On Mother's Day this Year in our House: There's Cake, and then there's Raspberry Elegance

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

Tuesday May 10 and Saturday May 14, 2022

Just Another Psalm and Boom, There It Is, The Problem of Evil

In reading Psalm 98 today it occurred to me that if you ask most Christians what it says to them, what it means to them, it is that it is a way of expressing how they are thankful to God for when God does well by them (which means that when things go well they attribute that good to be something provided to them by a Benevolent Being). Then, too, if you asked them about what is happening when things go badly for them they would be perplexed because God’s goodness to them is not an act of charity but rather a character trait. And so there would be perhaps only two logical choices for why the sordidness arrives: one, God’s goodness has seen fit to provide badness for our own good. Or two, our badness deserves more badness because God’s goodness cannot withstand such badness. And there you have the classic answers to the vexation of evil. What’s troubling (to me, and the history of theology and philosophy) is that both are rationales constructed to let an Omnipotent God (the very definition of a god) off the hook for allowing (not really powerful in the end) or inciting (not really loving in the end) evil. 

Well then. I have a small mind and will not proport that what the paragraph above poured out on a Tuesday in May surmises things comprehensively when it comes to the vastness of why evil. But I will say it’s helpful to me as an encapsulation. 

But there is, alas, more. Or at least more to say. And so on the following Saturday, more: God chooses, not based on merit, but based on God’s decision. Not within any legal structure or system, but outside of it. So, a Zacchaeus (Corrupt Tax Worker) has just as much of a chance with God as a Nicodemus (Pristine Pharisee). It’s God’s decision, election, that is the operating system at work, not a legal structure, Law, that causes, drives God to select or bless. 

God chose Israel, without merit, just like God created the world, out of nothing, not legal structure, no merited reason. God is just simply life, given. Only God gives life and life is only what God gives. And this is precisely what evil is when law is the operating and guiding system – because God can and does choose to give life or take it and I, we, have nothing to say about it. I have no agency, not way to influence the choice being made for me. That is not good in my book. It is evil. 

Steven Paulson, in Luther’s Outlaw God, Volume 1 (Evil, Predestination and the Hiddenness of God), writes this:

“In hardening Pharaoh’s heart, we learn that the term necessity is confusing not just because it is inadequate to describe what Pharaoh’s heart actually wants but because it says two opposing things. Necessity says one thing concerning the law, but says something opposite this law when necessity concerns a promise. In the law, necessity means coercing a recalcitrant human will to will what God’s will wants in the future – that is, to get your untamed will to align with God’s steady, cultivated will and so finally accomplish the law’s demands. But Luther’s necessity means certain, and certain means opposite things in the law and in the gospel. In the law, certain means forced; in the gospel it means what no opposition, even my own, can overcome.”

God’s will of only giving life where and when God decides will not and cannot take any quarter. God doesn’t destroy the earth (the flood story) based on the law (humankind deserved it because they did bad things) but because something got in God’s way, something opposed the Life-Only Giving God. God doesn’t destroy the Canaanites (the promised land story) based on the law (they deserved it because they were, among other things, polytheistic) but because they got in the way of God’s deciding to give life to Israel. 

The fact that God destroys, “hardens Pharaoh’s heart,” should not offend us or scare us but rather alert us and encourage us to the fact and truth that God does not Lie. When God promises, nothing can or will get in the way of the promise. 

[A detour for a moment, if you will allow. One of the key tenet’s in Martin Luther’s working exegetical approach to Scripture (his day job was as a Bible scholar/professor) was something we describe today as the “plain sense of Scripture.” Luther engaged, and worked in opposition to what the classical biblical scholarship of the time (in the mode of Scholasticism) used as the accepted biblical interpretive approach: all Bible accounts/stories/narrative could and should be interpreted in one or more of four ways: the literal, the allegorical, the tropological (moral) and the anagogical (concerning future heaven/hell). Luther, said, no, don’t layer on these four meanings as options for understanding. Instead, just take the “plain sense.” Meaning, take it at face value. This means if a passage is obviously, plainly, figurative language (“The Lord is my Shepherd….”: God is not a literally a herder of sheep; God takes care of us like a herder cares for the flock), then let it be that. But if a passage says “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart,” as in our focus here, for example, then take it to mean what is plainly says. It does not say “God allowed Pharaoh’s heart to be hardened” or “Pharaoh hardened his own heart.” Erasmus, not a shabby theologian and philosopher himself, whom Luther famously engaged in his 1525 treatise, The Bondage of the Will, used just this trope to get God off the hook of what looks like God driving Pharaoh to do something Pharaoh himself didn’t want to do. Luther insisted the text means what it actually says, plainly:  It says God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. God did the deed. When you take a text to mean plainly what it says you run into some challenging stuff concerning God’s will and predestination and evil. But Luther wasn’t afraid of the challenge. Nor should we be. Here’s another example: Exodus 4 where God tries to kill Moses. Read it and wince.]

But wait! What if God chooses someone else and not me and I have nothing to say in the matter! What if I am Pharaoh? That is not fair – and of course that is true enough when you operate in the legal structure of deserving or not deserving. But if I operate in the illegal structure of gospel, the non-legal structure of gospel, nobody gets anything they deserve. They only get what God decides and, remember this,  God decides only Good. Will I be saved? I do not know based on my life. I only know (certainly!) based on God’s life. And God only creates and resurrects. 

God’s election, choosing, omnipotence of certainty (as opposed to the omnipotence of force) is distasteful, unnerving, evil to us because we have no agency, no power, no decision-making influence.

So how can we say God only creates/resurrects when too, God clearly killed Pharaoh? We can only say it if we say the killing is life-giving – and it was, it liberated Israel. But that’s not fair! What about poor Pharaoh!? He’s just a pawn? No, because the fact that God does not lie, that God makes good always on God’s Promise (creation of world and election of Israel are the meta-narrative) means that for even Pharaoh there is hope. Even after God took him out. The salvation story does not tell us God is fair, it tells us that God does not Lie, that God is only creating and resurrecting because that is what God promises. 

Because God is hope and we are not hope, there is always and only hope. For all people. For all creation (let’s get off the high horse of making everything about people and forgetting the flora and fauna and igneous rock, passim. Scripture says clearly all creation is God’s focus).

And so how will we know this – that there is hope delivered by God without a legal system, outside of a legal structure of fairness, that is not about fairness but about unconditional love, about only life and resurrection, that mercy is not leniency in the law but rather is the abolition of the law as the deciding factor for and in destiny?

We know all this in Jesus of Nazareth. 

Watch him, listen to him, follow him until you can’t take anymore, this unfettered and untethered (the law, and grave, cannot hold him) man who chose all the wrong people for the right reason, and you kill him (and so, just to be clear and absolute about it, you have nothing to do with your salvation – you destroyed it, you destroyed him).

It is not fair. He is only Good.

And good for nothing?

No, good for something, or more correctly, and precisely, good for you.

When he said “this is my body and blood” for you, he meant it. 

Again, how will we know there is hope for us outside of fairness, especially important and relevant to us when we know we haven’t been fair at all (we killed him and we kill him still) and, mind you, when we have been fair and think that that is going to get us somewhere? Only when it is given to us.

There is Hope. 

Take God’s word for it. 

Take it verbally – Scripture and Sermon (the very reason you must find yourself a good Preacher).

Take it visibly – Sacrament (the very reason you must get yourself to that wine and bread hebdomadally).

Just Take it. 

Lose the Fear. Find the Hope. 

Take it.