That's great, but what about process theology?

I sometimes feel like a broken record when I complain about authors on religious topics who ignore process theology, but it after reading Robert Wright's column in today's New York Times about how to reconcile faith in God with evolution, I once again found myself thinking, "That's great, but what about process theology?" One of the reasons I find process theology intriguing is that it addresses two theological questions that I think have to be resolved if belief in God is to be tenable: how to reconcile science and religion, and how to reconcile the existence of God with the problem of evil. Thus whenever an author gives an ostensibly comprehensive analysis on either of those two subjects for public consumption, and yet in so doing ignores process theology altogether, then I find myself objecting that the treatment of the subject matter is really incomplete.

Wright argues in his column that the only way for believers in God to also believe in evolution is to subscribe to a kind of deistic biology, in which God created the mechanism of natural selection and then subsequently just sat back and watched:

The first step toward this more modern theology is for them to bite the bullet and accept that God did his work remotely — that his role in the creative process ended when he unleashed the algorithm of natural selection (whether by dropping it into the primordial ooze or writing its eventual emergence into the initial conditions of the universe or whatever).

This isn't much different from other kinds of deism, and while it is true that this would indeed be one solution to the problem, another possible solution he doesn't mention and yet which is offered by process theology, suggests that God is actively involved in all the processes of the world (including biological evolution), but not in a coercive fashion but rather as One who offers creative possibilities at each moment. God under this model is then a non-omnipotent co-creator with creation itself. Thus, unlike the deistic evolution that Wright proposes, process theology sees God as remaining active--but not in an omnipotent sense.

I am certainly not saying that anyone, including Robert Wright, has to accept process theology. I do think it is frustrating, though, when process theology gets short shrift in an area of theology that it is specifically suited to address, and thus a treatment of a subject like this is not as comprehensive as it sets out to be.

It is also notable in this case that Wright goes on to say in his column that "organisms must come from a different creative process than rocks" and that " this creative process imparts a purpose (however mundane) to organisms." The idea that there are two different creative processes at work in the universe involves a kind of dualism that some might find a bit unsatisfying at some level, and he takes this dualism for granted when in fact it is not philosophically necessary. Indeed, this kind of dualism in the creative processes is something that process theology also rejects, seeing ultimately the same Divine creativity at work throughout all the processes of the universe.

God , suffering, and long-term plans

NT Wrong provides some insightful comments on blogger Rebecca Lesses's posting about John Hagee's theology of the Holocaust, specifically remarking on the idea of Satan and the book of Job.

Hagee, as you might recall, claimed that the Holocaust was the fulfillment of God's will because it served God's long-term plan for the Jews to form a state in Palestine. This long-term plan was supposedly outlined in the Bible, although one has to know how to interpret the pertinent passages to realize this; and, apparently, when God lays out his plans for history--well, as the saying goes, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Or, in this case, six million eggs.

There are at least three key assumptions that lie behind Hagee's view: first, that God has laid out a script for history; second, that God intervenes directly in world events in order to ensure that the script is followed; and third, any mass slaughter, genocide, torture, or other atrocities that might take place in the service of the divine plan can be dismissed as mere collateral damage.

It is easy to feel outraged at Hagee's crude theodicy, which is predicated on a simplistic interpretation of the meaning of Divine prophecy as found in the Bible. Many people object, and rightly so, to the idea that God would use such unmitigated evil to serve Divine purposes. And yet, as I pointed out in my commentary on the blogversation between N.T. Wright and Bart Ehrman, Wright's vague and incoherent theodicy also involves a "long-range plan" on God's part that does not concern itself with the suffering that individuals undergo along the way to the fulfillment of that plan. Though not as crude or simplistic as Hagee's theodicy, N.T. Wright's theodicy nevertheless also conceives of God as having a "plan" that happens to offer no resolution for those who suffer and die long before the plan is fully carried out.

For example, Wright says to Ehrman that the call of Abraham is

the moment when God launches the long-range plan to rescue the world from its misery. In other words, I read the story of Israel as a whole (not merely in its individual parts, which by themselves, taken out of that context, might be reduced to ‘Israel sinned; God punished them’, etc.,) as the story of theodicy-in-practice: ‘this is the narrative through whose outworking the creator God will eventually put all things to rights.’ Hence the promises of Isaiah 11 and so forth.

When push comes to shove, how is this really any different from what Hagee proclaimed? Can short term suffering really be dismissed in favor of some far off future solution that won't help the victims who happened to be born in the wrong place and time, but instead will be enacted further on down the road for those lucky enough to be born later, when God finally gets around to "putting things right"?

Some turn to the book of Job for answers to explain away human suffering, but I think that this story offers no answers. For one thing, Job's suffering was really just a special case; he was the object of abuse, basically in order to settle a bet between God and Satan, and his experience provides no explanation for suffering in general--unless one thinks that all instances of suffering are the result of experiments done to us by powerful forces just to see how we will react. The final non-answer from God out of the whirlwind was simply to tell Job, "You aren't me, I can do what I want, so shut up and take your lumps." I think that those who suffered under the Holocaust, as well as all of those who suffer in other circumstances, deserve a better explanation than that. A God who can intervene but who does not do so has some explaining to do.

The question of how much God has scripted out the future of the world, or for that matter our individual lives, depends on how much free will and uncertainty you think exists in the world, and also whether you conceive of God as a supernaturally interventionist omnipotent being. As I see it, there are several questions involved:

First, is the future of human history predictable with absolute certainty? If yes, is that because there is an unbreakable chain of cause and effect, such that, given absolute knowledge about the current circumstances, anyone (even humans) could predict every subsequent outcome? In that case, then God needs only to set up the initial conditions and watch the world unfold according to plan (Deism). (Alternatively, maybe the world has greater free will than that and is not predictable to humans, but predictable to God because he has super telekinetic powers.)

Second, can the future of the world only be predicted in terms of short term probabilities of immediate outcomes of events decided by freely choosing agents? God might know that I will have an 87.3% chance of going to church on Sunday, and a 12.7% chance of staying home and surfing the internet. God might calculate this probability with absolute accuracy--but maybe even to God, it is only a probability. This would also mean that the world thus becomes decreasingly predictable over time as the uncertainty of each possible outcome in turn leads to one or more possible outcomes with varying degrees of certainty, resulting in the distant future being all but unpredictable--even to God. Life in this scenario is not a linear, deterministic chain of cause of effect, but rather an ever expanding decision tree with various probabilities assigned to each branch.

Third, if the universe is not absolutely predictable, can God nevertheless influence events via interventionist course corrections that steer the world back in a desired direction? Or is God only capable of exerting influence via persuasion, without the power to either absolutely predict or deterministically control the outcome of future events (process theology)?

The blogger Simon H writes this about the idea that God has planned out our lives:

When I was a bright eyed young Fundamentalist the passage from Jeremiah was oft quoted during difficult times: "For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."

This is supposed to give the hearer a feeling of security and comfort - life has been planned out for us. The good times are God's blessing, and the bad times are there for a reason.

But, he suggests (and I agree),

Life is not planned out. It just happens....Process Theology gives me comfort, not because it tells me that God is "in control", but because it says that God suffers with us.

Here, I think, we have two different levels of "control". At one level, the Jeremiah quote suggests God is said to be in control of our personal destinies. This idea of divine control over our individual fates is hardly restricted to Abrahamic religions. The ancient Greek gods were also said to be in control of personal destinies. Oedipus, for example, didn't have any choice about what his fate would be--he was just a victim of fate. Is human life little more than just a Greek tragedy?

At a higher scale, according to Hagee, God is in control of the destiny of entire nations. This level of planning, however, can easily clash with the destiny of individuals. You can trust God to have your fate in your hands all you want, but if you get caught up in the sweep of history, your individual fate may just suffer in service to the greater cause. You might, as Hagee suggests, get thrown into a gas chamber, because God's script for history demands it.

When talking about either nations or individuals, however, the basic idea in both cases is that God scripts out a future for the world. If you believe in free will, this is hard to fathom. If you believe that God doesn't script our lives (or the lives of nations) in absolute detail, but instead intervenes just from time to time, then does that mean there is no script?

I suppose one might believe that God is an improvisational director, who lays out the broad outlines of a plot but mostly lets the actors do what they want. As the Divine Director, maybe God yells "cut!" from time to time, and then intervenes--maybe fertilizing a virgin here, resuscitating a Son's dead body there, curing a sick aunt's cancer because she had enough friends who were willing to pray for her, and so forth. The problem with this is that once you've let the omnipotence cat out of the bag, you are stuck with explaining how it is that God didn't bother to prevent horrible evils like the Holocaust. Hagee's answer is that God didn't prevent it because it actually served God's long-term plans. It also does seem to me that an omnipotent God could surely have created a Jewish state in Palestine without using the Nazis, but in any case, Hagee's point seems to be that nothing happens without God's permission or active complicity--which, it seems to me, is a more logically consistent view to take if you think that God has intervened in history at all. The "free will" defense for the existence of evil , I believe, falls apart as soon as you accept that God intervenes at all. If God didn't intervene to prevent the Holocaust because of "free will", then wasn't God also violating free will all the other times that he intervened?

I think that the desire to believe in an omnipotent God is very strong indeed. It is comforting to think that there is a method to the world's madness, that someone with greater wisdom and authority than us actually is in charge. A Jerusalem Post article from two months ago about Rabbi Harold Kushner describes the negative reaction that he received from many Jews in response to his suggestion that God is not omnipotent:

Kushner committed his gravest offense, as the Orthodox see it, in When Bad Things Happen to Good People. He labored to reconcile the twin Jewish beliefs in God's omnipotence and his benevolence with the reality of human suffering, ultimately sacrificing the former to salvage the latter.

Kushner's God is limited in his ability to control the random hazards of life that result in tragedy on a widespread and a smaller scale, like the Holocaust and the death of a child.

It is a view that runs afoul of traditional Jewish teaching about God. The Orthodox, who Kushner says feel obliged to defend every writing by an Orthodox rabbi, accuse him of propounding un-Jewish ideas. Among the top Google hits for "Harold Kushner" is an article from an Orthodox Web site titled "Why Harold Kushner is Wrong."

Given all of that, I have come to my own conclusions about omnipotence and Divine activity. I work from these assumptions:

First, I think the world is characterized by free will. Each outcome, each event, represents the expression of a freely chosen decision.

Second, I believe that there is no overriding script that dictates the course of either national or individual histories. I would instead suggest that God responds to each set of circumstances as they arise and evolve over time. As circumstances change, as the result of the freely chosen decisions, God offers new responses.

Third, I think that the nature of the responses that God offers to each set of conditions is not coercive intervention, but rather the offer of creative possibilities, which are the best possibilities imaginable according to God's perfect values.

I thus see God as always responding lovingly to the immediate conditions of the world, trying to persuade the world to act according to God's overall ideals. But there is no script, there is no omnipotent intervention, no predetermined plan for the coming millenia--just continued improvisational responses by God, rooted in persuasive love at each moment in time. And God's perfect sympathy means that God is with us when we undergo suffering--suffering that God did not cause in order to serve some deeper purpose, and suffering that God cannot prevent.

Ehrman and Wright

Beliefnet has been featuring an ongoing blog debate between Bart Ehrman and N.T. Wright about theodicy. I always find debates like these a little frustrating, because they create the illusion that an important question like this one can be boiled down to just two positions, when perhaps there are three or four or a dozen takes on the problem. This is certainly how I feel in this case, since I place myself in neither the Wright camp nor the Ehrman camp.

To a certain extent, I am more sympathetic with Ehrman's point of view than I am with Wright's, because I think that Ehrman raises valid points about theodicy that beg for answers. Even if I don't agree with the answers that Ehrman came up with, I think his questions are still important. So I was curious how Wright would respond to these points. Based on this online debate, the answer appears to be that he responds to them by evading them altogether.

Ehrman starts off the discussion by explaining how the problem of suffering led him to ask the question, "Where is God?" Wright responds by almost completely ignoring the whole problem of theodicy, and instead attacking Ehrman's rhetorical style as well as his scholarship. In particular, he accuses Ehrman of engaging in "emotional" arguments by detailing the horrors of evil that exist on the planet--as if that had anything to do with the substance of the problem that Ehrman identifies.

As for Ehrman's scholarship, that discussion might have been interesting if it had addressed the fundamental question that this debate was ostensibly about: how a benign, omnipotent God could allow suffering. No such luck. The closest Wright comes to offering a theodicy is to toss out some vague gobbledygook about how God's call of Abraham represented "the moment when God launches the long-range plan to rescue the world from its misery." This long-range plan, according to Wright, came to its culmination with the resurrection of Jesus. I have no idea how this is supposed to explain away the problem of evil. Are we just going to tell the victims of the the horrors of the world over the past several millenia that they should have just been patient in the midst of their sufferings because God had a "long-range plan" for the world, which of course would not include them because they'd be long dead by the time God got around to fixing things? Barman was correct in his subsequent response to Wright when he wrote

The issue of human suffering is not a logical problem to be solved or some kind of mathematical equation. It is a human problem that requires empathy, sympathy, emotional involvement, and action.

By contrast, Wright's "long-range plan" first and foremost ignores the plight of the here and now, ignores the suffering that individuals experience while they experience it, instead offering the platitude of some sort of "long-range plan" for the world as a whole. Individual suffering becomes secondary to the goals of achieving some kind of future world order. But making individual human experiences subservient to a Divine narrative involving the entire planet is not a theology of compassion. Here is where Wright's theodicy seems to be badly off track.

In his response, Ehrman points out another problem with Wright's "long-range plan" argument: it is predicated on a simplistic interpretation of the Bible. Wright treats the Bible

as if it were one continuous narrative written by a single author with one overarching theme (with Abraham as the lynchpin). It is not that, any more than the New Testament, or even the NT Gospel literature, represents one point of view of one author.

Regarding the Bible, Wright did offer one valid critique of Ehrman when he wrote, "I did have the sense, frequently, that the form of Christian belief you were rejecting was a particular kind of north American Protestantism which I don’t believe itself did justice to the material." I definitely agree that Ehrman has mistaken the theology of his own evangelical background with Christianity per se, and, as Wright points out, this comes into play in Ehrman's acceptance of the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. I think that ultimately this also comes into play in his conception of God, which is what led him to reject religion altogether as the only possible solution to the problem of theodicy.

Later in this debate, Wright then continued to evade the fundamental problem at hand, which became increasingly frustrating, although perhaps not surprising. Wright's argument was essentially that Jesus revealed to us what it means for God to rule the world, and that God ruling the world has nothing to do with ending human suffering through Divine intervention. Wright's answer to the problem of evil is, essentially to say that Jesus was all about challenging our expectations, and that includes our expectations of the logical and moral implications of God's ostensible characteristics of omnipotence and benevolence. In other words, according to Wright, Jesus told us that God doesn't work the way we expect him to, so we should just shut up and stop complaining. He writes:

What ‘we would want God to do’ – to have God measure up to our standards of ‘how a proper, good and powerful God would be running the world’! – seems to be the very thing that Jesus was calling into question.

This non-answer is a basic retreat from trying to explain anything away. It just says that this is how God runs the world, and we know this is so because Jesus said so, so get used to it and shut up already. Which, I suppose, is not much different from the non-answer that God gave Job out of the whirlwind. But just as God's answer to Job was unsatisfying, so is Wright's answer to Ehrman.

This is too bad, because Wright tantalizingly hinted at a better approach, when he wrote:

Near the heart of Jesus’ proclamation lies a striking redefinition of power itself, which looks as though it’s pointing in the direction of God’s ‘running of the world’ (if that’s the right phrase) in what you might call a deliberately, almost studiedly, self-abnegating way, running the world through an obedient, and ultimately suffering, human being, with that obedience, and especially that suffering, somehow instrumental in the whole process.

Now we are getting somewhere, at least potentially. And yet, although Wright stands on the brink of offering an insightful analysis, he never really makes the leap. The question of what Divine power means indeed, as far as I am concerned, gets to the heart of the question. If we define God in such a way as to suggest that God does not intervene omnipotently in the world to prevent suffering because God is not a supernaturally interventionist being--then the problem would have been solved in one fell swoop. But while Wright hints at that, I don't think he is really going there. He seems instead to be saying that it suits God's purposes to solve the world's problem's through a voluntary decision to do nothing in the face of ongoing evil; instead, he has put into place a long range plan that we cannot fathom but which is revealed via an ongoing narrative in the Bible, starting with Abraham and ending with Jesus--and this plan involves the Divine prerogative not to exercise his power in this way. If this is indeed Wright's argument, then that would suggest that God has the power to eliminate suffering immediately but he has decided not to use it, because Divine wisdom decided it was better to have a "long-range plan".

This is essentially an argument by authority--in this case, the authority of Jesus (as Wright interprets Jesus's message to be.) Since Jesus said that this is how God acts, then Ehrman has no right to complain. But, in fact, even if Jesus's life and message included this sort of theodicy, that hardly serves as a convincing argument to an agnostic like Ehrman of whether this is really a just use of Divine power. Wright offers no explanation of how this decision to not use Divine power to intervene (in accordance with a "long-range plan") is justifiable morally or logically. He lets himself off the hook by saying that he is just echoing what Jesus showed about God's own decision not to intervene in this way.

It is not a solution to the problem of evil; it instead says that you should just ignore the problem altogether and assume that God knows that what he is doing.

Again, I think that all of this would much more easily be solved by simply affirming that God's nature is not that of a supernatural interventionist who has the power to act upon the world from the outside if he/she so decides to, but rather as a creative force that acts through the natural world, through persuasion rather than coercion. Take away the idea of God as omnipotent supernatural interventionist, and the problem of theodicy goes away.