Four Ways of Interpretation: The Medieval Quadriga^[1]

Littera gesta docet; quid credas allegoria;

Moralis quid agas; sed quid speres anagoge.

1. The letter lets you know what happened;

2. Allegory what you believe;

3. The moral sense what you must do;

4. and anagogy what you may hope for.

When they are rhymed:

The letter shows us what God and our fathers did;

The allegory shows us where our faith is hid;

The moral meaning gives us rules for daily life;

The anagogy shows us where we end our daily strife.^[2]

They are one historical and three spiritual interpretations:

1. Literal or historical 2. Allegorical 3. moral 4. hidden

meaning for the future life

For example:

“Jerusalem”

1. The Jewish city 2. The Church 3. The human soul 4. Heaven

“Ishmael and Isaac”

1. The two sons of Abraham 2. The two testaments or the synagogue and the church or law and grace 3. Flesh and spirit

4. Hell and heaven

Luther proposed another Evangelical fourfold interpretation in his commentary on Psalm 117, developing it out of one simple sense that gives much.[3]

1. Prophesy: interpreting the writings of the prophets concerning Christ

2. Revelation is more than allegory, it means to strike something special in the scripture that not everyone can find, who may well have some of the first three parts or even all of them.

3. Instruction is teaching knowledge. (Numbers three and four are somehow mixed together). Teaching is preaching faith and how it makes us righteous without our deserving it.

4. Admonition is how we should serve God, making a distinction of outward behavior and customs. In the Psalm 117 he gives instruction about offering or sacrifice and vows.

Luther is slightly confusing here (p. 146) because he derives his fourfold interpretation from St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 14:6:

“Dear brothers and sisters if I came to you speaking in tongues, what use would I be to you, if I did not speak to you through revelation or insight or prophesy or teaching.”

Luther tries to be completely Pauline in defining each of Paul’s terms with other passages from Paul. Rereading the commentary, of which a great deal had to be cut to reduce the length of our book, may help make his four ways of interpretation somewhat more clear cut.

About our book Luther’s Spirituality:

I would love reaction on what I call his diabolical dialectic found on pages 142-143. But there are clues for its meaning right at the beginning of his section on Instruction, where he says that God’s highest wisdom is godly, not human, secret, not revealed and in the world it is called “insidious heresy,” the devil’s damned instruction (page 135). “Why do they all persecute this teaching about the grace of God and call it heresy?” (page 136) Other real highlights of this commentary are his description of the Heaven of Grace, pages 138-140 and the incredible catalogue, listing almost every possible phenomenological situation of the church, and finding that the Gospel was always missing (pages 134-135).

At Christ Lutheran Church in El Cerrito, California, we just concluded a reading of this book together and the experience was very rewarding. The class received an in depth introduction to how Luther writes out of the midst of life and experience remaining incredibly relevant for the toughest issues of our lives and experience. Pastor Peter Krey

Religious Experience of God’s Existence

Lecture for the Philosophy of Religion by Dr. Peter Krey

Diablo Valley College, Pleasant Hill, California

In a classic biography of St. Augustine, Peter Brown writes about “a long contemplation of the Logos, whose existence can be ‘hinted at by innumerable rational proofs’”[1] We have been honoring reason by going through some of these proofs that attempt to approach the Infinite and Ineffable. There are the cosmological proofs of St. Thomas Aquinas, the more modern ones of William Lane Craig, Samuel Clarke, as well as the Islamic proof called the Kalam Argument. Then we covered the teleological argument of William Paley, the ontological arguments of St. Anselm as well as the modal one by Alvin Plantinga, and there are many others, whose truths are supported by “sparkling little chains of [reasoning]” to use a phrase of Plotinus.[2]

Religious Experience

Now we turn away from rationalism and toward empiricist justifications of God’s existence. Experience is much more akin to our modern scientific and inductive way of thinking. A central thesis from our Philosophy of Religion text reads:

Ultimate reality is recognized as sacred in relation

to when persons enter a transformative process.[3]

As a transition from rationalism to religious experience, listen to the experience of St. Augustine conversing with his mother, Monica as related by Peter Brown from Augustine’s ninth book in his Confessions:

There we talked together, she and I alone in deep joy….and while we were thus talking of His Wisdom and panting for it, with all the effort of our heart we did for one instant attain to touch it; then sighing and leaving the first fruits of our spirit bound to it, we returned to the sound of our own tongue, in which words must have a beginning and end….What we said is this: “If to any man the tumult of the flesh grew silent, silent the images of the earth, sea, and air, and if the heavens grew silent, and the very soul grew silent to herself, and, by not thinking of self, mounted beyond self; if all dreams and images grew silent, and every tongue and every symbol – everything that passes away…and in their silence He alone spoke to us, not by them but by Himself: so that we should hear His Word, not by any tongue of the flesh, not in the voice of an angel, not in the sound of thunder, not in the darkness of a parable – but that we should hear Himself . . .should hear Himself and not them.[4]

They entered up in a spiritual rapture that went into the infinite. Then they heard the sound of their own tongue again, in which words must have a beginning and ending. That means they were back in the finite world of experience. With paltry words Augustine tries to recapitulate how they might hear God speaking to them.

Thus they may not have been able to traverse the Infinite, but they experienced a foretaste, a preview of it.

What kind of an event is a religious experience? In our Peterson’s text religious experience is classified in the following ways:

1. as a feeling of dread or awe, one of utter dependence, or a feeling of longing for the transcendent being, who fascinates us.[5]

2. as a type of religious perception, perhaps not a

common perception, but like a sensory one.

3. as an interpretative account of experience,

one described as transcendent (pages 5-6).

We already mentioned the ecstatic experience of St. Thomas, where in a realization of all his theology he had something like a beatific vision, which caused him to cease writing. In the face of that experience, he said that all his words were like straw.[6]

We can also remember the experience of St. Augustine when he heard the sing-song voice of a child say, “Take and read!”[7]

Martin Luther of old (1483-1546) had a transformative experience while overcoming the medieval wrathful and vengeful judging God in the sky with a loving sweet and forgiving God. Before he experienced the language event which we call his being justified by faith, he hated God’s righteousness and raged,

As if, indeed, it is not enough that miserable sinners, eternally lost through original sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity by the law of the Decalogue, without having God add pain to pain by the gospel and also by the gospel threatening us with his righteousness and wrath.[8]

Luther was trying to understand what St. Paul meant by Romans 1:17. “In the [Gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith, as it is written, ‘the one who through faith is righteous shall live.’” Luther meditated on this place in Scripture ardently desiring “to know what St. Paul wanted.”

At last by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed, as it is written, ‘he who through faith is righteous shall live.’” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself again through open gates. There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me. Thereupon I ran through the Scripture from memory. I also found in other terms an analogy, as, the work of God, that is, what God does in us, the power of God, with which he makes us strong, the wisdom of God, with which he makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God.

And I extolled my sweetest word with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word “righteousness of God.” Thus that place in Paul was for me truly the gate to paradise.[9]

Often some theologians interpret this place in Luther’s life as if it merely had doctrinal significance. But it was an transformative experience that not only made a very different person of Luther, but brought about the sixteenth century renewal of the Christian Church, called the Reformation.

Pojman mentions the theophanies of Moses before the burning bush, Isaiah experiencing God in the temple, and Saul becoming transformed into Paul on the road to Damascus.[10]

Some Definitions from our Introduction (Peterson, p. 1-3):

Philosophy of Religion is the critical examination of basic religious concepts and beliefs. As a philosophical activity, it tries to be as objective and rigorous as possible analyzing the major ideas of religion and theology (e.g., God, miracles, evil), to synthesize them into a coherent point of view, and to assess the reasons that thoughtful people have offered for or against religious belief.

Theology is the discipline of questioning key beliefs and doctrines inside of a religion for their conceptual development and systematization.

Natural theology deals with what all human beings can know through reason and revealed theology, with what can be known only through revealed scripture.

Religion, difficult to define according to our text, is a set of beliefs, actions, and experiences, both individual and collective, organized around some sacred idea of Ultimate Reality in relation to which persons can become transformed.

Ultimate Reality is a unity or plurality, personal or non-personal, divine or not, differing from religion to religion.

Classical theism is the belief that a transcendent spiritual being exists, who is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. Because “theism” is a term that derives from Greek philosophy, some have argued that the God of the Jews and Christians is non-philosophical and thus one could be an atheist and still believe in the God of the Bible.

Theodicy tries to square the divine attributes of God (omnipotence, holiness, and perfection) with the problem of evil.

Philosophy endeavors to analyze and critically evaluate our most basic concepts and beliefs.

Analytic approach to philosophy is concerned with meaning, consistency, coherence, reasonableness, justification and truth of our beliefs. It emphasizes crucial concepts and the structure and soundness of the arguments used to justify them.

The Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle (1920’s) argued that religious language had no cognitive content, using Wittgenstein’s verifiability principle, which was a modern version of David Hume’s analytic/ synthetic scissor.

The verifiability principle criterion of meaning states that 1) a factual statement has cognitive meaning only if sense experience can provide evidence for its truth and 2) the experiences that would demonstrate its truth are identical to its meaning.[11] This principle became problematic when many scientific statements could not meet this criterion and Wittgenstein turned the principle upon itself and showed that it was not verifiable in itself. W. V. O Quine argued that statements in isolation could not be verified, because they presented themselves corporately: some statements could be falsified at the periphery of one’s core beliefs, but observations and experiments would be challenged if core beliefs became contradicted. Thomas Kuhn used Quine’s ideas to speak about the nature of scientific revolutions, where a paradigm was not changed, despite experiments and evidence to the contrary, until a new paradigm was ready to explain the new evidence and everything the old one had explained.

This turn of philosophical theories brought much more respect for the integrity of religious rationality and experience, and that many philosophers have become religious themselves, adds to exciting new developments in the philosophy of religion.

Religious Experience

An elderly man, who was a friend of mine, is under a tree before daylight contemplating suicide. His new wife is an abusive alcoholic. His former wife had committed suicide, for which he feels guilty. As the daylight begins to dawn, suddenly the whole tree becomes alive with birds singing their songs as if they would burst. The old man looks up to the heavens, the sun is rising, and he thanks God for speaking to him, loving him so much, and saving his life through the songbirds in that tree.

He felt that he had had a religious experience through which God interceded and saved his life. It assured him that God still loved him no matter what he was going through.

This person felt that in this religious experience heaven had touched his soul and he had been healed. Was it an experience as described by William James or Rudolph Otto? Not exactly: dread, utter dependence, trembling, tremendous fascination, and longing for the transcendent being as feelings do not seem to hit the mark. Not mysticism of total absorption into God or the secondary experience of trance, glossolalia (speaking in tongues), automatic writing, etc. either. They do not seem to fit.

Following William Alston, we could say that it was religious perception. To interpret Alston somewhat through Origen’s spiritual sense (See hand-out), perceptions do not take place only through the five physical senses. They can also take place through the spiritual senses, the perception of the soul. One can see through the eyes of the heart, hear with the ears of the inmost self, and be touched at the heart. When Alston notes that this is not a sensory or common experience of a perception, although it is analogous with a sensory perception, he might be searching for Origen’s insight (see page 22).

Thomas Aquinas felt that all the physical senses internalized and integrated were the intellect. For him the intellect was like an invisible hand that could grasp and comprehend consciousness, concepts or perceptions. Because they were made out of the mind and made for the mind they were abstract. The hand touches and feels. The internal senses could also focus more on spiritual sight or a more intense and concentrated spiritual sense of hearing.

Thus when Alston speaks of “generalizing from sense perception, that we acquire a wider concept of perception” (page 22), certainly reminds of Origen. Thus if we have the perception of a cat, then we assume there is a cat present that has given us the perception. In the same way when we have had a perception involved in a religious experience, then God became present, appeared, or was somehow given, for that religious perception to have taken place. He thus argues that religious perception provides a strong justification of the existence of God.

Vocabulary: “doxastic” (on page 24 top) giving rise to beliefs and therefore teachings and doctrine.

In Alston’e perceptual model to mystical experience, he argues that if God exists, then mystical experience is quite properly thought of as mystical perception (page 24). There can certainly be delusional perceptions as well as real ones, but that is true for the sensory and the spiritual variety of perceptions and experiences and thus mystical or religious perceptions are not disqualified and some can also be real (veridical).

By indirect experiences of God, Alston refers to becoming aware of God through beauties of nature, the words of the bible or a sermon, or other natural phenomena (page 21). In contrast by direct religious experience of God, Alston refers to presentations of God to the individual in somewhat the way in which physical objects are presented to sense perception (page 21).

It is questionable whether or not the religious experience under the songbird tree was indirect or direct perception. I do not feel it was the beauty of nature that stirred the man, but the very surprising fact that the tree was full of songbirds that all burst into song at the same time speaking the love of God to him. This experience convinced him that God was present and the elderly man perceived it through the songbird-tree experience.

Can religious experience be used to justify religious beliefs, e.g., that God exists. Such an approach is far more consonant with our modern mentality than all the rational proofs. Thus William James argues that “religious experience is the root of religion” (the title of his article, page 10). We are much more experiential today than purely rational and experience and observation are more convincing to us. So religious experience as a type of perception points to its source, the way the visual experience does to the presence of a cat.

Pojman’s critique of all the variety and diversity of religious experience can be answered to an extent by those who argue for its being an interpretation of experience. Here the Ultimate Reality becomes present and the religious experience, the primary feeling, is interpreted in the religion and tradition of the particular believer involved. That would account for all the diversity in religious experience.

Pojman’s critiques of religious experience are that

1) they are so amorphous and varied, 2) their justification is often circular: the premises are as questionable as the conclusion, and 3) they are non-verifiable.

William James argues that to discern diabolical mysticism from good mysticism the experience must be sifted and tested, and it must run the gauntlet of the total context of experience, just like what comes from the outer world of sense (page 17-18). It is important to be cognizant of this evil kind of experience as well, because the spiritual comes in good and evil varieties. In the Scripture the prophets sometimes heard the voice of God. Elijah hiding in the cave for instance (e.g., 1 Kings 19:13). But a very disturbed woman was hearing voices and I asked her what they said. “They are telling me to throw you off this balcony.” She said. Voices are sometimes heard from the fragments of a person’s ego and considered to come from the outside. These kinds of voices can be very destructive. Thus the spirits have to be discerned for being good or evil, and all spirituality should not be assumed to be good.

Second Sunday of Pentecost May 25^th 2008 by Pastor Peter Krey

Isaiah 49: 8-16a Psalm 131 1 Corinthians 4:1-5 Matthew 6:24-34

Let faith take a bite out of your worry!

Whenever we say the Lord’s Prayer, we Protestants conclude with: “For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever! Amen.” Do we just say it or do we also believe it? Do you and I believe that Christ reigns because God sent him to take charge over us and make us part of the Kingdom of Heaven and when we confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, do we attribute the power and the glory to him over our lives? Having that faith is the challenge.

The first verses of the Gospel lesson must have made me uptight, because I forgot to see how the stock market was doing. Later I found out it went down another 146 points. That takes another big bite out of our pension! But hold it, Jesus says, “either / or”! You either serve me or mammon. Usually we understand “Mammon” as the god of materialism and money. But in Hebrew “mammon” merely means the accumulation of wealth. “Unrighteous mammon” from that notorious text about making friends with unrighteous mammon” needs to be explained (Luke 16:9). Your wealth is unrighteous if you have surplus, more than you need, but you won’t help save the lives of the needy with it. Make friends with unrighteous mammon means to save those lives with that surplus, so that the poor, whom you have saved, will welcome you into their mansions in heaven!

When I watch the business channel that operates from the floor of Wall Street, a goodly number of people seem to have the accumulation of wealth as the sole purpose of their lives. But that means to serve Mammon and makes you hate Christ, because Christ wants us to serve him alone. Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all things will be added to you. If making money is the first priority of your life, then God will subtract all things from you. When Jesus speaks of having a single eye, he means that we can either choose the one purpose or the other.[1] So let’s keep our eye on seeking the Kingdom of Heaven and the justice it stands for, and then God will provide for our every need.

Now often we look over our shoulders and become jealous of those who are raking in the doe. That is because we think that money will fulfill their lives. Looking over our shoulders like that makes us slip and fall.[2]

Now I ask myself, “How come I have so much road rash?” (When the boys fall off their skateboards and get all scraped up, they call it “road rash.”)

Well, it’s easy to say “Don’t worry!” but there are a whole bundle of things to worry about. “How will we pay our bills if the gas price keeps going up? What good are dollars if their value keeps going down? What happens if I can’t pay my mortgage and they foreclose on our house? How can we afford to pay for college tuition, when it is so high? How do I keep my medical coverage should I get laid off? What if my pension money runs out?” Wow, it is hard not to worry about all these questions in our lives. Jesus boils the questions down to, “What will I eat, What will I drink, What will I wear?” and says, don’t worry. But my worries overflow: “How will I pay off my credit cards? If I’m unemployed, how will I find a job?”

In our society we certainly have reason to worry; but not if God is our champion. That is the reason we can be as trusting as the birds and get dressed more beautifully than Easter Lilies. God rules over us through Christ and he will fulfill all God’s promises to us. “Christ is our champion, my friend! He’ll fight for us to the end.” The American dream might fail, but not the dream of the Kingdom of Heaven; that dream will come true. Thus we have no need to worry. We only have to worry if we think Obama, Hilary, and John can keep their promises. They can’t. I don’t have to be a prophet to predict that.

A president does not have that kind of power – nor a power elite, if you are into conspiracy theories. Nor do people at the grass roots have the power. Would you repeat the words of the prayer with me: “For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever and ever! Amen.”

We don’t have to worry or get anxiety attacks, because in the words of Isaiah, “Thus saith the Lord, ‘In the time of favor’” (and God is always in time, that’s the kairos,) “I have answered you, I have helped you with the day of salvation.”

Check out all of the promises God makes to you in that Old Testament lesson. I‘ll mention only two. God cares about us like a mother nursing her child and God did not only have an exodus back with Moses. He had one through the wilderness in Isaiah’s time and God has an exodus for you and me as well.

So like a mother tenderly nurses her infant at the breast, God will tenderly love us and care for all of our needs. Even should a mother forget her child, God will never forget or neglect us.

Hello! This is the Maker of heaven and earth speaking. Jesus says, “O ye of little faith!” Do you really think someone in Washington will think of you, let alone care for you tenderly? They might if they seek righteousness and have Jesus Christ as their champion. If they too are seeking the Kingdom of God and its justice, then the Creator of heaven and earth can also work through them. But usually they have taken the other way.

If you believe that money will fulfill your needs and all you need is more of it. Jesus will say, “O ye of little faith!” (And I’m preaching to myself as well, do you hear me?) No, first seek the Kingdom of God and its righteousness. Confess that Jesus Christ is Lord and allow him to orient your life and get into the campaign that Christ is running to make the Kingdom of Heaven real amongst us. But you have to believe it. It takes some faith. When that becomes the first priority of your life, then you have no need to worry. Isaiah speaks of an exodus that God will perform for you, should you be pushed to the place where you find no escape.

Luther has an interesting take on the exodus. In the creation story, God separated the waters from the waters and then divided the waters of the oceans to form the continents. God commanded the wind and the waves, “You can pound on the shore, but you cannot reach my people! They shall walk and live and have their being on dry land.” That is the miracle of the exodus God performed for all the nations of the world even before the one God performed over the Red Sea for the Children of Israel. So don’t you think he can find a place for you feet to go?

Ah, we worry ourselves to death, we go under the water, because we do not trust the God of the exodus, who draws us out of the water as his people and keeps us safe on dry land.

We certainly have lots to worry about if we trust in our money. Remember, even on our money, it says, “In God we trust.” Well, you say, “The dollar is now only 57 cents on the Euro and countries are converting their money into Euros instead of dollars and the United States has lost a good deal of its standing in the world!?!” But we are seeking the kingdom of heaven, remember? And we confess Jesus Christ to be our champion, to be our Lord. Our lives are committed to his righteousness, to his way of loving and sharing. As we say in Christ Lutheran Church, “God calls us to live and share the amazing love and grace of Jesus Christ with all people.” What a wonderful mission statement!

Doing that at home, at work, at school, at play and we can shake our worries and become worry-free. No anxiety attacks necessary! In their place we have a robust faith, a full measure, packed down and overflowing bushel basket full of faith, the good faith through which God provides for us. And what a wonderful God! Even when we are faithless, Christ is faithful. Even when we are untrustworthy, Christ remains trustworthy.

Just look at the birds. They neither reap nor sow. They are justified by grace. And see how the Father in Heaven cares for them. They don’t accumulate wealth and put it into the bank or risk their seeds on the dogs, horses, Las Vegas, the lottery, or the stock market. They don’t put their seeds into hedge funds, but God takes care of them.

They are justified by grace and don’t have to sow or reap; like the lilies, don’t have to toil or spin, but their good faith lets God provide all kinds of gifts through them. Yes, consider the lilies. All the movie stars posing on the red carpets with their expensive gowns and dresses are not arrayed like one of these. Coming back from Philadelphia, I’ve really gotten into the flowers here, especially the roses. Gaze at them and let them fill your soul with their beauty. Just take in the fragrance of a rose and it will witness to the One who is richer and wiser than Solomon and whose Kingdom of Heaven you’ve been baptized into.

That’s why we need not worry. Jesus makes it clear that our Father in Heaven knows our every need and through the Kingdom of Heaven, ruled by the Creator of heaven and earth, all our needs will be met, and our souls will be quieted, like a baby is quieted at its mother’s breast.

It is so easy to lose sight of the heaven of grace over us and lapse into that little faith that places its hopes in money or the government in Washington, or even makes our private lives be an end all, while we are supposed to be campaigning for Christ. We fix on this world as if Jesus never proclaimed that the Kingdom of Heaven, never baptized us into it, never taught us that “we do not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”[3]

Jesus knows how hard this faith is. You and I need to pray God for a big new measure of it, an increase of good faith in the One God sent to save us. That faith will take a big bite out of our worry. Because Jesus knows how hard that is for us, he says, “Take it one day at a time.” The old words were: “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” Don’t import all the troubles of tomorrow into your today. God will provide for us, as God did in all our yesterdays. With utter confidence, let us also place all our tomorrows into God’s hands. And when God raises up his hands to bless us, we will see our names inscribed on the palms of his hands, Isaiah says, for God does not only know our names, but also all our needs in order to provide for them. Amen.

Divine Attributes A Lecture by Dr. Peter Krey 3/13/2006

Philosophy of Religion, Diablo Valley College, California – March 13^th 2006

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam argue that God is a divine personal being who has created the entire universe, not out of need but out of sheer generosity and goodness. God is all-powerful, all knowing, ubiquitous, and perfectly morally good. The history of the world and the universe does not unfold in chance, but in divine providence. The amount of control God takes is controversial but God tries to attract all humanity by love and friendships and bring human being to a culmination of fulfillment.

It is controversial whether or not God possesses the attribute of necessary existence, i.e., to hold that it is impossible for God not to exist. Against it some argue a necessary existence is incoherent proving for them that God does not exist.

What about omnipotence? Aquinas argues that God can bring any state of affairs into existence, if it is logically possible. Omnipotence has brought many a puzzle— just the same way God’s foreknowledge has vis-à-vis (in relation to) human freedom of will.

What does it mean that God is eternal? Is it timelessness— is God’s existence outside of the realm of the time and change that we inhabit or is God everlasting— meaning that God exists and acts in time, but a time that neither has a beginning nor end. Perhaps the latter is closer to the Biblical position.

There are also alternative conceptions of the deity from process theology or theism that see God guiding the world but not controlling it. The a Hindu view is “monistic” and “pantheistic”— Brahman, the sole ultimate reality is impersonal, underlying the whole universe— a unity that proves the multiplicity is illusionary Maya.

John Hick tries to refute J. N. Findlay who put the ontological argument into reverse, to say that it actually disapproved the existence of God, in his much discussed article, “Can God’s existence be disproved?”(p. 133).[1] A being, who is logically necessary cannot exist, because existence to empiricists has to be factual and contingent, not necessary.
On the top of (p.134) Findlay has his four reasons,

(1) an adequate object of religious attitudes must be conceived as a being infinitely superior to ourselves in value and worth. (Accordingly, Findlay refers to this object as “he” rather than as “it.”)

(2) He must be conceived as being who is unique: God must not merely be one of a class of beings of the same kind, but must stand in an asymmetrical relationship to all other objects as the source of whatever value they may have,

(3) then, says Findlay, the adequate object of religious attitudes must be conceived as not merely happening to exist, but as existing necessarily; if he merely happened to exist
he would not be worthy of the full unqualified attitude of worship.

And (4) this being must be conceived as not merely happening to possess his various characteristics, but as possessing them in some necessary manner.

Points (3) and (4) are used by Findlay to argue in the theoretical work of Hume that it is absurd to speak of such a being existing, because no proposition of the form “exists” can be analytically true. Thus, the a priori existence in a necessary manner is self-contradictory.

Hick argues against Findlay pointing out that he has two premises, a philosophical one that no existential proposition can be an analytic truth and secondly, a theological one, that an adequate object of worship must be logically necessary. Hick finds the former true, but the latter premise false. It is like saying a circle must be square; it is an improper use of language. God is not an inferred entity but an experienced reality for the people in the Bible. Logical necessity was a completely alien philosophical puzzle to them. They experienced the being of God, whose non-existence to them was unthinkable, in a tradition that sees God as a necessary being. It is not a logical, but an ontological factual necessity that made God an adequate object of worship. Kant speaks of a “material necessity in existence” and not merely of formal and logical necessity (p. 136). He sometimes calls it causal necessity, participating in the universal causal system of nature. Anselm had the concept of a necessary being first, “It is impossible to conceive of a being which cannot be conceived not to exist” (p. 136). His rejoinder to Gaunilo is that a beautiful, perfect island can be conceived not to exist because it has a beginning or end or composition of parts, and does not [in] whatever, at any place or at any time exist as a whole. “That being alone on the other hand, cannot be conceived not to exist, in which any conception discovers neither beginning nor end nor composition of parts …and which any conception finds always and everywhere as a whole” (p. 136). What Anselm is speaking about is far more than logical necessity, but the essence of the contrasting notion of God as sheer, ultimate, unconditioned reality without origin or end.

Hick finds necessary being in Aquinas, too. Contingency is transiency or temporal finitude and by contrast, non-contingency is the necessary being of God, an existence with neither beginning nor end, in other words, an eternal being. God’s existence is one that is in and of itself and not dependent on anything else for his existence. In Latin, existence without any external cause is (a se esse) being from itself. That is where Hick’s gets the word “aseity,” that God is not from nothing, but God is through himself and from himself being whatever he is. Thus, God’s aseity makes the divine exclusive of dependence on anything whatever.

Moses Maimonides argues the use of the “way of negation,” because to grow in the knowledge of God is to increase the number of attributes that you know cannot be ascribed to God, because God is superlatively more than these. Those people who argue that God does not have a body are closest, those who do not know, are further away; and those who argue God has a body are farthest from knowing God. But we divested God of corporeality, but not the modes of corporeality, namely, the accidents (p. 138).

The Torah, says Maimonides, speaks in human language. But how can human language speak of the attributes of God to predicate divine perfection, of God, who is above every attributive qualification? (p. 139)

As with the functions of fire (p.139) and human rationality (p. 139-140) their many functions do not really point to the true nature of each, i.e., of fire and rationality. Thus the description of God by means of negation is the correct description “that is not affected by an indulgence in facile language and does not imply any deficiency with respect to God in general or in any particular mode” (p.140). Affirmations, however, associate with God that which he is not and imply a deficiency to God.

In a certain respect negations are attributes and they differ from affirmative attributes and God has to the described through negations. (Vocabulary: Quiddity— is that, which makes a thing what it is.) (Top of p.141) Maimonides proves that God cannot have any affirmative attribute in any respect.

Like fire burning, the existence of (the Supreme Being), which is his essence, suffices not only for being existent, but also for many other existences flowing from it. The overflow of divine existence issues into all the other extent sentient and non-sentient existences (p. 141, but using my own words).

attributes

1. of essence

2. of actions

Air is odorless, tasteless, and colorless, so what is it? What makes it that which it is, i.e., gives it quiddity. See the middle of (p.142) “What then should be the state of our intellects when they inspire to apprehend him…?” An existent to which none of the things brought into existence resembles.

When intellects contemplate God their apprehension turns into incapacity (bottom p.142). Their knowledge turns into ignorance, eloquent speech turn into weary words.

When the attributes of things are predicated, then the more they are particularized by increasing attributes, the more one predicates, the closer one comes to the apprehension of a thing’s true reality. For God, however, the apprehension comes nearer with every increase in the negations regarding him (top p. 143).

Maimonides subtracts or negates corporeality and affection and continuing in this way— is to come nearer to God. Look at Augustine and his mother— they go in a negative way in their words all the way to the voice of God. Augustine and his mother ‘stood alone leaning in a window, which looked inwards to the

garden within the house where we were staying. [Augustine continues]

There we talked together, she and I alone in deep joy….and while we were thus talking of His Wisdom and panting for it, with all the effort of our heart we did for one instant attain to touch it; then sighing and leaving the first fruits of our spirit bound to it, we returned to the sound of our own tongue, in which words must have a beginning and end….What we said is this: “If to any man the tumult of the flesh grew silent, silent the images of the earth, sea, and air, and if the heavens grew silent, and the very soul grew silent to herself, and, by not thinking of self, mounted beyond self; if all dreams and images grew silent, and every tongue and every symbol – everything that passes away…and in their silence He alone spoke to us, not by them but by Himself: so that we should hear His Word, not by any tongue of the flesh, not in the voice of an angel, not in the sound of thunder, not in the darkness of a parable – but that we should hear Himself . . .should hear Himself and not them.”[2]

The via negativa one might say, subtracts every

positive attribute of the creation to end up with the essence of the One left thereafter, as Augustine does to hear the naked voice of God.[3]

George Mavrodes looks into puzzles of omnipotence. Can God make a stone that he is unable to lift? If he cannot, then there is something that God is unable to do. If God can do it, then there is still something God cannot do, namely lift the stone once he made it.

Mavrodes helps with Aquinas right at his beginning. Aquinas tries to clarify the meaning of omnipotence, by saying that it is doing all things that are not self-contradictory. What does being able to draw a square circle have to with omnipotence? The answer is nothing. The law of non-contradiction leaves God’s omnipotence in the proper universe of discourse in which the teaching is intended to be.

The dilemma of the stone is also about doing something self-contradictory— and to reply that God cannot, does not damage God’s omnipotence (top p.148).

That a stone becomes too heavy to lift by a power that can lift anything is Self- contradictory. It resembles infinite power to create and infinite power to lift, which has something of Zeno in it. Zeno also featured the contradictions that are associated with infinites.

Boethius follows Nelson Pike because he shows where God’s knowledge from out of the eternal touches everyone of our moments of time, but does not make our actions necessary thereby nor control them. Nelson Pike argues that foreknowledge in one sense really means that all actions have to be determined or controlled by the eternal God, who knows them and believed they would occur. Augustine separates God’s foreknowledge from controlling power.

Nicholas Wolterstorff takes issue with the Hellenization of the Biblical God. God acts in time and is completely involved in our lives and in our history. Greek philosophy places God outside of time, into eternity, where God is impassive, immutable, and detached. This concept of God is very much like Aristotle— the unmoved mover of pure actuality completely uninvolved with the creation. Wolterstorff shows that the Biblical God is involved in temporal events like sending Moses back to Egypt, like participating in the Exodus, like visiting and dwelling on earth in Jesus Christ and being involved in the resurrection. Thus God shares our temporality and does not stay aloof above it, and this means that God is everlasting, but not eternal. Wolterstorf’s distinction attempts to prevent the emasculation of God by Greek philosophy.

Perhaps the Christian teachings about God as a Trinity, which are, however, also much influenced by Greek philosophy, play a role here. Boethius speaks of the peculiar simplicity of God, that Maimonides assumes as well. But Christians speak of the complexity of the Triune God, where the immanent Trinity may well reside in eternity, but the economic Trinity has complete commerce with the temporal.

John Cobb and David Ray Griffin follow Alfred North Whitehead in Process Theology. God’s love is not dispassionate and it is shown only in doing good things for the loved one. God’s love is also responsive, as well as sympathetically compassionate. A “love” that is devoid of genuine sensitivity to the deepest needs of the “loved ones” is problematic for the authors.[4] God’s love is not that of a “do-gooder.” Not because God does not do good, but because “do-gooders” go around trying to impose their own notions of the good that needs doing, without any sensitive responsiveness to the real desires and needs of those they think they are helping (second edition, p. 151).

So as divine absoluteness cannot be the whole story, process theologians speak of divine relativity as well—if people suffer, God suffers, too (second edition, bottom p. 151). The authors disagree with the doctrine of divine simplicity— which I just also tried to counter with greater insight into the Christian Trinity. For the process theologian Hartshorne, God has two poles: an abstract essence and a concrete actuality (Ibid.). As the description of each— one absolute, independent, unchangeable, abstract essence while the other is temporal, relative, dependent and constantly changing, concrete actuality (Ibid.). This teaching they call God’s divine Dipolarity.

God is working to overcome evil and create goodness in the world. But God does not control everything with coercive power, but is persuasive with divine creative influence (p.154).

The moral trust is apt here in relation to control, because the divine creative activity involves risk. God provides an “initial aim,” but the human being can actualize him/herself from a range of inner impulses, among which, the person is free to choose. So evil can come about and it is not incompatible with God’s beneficence to all his creatures (top p.155).

If we truly love others, we do not seek to control them and while traditional theology places God’s power over God’s love, these process theologians place God’s love over His power.

This article is very rewarding. The image of God is separated from coercive control and the essence of God is declared to be persuasive influence, which (from my point of view) if embedded in trust, should win more and more ground in the universe of human experience— so that coercive control recedes not only in our relationship but also in international ones. Control is a last resort to be used with a sense of regret rather than from the thrill that comes about from a sense of imitating the Deity (p. 155), i.e., playing God. As Luther said, “Let God be God!” Those that play god misunderstand the Infinite One completely, too.

J. P. Moreland explaining the Kalam argument also uses the big bang theory and the second law of thermodynamics to support the claim that the universe had a beginning, i.e., it could not be infinite. For the most part the theory of the oscillating universe has been put to rest. It requires that the universe be twice as dense as it actually is. Thus the big bang is the event that begins the universe, first a dimensionless geometric point that is exploding into the expanding universe we inhabit. If the universe would be contracting and expanding, i.e., oscillating infinitely, then the energy and heat loss, according to the second law thermodynamics, would already have spelled the “heat death” of the universe. Thus these two scientific theories support the claim that the universe had a beginning.

Because something does not come from nothing, it is reasonable to believe that the world was caused. Events have a definite beginning and end, and they do not happen if they are not caused. God on the other hand does not need a cause, since God is neither an event nor a contingent being. God is a necessary being, who is uncaused. It is a category fallacy to ask for the cause of God since this is really asking for the cause of an uncaused being. (P. 206) Finally when asking about the necessary and sufficient conditions for the cause that began the universe, it has to be personal. For a physicalist to maintain they are not personal, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the event that began the universe had to exist from all eternity in a timeless, changeless state. But that does not explain why the event that began all things happened. The only reasonable explanation is that a spontaneous free act of a person or agent caused the event that began the universe. Q.E.D.(P. 208)

16^th of May, 2008

Today’s New York Times had an interesting article about Chinese superstition spread by bloggers over the Internet. (It is on page A 10 and authored by Andrew Jacobs.) In the days before the earthquake in the Sichuan Province, the stories go, that ponds inexplicably drained, cows flung themselves against their enclosures, and swarms of toads invaded the town of Mianzhu. The latter event was confirmed and took place two days before the earthquake. 3,000 people died in Mianzhu and 4,500 are still missing.

The draining of a lake would have something to do with the quake, but the prescience of the cows or toads may well be a fallacy of thought, or perhaps not. The fallacy in reasoning that I am referring to is false cause: post hoc, ergo propter hoc. In English that means “after which, therefore because of which.” Because the earthquake happened after these events, they therefore happened because of them. But my reasoning is not yet precise.

A draining of a lake, if true, would be correspondence; it corresponded with the seismic events and could have indicated some geological event was afoot. But that is, if it really occurred.

The argument is not, in terms of the other cases, a matter of cause, but whether the cows and the toads were prescient of the coming quake and thus could have given the people an indication that it was coming.

Let’s step back. Empiricism, that reliable knowledge derives from the senses, and rationalism, that it derives from logical reasoning, need to be aided and abetted by the scientific method in order to determine whether or not an event is a false cause or a real one. Just because something happens after something else, does not mean that it caused it. After the people of an ancient city built a statue of a god, an earthquake hit. They tore it down, reasoning that it had caused the event. Superstition is rife with false causes.

But the argument is not that the toads, for example, caused the earthquake, but that they were prescient of its coming and their swarming into the town was a portent warning the population that a natural disaster was about to come. The Internet bloggers argue that the government did not care enough to warn, evacuate, and protect the people.

First of all, the sign that the toads represented was negative, and interpreted as such by the frightened population, but otherwise very ambiguous. How would the government or any sages for that matter, know that it meant a coming earthquake and not a fire, storm, or other natural catastrophe?

Two days before the earthquake, when the toads had swarmed into the town, the director of the Mianzhu Forestry Bureau tried to calm the terror of the residents on TV by saying that the mass migration of the toads was a normal part of their breeding season. That, of course, does not seem reasonable, because the people would not have reacted with fear, if such a swarm of toads was a normal occurrence. The people had insisted that the invasion of toads was a harbinger of bad things.

Here is where the scientific method has to come in. could animal life in some way become prescient of coming natural disasters? Perhaps that is the rational reason behind the ancients’ trying to read portents and signs from the flight of birds. In the sixteenth century, abnormal births of animals also were read as portents of evils to come. Our genetic understanding of mutations clears up that superstition.

But animals may well be closer to nature than human beings and may react more sensitively to indications of a coming catastrophe. The ability of dogs to read and understand smells, far surpasses ours and lets them guide us to people buried under the earthquake rubble. Birds may have instincts attuned to magnetic forces that guide their flights. The problem becomes that such signs may not be ambiguous about whether or not a coming event is negative, but it is ambiguous about what event is indicated. Stories go that animals were aware of the coming Christmas Tsunami and ran for higher ground. Such an occurrence is hard to read accurately and there is no evidence that the story is true. I myself have been awakened by dogs barking very strangely in the night and then the jolt of an earthquake hit our house that sounded like a truck.

It might be the case that in our separation from nature, creatures more fully embedded in nature, may have some prescience to natural catastrophes that we do not have. Meteorologically, science and technology have given us great advance; it is wished that the victims of the Tsunami and Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar could have had it! We are not there yet with earthquakes, however, and portents remain ambiguous.

Our bodies, however, sometimes know more than we consciously know. Thus our dreams often contain symbols that give fruitful instruction at the incomprehensible edges of our lives. When a bright cross covered the full moon in a deep blue sky in Gruenberg, Silesia, (Schlesien) during World War II, my father, a pastor, was asked by the people to interpret it. All those who gazed at the cross felt that it was a portent, a sign of things to come. “It foretells a time of great sorrow.” he said. I think it crystallized my father’s foreboding that the Russian army was closing in and the days would become very evil.

Despite the kindly bishop, who calmed the people and tried to persuade my father not to take fight, the family packed all its belongings and left. I was one year old at the time so we were a family of eleven. Dreadful things did happen when the Russians Army took revenge on the Germans. My father, who always seemed to be praying, had read the sign accurately.

Here I was going to just describe a fallacy of thinking and look at where I’ve ended up!

From my Dissertation March 10, 2001

Luther speaks about change versus improvement:

“Often have I said that change and improvement are two different things (but who will believe me until they experience it?): one lies in human hands and God‘s ordaining; the other in God‘s hands and gracious favor.“

From Luther’s Commentary on Psalm 101, written in 1534.

WA 51:258.22‑24.

I you do not know the way scholars refer to the Weimar Edition of Luther’s Works,

“WA 51:258.22‑24” means:

Volume 51 in the Weimar Edition of Luther‘s Works, page 258, lines 22-24.

The quotation in Luther’s Early New High German:

Denn ich hab nu offt gesagt (wer wolt mir aber gleuben, bis mans [23] erfare?), Das Endern und Bessern sind zweierley. Eines stehet jnn der menschen [24] hende und Gottes verhengen, Das ander jnn Gottes henden und gnaden.

WA 51:258.22-24.

As taken from my dissertation:

The direct action of God is so important, because God alone brings improvement, while humans bring only change. In Luther‘s Commentary for Psalm 101 (1534), a Fürstenspiegel, ( a mirror for princes) for the elector John Frederick, the Magnanimous, he wrote:

“change and improvement are two different things: one lies in human hands and God‘s ordaining; the other in God‘s hands and gracious favor.“^[1]

Now directly from the WA:

Denn ich hab nu offt gesagt (wer wolt mir aber gleuben, bis mans erfare?), Das Endern

Und Bessern sind zweierley. Eines stehet jnn der menschen hende und Gottes verhengen,

Das ander jnn Gottes henden und gnaden.

To put that in modern German:

„Denn ich habe nun oft gesagt (wer wollt mir aber glauben, bis man’s erfahre?):

Das Verändern und Verbessern sind zeierlei. Eines steht in der Menschen Hände und Gottes Verhängen. Das Andere in Gottes Händen und Gnaden.“ ^[2]

I tried to explain how moral evil often plays a role in natural evil experienced in natural disasters and the theory that God is not finished with the creation yet. We need to participate in God’s continuous creation and not waste the earth’s resources with war and destruction.

If the blog is too long, read it in portions. I can’t put one in everyday. I read the New York Times thoroughly and also entered something about the gospel song writer, Dottie Rambo and then at the end, I relate Rauschenberg’s understanding of change. That could give you a laugh.

Diablo Valley College, 2005

The pages being referred to in this lecture come from the textbook for our course: Michael Peterson, William Hasker, Bruce Reichenbach, and David Basinger, editors, Philosophy of Religion, Third Edition, (Oxford University Press, 2007).

A definition of religion offered by Peterson, et. al.: “a set of beliefs, actions, and experiences, both individual and collective, organized around some idea of Ultimate Reality that is recognized as sacred and in relation to which persons enter into a transformative process” (page 1).

Religion’s realists maintain that when they discuss the existence of God and the properties of God they mean to refer to a real being with real properties. So, if such a God or these properties did not exist, their assertions would be false (Peterson, p. 5).

There are many kinds of realism; for example, ethical realism is another kind. Ethical realists believe their terms and normative claims pertain to actual realities in the moral realm, referring to something in the very structure of how things are (p. 6). Subjectivists on the other hand, believe these terms and normative claims only refer to feelings of private preference. Right and wrong represent only approval or non-approval as sentiments (Hume).

Some scientists are non-realist instrumentalists. They consider their terms merely convenient constructs that enable a theory to predict testable results.

A non-realist in religion denies that religious belief and statements are about objectively existing entities (p. 6). Religion is a human creation and human beings are not a divine creation. Religion makes people function better in society but spiritual things and events are not beyond ordinary experience. Proponents of this position are Nietzsche, Freud, and William James.

Non-realists ground religion sometimes in psychological experience and sometimes in the structure and demands of society.

Emile Durkheim argues that religion is essentially a social phenomenon. Religion, he argues, lies at the heart of societies that developed. Society uses religion to make people comply and there is no metaphysical ground of religion—it is a purely natural, not a supernatural phenomenon. Religion is created by and for humans and must be structured as a social discipline.

The basic sense of religion changes from this perspective (top p. 7). From my point of view, the mystery of there being something instead of nothing (Leibniz) is placed into human agency, and it is patently false that humans have created the universe.

Wittgenstein introduces a third perspective, both a critique of the realists and non-realists.
We should study the grammar of belief, which involves the dynamic, living context of religion’s application (p. 7). All beliefs and not just religious beliefs find their meaning in their use and not in their relation to an external object.

Returning to the sociologist, Emile Durkheim, he is an ethical and religious realist in another sense, because he considered religion and morality capable of objective study as social realities. Many questioned whether or not he could speak of objective ethical and religious facts. He counters those who argue that “it is not only paradoxical but ridiculous for us to compare the realities of the social world with those of the external world. But our critics have curiously misinterpreted the meaning and impact of this analogy, for it was not our intention to reduce the higher to the lower forms of being, but merely to claim for the higher forms a degree of reality at least equal to that which is granted the lower. We assert not that social facts are material things, but that they are things by the same right as material things, although they differ from them in type.”[1]

If Durkheim would allow spiritual forces in the innermost center of social forces, then although they would have to be taken in faith, a sociological interpretation of religion would not contradict the faith that God created the universe. If sociology claims that religion is a human social product, then Leibniz’s religious question about why there is something and not nothing, how this universe has come to be, and how it is we find ourselves in it, are left completely bereft of the Ultimate Reality, which Paul Tillich would say, is the Ground and source of our being. We certainly did not create the universe and even when we discover some of the physical laws and mathematical equations by scientific measurements, we are still struggling to understand our universe and our lives in it. It is as if we are struggling to understand a great mind that preceded ours with an ultimate epistemology implicit in the ontology of the internal and external realities our conscious scientific, knowledge accumulating minds are awakening in.

“There is a there there,” to quote Gertrude Stein, and we find ourselves as part of it and scientific materialism does not have the appropriate awe deriving from an inner bond with the source and ground of that Ultimate Reality. I believe that this awe is the source of worship and morality. For it to be authentic awe, however, it should never snuff out the quest but motivate the quest for further scientific enquiry, both of human life, nature, and their inter-relationship. Return to the definition of religion above and you will see why Durkheim found religion to be a ubiquitous phenomenon for study throughout the whole world.

The Problem of Evil— Dr. Peter Krey (Diablo Valley College, 2005): A review of a chapter in Pojman and one essay in Peterson’s Philosophy of Religion, and some of my own thoughts, merely touching upon many themes on the subject.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s (1821-1881) story concerning the problem of evil is poignant, but the protest of Ivan Karamazov to his religious brother Alyosha, I believe, is misguided. Ivan relates a gruesome story: When an eight-year-old boy wounded a general’s favorite hunting dog by throwing a rock at him, the general lets the dogs hunt the boy and they tear him to pieces. Ivan cannot accept a world where such incidents occur. He thus cannot accept God’s entrance ticket.[1]

Ivan fails to see that he is refusing to participate in the goodness of God, refusing to get involved and make a stand for God’s gracious love and goodness, thus opening the negative space for the way the general is. The torture, the refusal to value the life of a peasant boy, making it equal to the wounded paw of a hunting dog, all of these conditions, attitudes, malignant dispositions of the human heart, are alienated from God, and are turning the blessings intended by God into distorted, ugly curses on what could be such a beautiful and marvelous creation. But the position taken by Ivan also alienates him.

We have to get to the heart of the protest here against the existence of God, but first, just one sentence on Epicurus’ paradox (341-270 BCE): it fails to take into account the rebellion of the creation against God, the fall and the alienation of creatures from their creator, and from my point of view, those that are the doers of evil are accompanied by those who, by non-involvement, alienate humankind and human nature further from its intended goodness.

That God is all-powerful, omnipotent and omni-benevolent, and omniscient can be considered a theistic Greek philosophical influence on the scriptural presentation of God and not the heart of the scriptural tradition. We do not have to accept the Process Theological conception of a limited God, however, because our standards cannot pretentiously measure the God whose sovereign authority measures and evaluates us.

Pojman criticizes the assumption that omniscience entails God’s control of the future thereby obviating free will. He notes that the “epistemic domain does not affect ontological ones” (p. 69). In other words, someone can know what is going to happen without that entailing controlling it.

Another consideration in the omnipotence attribute is that all-powerful does not entail doing the logically impossible. It does not mean God has to be able to square a circle or make 2+2=5. If God is also under the law of non-contradiction, does the logic of Epicurus prevail over God as well? It is similar to the question of Socrates: “Is it good because God commanded it, or does God command it because it is good?” I believe this issue becomes resolved because goodness flows out of the nature of God, logic is God’s ordained structure of thought and reason, and justice is required by God and also is God’s consummate nature (Macintyre’s contribution in Peterson, et. al., in The Philosophy of Religion, p. 621). Anomalies will exist from our perspective, however, because it again involves the paradoxes that occur in the interface of the finite with the infinite.

Perhaps the goodness of God gets into these paradoxes as well, considering the relationship of infinite and finite goodness. To say that God is not completely or perfectly good because of them, makes us have to call a Demiurge into existence, as the source of material evil—relegating God to all spiritual good and helpless before the Demiurge. Or there is God on one side and the devil on the other—two sides of the some coin. That kind of a schizophrenic God cannot be God, because then God would not be good. It could well be that our false ultimates, false gods, our distortions of God, that perceive God as wrathful, punitive, and apathetic, need to be overcome to allow us to see the real face of God in the self-less unconditional love shown by Jesus Christ for all humans.

Luther spoke of the Deus revelatus vs. the Deus absconditus —the revealed God and the hidden God. In this sense, those who rebel against God experience God as a devil—and those who worship and obey God, undistorted by our self-deception, receive God’s grace and benevolence. Now there is a difference between God in god-self and our perception and experience of God. When completely alienated and rebelling in a distorted state against God, God will appear as a monster in the sky, and the good forces become externalized and they are encountered as a beast, ready to tear the rebel’s heart apart. But making friends with the beast, internalizes it, transforming it into powerful compassion, and changes the heavens, placing a gracious God up in the sky, one who lifts a person up in the creative powers of grace that continue rescuing the creation from its evil rebellion against the good that God created it in.

Thus, evil happens because of an externalized enmity with the powerfully positive, continuously creative forces of God—distorting them and turning them into evil.

That there is evil is mostly not denied. Some evil is moral and some is natural. Natural or “surd evil” is that which is irrational (p. 71) and is what unredeemed nature does of her own accord: hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, etc. Moral evil is what humans do to each other. Humans tear each other up like wolves, and to make this statement really insults wolves, because they are in no wise as bad humans can be.

Now both evils are intimately related, because poverty and neglect—the perversion of war, waste the earth resources on destruction and prevent human beings from using them to change the earth into a more human-friendly place.

Pojman also refutes the idea that good needs the contrast of evil, that a balance is required. Properties, he notes, do not require their opposites to be able to exist (p. 71).

The free will defense asserts that it is logically impossible for God to create free creatures and guarantee that they will never do evil. Because we agree that it is good to create morally responsible creatures—but then, they have to be free in order to choose good or evil.

A libertarian view of the freedom of the will claims that people are free to choose and they are causally underdetermined. Determinism in opposition claims there is no free will and compatibilism attempts to reconcile freedom of action with determinisms. If, according to Pojman, you are committed to the last two positions, then the free-will defense does not help (p. 72). For an analogy of God and humans in compatibilism, if an adult is watching children, then the adult is still responsible to limit the evil the children do. Compatibilism is a kind of soft determinism that makes it possible to keep moral responsibility, but it is not as robust a defense against the problem of evil as the unrestricted free-will argument (p. 73).

The theodicy defense was first formulated by G. W. Leibniz (1646-1716). It states that all evil will contribute to the greater good and despite appearances, this is the best of all possible worlds. John Hick continues the argument today; he argues that the world is wide open to evil in order to use the world as a place for soul making, which involves the spiritual perfection of our characters as persons (p. 74). That seems to hark back to Socrates—“Ye Men of Athens” speech, where he charges that they think only of wealth, property, and honor, and think nothing about the improvement of their souls.

I believe that God did not make the world as a completed creation. As Irenaeus of Lyons (130-200 CE) argued, humans were made in the image of God, but they do not yet have God’s likeness—they are incomplete—and in God continuous creation—(to insert a Martin Luther phrase) they must become fully perfected in God’s likeness. In our world a second and harder stage of the creation is taking place according to John Hick (p. 74). What sense would this creation make as a “play pen paradise,” as a hedonistic romper room—where all our actions had no consequences? The whole of human development would become morally stagnant (p. 75).

Pojman argues against this Theodicy defense, that there seems to be very much more evil in the world than necessary for what Hick is theorizing. There is seemingly a gratuitous amount of evil and Hick might be overestimating human capacity to use evil for good (p. 75).

Pojman does not mention the theological insight of Augustine’s happy sin or the “felicitous Fall.” God gives human beings free will and God’s glory consists in being able to turn the evil that humans do into good. Thus, Adam and Eve’s fall made it possible for them to grow into a maturity outside of the guarded and protected confines of paradise, (not quite a “play pen paradise,” because there was the tree of good and evil tempting them). In the case of the Joseph Narrative, that his brothers almost kill him, that he is “sold down the river” into slavery, and that he is framed for a rape he did not do, are all evils that God changes into a blessing. It prepares Joseph for saving all the Egyptians and even neighboring people from dying of hunger in a famine and then he succeeds in bringing about a change of heart in the murderous brothers. Joseph demonstrates how tough love can lead hard hearts to repentance.

Thus it is the glory of God to change the evil we humans do into good. In that way, the most brutal instrument of torture and execution—the Roman cross, becomes changed into a symbol of the greatest love the world has ever known—and into a symbol for the continuing of redemptive suffering that overcomes violence, evil and other suffering in the world. Pojman does not mention the divine capacity to change evil into good.

There is still evil beyond these bounds, and from my point of view, it is part of the chaos that has not yet been redeemed by continuous creation. In the Christian religion, in addition, the incarnation is also an important strategy of God against evil. Marilyn McCord Adams argues that in the crucifixion God in Christ suffers torture and evil and dies like us, to identify with us and thereby to overcome evil, suffering, violence, war, and death (p. 79), all by means of the cross.

As a boy was being hanged by the Nazi’s in a concentration camp, one prisoner asked a believer, “Now, where is God? Where is your God now?” The believer replied, “Up there, being hanged by us.” In the incarnation, God becomes as vulnerable as the least of these—these victims, but thereby gives a way to become more than victorious.

The evolutionary source of evil—with nature being red in tooth and claw—reverts us to our animal nature, but we are not merely sentient, but have learned ethics that make us very human. We can be lifted up even into God, in a theosis—as Luther says—but we can also descend into an abyss of evil, a bottomless pit of brutality—we can be truly demonic. Thus we do not become fully human until filled by divine goodness, this from a believer’s point of view.