The Sunday Assembly and Theologies of Suffering

Katie Cross

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000164527
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Teología y religión
• Categoría: Teología cristiana

This book draws on a study of the Sunday Assembly- a "godless congregation"- to reflect on how the Church might better deal with suffering, lament and theodicy. Against a backdrop of a shifting attitudes towards religion, humans are now better connected than ever before. It is no exaggeration to suggest that we carry the suffering of the world in our pockets. In the midst of these intersecting issues, the Sunday Assembly provides insight into how meaning-making in times of trauma and crisis is changing.

Drawing on practical theology and using ethnographic tools of investigation, this book includes findings from interviews and observation with the Sunday Assembly in London and Edinburgh. It explores the Sunday Assembly's philosophy of "celebrating life, " and what this means in practice. At times, this emphasis on celebration can result in situations where suffering is "passed over, " or only briefly acknowledged. In response, this book considers a similar tendency within white Protestant churches to avoid explicit discussion of difficult issues.

This book challenges churches to consider how they might resist the avoidance of suffering through the practice of lament.The insights provided by this book will be of particular interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Practical Theology, Secularism and Atheism/Non-religion.

1
Theological roots

The evils of theodicy

The realities of human trauma are long established. “History shudders,” writes theologian Rebecca Chopp, “pierced by events of massive public suffering.”¹ Now, as in centuries past, that which Christopher Brittain refers to as “ground zero” events pose a challenge to Christian configurations of divine benevolence.² Now, as then, raw pain galvanises hard questions. The frequently heard exclamation, “How can God allow so much suffering?” confronts theologians with a particular issue: is it possible to hold that God is good, loving, and wants the best for the world, even when confronted with evidence of suffering which suggests otherwise? As in ages past, this question continues to present a robust challenge to belief in God.

The practice of theodicy has maintained a central place within Christian thought for centuries. It has been required to placate concerns about the existence and personhood of God against a backdrop of continuous suffering. Nevertheless, I argue that theodicy in the classical sense, which seeks to justify the divine in sight of on-going suffering in the world, is problematic. The attempts of theologians to produce explanations that justify divine goodness in response to radical suffering are, in John Swinton’s words, both “theologically questionable” and “pastorally dangerous.”³ Theodicy is often bound up in overly abstracted philosophical dialogue, and thus undermines the realities of evil. All too often, theoretical renderings of theodicy are inapplicable to human experience, pass over the particularities of suffering, and perpetuate a culture of blame. In sum, theodicy can hold greater potential for hurt than for healing.

Theodicy: a history

Augustinian theodicy

Augustinian theodicy, named for Aurelius Augustinus or St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), a fourth- and fifth-century philosopher and theologian, constitutes a classical Christian response to the problem of evil.⁴ Twentieth-century philosopher John Hick identifies a number of variations of this theodicy throughout history. In his 1966 text, Evil and the God of Love, Hick distinguishes Augustine’s theodicy and its subsequent developments as “Augustinian.” Augustinian theodicies commonly assert that evil is a privation of good, and the result of human misuse of free will. Accordingly, God is not held to be directly responsible for evil, and thus, divine goodness and benevolence is upheld.

Augustine develops his key ideas regarding suffering in his two major works, Confessions and City of God. In Confessions, he begins his theological response to the problem of evil, drawing on the opening chapters of Genesis and the writings of the Apostle Paul. In City of God, he develops his theodicy further, situating it within the wider framework of human history. Centrally, Augustine proposes that evil cannot exist within God, and that it cannot be created by God. As such, evil is a by-product of God’s creativity, and a lack of goodness, which exists as a result of human misuse of free will. Augustine assumes that human beings were created in possession of free will, which provides conditions of self-determination. Because of this, humans are presented with the choice to discern and choose between good and evil. The blame for evil and suffering is, therefore, passed on to humans. Augustine draws on the creation narrative in Genesis and argues that instances of evil in the world occur as a result of Adam and Eve’s original sin. This is true of all evil, whether it is moral (involving human wrongdoing), or natural (involving natural disaster or disease). The evil will present in humans is, within his understanding, a corruption of the conditions of free will given to human beings by God.

Within the Augustinian account, suffering is held to be a consequence of sin but also a means of its gradual extirpation. To Augustine, the purpose of suffering is to gradually destroy sin over time. In soteriological terms, suffering therefore has a “positive purpose.” Ultimately, Augustine rests upon an eschatological argument: that suffering will finally be justified in the consummated purposes of God. It is because of this that Augustine’s work has widely been referred to as constituting a “free will defence.”

Important though Augustine was in the world of his day, G. R. Evans suggests that his impact on theological and philosophical discourse has been “still greater in the…years which came after.”⁵ Thomas Aquinas (c.1225–1274), a thirteenth-century scholastic philosopher and theologian, was heavily influenced by Augustine’s works, writing a form of Augustinian theodicy in his Summa Theologica. For R. Douglas Geivett, “Aquinas believed that the presence of evil in the world is the basis for the most threatening argument against the existence of God.”⁶ As such, his theodicy begins with five arguments for the existence of God, known also as the “Five Ways.” Thereafter, Aquinas attests that “God, being good, must have a morally sufficient reason for permitting the existence of evil.”⁷ He approaches the question of theodicy by arguing that all goodness in the world must exist perfectly in God, and that since God exists perfectly, God must therefore be perfectly good. As such, there is no inherent evil in God. Building on the Augustinian concept of evil as a privation of good, Aquinas links the existence of evil to human free will and argues that the possibility of sin is necessary for a perfect world. Like Augustine, he sees individuals as responsible for their own sin, and thus, their own suffering. Eleonore Stump considers Aquinas to have a positive view of suffering, inasmuch as he finds evil acceptable and justifiable because of the good that comes from it. However, she also draws attention to his emphasis on the doctrine of heaven:

[I]n order not to see the acceptance of suffering or the justification of God’s allowing suffering as senseless, it is essential to include the doctrine that human beings are capable of everlasting union with God in the afterlife.⁸

In other words, as Stump points out, Aquinas sees suffering as legitimate because human beings have the option to choose “good” and therefore reach a perfect afterlife, where no pain or evil exists. The eschatological nature of Aquinas” approach points away from current anguish, towards that which is yet to come. Later in this chapter, a particular critique, stemming from the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, will be applied to this reasoning.

German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) was the first to use the term “theodicy” in his 1710 text of the same name.⁹ In his writings, Leibniz, seeking to defend the goodness of God against the accusation that divine goodness is incompatible with the realities of human suffering, draws upon the Augustinian tradition. Théodicée is a direct response to the writings of Pierre Bayle, a French philosopher, who rejects philosophical attempts to solve the problem of evil on the basis that there can be no rational solution to it.¹⁰ From Bayle’s perspective, the co-existence of God and evil can be proven, given that it is prevalent throughout the Bible. Ultimately, Bayle concludes that there is no defensible, rational solution to the problem of why God permits evil. As such, he does not conceive of evil as a problem to be solved but rather a state of affairs which should simply be acknowledged, and ultimately accepted.¹¹

In contrast, Leibniz, like Augustine and Aquinas before him, argues that God is infinitely perfect. As such, God must have created a world which contains the best possible balance of good against evil. Leibniz posits that God chose the present world from an infinite number of “possible worlds” that were present as ideas in God’s mind. Because God wills what is best, this world is therefore the “best of all possible worlds.”¹² Leibniz also presents his own theodicy; he argues that there are three central and distinguishable forms of evil, including moral (sin), physical (pain), and metaphysical (limitation). Building on Augustine’s renderings of the free will defence, Leibniz suggests that God permits moral and physical strains of evil for the “greater good.” Metaphysical evil is an unavoidable consequence of the existence of the world, since any created world must necessarily fall short of God’s absolute perfection.

In contemporary discourse, Alvin Plantinga (1932–), an American analytic philosopher, has paid tribute to Augustine’s renderings of the “free will defence” in his own work. Plantinga does not consciously present his work as theodicy; he is not interested in presenting a justification for God’s actions. Rather, he intends to demonstrate the logical possibility for an omnibenevo-lent, omnipotent and omniscient God to create a world that contains moral evil. Nevertheless, as Alistair McGrath points out, since Plantinga himself identifies as a Christian, and seeks to reconcile the existence of suffering with the existence of God, his work could feasibly be construed as a classical form of theodicy. Indeed, Plantings reasoning is “deeply rooted in the Christian tradition,” and has, as such, been widely accepted within Christian and theological circles as a legitimate theodical explanation for the existence of suffering.¹³

Plantinga asserts the importance of free will thus:

A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all.¹⁴

In other words, Plantinga suggests that the “value” of free will is that it allows human beings to choose to love God freely. That being the case, God can (and did) create free creatures. H...