Against Theodicies and Theologians
November 24, 2004
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the controversy surrounding “Open Theism” and the firing of John Sanders, a theology professor at Huntington College and a proponent of the openness of God. The denial of the historically orthodox view of God as omniscient and omnipotent is not new. And now, as before, it is motivated by an inability to come to grips with a capricious universe.
In this account we learn that for Sanders, “the road to Open Theism began when he was in high school and only nominally Christian. The death of his brother in a motorcycle accident led him to begin thinking deeply about religion. People tried to comfort him by explaining that the accident was part of God’s plan. “I said, “So God killed my brother so I would become a Christian?’ They’d say, ‘Oh, no, it’s not like that.’ But there was a disconnect.”
Mr. Sanders, who gradually became a committed evangelical, began developing a position that refused to see all events as ordained ahead of time by God. “‘An openness view says humans are incredibly responsible for what happens,’ he says.”
Developing an understanding of God that medicates the pain of a personal tragedy may be understandable, but it does not make for an adequate beginning from which to develop a theology. Clearly, a lot of evangelicals are petrified of pain and death; and they are also afraid that at bottom they lack belief in and/or are angry at God. Intelligent adults who think about God the same way they think about their 401(k) accounts–a discrete object to be manipulated according to a felt need for a never obtained peace of mind–strike me as atheists in denial. I suspect they are mainly concerned with producing and protecting respectable, adult, modern, intellectual constructions of “religious faith” because this is the only way they know to protect an experience of faith that has become very distant.
A good cure would be a forced 24-hour reading of Job: “Then Job answered the Lord, ‘Behold, I am insignificant; what can I reply to Thee? I lay my hand on my mouth. Once I have spoken, and I will not answer. I know that Thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of Thine can be thwarted. Therefore I have declared that which I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. Therefore, I retract, and I repent in dust and ashes.’”
There is the answer to the theodicies modern man can’t get over. It couldn’t be clearer.
This problem is symptomatic of the larger disease of modern theology: that its practitioners believe their work uncovers something called “Truth.” Whether it is a liberal, progressive, living, small-t truth or a calcified, objective, unchanging, capital-T “Truth,” the resulting pathologies are at root the same: God becomes a laboratory specimen with a DNA to be either mapped and guarded or mapped and modified. It goes without saying, of course, that the lab technician remains untouched by either procedure. The practice of the theologians, as it has always properly been understood, is not to uncover and defend truth (that is the sole province of the Church), but rather it is a process of discreet uncovering of oneself and others in service of wholeness, health, and prudential wisdom. True theologians know that they are in the business of creating secondary inspirations that are “filters” through which the faithful (themselves included) can be exposed to the rawer and more immediate human experience of The Inspiration that Jesus is Lord (and I am not). So long as the secondary inspirations restore and preserve a faithful openness and proper tension in the soul towards The Inspiration while also insulating us from its terrifying implications, they produce health and wholeness. Which is to say, they produce the strength to suffer in faith, hope, and love. We cannot all be Desert Fathers, and if we could, there would be no need for theology. Even Moses, after all, saw only God’s hindquarters.
Theology departments do not–cannot–operate this way. The evil of theology departments really can hardly be overstated. They are birthing centers for atheists: both the practicing kind and those in denial. They can only be saved if they become monastic communities, scrap systematics, and teach history. Not until students achieved a high level of orthopraxic ascesis and a solid grounding in historical reality would they be allowed to study the classic theological texts.
Or, perhaps even better, theology could be left to the realm of farmers/soldiers/steelworkers, or anyone else of the sort who is daily engaged in the base realities of existence with little means of recourse other than the casting of their souls into the arms of either the Devil or our Lord. The discipline, I’m sure, would then achieve a level of clarity not before seen in our lifetimes.
This is Against Theodicies and Theologians in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: St. Tammy, Our Lady of Preservatives | Next: Mark Galli and Anna Quindlen Join Forces | TrackBack (1) | Comments (0)
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