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.