Science, Suffering, and Theology

In times past pain was considered to be the manifestation of evil.  All human suffering was viewed as an occurrence against the will of God.  A lot of people still carry this attitude toward suffering, especially when they themselves are the ones who suffer.  The human reaction to suffering is at the core of all religious experience.  All ethics, all morality, in one way or another tie back to the existence of suffering and the question of what the proper human response is.  All such forms of thought seem to share the idea that pain is not the way things "are supposed to be".  The problem is that Darwin really threw this line of thinking for a loop, and we've never really adequately recovered from it.

In nursing it's common to refer to pain as "the sixth vital sign".  One way to assure that a person is alive is to test for their reaction to pain.   According to a Darwinian way of viewing the world pain is simply an adaptive response that helps life to survive.  In this way, pain ceases to be an enemy, but becomes a necessary part of clinging to life in a hostile world.  The reason we feel pain is that all the beings which did not feel pain died, and we suffering creatures were the only ones to survive and procreate.  

From this perspective we cannot continue to vilify pain, but must allow that it is a necessary part of our humanity.  Pain is a vital part of all animal nature.  Yet, still, there is the sense in which we know that pain, or the avoidance of, is not and should not be the meaning of human life.  

There is a very real sense in which pain is a force that drives us forward.  We make our plans, we educate ourselves, we wake up before we want to, we devote ourselves to caring for our bodies in part to avoid pain and suffering.  Those who would like to believe that humanity would continue striving for a better future with no recourse to pain, I cannot believe are being very practical or honest.

Yet, it does seem that this is the purpose that pain has come to fill in life:  it inspires the struggle of the greater whole to survive and live in ways that minimize pain.  This seems straight-forward enough, but I think for humans especially this becomes the place where our experience of suffering becomes the experience of evil.  As conscious beings we know that pain should serve as an impetus for driving us to a better life.  This is where we find meaning and identity in the experience of pain.  This is not intended to gloss over the experience of pain, but to explain that pragmatically it serves a purpose for humanity:  to drive us collectively to overcome, inspiring us toward a better future.

Thus, evil, in my view, is the experience of pain where the potential to overcome is denied.  In this situation pain ceases to have a meaningful purpose.  It is "dumb suffering" to quote Schillebeeckx (oops I said it).  This is suffering that has no greater purpose for humanity; it has no redemptive victory.

This is the suffering of the 'third world' that disturbs us in the 'first world', for our unintended complicity to it, and our knowledge that the death of a child in a sweatshop solely for the purpose of making our t-shirts cheaper has no redemptive meaning.  It is the existence of meaninglessness that we suffice to keep out of the public eye, but never completely out of the back of our minds.

This is what I mean when I say that sin and evil is simply the denial of human (or even animal) dignity.  Pain in evolutionary perspective serves as an impetus to adapt, but all situations where pain is real yet all opportunities for adaptation are denied obstruct an intrinsic drive of all organisms.  This takes the richness of human life, with its experience of emotions and depth of consciousness, and denies it the dignity that even insects have.

This experience of evil as the oppression of adaptive drives in the face of pain has a wide scope of implications and manifestations, which I would have to go into at another time.  But, I do feel it is at least a start for a new perspective on suffering and evil in human experience; one which is more consistent with the implications of modernity and yet still offers a reverence for life consistent with religious thinking.

Satan, etc.

When I was in college I took a seminar in the Old Testament with one of the few liberal professors who taught at my school.  Rumors had circulated to the inquisitive collective of Bible majors that he didn't believe in Satan.  Thus, I recall spending close to 30 minutes every week, participating in the group attempt to corner the man into stating this possibly blasphemous belief.  Fortunately, he was much smarter than us; we could never coerce him into a blatant denial of the devil's existence.  Lord knows we tried.  He always dodged the question and tried to point us to literature that represented respectable scholarship, which I imagine a dismal percentage of us ever consented to read.

He did manage to incite enough interest in me to be tormented for years following with the desire to know.  Such was my downfall.  

I've read a few of the things that he might have possibly pointed me to earlier had I really cared to know rather than be told.  So, here's my reply to the question I asked so relentlessly.

No.

First let's lay out on the table that the word Satan is used very sparingly in the OT.  In all such cases, it carries the connotation of an accuser or a prosecutor.  Never the personification of all evil.  There are a few other terms, such a Belial, which come closer, but never amount to God's great antagonist.  The OT has no category for a being that represents the inspiration of evil.  There is that in the world which fights against God, but it's story is never so important as to be told.  It is just an existential fact that there is evil that opposes God, but therefore the important thing is siding with God.

Second, I think it of vast importance to say that snakes are snakes.  Why you may wonder?  Because, goes the reply, the serpent in Eden was just that:  a serpent.  There is no direct equation in the OT that Satan entered Eden in serpent form to tempt man.  This was to become the assumption later . . . much, much later, but the story of the Fall has no "evil force" responsible for Eve's temptation.  The fact is that the ancient mind was fascinated by the fact that snakes appeared to sit around, still, all day long, and with a little venom managed to survive . . . that takes some craftiness.  Keep in mind these stories are contrived by shepherd who chase sheep around all day to make a living.  The serpent of Eden is just as likely to represent the craftiness of human intuition by which we deceive even our very selves.  There is nothing in the narrative that advises us to assume Satan has an affinity for reptilian manifestations.

When reading the OT through an historical lens, it becomes apparent that originally faith in YHWH attempted to diminish faith in all other demigods and spiritual beings.  It appears that the spiritual proponents of faith in YHWH had in mind to compromise the very existence of such lesser gods.  The hope was to leave faith in YWHW alone and no others.  Yet outside such circles belief in lesser spiritual beings persisted in Palestine.  

In the Exile, Israel faced many significant theological challenges.   Both in witnessing the wholesale slaughter of massive portions of Palestine by Assyrian and Babylonian armies, which had obvious traumatic effects.  The question of theodicy (how can an omnipotent God be justified in the face of evil?) became much more pressing to those who would propose that YHWH remained the one true God.  No longer was evil a matter of minor malevolent forces, but now it was major force that for all appearances could rival YHWH himself.  How could this be reconciled to their theology?  Israel found itself simultaneously confronted with Persian/Babylonian religions, primarily Zoroastrianism.  This religion had a much more dualistic view of the world and saw the cosmos divided between good and evil equally.  It is in returning from this context that we begin to hear Judaism give more and more credit to the concept of Satan.

Around 200 years before Christ we begin to find the ideas (for instance in Chronicles) that Satan is the adversary of Israel.  Not God, but God's chosen people.  The idea that God could be opposed by any was still largely denied.  It appears that around 180 B.C.E. was when this began to change.  First with the advent of the anti-messiah Antiochus IV, the man who sacrificed a pig on the alter of the temple.  In other words, the man who openly defied and opposed God in front of God's people.  This combined with their suffering lead to an increased viability for the idea of an "Adversary" who opposed YHWH himself.  Satan is born.

By the time Jesus was born, Satan with his extensive hierarchy of sub-demons were simply an accepted part of the contemporary worldview.  As I've written before I think Jesus was completely human and fully enculturated to the worldview of his people at his time.  With such a mindset I think sparring with Satan was a viable idea of his time.  He certainly wasn't foolish for thinking such things, as even the most educated frequently believed such ideas.

I just don't think with our modern understanding it's something we can truly believe in anymore.  I fully believe in the reality of evil as an experience of humans resulting in the loss of their dignity and the opposition of wholeness.  I just don't believe that there is a personified form of this evil.  I believe that the realm of the 'spiritual' is so subtle and unknown that we could identify things as the work of angels or demons, but to me this is just assigning a symbolic name to a human experience.   If someone chose to explain it by atoms and molecules and synapses with neurotransmitter levels I don't think they are wrong to do so.

For people who have no taste for modernity as a way of understanding the world, I don't know that I think of it as my quest to convince them to give up on the idea that there is a Satan, and a war between light and dark.  But, as with all humans, I hold to my understanding because I'm convinced it's true.

At the core, I think the most important point is that belief in spiritual beings, including Satan, is not a part of the core of Christian faith.  I know that a huge portion of our population, both those who believe Jesus and those who don't, are excluded by the fact that it is too often assumed that to find salvation in Jesus, I must believe in a Satan that he saves me from.  I find it vitally important as someone who frequently finds himself poised between such parties, to point out that this is not so.  Human salvation can readily be experienced whether or not Satan is real, just as evil is experienced by all whether or not we personify it in the form of demons.

Concentric Canons

So, I'm reading one of the major books by my favorite theologian, whose name scares people so I refrain from using it.  Half the book consists of giving historical context to the NT apart from the synoptic Gospels, which he dealt with in his previous book.  Anyway, I'm working my way through his take on the Gospel of John.  

I think I knew I had some problems with John before reading this.  I could never put my finger on exactly what it was that I didn't like, I just knew there was something.  

According to many scholars the Gospel of John as well as the Epistles of John were written by a Samaritan church outside the major cultural centers of Antioch, Rome, and Jerusalem.  It is essentially a Palestinian Gospel.  The letters are all written in the context of serious persecution by the local synagogues.  It appears that Christians in John's church were significantly outnumbered, and were still clinging to their Jewish roots.  Under the social pressure from the synagogue, many Christians were turning back to Judaism.  So, what's the answer?

For John, it is to increase the polemic against the Jews and turn inward as a community.  So, in the Gospel we find all sorts of statements excluding Judaism, and meanwhile trying to increase the strength of the community.  On the one hand we have and increased call to love one another, which I appreciate highly.  Yet on the other hand, John tries to lay down doctrinal guidelines to cement a community identity.  This is done to force the people on the fence to choose a side.  This is an aspect I'm not such a fan of.

I could go on and on, but that would be tangent to what I'm really concerned with here.  The fact of the matter is that I don't like, nor do I respect, the Gospel of John on the same level I do the synoptic Gospels.  Just the same as I have an extremely low estimation of the pseudo-Pauline epistles, whereas I actually like authentic Paul quite a bit.  So, yes, I'm guilty of having a 'canon within a canon', as is so often referred to with denigration.  Seriously though, I think it's normal, if not necessary, to do so.

Judaism does this.  Esther is not taken with the same seriousness as Genesis.  The Proverbs are often given less precedence than the Psalms.  Isaiah is really seen as a prophetic commentary on the Torah, and so is not held on the same level.

For me, the core of the Christian faith is the person of Jesus.  This sounds simple enough, but it's really not.  It requires me to make completely subjective choices as to who I think that is, and what that would look like in my context.  I don't really think there's anything cut and dry about it.  The picture offered in the synoptics is quite divergent from that offered in John, and personally I think the synoptics offer a much more important and applicable picture for my context.  

That doesn't mean I cut John out of my Bible.  It just means I don't take it with the same seriousness which I extend to Matthew, Mark and Luke.  It would be good to glean from John and pseudo-Paul as much as I possibly can, they still have a voice I should take seriously.  But, the theology that I shape my life around need not be structured around their concerns.  I feel their are core concerns in the pastoral epistles that I disagree with entirely.  I don't believe that the preeminence of the patriarchal household is something that Christians need to hold central to their faith.  Nor do I feel an inward facing community under Jewish persecution deserves to be a major driving voice in the theology that guides me as an American Christian in 2008.