Intellectual Dissonance
One of the more interesting facets of my life over the last several weeks has been a rush of intellectual quandaries that I find surprising. Surprising because questions of theodicy (the problem of evil and God's nature) have not been all that disturbing in the past, not because I thought I understood the difficulty, but because there was sometihng in the nature of freedom that made it all palatable. Why does God allow evil? Because love demands freedom. End of story.
But on the evening of 9/11, I went to an event that started me thinking. If you don't know about The Kindling's Muse, you should. Dick Staub, talk show host, author, and defender of the need for deep, intelligent, Christian middle-brow culture, has begun to host a series of what he calls "hospitable" discussion on culture, the arts, politics and other current issues in a cozy little venue called Hale's Ales Brewery and Pub on Monday nights.
On 9/11, the subject was God's whereabouts five years ago when the towers came down. Which, of course, is no different than the question of God's whereabouts any day of the week as evil and tragedy strike at people around the planet. God and evil: why does He allow it? The panelists for the night were a Jewish Rabbi, a Protestant Pastor, and an Muslim Cleric. You can listen to the podcast of the evening's dicussion here. (Scroll down the page.) The Muslim Cleric spoke very forcefully about all events happening in the presence of God, and it was a combination of that thought and the deep security the Muslim Cleric drew from it that started me thinking.
The thought that struck me between the eyes with new force was the notion that God knows everything. Such a simple, innocent phrase, that. God knows everything. But in the same spirit in which Francis Schaeffer refused to let people get away with "nothing" miraculously becoming "something" in the discussion of the origin of creation, I sat down and contemplated the everythingness of everything. Everything? Coupled with the notion of God standing outside of time, with equal access to all points in time, the everything now encompasses past, present, and future. Which means He knows everything yesterday, today, and tomorrow with equal knowing.
And that leads right to the heart of the debate concerning free will and determinism. How does our free will interact with God's foreknowledge? He knows the choices, He knows the outcomes, He knows the prayers that are prayed, which ones are answered, which ones not, and who will choose to accept His grace and who will refuse it, etc. He knows my thoughts before I think them, as the Psalmist might say, my words before I speak them. My days were written in the book before one of them was lived. Interesting phrases, ones that cause some people to simply throw up their hands and walk away from responsibility, saying, oh well, what's done is done.
My difficulty is that all our language suggest a relationship to time. Any emotional state ascribed to God is a movement in time, emotions being mostly reactions to circumstances that are unfolding. Joy and wrath alike seem to me to be states of being in response to something previously unknown. Which begs all kinds of questions related to God's purpose in the beginning, knowing fully what was to unfold in the course of time, beginning to end.
Oddly--just so you know--none of this makes me want to abandon faith by any stretch. It is simply a contemplation of the nature of God, which scripture says is a good thing.
This post is too long already, so I'll continue this tomorrow. Except to leave you with the question, and there's nothing rhetorical about it: how do you resolve this dilemma in your own thought?
More to come...
6:12:48 AM 
