How should we respond to the theodicy question? Affirm traditional divine omnipotence or take the option of a dead/weak god? Neither seems quite right. The former doesn’t feel sensitive to the atrocities of history, the latter has to ignore all kinds of religious experience. One could say that although reports of the death of God have been greatly exaggerated they were not outright fabrications. What if the truth is closer to a via media here: God has some power but depends upon us for its exercise and realization? What if God constrains herself to act only when we make space for her in the world, only when we achieve some transparency to the divine, whether consciously or not? This could be summarized in the gospel saying in which Jesus could not do many miracles in his home town because of the lack of faith found there. This would perhaps go some way towards explaining why it is that religious experience seems to work on the personal level but not on larger group levels. It is possible for individuals to act on the basis of self-sacrificial love and kenotic service but it seems unrealistic, perhaps impossible, to posit this as a basis for a polity of any large size (as Niebuhr recognized). Hence I have been involved in decision in which a local church decided to give up money owed to it and to forgive qua a group, to take two examples. Yet churches, which are in theory founded on such kenotic ethics, to embody and preserve them, at the larger institutional level find it difficult to work according to what should be their own logic. And so such divine kenotic logic is almost never seen at work at national or international levels, in which a Hobbesian state of nature seems to hold sway and politics is inseparable from violence (as Weber pointed out in ‘Politics as a Vocation’).
It is sometimes difficult to tell when one’s ideal speculations, such as the above, are insightful or worthy of a crackpot. Yet in the most recent issue of Philosophy and social criticism there is an article by Richard Kearney on Paul Ricoeur which may suggest just what I had been wondering. ‘God is all he is able to be’ but ‘this enabling depends for its actualization on human will acting in accord with divine grace’. ‘…God as posse, in contrast to theodicy and cosmological externalization, is not a panacea for history’s victims…[but] a God who is willing to efface his own being for the sake of giving more being to humans…The notion of divine posse – of an enabling God who says ‘You are able!’ – repudiates all forms of theodicy and theocracy by returning power and responsibility to humans…Such a divinity is ‘capable’ of making us ‘capable’ of an increasingly abundant existence; and it does so by emptying divine being into non-being so as to allow for rebirth into more being’.
This seems to capture what death of god theologians want – the avoidance of immaturity and irresponsibility that can be fostered by religion – without making a patently false claim: that religion makes people necessarily immature (clearly some of the most clear-sighted and mature human beings have been religious). It even grants the notion of a kind of death of god, but one followed by re-birth in a different form. Now I don’t know if Kearney means this as some form of realist theism, which is how I had been thinking of it, but it sounds stunningly fascinating and promising.
Recent Comments