405 - Theology and the Problem of Evil

Theology and the Problem of Evil
By Kenneth Surin
Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1986.192 pp. $39.95 ($14.95 pb).

In this dazzling but ultimately disappointing book, Kenneth Surin asks a disturbing question. Why is it that most philosophical attempts to reconcile the facts of evil and suffering with the existence of the Judeo-Christian God seem so facile, irrelevant, and far-removed from the reality of the horrors they contemplate? Surin argues that the culprit is the theoretical bent of philosophical theodicy, its need to see evil sub specie aeternitatis, as an intellectual problem to be approached methodically and impersonally. But evil is intractable to theoretical reason, Surin maintains, and any philosophical rationale for it insults those who labor under its weight.

Surin's judgment of theodicies with a "theoretical emphasis" is as tightly argued as it is remarkably harsh. Drawing upon the new historicism of such philosophers as Rorty and MacIntyre, Surin argues that the self-image of academic theodicy, as a discipline tackling a "perennial problem" bequeathed to us by theological and philosophical ancestors who lacked the proper analytic and interpretive tools, is blind to its own historical origins in the Enlightenment. It thus ignores the fact that theodicy as practiced by, say, an Augustine or Irenaeus was a very different sort of enterprise. Augustine's theodicy, for example, was set against the social context of a newly official Christian church, with its transformed perception of the evil afflicting Christians as coming not from pagan persecutors, but from the alienation of sin-corrupted souls yearning to return to God. Irenaeus' treatment of evil could only be property understood when set against his dogmatic controversies with Gnostic dualism. Given these specific social and cultural backgrounds, Augustine's reliance upon Neoplatonic epistemology and an eschatological view of history and Irenacus' insistence upon the immanence of God's agency in an imperfectly-good world make perfect sense. The theories they invoked were legitimate tools in a practical response to a lived encounter with the evils of their day. But it is precisely this conception of theodicy as a form of praxis shaped by highly specific human problems and social orders that is entirely missing from modern philosophical theodicy after Leibniz. Why so?

Surin suggests that the rise of the modern scientific world-view, coupled with the Cartesian revolution in philosophy's methodology, transformed theodicy from an attempt to address specific evils from within a Judeo-Christian perspective to an effort to provide rational grounds for such a perspective. Galilean science mechanized the natural order, thus robbing the world of God's immediate presence, but requiring God as a rational hypothesis. Cartesianism demanded the construction of a priori and thus ahistorical accounts of a God that could

406 - Theology and the Problem of Evil

absently "permit" moral and physical evil in creation. Thus, theodicy as a theoretical discipline was born. But the Deus absconditus that post-Leibnizian theodicy attempted to justify was so abstract that God could be safely ignored, which is precisely what Enlightenment theorists, in their efforts at a meliorative "science de I'homme," did. The historical victory of theoretical theodicy was thus short-lived. Not only did its ahistorical ambitions shield it from its own historicity, but it was destined to be outpaced by the very social and cultural forces which had once signalled its urgency.

It is not surprising, then, that Surin views such philosophical theodicists as Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, John Hick, and Charles Hartshorne as curious anachronisms, pursuing a fach which long ago lost its point. Evil today is not what it was for Augustine, for Irenaeus, for the Enlightenment thinkers. The terrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima turn all efforts at rationalization into cruel evasions. It is Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, the "protest atheist" who refuses to accept God's wretched world, who sets the agenda for today's serious theodicist. Surin glosses Ivan's challenge to Alyosha as a grammatical one. How can the concept of a merciful, powerful God find application in the life-world of a victim of torture, of institutionalized brutality and oppression? How could the philosophical anodynes of "soul-making" (Hick) and "transworld depravity" (Plantinga) have any resonance in Treblinka or the Gulag?

For theodicy to make a difference, insists Surin, it must forego its theoretical posturing and embrace a practical perspective. It must address specific evils suffered by specific individuals in specific circumstances. It must inspire a praxis in which believers come to see God, in the concrete, as taking up and enduring suffering and pain, as inhabiting the same ontological space as the miserable and the oppressed. Surin contends that such a theodicy, exemplified by the work of Soelle, Metz, Moltmann, and Forsyth, must dissolve itself into an incarnational theologia crucis.

Surin's move here, in effect an appeal for an end to philosophical speculation and a new beginning for the praxis of faith, begs a very important question. Even if one grants the accuracy of Surin's historicist deconstruction of post-Enlightenment philosophical theodicy and its relentless theoretical drive, one can still wonder whether Surin's opting for dogma over philosophy isn't itself in need of a philosophical defense. For as Surin himself notes, the surd quality of evil, its very resistance to rationalization, provides as much ground for "protest atheism" as it does for the theologia crucis. What is to stop a latter-day Ivan from dismissing "the crucified God" as so much cowardice and wishful thinking? What can the suffering believer say in response?

Surin's wholesale assault on "theory" (though understandable and largely sound) is thus misplaced, for one of the things the believer needs, to rescue his or her theologia crucis from the charge of being an obscure compulsion, is some sort of theory, or rather, the integration of some

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shared vision of life, the good, and reality into the demands of Judeo-Christian praxis. This does not entail any sort of foundationalist hubris. Philosophical theories about the world are as historical as any other theories and, like other modes of praxis, are rationally transformed against a shifting background of common need. Theories--philosophical theories--are a form of praxis, and insofar as they can rationally interpret, articulate, and provisionally justify the demands of faith, they are a mode of praxis far more indispensable than, I think, Surin takes them to be.

Michael J. Quirk

Drew University
Madison, New Jersey