No doubt the usual silly suspects will tell us why God is doing this to us. A punishment? A warning? A sign? These are knee-jerk would-be Christian reactions in a culture which, generations back, embraced rationalism: everything must have an explanation. But supposing it doesn’t?The point of lament, woven thus into the fabric of the biblical tradition, is not just that it’s an outlet for our frustration, sorrow, loneliness and sheer inability to understand what is happening or why. The mystery of the biblical story is that God also laments. Some Christians like to think of God as above all that, knowing everything, in charge of everything, calm and unaffected by the troubles in his world. That’s not the picture we get in the Bible.God was grieved to his heart, Genesis declares, over the violent wickedness of his human creatures. He was devastated when his own bride, the people of Israel, turned away from him. And when God came back to his people in person—the story of Jesus is meaningless unless that’s what it’s about—he wept at the tomb of his friend. St. Paul speaks of the Holy Spirit “groaning” within us, as we ourselves groan within the pain of the whole creation. The ancient doctrine of the Trinity teaches us to recognize the One God in the tears of Jesus and the anguish of the Spirit.It is no part of the Christian vocation, then, to be able to explain what’s happening and why. In fact, it is part of the Christian vocation not to be able to explain—and to lament instead.
1. N. T. Wright has always been a mixed bag. As I recall, he developed a conservative reputation by debating Jesus Seminar types, and he was pretty good on his side of the debate. He also wrote a classic defense of the Resurrection. But in addition he churns out hasty, forgettable potboilers. He spreads himself way too thin. He's overrated and overexposed. He's become an oracle who's expected to have something wise to say about everything.
2. His appeal to Scripture is selective. On the one hand he appeals to the biblical lament tradition. On the other hand, he dismisses out of hand as "silly" the idea that a natural disaster might be a divine punishment, warning, or sign–even though there are many examples of natural disasters having that function in Scripture.
Mind you, I'm not saying we should interpret the pandemic as a divine punishment, warning, or sign. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. Providence is often inscrutable. But we should make allowance for the possibility.
3. It's ambiguous to deny that everything must have an explanation. It could be an epistemological denial: everything has an explanation, but we don't know what the explanation is. Or it could be a metaphysical denial: some events are ultimately inexplicable. They happen for no good reason.
4. He jumbles together a number of distinct claims:
Some Christians like to think of God as above all that, knowing everything, in charge of everything, calm and unaffected by the troubles in his world. That’s not the picture we get in the Bible.
As written, he seems to deny each of those propositions. God doesn't know everything, is not in charge of everything, is not unaffected by the troubles of the world. If so, He seems to operate with an open theist hermeneutic and doctrine of providence.
5. Even if you're a freewill theist, you can't drive a wedge between God and natural disasters. Assuming that the coronavirus is a natural pathogen, it's exempt from the freewill defense. If God prevented the virus or stopped it, his intervention wouldn't violate its libertarian freedom, since a pathogen is not a rational agent.
Freewill theists sometimes justify the existence of natural evils on the grounds that the natural world must have sufficient stability so that we can make choices with reasonably predicable consequences. Be that as it may, the pandemic is quite unpredictable in its scale, lethality, and distribution, so that's not a very promising theodicy in this case.
6. There's another fundamental distinction which Wright fails to draw. And that's the distinction between knowing the actual reason for a particular event and having a general list of possible reasons for why certain kinds of things happen. The fact that we don't have a specific explanation for a specific example doesn't mean we're completely in the dark. It might be one of several explanations.
7. Wright's response exempts God from complicity by consigning him to irrelevance. Who needs a God that "laments" over natural disasters? You fall back on lament if that's your only resort, but if you have it within your power to avert the lamentable disaster, then lamentation is an inexcusable substitute and cop-out.
Imagine if a child runs out into a busy intersection. Suppose you can rescue him before he's run over. But suppose, instead of intervening to save his life, you stand by while he's mowed down by the traffic, then lament his untimely death.
Wright's response won't be satisfying to unbelievers. It will reinforce their view that Christianity doesn't have answers to tough questions. Doesn't have answers to the most important questions. When the going gets tough, Christianity comes up empty.
Likewise, if God is that clueless and ineffectual, then is God a prayer-answering God? Why should we pray to God unless he is able and sometimes willing to intervene regarding natural evils? Does Bishop Wright ever pray for miraculous healing. Or is nature an autonomous machine that God created, but has no control over? Is nature a Frankenstein monster? God made it, but it slipped the lease. He can't make nature do his bidding? He's at its mercy. Please be a good monster! Play nice. Don't stomp on my little human creatures! I can't stop you. I can only plead with you.
What if Wright's God unwittingly made a doomsday machine? He switched it on but it has no off-switch. God watches helplessly as it destroys everything in its path.
What if Wright's God unwittingly made a doomsday machine? He switched it on but it has no off-switch. God watches helplessly as it destroys everything in its path.
8. Theodicy is unavoidable because we must play the hand we were dealt. It would be pleasant if we didn't have to wrestle with the problem of evil, but that's not an abstract thought-experiment. The coexistence of God and evil forces us to think about their interrelationship whether we'd like to or not. That's not optional. That's imposed on us by the ubiquitous pressure of reality. We live in the shadow of that reality every day. So the question is inescapable. When Wright tries to evade it, he disqualifies Christianity from seriously consideration.
9. One of the ironic things about Wright is how he moves seamlessly between condescension and superficiality. He adopts a patronizing tone of dismissive superiority and contempt, followed by a shallow response that ducks the philosophical and theological challenges–as well as the philosophical and theological resources to address the same challenges. He combines intellectual pretentiousness with intellectual impatience.
I've read a few thousand pages of N T Wright. He seems to have an urge that he can't control to paint himself as the only person who has ever understood an issue rightly. It's as if the truth just *can't* be something that the church already knows the broad outlines of. It has to be something that only N T Wright has correctly understood, for the very first time. He gives the impression that simply saying "the church, at many times in history has, in general terms, correctly understood what God revealed about this topic, though we need to work to nuance a few things and understand how to apply them in new contexts" would be a terrible failure that he must avoid. This is, of course, a malady that is pervasive throughout the academy in general.
ReplyDeleteSo, as in the extract above, traditional Christian answers are described almost automatically knee-jerk, silly or trite. Though, such traditional answers, as you point out, get portrayed in simplistic terms, which makes them a lot easier to contrast... but again, the contrasting presentations often turn out to often only be more sophisticated by the mere power of his having said so, rather than in reality. This trick itself begins to look shallow once it's been played out a few times.
It's really frustrating when NT scholars make such basic mistakes about the OT (and NT Wright is a particularly frequent offender in this regard). If he had read standard books like Westermann on the forms of the psalms, he would have recognized that Biblical laments regularly include certain elements, including the appeals for God to "Hear" and "Save" the psalmist and his community. In fact, some have argued that it would be better to call these petition psalms than lament psalms, since the focus is precisely not on asking God to share our pain but to intervene on our behalf. But don't let the facts get in the way of the argument...
ReplyDeleteOff-topic, but I just wanted to say I've recently been reading through the CSB and enjoying it. Thanks for your work on the translation, Prof. Duguid!
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