Christ and Horrors, Part 4: Why?

This is my final post reviewing Marilyn McCord Adams' book Christ and Horrors. In this last post we turn to the Big Question: Why?

Why would God make us so vulnerable to horrors?

To start, Adams makes a distinction between justifying reasons and explanatory reasons. Explanatory reasons offer explanations as to why God might, for one reason or another, make us vulnerable to horrors. Two common and traditional explanatory reasons include the following:

1. For love to exist there must exist, necessarily, the possibility of pain. (I think C.S. Lewis makes this argument in The Problem of Pain.)

2. God allows Creation a degree of autonomy so that true relationship between God and Creation can emerge.

Justifying reasons are different. Justifying reasons are explanations that justify God's choices to Man. For example, in the prelude to this series Jack Miles claimed that "the world is a great crime." Framed that way, was God justified in creating a world vulnerable to horrors? Should he have refused to create in the first place?

Justifying reasons are hard to find for God. But Adams is concerned with how they frame the conversation about God. That is, they are prone to set up and bias the conversation to smear God. Given that I tend to seek justifying explanations from God, this caution from Adams is well-taken. That is, we must take care not to conduct theodicy discussions in ways that set God up to play either the fool or a monster. (Personally, I often do this. Given my issues with God and general sense that people go way too easy on God in church, I tend to come out with both barrels blazing. I recognize this, and Adams' comments help make me more reflective about this tendency of mine.)

Adams summarizes all this (p. 43, emphases hers): "My own view is that talk of theodicy--of justifying the ways of God to humankind--is misleading, because God has no obligations to creatures and hence no need to justify Divine actions to us. Personal though God is, the metaphysical size-gap is too big for God to be drawn down into the network of rights and obligations that bind together merely human beings. Elsewhere, I have argued that horrors are so bad that no candidate reason-why that we can think of is remotely sufficient to exhibit the compatibility of horrors with Divine goodness-to created horror-participants, and that any attempt to construe one or more of them as sufficient underestimates how bad horrors are and caricatures God into something monstrous."

This, I think, is an interesting observation. That is, theodicy, simply by trying to offer an explanation for horror, may poison the well right from the start. That is, theodicy may always end in a very unsatisfactory way by either minimizing the horrors or turning God into a monster. It's a razor edge. (I believe this is the danger George has been pointing out in the comments to this series.)

So, where does this leave us? Ultimately, with no great answers. And, if what Adams says above is correct, that the whole theodicy project can't really produce good answers, we are left with a lot of mystery. But Adams does offer an interesting metaphor (p. 40-41): " My proposal is inspired by the following analogy. Soldiers who become fast friends in World War 1 foxholes might admit that they would never have prospectively willed the horrors of war as means to the end of friendship. Yet the value of the relationship thus occasioned is such that they would not retrospectively will away those wartime bonding moments from their lives. So also victims of horror from the vantage point heaven, when they recognize how God was with them in their worst experiences, will not wish to eliminate any moments of intimacy with God from their life histories."

I don't know if that holds up in the end. But it's progress. Christ and Horrors is progress. For these reasons. First, Adams makes theodicy the central work of Christ. And further, in her hands, theodicy and horror defeat is no longer a generic, abstract, cosmic project. Rather, horror defeat occurs in the very particular, unique, and personal lives of horror-participants. It's God and the Individual. Theodicy, salvation, and horror-defeat is worked out in that very intimate, relational space. For that focus, I owe Adams a warm debt of gratitude.