its answer: if being is denied by empirical establishment of a lack of evidence, does that lack locate God beyond essence, otherwise than being---does positivism then give credence to a God without being, or does it relegate the whole matter to the ever-growing heap of nonsense? If willing the good for the other passes for love, then it is a strange love indeed that does not always and forever will the good for all of creation. What has happened to an appeal to the univocity of love?

But not so fast. The urgency of this theodical question also interrogates the lack of urgency on the part of those for whom the concrete players are not held to what must assuredly be a responsibility to their power. A theodicy with theodicy has no other recourse but to conclude irrational obstinacy, an embrace of a studied naïve magical realism. Presumably a theodicy without theodicy would have richer choices. Indeed, in any hypothetical theodicy without theodicy, doubt plays out very differently than in the classical theodicy with theodicy. So, then, which do we doubt, 'love' or 'the good'?

Emmanuel Levinas once suggested that Judaism is a religion for adults. It goes without saying (and this is perhaps why thinkers like Jean-Luc Marion and Emmanuel Falque do not say it explicitly) that Christianity is also a religion for adults. One of the ways, it seems to me, Christianity enjoys a status similar to Judaism, is its rhythm of cataphasis and apophasis. Meister Ekhart asks God to free him from God. We ask in faith for God to help our poor faith. It also goes without saying that any responsible faith, any adult religion, would be constituted by doubt. This is not the destructive doubt of paralysis and positivism, but more akin, ironically, to Descartes' reduction to doubt, which, with its corrosive edges, tears down everything to the bare bones of an encounter with the infinite. Doubt begins the expedition to the discovery of a new world of contradiction and paradox, a world of Yeatsian 'terrible beauty', a world both beautiful and treacherous.

A theodicy without theodicy interrogates power itself, and empowers doubt to be its examiner. The 'doubting Thomas' of the Johannine tradition does not earn condemnation, even if that tradition does find him a bit comical, taking himself, as he does, just too seriously. No, not condemnation, but instead, this most adult of the apostles receives a gift; Thomas utters the highest Christology in the Gospel tradition: my Lord and my God.  Such belief anchored by doubt has always been offered by the Christian tradition as authentic over and against any brand of fideism. Doubt is the business end of reason; its drive toward a mature faith and authenticity leads not to postivism's dead ends and nonsense, but to think again. If not being, or a version of being, or of ontological difference, then toward what does declarative prayer direct itself?

It simply cannot be that the question of a Jesus, a God, who can but doesn't, ends the matter. That's just another way to say Roma locuta, causa finita est---we are trying to get beyond such positivisms. The theist and the atheist stand on different, not opposite, ends of the same question. But on what do they stand when they angle their stands at the same question? Is it the very 'ground of being' which some believe to 'be' God? No, I think not; a 'ground' is no place to stand if the question is being. A ground of being is just a being upon which being stands. That's simply the infinite regress of more of the same---classical theodicy in a slightly different light. What would a theodicy without theodicy stand on; what does a religion without religion stand on?

In such a preliminary piece, I must do a little damage control, and ask a more modest question. The fact is this, good people, atheist and theist alike, positivist and other-than-positivist alike, stand together in this world. 'Where do they stand?' is another way of asking 'how are things between them?' They stand before each other across the same abysmal question. If each encounters the face of the other, then they must stand on that which is before being itself. They stand, in short, on the love that is prior to being, on the claims made upon them before they are even 'selves'. This is the threshold upon a theodicy without theodicy, properly recognized and pronounced by someone who does not even believe such anteriority is either possible, or that it matters even if it were possible. His pronouncement accuses me, as his atheism calls my theism into question. What matters, at least at this point, is our standing; and we stand before the same voice, the same call from what is harbored in the name of God. How we hear it, and where doubt leads us, and what urgency moves us, makes all the difference in the world, even if we can share that world, even if the discovery of joy or crushing sadness awaits us in this shared world. Events are like that.

Discovery at Bethany, Redux

Now a man named Lazarus was sick. He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. (This Mary, whose brother Lazarus now lay sick, was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair.) So the sisters sent word to Jesus, “Lord, the one you love is sick.”

When he heard this, Jesus said, “This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.” Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days, and then he said to his disciples, “Let us go back to Judea.”

“But Rabbi,” they said, “a short while ago the Jews there tried to stone you,and yet you are going back?”

Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Anyone who walks in the daytime will not stumble, for they see by this world’s light. It is when a person walks at night that they stumble, for they have no light.”

After he had said this, he went on to tell them, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I am going there to wake him up.”

His disciples replied, “Lord, if he sleeps, he will get better.” Jesus had been speaking of his death, but his disciples thought he meant natural sleep.

So then he told them plainly, “Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.”

Then Thomas (also known as Didymus) said to the rest of the disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”

On his arrival, Jesus found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. Now Bethany was less than two miles from Jerusalem, and many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them in the loss of their brother. When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed at home.

“Lord,” Martha said to Jesus, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.”

Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.”

Martha answered, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.”

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

“Yes, Lord,” she replied, “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.”

After she had said this, she went back and called her sister Mary aside. “The Teacher is here,” she said, “and is asking for you.” When Mary heard this, she got up quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet entered the village, but was still at the place where Martha had met him. When the Jews who had been with Mary in the house, comforting her, noticed how quickly she got up and went out, they followed her, supposing she was going to the tomb to mourn there.

When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. “Where have you laid him?” he asked.

“Come and see, Lord,” they replied.

Jesus wept.

Then the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”

But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone laid across the entrance. “Take away the stone,” he said.

“But, Lord,” said Martha, the sister of the dead man, “by this time there is a bad odor, for he has been there four days.”

Then Jesus said, “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?”

So they took away the stone. Then Jesus looked up and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this for the benefit of the people standing here, that they may believe that you sent me.”

When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!”The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen,and a cloth around his face.

Jesus said to them, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.”

Therefore many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary, and had seen what Jesus did, believed in him. But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin.

“What are we accomplishing?” they asked. “Here is this man performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.”

Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, “You know nothing at all! You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”

He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and not only for that nation but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one. So from that day on they plotted to take his life.

Therefore Jesus no longer moved about publicly among the people of Judea. Instead he withdrew to a region near the wilderness, to a village called Ephraim, where he stayed with his disciples.

When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, many went up from the country to Jerusalem for their ceremonial cleansing before the Passover.They kept looking for Jesus, and as they stood in the temple courts they asked one another, “What do you think? Isn’t he coming to the festival at all?” But the chief priests and the Pharisees had given orders that anyone who found out where Jesus was should report it so that they might arrest him. [John 11, NIV]

Jesus discovered that Lazarus had been in the tomb 4 days (John 11:17).

Jesus had just told the disciples that Lazarus was dead, and that he rejoiced for them that he was not there as sickness became death, so that they would believe. At first the disciples thought Jesus was speaking metaphorically about a sleeping Lazarus, so he spoke to them more directly: Lazarus was plain and simply dead. Jesus rejoices not in that death, but in the faith-to-come that Lazarus' death will celebrate. Still, he wept that Lazarus and his sisters suffered, for he loved them (11:5). Joy for some, and mourning for others. 

Such is the face of love in the topsy-turvy world of the 4th gospel. Jesus loved them so much, that he stayed where he was for 2 more days; for Lazarus' illness was not unto death, but that the bright splendor of God will shine through it. Jesus makes use of the day: when it is light, the light will shine forth. Even the gathering mourners connect the death of Lazarus with the work of the day when the man born blind was recreated to see the light of the world (11:27; cf. John 9); light makes the difference between night and day. Darkness is useless, ruined space and time. For Lazarus, night becomes day, the splendor of the day.

In order for John to speak to us through the storied history of readings of his Gospel, we must, as Caputo has convincingly argued, allow scripture (for us, this pericope) to undergo a "methodological transformation into an event" in which the 4th evangelist's voice can make an appearance (Weakness of God, 117; Caputo's emphasis). This twofold transformation identifies the unconditionality of what's brewing in the text---the call---and then gives John's voice presence to us. We allow this voice to appear in all its freedom by freeing it from the layers of exegesis, historical analysis, and especially the onto-theology that has grown around it. This strategy is the epoche, the suspension of what has become the natural attitude toward this text (and others of course). To free our vision from its prejudices and presuppositions, the natural attitude of a strong theology undergoes the phenemenological reduction that bring the event of the pericope into sharp relief (cf, Weakness, 115-17).

The traditional reading of the raising of Lazarus presents a Jesus that deliberately delays his return to Bethany to permit suffering and death only to rebuke it in a demonstration of the divine 'testosterone' (Caputo talks like that). It is a very short journey from such an onto-theology to a harsh theodicy that lays such evils within the divine omnipotence, omniscience and omni-benevolence and renders God's goodness incomprehensible. The text might very well be complicit in such a strong theology, but by bracketing off all that strength, something else wants to get itself done.

Caputo looks to Jesus' tears, as they foreclose on a deliberate delay, which would be 'impossible'. He concludes that Jesus could simply not get there in time. Yet, once we collapse an "all too human love for displaying power," our vision becomes unobstructed (Weakness, 257-58). We see what John is giving voice to: to the very humanity of Jesus in all its fear and suffering. We see that at the moment the word of Lazarus' illness reach Jesus, his beloved friend had already died, unbeknownst to the messenger. Jesus stays across the Jordan (10:40) for 2 (δύο) more days and then returns to Bethany where he discovers that Lazarus was already in the tomb for 4 ( τέσσαρας) days. It apparently takes him 2 days to complete his return (presumably the same 2 days it takes for the word to reach him across the Jordan). Over the six day period between the departure of the word from Bethany to Jesus' return there Lazarus had died, a death which coincides with the delivery of the word of his illness. John has crunched the numbers he has enumerated for us; it was there all the time, but only now visible in the reduction: Jesus knew at the moment of hearing the word of Lazarus' illness that his beloved friend had died; and he shares this sad news with his disciples who at first misunderstand him. In his profound grief for his friend he rejoices in the disciples' faith-to-come; for Lazarus will not stay dead. John's mathematical time forecloses on any calculus of the divine strength to orchestrate a show of its muscle, which flexes enough in the voice of Jesus calling life upon the dead.


John wants us to see the depths of Jesus' humanity here---the generosity of his joy for his disciples and of his grief over the loss of his friend. In 11:35-38, Jesus' tears cause the Judaeans to marvel at his 'love.' Jesus is then moved deeply and then toward the tomb (11:38). The word ἐμβριμώμενος suggests a reaching deep within himself. Such a reaching doubtless informs the 2 days Jesus needs to compose himself before he returns to a place of sadness, which is a place very near a death by stoning (John 10).

The story does not end with death as Jesus told his disciples, yet neither does it end with Lazarus alive. It ends with the prophecy of Caiaphas and the plot to kill Jesus. Despite the faith that the miracle stirs in some, some others still report to Jesus enemies (those who caused him to retreat across the Jordan in the first place). So this is the situation at Bethany: it is a place of great danger and great love; a place of joy and grief and, with the life restored to Lazarus, the acceleration of the way to the Cross. There is no greater love than this: to lay down one's life for a friend. This is the event released at Bethany. To see it clearly, we even have to bracket off all that  'power' and choose the weakness of God. John, given his voice back from a bracketed dogmatic theology he does not know, tells us simply that Jesus loves in the weakness of his tears. 

Love---agape, philos---discovers suffering and mourning within itself. Lazarus discovers the light from the darkness of the tomb as the man born blind finds sight at Siloam. These are short journeys of discovery, as these figures step from darkness into the light. Jesus' own journey to Bethany discovers that love weeps in the face of suffering, and his tears are the tears of love. Jesus wept; God wept. And weeping swept away death, as darkness fades into light. Jesus loves and weeps as we love and weep. And tears melt into prayers for more light. Jesus' prayer is a very public prayer that connects him to the Father and brings the hearers of the prayer to faith. Jesus presents the discovery that love, faith, mourning and suffering entangle the doxa of God. 

Though our old friend Nietzsche looked with contempt upon Christianity, he could sing the very song of darkness, midnight's song, where joy and suffering are of a piece, joy deeper yet than suffering in the eternal morning that quickens the eternal night. The light of the sun is its shining joy as the benighted become enlightened. Midnight awakens from its dream into the ebb and flow of joy and sorrow whose currents flow in a single sea of recurrence. The Mitternachtslied is a very Christian moment for the philologist of Basel when read through Lazarus' eyes, or the eyes of the man born blind. Or if the eyes just can't have it, it is the moment of the very voice of midnight. Midnight accepts joy and suffering in eternity where love encompasses its rhythm with all its syncopation, its unexpected accents on suffering, mourning and joy. This is love. This is metanoia, the event harbored in the raising of Lazarus. 

The movements of bodies undergird the movement of a coming to believe. The disciples with Jesus move with him from Jerusalem to across the Jordan, and then back again across the Jordan to Bethany, where their faith-to-come materializes. Martha and Mary move from where they meet Jesus to where they were staying. First Martha alone meets Jesus on his way to the tomb where she proclaims her faith that he is the Messiah. She returns to Mary to tell her Jesus has come. Mary goes to meet Jesus, and utters the same faith in the Martha's own words ("my brother would not have died").  Mary and Martha move together with Jesus to the tomb where their faith reveals the glory of God. These motions are the grammar of a change of heart, and change of life, a new life in the presence of the human fully alive.

This metanoia recreates the self, reborn like Nicodemus, that other weaver of light and dark. Not a return to the womb, but a womb-ing of the self that finds itself in relation to the givenness of love. From love, Jesus gives Lazarus more time; for Lazarus does not experience resurrection. Resurrection is unto the eternal beatific vision of love itself; but more time is all the eternity we get in this world. Martha knew this all too well; she knew the Resurrection is not for this day, but the last day. She also believed that Jesus was the Resurrection, and that on this day of his return to Bethany, that fact means more of this life. More life, more time---these symbolize the Resurrection-to-come. The symbols of life and time play out among love and suffering, the rhythmic complexity of love, which constitute the calculus of relation with the divine.

The heuristic elements of raising Lazarus call for a hermeneutics that embraces the text as Jesus loves and weeps, as Martha believes, as the disciples believe,  as love punches out its percussive melody, as midnight embraces the rhythm of waking and sleeping, living and dying. Even the day, Jesus' favorite time, the time of doing the work of God, discovers something beyond it. The day cannot contain the event of more life and time, and we cannot remain an older self as the event pulls us into something new. And though we can see in the light of the world, we cannot see into it; yet it sees us in its fullness and we know that we are seen, that we are loved, that we are loved before we are, by a God who loves before he is.

Catholicity and a Suffering God

‘The devout Christian of the future will either be a “mystic”, one who has experienced

“something”, or he will cease to be anything at all’.

---Karl Rahner, 'Christian Living Formerly and Today,' Theological Investigations, vol. 7, trans. David Bourke (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 15.


One of our more eloquent contributors (see the comments to "Retreat of the Barron") to this blog has suggested that I depart from the teachings of the Church from time to time as it suits the topic. It is never my intent to subvert the fundamentals of Catholic dogma, doctrine or Tradition, though I am aware that sometimes I place a heavy tax on them. My goal is never to destroy, but it is often to deconstruct, and that makes some people very nervous. I am not St. Paul, however, and I do not know I am able to be all things to all people. My goal is to read scripture, dogmatics, doctrine and Tradition and see what wants to come to life in them, to see what events seek release from them, and then allow the event to unfold (that pretty much is deconstruction in a nutshell). I attempt to look past the statements-as-idols and try to land on their iconic element. My self-imposed caveat: avoid at all costs becoming a dogmatic fundamentalist--avoid committing idolatry of the word(s).

What I propose here is not novelty for novelty's sake, nor do I propose to usurp Catholic tradition and turn it into something it cannot become ( that is, foster an inauthentic development). What I am discovering is that the Tradition of the Church is rich with meaning, far from any possibility of being reduced to dead dogma that speaks to no one and ends up on the refuse heap of history. Dogma and doctrine are great gifts bestowed upon the religiously and theologically minded, and as in the parable of the talents, to be received so that they enrich and enliven that tradition. It is their very given-ness that opens up a horizon for their releasing of the event.

My assertions lately of a suffering God do not come hocus pocus from a magical hat. They are deeply embedded in the mystical traditions of the Church, and are part of the very tapestry of scripture. I recently paraphrased Rahner's axiom that the Trinity we see is the Trinity that is--the immanent Trinity is identical with the economic Trinity. And that has implications worthy of meditation and contemplation. Hans Urs von Balthasar has also closed the gap on the economic and immanent Trinity, and from that has allowed for an understanding of a suffering Godhead.

In a remarkable document completed before Rahner and von Balthasar died, we find a veritable Biergarten of  thinkers coming into consensus (the document was very likely finally redacted by Joseph Ratzinger).

I will quote a substantial portion here:

For historical or systematic reasons God’s immutability or impassibility is often called into question in today s Theology, above all in the context of a Theology of the Cross. In that way different theological conceptions of the suffering of God have arisen. It is necessary to know how to separate false ideas from elements in accord with the biblical revelation. Since discussion of this problem continues, we limit ourselves to a first approach, which nevertheless seeks to point to a solution to the question.

1. The supporters of this Theology assert that their ideas can be found in the Old and New Testaments and in some of the Fathers. But the influence of modern philosophy has certainly had a greater weight, at least in the systematic presentation of this Theology.

1.2. According to many of our contemporaries, this Trinitarian suffering is rooted in the very divine essence itself; according to others, it is based on a certain emptying of himself on the part of God the Creator, who in some sense binds himself to human freedom or, in virtue of a pact, freely forces himself to hand over his Son—a fact that they say makes the suffering of the Father deeper than all the suffering of creation.


In recent years a few Catholic authors have made similar suggestions, maintaining that the principal role of the Crucified consisted in manifesting the suffering of the Father.

3. Without doubt the Fathers underline (against the pagan mythologies) the “apatheia” of God, without denying in this way his compassion for the suffering of the world. For them the term “apatheia” indicates the opposite of “pathos”, a word that means involuntary suffering imposed from the outside or as a consequence of fallen nature. When they admit natural and innocent suffering (like hunger or sleep), they attribute these to Jesus Christ or to God inasmuch as he feels compassion for human suffering (Origen, Horn, in Ez. 6, 6; Comm. in Matt. 17, 20; Set. in Ez. 16; Comm. in Rom. 8, 9; De prin. 4, 4, 4). From time to time they use a dialectical form of expression: God has suffered in Jesus Christ in an impassible fashion because he has done it in virtue of a free choice (Greg. Thaum., Ad Theopompum 4-8).

... But the Christology of the Church does not allow us to affirm formally that Jesus Christ could suffer according to his divine nature (cf. DS 16, 166, 196f., 284, 293f, 300, 318, 358, 504, 635, 801, 852).

Despite what has just been said, the Fathers cited above clearly affirm the immutability and impassibility of God (e.g., Origen, Contra Celsum 4, 4). Thus they absolutely exclude from the divine essence that mutability and that passivity that would permit a movement from potency to act (cf. Thomas Aquinas, STh I, q. 9, a. lc). Finally, the following considerations have been taken into account in the Tradition of the Faith of the Church to clear up this problem.

4.2. The affirmation of the impassibility of God supposes and implies this way of understanding his immutability, but this is not to be understood as though God remained indifferent to human events. God loves us with the love of friendship, and he wishes to be loved by us in return. When this love is offended, Sacred Scripture speaks of suffering on the part of God. On the other hand, it speaks of his joy when the sinner is converted (Lk 15:7). “To suffer is a more sane reaction and closer to immortality than complete insensibility” (Augustine, En. in Ps. 55, 6). The two aspects need each other. If one or the other is neglected, the concept of God as he reveals himself is not respected.

5.1. Today man desires and searches for a Divinity that will be omnipotent and certain but that does not appear indifferent; one, moreover, that is full of compassion for the miseries of man and in that sense “suffers with them”. Christian piety has always rejected the idea of a Divinity indifferent to the vicissitudes of creatures. It is even inclined to admit that, just as “compassion” is among the most noble human perfections, it can be said of God that he has a similar compassion without any imperfection and in an eminent degree, namely, the “inclination of commiseration ... and not the absence of power” (Leo I, DS 293). It is maintained that this compassion can coexist with the eternal happiness itself. The Fathers called this total mercy toward human pain and suffering “the passion of love”, a love that in the Passion of Jesus Christ has vanquished these sufferings and made them perfect (cf. Greg. Thaum., Ad Theopompum; John Paul II, Dives in misericordia, 7; AAS 72 [1980]: 1199ff).

5.2. As far as the question of the “suffering of God” is concerned, there is undoubtedly something worth retaining in the expressions of Holy Scripture and the Fathers, as well as in some recent theologies, even though they require clarification as shown above. This should perhaps also be said with regard to the Trinitarian aspect of the Cross of Jesus Christ. The eternal generation of the Son and his role as the immaculate Lamb who would pour out his precious blood are equally eternal and precede the free creation of the world (cf. 1 Pet l:19ff; Eph 1:7). In this sense, there is a very close correspondence between the gift of divinity that the Father gives to the Son and the gift by which the Father consigns his Son to the abandonment of the Cross. Since, however, the Resurrection is also present in the eternal plan of God, the suffering of “separation” (see above, B, 1.1) is always overcome by the joy of union; the compassion of the Trinitarian God for the suffering of the Word is properly understood as the work of most perfect love, which is normally a source of joy[.]   from "Theology, Christology and Anthropology."

The voices of Rahner and von Balthasar are still perceptible in this fascinating treatise.

This God of sympathy, empathy, compassion, need not be conceived as one coming into his own Trinitarian reality in some process within the immanent relations of persons. Rather, as I have suggested, the compassionate God is presented the suffering of the eternal Son made flesh and receives it in sympathy through the hypostatic union. God has confirmed his solidarity with his creature by answering her suffering with his love and presence. God insists we do no less for each other.

The God of suffering has implications for the debunking of theodicy once and for all. Just as God turns the tables, changes the subject in the Book of Job, we, as beings who meditate on human suffering, must uncouple the power and mystery of God from the human condition. If Job teaches anything, it teaches that theodicy is not the right question, otherwise God would have given his answer. Instead, he enjoins Job and makes him present to creation and restores him to more and greater life. Even here in the older scriptures, God has declared his solidarity with mankind.

Genesis has also revealed, in mythical terms, that mankind, having chosen knowledge of good and evil over life itself, must take responsibility for that choice. He must look not toward God to justify or explain evil and suffering in the created world, but to humankind itself. This is the fire mankind has stolen from reshith, and a flame mankind must keep lit. And that work of addressing evil and suffering is hard work, and underscores mankind's preference for taking privilege without its attendant responsibility. After all, God, in the Incarnation has given the Tree of Life back to mankind even after it has claimed to own good and evil. This is the irrevocable self-communication of God as understood within the theological-anthropological horizon.

Redirection and uncoupling: redirect Job's question to explain the ugly side of the human condition toward creation itself, and uncouple God's potentia absoluta from his potentia ordinata, thereby uncoupling his omnibenevolence from suffering in this world. This hermeneutic strategy does not give God a pass on mankind's problem of evil and suffering, but instead underscores his delimiting his own omnipotence in order to respect the integrity of a created universe that lives and breathes in great viability according the his absolute creative gesture.

This challenge to the theodical gesture will no doubt be met with incredulity. Why didn't God in his potentia absoluta create a world already perfect; certainly he could have done that. Wouldn't that obviate his having to ordinate his power to his own creation? The Church has always taught that God, in his absolute goodness and freedom, could have created a world other than this one; but it does not teach that it would be any less imperfect. The aporia cuts an apophatic space of unknowing where all negative statements are true and all positive statements are inadequate (Nicholas of Cusa). He did not create another world: true. He did create this one: inadequate. Such is the aporia of life itself, the mind, and the human condition.

Rahner was right: a mystic or nothing at all.




 

In the Merry Old Land of Uz

Ha, ha, ha
Ho, ho, ho
And a couple of tra - la - las
That's how we laugh the day away
In the Merry Old Land of Oz



Uz.

It's where Job is from.

Idea for a 3 Stooges short:

It starts out merry, and ends up merry (all's well that ends well); but in this tale the boys meet a man named Job and all hell breaks loose.

Title: A Job's a Job, but that ain't my Job

Moe, Larry and Curly play Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar (they are affectionately called Eli, Bil and Zo in our treatment). I'm wondering if this should really be a Shemp. I'll leave it to casting.

Closing scene (theme music): Eli, Bil and Zo riding into the sunset on Leviathan, who's spurting out sparks and fire from his mouth and nostrils as the boys squeal wo-wo-wo-wo-wo.

Cut. Print.

***********************************************************


The Book of Job presents a problem of genre. Wise people place it among the Wisdom literature. But there is nothing in the Wisdom literature that contains this level of burlesque. God and [the]Satan, the one not so bright, the other a cunning knave, conjure several challenges for an unflappable Job. This is the stuff of comedy: financial catastrophe, violent death, horrific disease. God and [the]Satan--just what will those guys come up with next?

The standard reading of the book emphasizes the inscrutable knowledge, power, will of the Lord, and the smallness of human comprehension in the face of such a Lord. This reading is known as 'theodicy,' from the Greek roots, theos and dike, God and justice: God's justice. But what justice is this that abuses Job to show [the]Satan, the mischief-maker, just how just Job is?

Job never asks God to justify himself (he does ask audaciously for an explanation, but this never rise to the level of theodicy). He wonders what he or his family could have done to deserve such divine wrath, but cannot discover any guilt. Job wishes he had never lived, and he despairs in his profound loss and unspeakable suffering.


Job receives visits from his 'friends' who heighten his suffering through their presentation of traditional belief in retributive 'justice.' Talk about salt in the wounds. Job is grief-stricken beyond human endurance, though he does indeed endure. There must be something to Job's complaint, as the whirlwind appears, and God himself enters the fray. But this is not the Yahweh who held court in the opening lines of our text. This is no blow-hard: at this climax of the comic opera, we do not get the pompous ass promised in the overture. We do indeed get the inscrutable God.

Job 38 contains some of the most magnificent poetry in the library we call 'the bible.' Yehovah, speaking in his own name, recapitulates the beauty and terror of creation. Beginning in the cosmic order, God recounts the architecture of the world, all phenomena visible and invisible, the sentient and non-sentient universe. God underscores Job's absence from the terrible beauty of the world, from the dew to the fiery breath of Leviathan. Job, of course, acknowledges his absence from the events of creation and the reality of the created world (40:4-5). Finally, God humiliates Job with the imagery of Behemoth, the river horse hung like, well, a horse. Completely broken, Job surrenders to mystery of the world and its creator (42:2-6). Still, God makes Job present to the process of creation in the redux: he is made present to his absence, and present to a slightly widened aperture upon the wonders of the world. Job therefore retreats to a more strategic place, the docta ignorantia, the learned ignorance of apophatic space that, as Catherine Keller has pointed out in her Cloud of the Impossible, Nicholas of Cusa will carve out from the infinity of God. 

None of God's words address Job's complaint. There is no explanation for the capricious treatment visited upon Job's existence. God does not want to speak to the suffering he has allowed to be inflicted on his servant. God changes the subject[ivity] into intersubjectivity. Job gets a tour of the universe, and receives final vindication for his investigations; his friends are convicted for their 'theodicies,' pay their retribution to Job, and in good comic fashion, Job is restored to his rightful place in the land of Uz.

All's well that ends well. 

The traditional reading of Job will forever stand in its incoherence. The farcical elements of this book, its dark and dreaded humor, have no place amongst the so-called 'wisdom literature.' Job is sui generis, a comedy bordering on a satyr play that breaks the tension of a full day at the amphitheater. 

The book's 3 stooges want to make the matter one of theodicy. God and Job want it to be one of growing closeness between the human and the divine. God gives no answer to Job's suffering because there is no answer. But Job's restoration to even greater existence and fulfillment is telling. Is it just that some redactor couldn't stomach some original version of the text where Job simply dies of grief and disease? I think not. Job is about the reality of the horrors of life, the ugliness embedded within a good world. These things cause immense suffering, but they are generated within a world made with intelligibility and integrity. The restoration is something of a resurrection for Job, an allotment of more time, of more sacred space. The apophatic position is the winner in this comedy, and this deepening relationship between God and Job comes to fulfillment in another act of creation, of reshith. 'Where were you' becomes you are with me. The times of presence and absence blur into something new moving into another horizon.

The answer to Job is the Christ-event. I am with you always until the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). God comes to man as man, and interdigitates his nature with the human. Why do we suffer in this world? God says I suffer with you. There are no more Jobs after Christ because such Jobs will have their answer before they even ask: the Cross of forsaken suffering witnessed in the first person by God. So where is the consolation in that? It is no consolation at all if such forsaken suffering stays on the Cross. The insistence from the Cross is a call from a distance to the hearer of the message. It is an invitation to release the event of love in the presence to the Other, a presence of human contact. Job's restoration is his contact with the divine. Suffering asks us to knock on the door of the neighbor who suffers. Visit, stay awhile. That is sacred time and sacred space. Solid time: reshith. It doesn't make suffering less painful, or less mysterious. It does make it a little less incomprehensible, in a learned ignorance kind of way. And it may lighten the burden of suffering by sharing in its presence through presence, for a sacred moment.

The Retreat of the Barron: Theodicy Dies Hard

Robert Barron has reconsidered his recent homily on God's solidarity with the human condition. In his latest video, he retreats into simple theodicy, and though he asks his listeners to consider why Christians refer to the Friday of Jesus's death as 'good,' he has abandoned the theme of solidarity. Why Fr. Barron would adopt a strategy of defeat in the face of evil and suffering boggles the mind. Even his title for his presentation, "Stephen Fry, Job and Suffering" betrays a hopeless juxtaposition that valorizes all the wrong things.

Though he rightly reminds us that the actor-comedian is not the first to present the problem of suffering in the face of an omnibenevolent God, Barron allows the obscenity of theodicy in the face suffering children to hold the day. We stipulate that unspeakable suffering is the single best argument against the existence of the God of the 'omni's,' but we do not stipulate that the incomprehensibility of God's will, wisdom, plan, etc., is the answer to incomprehensible, meaningless suffering and other evils of this world.

It's as if Barron had reviewed my embrace of his homily and thought better of his original thesis, or certainly my synthesis of it, and now rejects it out of hand. Perhaps a review of the distinction of potentia ordinata and potentia absoluta is appropriate here. Suffice it to say that God has (co)ordinated his 'omnipotence' in this world of ours to this world. After creation, God saw that all was good, that creation was imbued with process, intelligibility and integrity. He therefore aligns himself to his creation and orders his power to what he has decreed in his creation. He has created creatures in his image and likeness,  and imbued them with radical freedom. He loves, but performs no magic.

The answer to Job and his shadows is not the potentia absoluta, but the potentia ordinata which expresses itself as divine love of the impossibility of the possible. We call this impossibility Christ. The answer to human suffering is the suffering of God. This response of solidarity is what I found so liberating in Fr. Barron's homily on Job. It cut to the horizon of love where God has chosen to reveal himself, as himself, in his self-communication in the Christ-event.

When Stephen Fry takes God to task for abandoning children in their suffering, I take Fry to task for not being at the bedside of these children more often, redeeming their suffering and time of loneliness. Would it kill him to tell a few jokes on the wards of Memorial Sloane-Kettering? It would seem that any atheistic ethic would demand that all atheists participate in the sacred time of the most profoundly human events---death and suffering. For theists this is not so much an ethic as an act of faith and mercy. Either substrate gets human beings to be present to the suffering other, to witness to what it means to be human and mortal.

So why are the suffering and dying so often alone? Because most atheists and theists share a secret,  their dirty little secret of self-indulgent, self-serving apathy.

Just as Christians are required to remove the log from their own eye before they presume to remove the speck from their brother's eye, so, too, the atheist must shake his fist at his fellow atheist before he shakes it at God.

How could Fr. Barron have missed this profoundly pastoral moment (he has just written a wonderful homily on The Transfiguration that deploys a savvy hermeneutic, which moved me to comment, especially upon his use of 'icon')? While we tend to the horrors of cancer in our fellow humans suffering in silence, perhaps we should also tend to the cancer of theodicy that makes a mockery of creation.