One God, One People, One Future: Essays In Honor Of N. T. Wright

By Eric Lewellen

Leading scholars from around the world engage with key facets of N. T. Wright's most important work, providing a window onto major debates and developments in New Testament studies in recent decades.

These essays focus on N. T. Wright's contribution to New Testament theology and interpretation over the past four decades. The structure is three-fold, corresponding to the three areas of classic Jewish theology that Wright views as starting points for discerning the shape of New Testament theology: monotheism, election, and eschatology. Working within these broad categories, the contributors critically engage with Wright's work from both biblical and theological perspectives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Jan 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781506450674

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God

ONE GOD

N. T. Wright’s theodicy

MICHAEL LLOYD

It is an enormous privilege to be invited to contribute to this Festschrift for N. T. Wright. Tom and I have been friends for over 40 years, now – ever since he was my chaplain, hostel-keeper and supervisor at Downing College, Cambridge. And for all of that time, the problem of evil has been the major occupation of my intellectual life. I studied for my doctorate on ‘The Cosmic Fall and the Free Will Defence’ at Worcester College, Oxford, where Tom was Chaplain. Indeed, on one occasion, Tom was introducing me to a student from another college, and said to me, ‘This is Nick. He’s doing physics at Merton.’ Then, to Nick, he said, ‘This is Michael. He’s doing evil at Worcester!’ And evil is what I have continued to do. So, when I was asked to contribute to this Festschrift, it was an obvious choice to write about Tom’s theodicy.

There is something unfair and anomalous about such an undertaking, as Tom is a biblical scholar rather than a systematic theologian or philosopher. So, in attempting to expound and critique Tom’s theodicy, there is a danger of attempting to fit his thought into categories that are alien to it – a bit like trying to outline Einstein’s view of Reader Response Theory. Indeed, Tom himself is critical of many theodicies for focusing on suffering as ‘a philosophical or logical problem for a good creator, rather than having much to do with the story the Bible actually tells’.[1]

However, though there is a real danger of distorting Tom’s thought by asking it to answer questions that are more at home in different di­scip­lines, there is, conversely, much to be gained by bringing the resources – and the reticences – of biblical scholarship to bear on a vital question that cannot be the preserve of any one branch of academic pursuit. It is my hope that the engagement between philosophy, systematic theology and biblical studies that is involved in this critique may serve to bring these disciplines slightly closer together, to enable them to enrich and to challenge each other, and to enable them together to shed more light on a question that has troubled not just scholars, but ordinary human beings throughout the millennia of human history.

An exposition of Tom’s theodicy

If, as I have suggested elsewhere,[2] responses to the problem of evil within Christian theology may be categorized according to whether they see suffering as instrumental to the purposes of God, inevitable within those purposes or inimical to them, then Tom’s writings strongly suggest that he falls in the third of those categories. He is explicitly critical of the view of suffering as instrumental to the purposes of God. In his only book-length (popular-level) treatment of the problem of evil, Evil and the Justice of God (Wright 2006), he writes:

If you offer an analysis of evil which leaves us saying, ‘Well, that’s alright, then, we now see how it happens and what to do about it’, you have belittled the problem. I once heard a leading philosophical theologian trying to do that with Auschwitz, and it was squirmingly embarrassing. We cannot and must not soften the blow; we cannot and must not pretend that evil isn’t that bad after all.[3]

And later in the same book, he criticizes the justification of suffering that is characteristic of an instrumental view of suffering:

We cannot get to the full solution of the problem of evil by mere progress, as though, provided the final generation was happy, the misery of all previous generations could be overlooked or even justified (as in the appalling line in a hymn, ‘Then shall they know, they that love him, how all their pain was good’, a kind of shoulder-shrugging acquiescence in evil which the New Testament certainly does not authorize).[4]

The New Testament does not – and could not – authorize it because of the divine assault on suffering in the mission and ministry of Jesus. If the One in whom the character of God is most fully seen, and who most fully performs the will of God, is the One through whom ‘the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised’,[5] then Christian theologians have no authority to assert that suffering or death has any necessary, intended or positive place within the purposes of God. As a New Testament scholar – and, in particular, as a New Testament scholar who intends to allow ‘the story the Bible actually tells’ to shape our philosophical and theological responses to the problem of evil – Tom finds himself constrained by the contours of the ministry (and lordship) of Jesus. As a pastor, he is also aware of the pastoral dangers of pretending ‘that evil isn’t that bad after all’. Not only is such talk glib and ‘squirmingly embarrassing’, but it also tends to make God the inflictor of people’s pain rather than its sharer and fellow victim. The view of suffering as instrumental to the purposes of God tends to make God seem the enemy of the sufferer. As Nicholas Wolterstorff writes in his Lament for a Son, after the death of his son in a climbing accident: ‘What do you say to someone who is suffering? Some people are gifted with words of wisdom. For such, one is profoundly grateful. There were many such for us.’ (Tom has been one such, for me, on countless occasions.)

But not all are gifted in that way. Some blurted out strange, inept things. That’s OK too. Your words don’t have to be wise. The heart that speaks is heard more than the words spoken. And if you can’t think of anything at all to say, just say, ‘I can’t think of anything to say. But I want you to know that we are with you in your grief.’ Or, even, just embrace . . . But please: Don’t say that it’s not really so bad. Because it is. Death is awful. Demonic . . . I know: People do sometimes think things are more awful than they really are. Such people need to be corrected – gently, eventually. But no one thinks that death is more awful than it is. It’s those who think it’s not so bad that need correcting.[6]

This is Wolterstorff’s pastoral protest against the instrumental view of suffering, and it is one that Tom clearly joins him in – on Christological and pastoral grounds.[7]

Tom nowhere, to my knowledge, comments upon the view of suffering as inevitable within the purposes of God. But his protest against the instrumental view of suffering, taken together with a strong eschatological conviction (and the high commitment to God’s omnipotence that alone can sustain such a conviction), would find itself in great tension with any view of suffering as inevitable. Indeed, his attack on ‘acquiescence in evil’ fits more comfortably within a view of suffering as inimical to the purposes of God than within a view of suffering as either instrumental or inevitable.

If suffering is inimical to the purposes of God, then it follows that he must have intended a world that was free of suffering. If, when we see him most clearly and personally at work, we see him assaulting suffering and death; and if he is committed to the ultimate overcoming and eradication of suffering and death, then it would be odd for him to have built them in to his creation in the first place.[8] In other words, Christology and eschat­ology commit one to a doctrine of the Fall, and this is what would appear to be Tom’s position:

I regard the main function of postmodernity, under God, to be the preaching of the doctrine of the Fall (the truth of a deep and fatal flaw within human nature) to the modernist, post-eighteenth century arrogance that supposes it has solved the world’s problems.[9]

The doctrine of the Fall, however, is saying more than that there is ‘a deep and fatal flaw within human nature’. It is saying that there is a gap between how creation is and how it was intended to be in the purposes of the Creator. If there is no such gap, then it would seem difficult to escape the conclusion that that deep and fatal flaw is a design fault for which the Creator bears some culpability.[10] And if there is no such gap, then the natural processes that are the occasion for the pain and suffering of sentient beings would seem to be so enmeshed with the purposes of God as to compromise the goodness of God. If the natural processes are largely as God intended them to be, then it is hard to account for the divine assault upon the suffering they occasion, which we see in the healing ministry of Jesus. And it would be correspondingly hard to defend the goodness of the God who deliberately set up those processes against the charge inherent within the atheologian’s argument from evil.[11]

But if there is a gap between how creation is and how it was intended to be in the creational purposes of God, then by what event, events or processes did such a gap come about? And here, Tom is hesitant to give an answer. Here, his reticence as a biblical scholar holds him back. He points out that the locus classicus of the Fall story, Genesis 3, does not give us the help we need at this point:

We all want to know what the story refuses to tell us: why there was a snake in God’s beautiful creation in the first place, and why it wanted to use its cunning in that way. Instead of giving us an explanation for evil, the story gives us a brief analysis of it . . . The narrative then tells us once more what God does about it.[12]

In other words, he suggests that the purpose of the story is descriptive rather than explanatory, paradigmatic rather than aetiological. He reinforces this finding (or, rather, this unfinding) later in the book: ‘I have also ruled out, to the disappointment (I fear) of some, any immediate prospect of finding an answer to the question of where evil came from in the first place, and what it’s doing within God’s good creation.’[13]

He mitigates that disappointment in two ways. First, he insists that the biblical narrative is more focused on what God does (and will do) about evil than on where it came from. As a good Wittgensteinian and a responsible biblical scholar, whereof he finds that he cannot speak, thereof he thinks it better to remain silent. And he defends his disappointing absence of answer at this point by reference to the contours of biblical theodicy. In contrast to the speculative tendencies of some philosophers and theologians, he considers it better to be constrained by ‘the story the Bible actually tells’.

Second, he justifies this reticence by reference, not just to biblical reticence, but to our inability to understand any answer that might be given:

We are not told, or not in any way that satisfies our puzzled questioning, how and why there is radical evil within God’s wonderful, beautiful and essentially good creation. One day I think we shall find out, but I believe that we are incapable of understanding it at the moment, in the same way that a baby in the womb would lack the categories to think about the outside world. What we are promised, however, is that God will make a world in which all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well . . .[14]

Here, Tom’s position is significantly in line with a mainstream movement in philosophical theodicy, namely what is known as ‘Skeptical Theism’.[15] He develops this point in his more recent book, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, in the section on ‘Jewish Monotheism and the Problem of Evil’. After a brief summary of different responses to the problem of evil within Second Temple Jewish monotheism, Tom writes:

To repeat, none of these approaches attempts to explain why there is evil in the first place within the good creation of the wise creator. They are all ways of articulating the tension, not of resolving it. They are ways, in fact, of saying that there is something absurd about evil, something out of joint, something that doesn’t fit. The fact that one cannot really understand evil is itself an element of creational monotheism, a demonstration that evil is an intruder, a force not only bent on distorting and destroying the good cre­ation but also on resisting comprehension. If one could understand it, if one could glimpse a framework within which it ‘made sense’, it would no longer be the radical, anti-creation, anti-God force it actually is.[16]

Putting this side by side with a quotation from Alvin Plantinga will point up the similarities of thought between Tom and the Skeptical Theistic tradition here:

Is there any reason to think that if God did have a reason for a given evil, we would be the first to know? Is there any reason to think we could even grasp His reason, if He proposed to tell us what it was? . . . Nothing much follows from the fact that some evils are inscrutable; if theism is true we would expect there would be inscrutable evil. Indeed, it is only hubris which would tempt us to think that we could so much as grasp God’s plans here, even if He proposed to divulge them to us.[17]

Thus far, we have seen that Tom’s writing on the problem of evil coincides most easily with the view of suffering as inimical to the purposes of God. I have suggested that the inimical view of suffering requires a doctrine of the Fall. And we have noted that Tom is reticent about articulating such a doctrine, or, indeed, any account of where evil came from in the first place, and that he justifies that reticence both biblically and philosophically. Thus far, he fits into reasonably standard and recognizable traditions of theodical enquiry. However, he does not leave us with a complete absence of argument and articulation. He does offer his own version of (something like) a Fall narrative, which is original and intriguing. It centres around the Pauline concept of the Principalities and Powers. These are sometimes interpreted as references to demonic beings, and sometimes as references to unjust human structures. Tom’s approach finds something of a middle way between these two interpretative traditions:

When we humans commit idolatry, worshipping that which is not God as if it were, we thereby give to other creatures and beings in the cosmos a power, a prestige, an authority over us which we, under God, were supposed to have over them. When you worship an idol, whatever it is, you abdicate something of your own proper human authority over the world, and give it to that thing, whatever it is, calling into being a negative force, an anti-God force, a force which is opposed to creation . .